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Author: Walter R. Erdelen
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429816944
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 294
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Book Description
Managing Complexity: Earth Systems and Strategies for the Future introduces and explores systems and complexity in relation to near-synchronous world and environmental problems. These relate to but are not limited to water, biological diversity, worldwide climate change, trade and conflict, global migration and the quest for sustainable development. Complemented by discussion of the new era of the Anthropocene, its many manifestations, and Earth system properties such as planetary boundaries and tipping points this book offers practical suggestions for how a sustainable future for humanity can be realised. Specifically discussed in Managing Complexity: Earth Systems and Strategies for the Future are innovation, education and capacity building, application of the natural and social sciences and new paths towards sustainability based on industrial development and engineering, as well as in diplomacy and foreign aid. The book’s conclusions discuss the ambitious yet vital reforms the authors propose as routes to a sustainable existence. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of sustainability, sustainable development and complexity theory.
Author: Walter R. Erdelen
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429816944
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 294
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Book Description
Managing Complexity: Earth Systems and Strategies for the Future introduces and explores systems and complexity in relation to near-synchronous world and environmental problems. These relate to but are not limited to water, biological diversity, worldwide climate change, trade and conflict, global migration and the quest for sustainable development. Complemented by discussion of the new era of the Anthropocene, its many manifestations, and Earth system properties such as planetary boundaries and tipping points this book offers practical suggestions for how a sustainable future for humanity can be realised. Specifically discussed in Managing Complexity: Earth Systems and Strategies for the Future are innovation, education and capacity building, application of the natural and social sciences and new paths towards sustainability based on industrial development and engineering, as well as in diplomacy and foreign aid. The book’s conclusions discuss the ambitious yet vital reforms the authors propose as routes to a sustainable existence. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of sustainability, sustainable development and complexity theory.
Author: Lynda Collins
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000418316
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 114
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Book Description
The Ecological Constitution integrates the insights of environmental constitutionalism and ecological law in a concise, engaging and accessible manner. This book sets out the necessary components of any constitution that could be considered "ecological" in nature. In particular, it argues that an ecological constitution is one that codifies the following key principles, at a minimum: the principle of sustainability; intergenerational equity and the public trust doctrine; environmental human rights; rights of nature; the precautionary principle and non-regression; and rights and obligations relating to a healthy climate. In the context of the global environmental crisis that characterises the current Anthropocene era, these principles are important tools for changing consciousness and driving pragmatic policy reforms around the world. Re-imagining constitutions along these lines could play a vital role in the collective project of building a sustainable future for humans, animals, ecosystems and the biosphere we all share. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of environmental law, ecological law, environmental constitutionalism, sustainability and rights of nature.
Author: George R. Lueddeke
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429814011
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 229
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Book Description
Planet Earth has been here for over 4.5 billion years but in just two human generations we have managed to place our only 'home' at great risk. Many lessons from history have not yet been learned and new lessons may prove equally, if not more, difficult to take on board as we head deeper into the twenty-first century. This book highlights two of our greatest social problems: changing the way we relate to the planet and to one another, and confronting how we use technology (dataism) for the benefit of both humankind and the planet. Covering a wide range of key topics, including environmental degradation, modern life, capitalism, robotics, financing of war (vs peace) and the pressing need to re-orient society towards a sustainable future, the book contends that lifelong learning for sustainability is key to our survival. The author argues that One Health - recognising the fundamental interconnections between people, animals, plants, the environment - needs to inform the UN-2030 Sustainable Development Goals and that working towards the adoption of a new mindset is essential. We need to replace our current view of limitless resources, exploitation, competition and conflict with one that respects the sanctity of life and strives towards well-being for all, shared prosperity and social stability. Clearly written, evidence based and transdisciplinary - and including contributions from the World Bank, InterAction Council, Chatham House, UNESCO, World Economic Forum, the Tripartite One Health collaboration (UN Food and Agriculture Organization, World Organisation for Animal Health and World Health Organization), One Health Commission and more - this book cuts across sociopolitical, economic and environmental lines. It will be of great interest to practitioners, academics, policy-makers, students, nongovernment agencies and the public at large in both developed and developing nations.
