Author: Adrian Parr
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780262662086
Category : Environmentalism
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
"Parr looks closely at five examples of the hijacking of sustainability: corporate image-greening by such companies as British Petroleum (BP) and Wal-Mart; Hollywood activism by Leonardo DiCaprio and other movie industry figures; the autonomy of communal ecovillages vs. the military-like security of gated communities; the greening of the White House (and its de-greening: Ronald Reagan famously removed solar panels installed by Jimmy Carter); and the incongruous efforts to achieve a "sustainable" army. Parr then examines key challenges to sustainability - waste disposal, disaster relief and environmental refugees, slum development, and poverty."--BOOK JACKET.

Author: Richard Welford
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134176708
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description
This text demonstrates how businesses and institutions continue to operate outside the ecological carrying capacity of the environment, and highlights the need for participation and social innovation on their part. It asserts that senior executives and middle management in large corporations have often sought, deliberately or unconsciously, to block the advancement of environmentalism. Industry has reconstructed the more radical environmental agenda to suit its own purposes, in effect hijacking it, by taking it out of its traditional discourse and placing it in a liberal-productivist framework. The book concludes by examining the way forward for more sustainable business, presenting new models that place greater emphasis on issues such as equity and ethics.

Author: Adrian Parr
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262261588
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 222

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Book Description
How the sustainability movement has been co-opted: from ecobranding by Wal-Mart to the “greening” of the American military. The idea of “sustainability” has gone mainstream. Thanks to Prius-driving movie stars, it's even hip. What began as a grassroots movement to promote responsible development has become a bullet point in corporate ecobranding strategies. In Hijacking Sustainability, Adrian Parr describes how this has happened: how the goals of an environmental movement came to be mediated by corporate interests, government, and the military. Parr argues that the more popular sustainable development becomes, the more commodified it becomes; the more mainstream culture embraces the sustainability movement's concern over global warming and poverty, the more “sustainability culture” advances the profit-maximizing values of corporate capitalism. And the more issues of sustainability are aligned with those of national security, the more military values are conflated with the goals of sustainable development. Parr looks closely at five examples of the hijacking of sustainability: corporate image-greening; Hollywood activism; gated communities; the greening of the White House; and the incongruous efforts to achieve a “sustainable” army. Parr then examines key challenges to sustainability—waste disposal, disaster relief and environmental refugees, slum development, and poverty. Sustainability, Parr says, offers an alternative narrative of the collective good—an idea now compromised and endangered by corporate, military, and government interests.

Author: Melinda Harm Benson
Publisher: University Press of Kansas
ISBN: 070062516X
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
The time has come for us to collectively reexamine—and ultimately move past—the concept of sustainability in environmental and natural resources law and management. The continued invocation of sustainability in policy discussions ignores the emerging reality of the Anthropocene, which is creating a world characterized by extreme complexity, radical uncertainty, and unprecedented change. From a legal and policy perspective, we must face the impossibility of even defining—let alone pursuing—a goal of “sustainability” in such a world. Melinda Harm Benson and Robin Kundis Craig propose resilience as a more realistic and workable communitarian approach to environmental governance. American environmental and natural resources laws date to the early 1970s, when the steady-state “Balance of Nature” model was in vogue—a model that ecologists have long since rejected, even before adding the complication of climate change. In the Anthropocene, a new era in which humans are the key agent of change on the planet, these laws (and American culture more generally) need to embrace new narratives of complex ecosystems and humans’ role as part of them—narratives exemplified by cultural tricksters and resilience theory. Updating Aldo Leopold’s vision of nature and humanity as a single community for the Anthropocene, Benson and Craig argue that the narrative of resilience integrates humans back into the complex social and ecological system known as Earth. As such, it empowers humans to act for a better future through law and policy despite the very real challenges of climate change.

Author: Robin Morris Collin
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0313352623
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 891

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Book Description
This three-volume encyclopedia explores the concept of sustainability in the contexts of the environment, economics, and justice. This expansive encyclopedia breaks new ground, giving definition and focus to an urgent and much-talked-about topic that is extraordinarily wide ranging and all too often misunderstood. As the first major reference work in its field, the three comprehensive volumes span the entire scope of sustainability from ecological concepts to financial concerns to public policy and community action, giving readers a solid foundation from which to think critically about efforts to make a more sustainable world. The Encyclopedia of Sustainability comprises three volumes, each dedicated to one of three equally important contexts in which the term is used: environment and ecology, business and economics, and equity and fairness. Each volume provides authoritative but accessible coverage of basic concepts and terms, as well as policy initiatives, controversies, and future trends. Volumes also include biographical sketches of important contributors to sustainability efforts from the scientific, economic, public policy, and activist realms, plus extensive listings of print and online resources for further exploration.

