Words and Ideas: Commitment, Continuity and Irreversibility 165ever. In Hyderabad a vigorous Society to Save Rocks has done great work; but to my knowledge
there is no equivalent in Delhi, or, indeed, in any other city in the world.
26 For a discussion of substitutability and well-being, see Alcamo et al (2003, pp79–81).
27 I was lucky to be involved both in drafting the chapter on human well-being and in plenary dis-
cussions across the whole range of subjects. This was one of the most stimulating and mind-
opening experiences of my life.
28 I will be grateful to anyone who can contradict or qualify the assertion that irreversibility remains
underdeveloped as a concept.
29 Caution is needed here in distinguishing cases. Some groundwater can be renewed in an almost
linear manner. However, restoration to a former condition implies a reversibility that is not char-
acteristic of ecological systems. Depletion, as through overfishing, may take an ecosystem below a
threshold of resilience, so that ‘recovery’ is very slow or follows a pathway to a different species
composition and community structure. In Newfoundland fishery, the failure of cod to recover
quickly is an illustration of this (David Schoeman, pers. comm.).
30 The Cinderella analogy works as a metaphor for exclusion by those with power and influence. Her
ugly sisters did this to Cinderella. Ugly in this sense myself, I was responsible for excluding ‘con-
tinuity of staff in their posts’ from the prescriptions of an IDS (Institute of Development Studies)
policy briefing paper on power, procedures and relationships (Chambers et al, 2001), as I recollect
murmuring that continuity was ‘old hat’.
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