Author: Dain Bolwell
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 042977060X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 307
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Book Description
Governing Technology in the Quest for Sustainability on Earth explores how human technologies can be managed to ensure the long-term sustainability of our species and of other life forms with which we share this world. It analyses human impact, the discourses of environmentalism and issues of economics, history and science. As these variables are complex, drawing on issues from the social, physical and life sciences as well as the humanities, Dain Bolwell uses an interdisciplinary approach to investigate these concepts and their related public policies. Exploring three major existing and emerging technologies – chemical herbicides, nuclear-electric power generation, and robotics and artificial intelligence – the book demonstrates the multifaceted and complicated nature of the grand challenges we face and draws out the measures required to effect sustainability in the wider political sphere. Exploring how we can govern technology most effectively to ensure a long term and sustainable future, this book will be of great interest to students and researchers of environmental studies, science and technology and environmental law and policy.
Author: Will Focht
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351171585
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 441
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Book Description
The goal of Sustainable Human and Environmental Systems (SHES) education is to prepare students to facilitate social learning in communities that builds knowledge of, capacity for, and commitment to sustainability to facilitate the emergence of sustainable societies. The SHES approach to sustainability education relies on complexity-based systems thinking that transcends disciplinary boundaries. This book provides a comprehensive guide to the SHES approach, including its rationale and theoretical foundation, its pedagogy and practical applications in curricula, and ways to support the approach through institutional administration. This book will be of great interest to academics and students of education, environmental sciences and studies, sustainability and sustainable development, natural resource management, conservation, environmental policy, environmental planning, and related fields in higher education. Educators can use this book as a guide to SHES pedagogy, curriculum design, sustainability, environmental studies, sustainable development, and sustainable well-being. Administrators will find the book useful in establishing, evaluating, staffing, and promoting programs based on the SHES approach.
Author: Jan Visser
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004416803
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 405
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Book Description
The quest to understand defines our humanness. Since time immemorial it has given rise to art and literature, philosophical reflection, religious practice, myths, metaphor, and allegory, as well as, in more recent history, disciplined scientific inquiry. Seeking understanding is a lifelong journey towards a goal the parameters of which change as our pursuit progresses, until, at life’s end, the goal vanishes beyond the horizon. Such is humanness. Along the way, we build, in an enduring self-transformative fashion, our mind—the scientific mind. But what is that mind? A transdisciplinary team of 21 prominent authors, from areas such as music history, psychiatry, physics, cosmology, education, astronomy, mathematics, medicine, gaming, artificial intelligence, science communication, early child development, science education, and economics, shed light on what it takes humans to build and cultivate the scientific mind along the lifespan. A decade of intercultural dialogue preceded the book. It comprised six major international Building the Scientific Mind colloquia in culturally diverse settings that spanned the entire planet. Several hundred people from different disciplines and interests—among them distinguished scientists, policy and decision makers, practitioners and thinkers—contributed to the dialogue. Building the scientific mind transforms our ‘way of being in the world.’ It is driven by the desire to understand deeply—cognitively and affectively—who we are in a world of which we are an integral part. It has great relevance for sustained human existence in the Anthropocene and profound implications for how we organize the conditions for informal and formal learning.
Author: Ulrik Pram Gad
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351031961
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 345
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Book Description
The Politics of Sustainability in the Arctic argues that sustainability is a political concept because it defines and shapes competing visions of the future. In current Arctic affairs, prominent stakeholders agree that development needs to be sustainable, but there is no agreement over what it is that needs to be sustained. In original conservationist discourse, the environment was the sole referent object of sustainability; however, as sustainability discourses have expanded, the concept has been linked to an increasing number of referent objects, such as society, economy, culture, and identity. This book sets out a theoretical framework for understanding and analysing sustainability as a political concept, and provides a comprehensive empirical investigation of Arctic sustainability discourses. Presenting a range of case studies from Greenland, Norway, Canada, Russia, Iceland, and Alaska, the chapters in this volume analyse the concept of sustainability and how actors are employing and contesting this concept in specific regions within the Arctic. In doing so, the book demonstrates how sustainability is being given new meanings in the postcolonial Arctic and what the political implications are for postcoloniality, nature, and development more broadly. Beyond those interested in the Arctic, this book will also be of great value to students and scholars of sustainability, sustainable development, and identity and environmental politics.