Author: Thaddeus R. Miller
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135960178
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 137

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Book Description
The growing urgency, complexity and "wickedness" of sustainability problems—from climate change and biodiversity loss to ecosystem degradation and persistent poverty and inequality—present fundamental challenges to scientific knowledge production and its use. While there is little doubt that science has a crucial role to play in our ability to pursue sustainability goals, critical questions remain as to how to most effectively organize research and connect it to actions that advance social and natural wellbeing. Drawing on interviews with leading sustainability scientists, this book examines how researchers in the emerging, interdisciplinary field of sustainability science are attempting to define sustainability, establish research agendas, and link the knowledge they produce to societal action. Pairing these insights with case studies of innovative sustainability research centres, the book reformulates the sustainability science research agenda and its relationship to decision-making and social action. It repositions the field as a "science of design" that aims to enrich public reasoning and deliberation while also working to generate social and technological innovations for a more sustainable future. This timely book gives students, researchers and practitioners a valuable and unique analysis of the emergence of sustainability science, and both the opportunities and barriers faced by scientific efforts to contribute to social action.

Author: Adrian Parr
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136909990
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 422

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Book Description
Recently there has been a plethora of work published on the topic of sustainability, much of which is purely theoretical or technical in its approach. More often than not these books fail to introduce readers to the larger challenge of what thinking sustainably might entail. Combining a series of well know authors in contemporary philosophy with established practitioners of sustainable design, this book develops a coherent theoretical framework for how theories of sustainability might engage with the growing practice of design. This book: brings together new and emerging perspectives on sustainability provides cohesive and jargon-free reading articulates the specificity of both theory and practice, to develop a symbiotic relationship which allows the reader to understand what thinking sustainably entails This volume describes a variety of new ways to approach sustainable design and it equips the next generation of designers with necessary conceptual tools for thinking sustainably.

Author: Arjen E.J. Wals
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 908686757X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 549

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Book Description
We live in turbulent times, our world is changing at accelerating speed. Information is everywhere, but wisdom appears in short supply when trying to address key inter-related challenges of our time such as; runaway climate change, the loss of biodiversity, the depletion of natural resources, the on-going homogenization of culture, and rising inequity. Living in such times has implications for education and learning. This book explores the possibilities of designing and facilitating learning-based change and transitions towards sustainability. In 31 chapters contributors from across the world discuss (re)emerging forms of learning that not only assist in breaking down unsustainable routines, forms of governance, production and consumption, but also can help create ones that are more sustainable. The book has been divided into three parts: re-orienting science and society, re-connecting people and planet and re-imagining education and learning. This is essential reading for educators, educational designers, change agents, researchers, students, policymakers and entrepreneurs alike, who are concerned about the well-being of the planet and convinced of our ability to do better. The content and related issues can be discussed on the blog by editor Arjen Wals: Transformative learning. 'We are living in times of incertitude, complexity, and contestation, but also of connectivity, responsibility, and new opportunities. This book analyses the consequences of these times for learning in formal, non-formal, and informal education. It explores the possibilities offered by the concept of sustainability as a central category of a holistic paradigm which harmonizes human beings with Earth. To change people and to change the world are interdependent processes - this book contributes to both.' Moacir Gadotti, Director of Paulo Freire Institute, São Paulo, Brazil 'I hope you share my excitement about the innovations for sustainability that this book catalogues and analyses. While the ecological news is grim, the human news is not. Even in a time of accelerating change, people are showing their enormous capacities to learn, adapt, restore and protect.' From the Foreword by Juliet Schor, author of ‘True Wealth: how and why millions of Americans are creating a time-rich, ecologically-light, small-scale high-satisfaction economy’ 'This book implies a ‘culture of critical commitment’ in educational thinking and practice - engaged enough to make a real difference to social-ecological resilience and sustainability but reflexively critical enough to learn constantly from experience and to keep options open in working for a sustainability transformation.' From the Afterword by Stephen Sterling, Professor of Sustainability Education, Centre for Sustainable Futures, Plymouth University, United Kingdom

Author: Bob Jickling
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319513222
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 161

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Book Description
This book provides a critique of over two decades of sustained effort to infuse educational systems with education for sustainable development. Taking to heart the idea that deconstruction is a prelude to reconstruction, this critique leads to discussions about how education can be remade, and respond to the educational imperatives of our time, particularly as they relate to ecological crises and human-nature relationships. It will be of great interest to students and researchers of sociology, education, philosophy and environmental issues.

Author: Stephen M. Wheeler
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136482016
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 418

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Book Description
How can human communities sustain a long-term existence on a small planet? This challenge grows ever more urgent as the threat of global warming increases. Planning for Sustainability presents a wide-ranging, intellectually well-grounded and accessible introduction to the concept of planning for more sustainable and livable communities. The text explores topics such as how more compact and walkable cities and towns might be created, how local ecosystems can be restored, how social inequalities might be reduced, how greenhouse gas emissions might be lowered, and how more sustainable forms of economic development can be brought about. The second edition has been extensively revised and updated throughout, including an improved structure with chapters now organized under three sections: the nature of sustainable planning, issues central to sustainable planning, and scales of sustainable planning. New material includes greater discussion of climate change, urban food systems, the relationships between public health and the urban environment, and international development. Building on past schools of planning theory, Planning for Sustainability lays out a sustainability planning framework that pays special attention to the rapidly evolving institutions and power structures of a globalizing world. By considering in turn each scale of planning—international, national, regional, municipal, neighborhood, and site and building—the book illustrates how sustainability initiatives at different levels can interrelate. Only by weaving together planning initiatives and institutions at different scales, and by integrating efforts across disciplines, can we move towards long-term human and ecological well-being.