Author: Christian Marouby
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429814259
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 290
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Book Description
We have forgotten how to think about limits. Most philosophical approaches to the environment have focused primarily on the value of the natural world, the status of anthropocentrism and the Anthropocene, and the largely ethical questions of our impact on the world. While fully acknowledging these concerns, this book emphasizes the centrality of the confrontation between the imperative of growth that has been present since the Enlightenment and our belated rediscovery of limits. The expression "Limits to Growth", the title of a famous book from 1972 by Donella H. Meadows et al., may have passed into a common discourse, yet the notion of limits itself remains insufficiently theorized, or even reflected upon, in the current movement of environmental advocacy. Sometimes it even seems as if there is an effort to avoid it. This book argues that, on the contrary, we can only resolve the present global challenges by confronting the question of limits and making it central to our reflection. This entails discussing the long history of thinking about limits in which Malthus is the most infamous figure, but which also includes such major participants as John Stuart Mill and Karl Marx. Ultimately, The Question of Limits contends that the value of embracing limits extends beyond the environment and offers the potential to become a transformative social good. The Question of Limits will be of great interest to students and scholars working at the intersection of environmental studies, economics, intellectual history and philosophy.
Author: Marie Harder
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351627333
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 195
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Book Description
This book explores the complex problem of how to measure the ‘success’ of social organisations, projects and activities. Whether improving a local situation, organizing a campaign around sustainability, or assessing the intangible effects of perceived social benefits, currently we have only have a very limited range of mechanisms for judging effectiveness. On the one hand, a market-driven logic demands that qualitative perceptions and experiences are quantified into simplified and numerically defined variables. On the other, community projects are left un-assessed, as one-off outcomes of local and situated processes that must somehow automatically ‘make things better’. For academics, researchers and other professionals working in this field this has resulted in the deep frustration of not being able to assess the things that are most centrally important: higher human values such as integrity, trust, respect, equality and social justice. Measuring Intangible Values argues that we can make shared social values – and their measurement - central to decisions about improving civil society. But because these social values are intangible, we need to develop ways of eliciting and validating them at the local level that can capture people’s shared meanings across multiple goals and perspectives. We need to develop mechanisms for evaluating whether these values are met that use rigorous but also relevant measures. And we need to develop ways of doing this that are scalable, transferable and comparable across different kinds of organisations and fields of activity. This book will be valuable for researchers in all social science disciplines which touch on human values, such as sociology, social psychology, human geography, social policy, architecture and planning, design and community studies.
Author: M. Shirazi
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351631535
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 249
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Book Description
This ground breaking volume raises radical critiques and proposes innovative solutions for social sustainability in the built environment. Urban Social Sustainability provides an in-depth insight into the discourse and argues that every urban intervention has a social sustainability dimension that needs to be taken into consideration, and incorporated into a comprehensive and cohesive ‘urban agenda’ that is built on three principles of recognition, integration, and monitoring. This should be achieved through a dialogical and reflexive process of decision-making. To achieve sustainable communities, social sustainability should form the basis of a constructive dialogue and be interlinked with other areas of sustainable development. This book underlines the urgency of approaching social sustainability as an urban agenda and goes on to make suggestions about its formulation. Urban Social Sustainability consists of original contributions from academics and experts within the field and explores the significance of social sustainability from different perspectives. Areas covered include urban policy, transportation and mobility, urban space and architectural form, housing, urban heritage, neighbourhood development, and urban governance. Drawing on case studies from a number of countries and world regions the book presents a multifaceted and interdisciplinary understanding from social sustainability in urban settings, and provides practitioners and policy makers with innovative recommendations to achieve more socially sustainable urban environment.
