Sustainability Calling

Sustainability Calling
Author: Pierre Massotte
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 432
Release: 2015-08-05
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1119145368

This book discusses the key concepts of the technologies that underpin the drive towards sustainability in today’s complex world. The authors propose an integrated view of the frontiers facing any organization nowadays – whether an enterprise, an administration or any human collective construction – that operates with a goal, a mission or an objective. While a unified approach still seems unachievable, the authors have nevertheless tackled the amalgamation of the underpinning elements (theories, domains of expertise and practice) and propose a model for assimilating the new concepts with a global view to design the sustainable organizations of the future. The book paves a way towards a general convergence theory, which will manifest, as a by-product, genuine sustainability. Furthermore, and due to the fact that the same main principles apply, the book redesigns the notion of “competitiveness”, which today is too often simply reduced to profitability.

Gray to Green Communities

Gray to Green Communities
Author: Dana Bourland
Publisher: Island Press
Total Pages: 202
Release: 2021-01-19
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 164283128X

US cities are faced with the joint challenge of our climate crisis and the lack of housing that is affordable and healthy. Our housing stock contributes significantly to the changing climate, with residential buildings accounting for 20 percent of greenhouse gas emissions. US housing is not only unhealthy for the planet, it is putting the physical and financial health of residents at risk. Our housing system means that a renter working 40 hours a week and earning minimum wage cannot afford a two-bedroom apartment in any US county. In Gray to Green Communities, green affordable housing expert Dana Bourland argues that we need to move away from a gray housing model to a green model, which considers the health and well-being of residents, their communities, and the planet. She demonstrates that we do not have to choose between protecting our planet and providing housing affordable to all. Bourland draws from her experience leading the Green Communities Program at Enterprise Community Partners, a national community development intermediary. Her work resulted in the first standard for green affordable housing which was designed to deliver measurable health, economic, and environmental benefits. The book opens with the potential of green affordable housing, followed by the problems that it is helping to solve, challenges in the approach that need to be overcome, and recommendations for the future of green affordable housing. Gray to Green Communities brings together the stories of those who benefit from living in green affordable housing and examples of Green Communities’ developments from across the country. Bourland posits that over the next decade we can deliver on the human right to housing while reaching a level of carbon emissions reductions agreed upon by scientists and demanded by youth. Gray to Green Communities will empower and inspire anyone interested in the future of housing and our planet.

Operationalizing Sustainability

Operationalizing Sustainability
Author: Pierre Massotte
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 438
Release: 2015-10-19
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1848218923

This book focuses on the emergence of the "science of sustainability" and the key concepts in making sustainability operational in an organization. The authors discuss the methods, techniques and tools needed to manage the impact of sustainability and how these can be reformulated into business models and solutions for new growth and applications. They then move onto the reformulation of future thinking processes before ending by looking towards an approach for the measurement of sustainability and competitiveness.

Just Sustainabilities

Just Sustainabilities
Author: Robert Doyle Bullard
Publisher: Earthscan
Total Pages: 360
Release: 2012
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1849771774

Environmental activists and academics alike are realizing that a sustainable society must be a just one. Environmental degradation is almost always linked to questions of human equality and quality of life. Throughout the world, those segments of the population that have the least political power and are the most marginalized are selectively victimized by environmental crises. This book argues that social and environmental justice within and between nations should be an integral part of the policies and agreements that promote sustainable development. The book addresses the links between environmental quality and human equality and between sustainability and environmental justice.

Sustainability in Higher Education

Sustainability in Higher Education
Author: J. Paulo Davim
Publisher: Chandos Publishing
Total Pages: 146
Release: 2015-08-24
Genre: Education
ISBN: 0081003757

Support in higher education is an emerging area of great interest to professors, researchers and students in academic institutions. Sustainability in Higher Education provides discussions on the exchange of information between different aspects of sustainability in higher education. This book includes chapter contributions from authors who have provided case studies on various areas of education for sustainability. - Focus on sustainability - Present studies in aspects related with higher education - Explores a variety of educational aspects from an sustainable perspective

Call of the Reed Warbler

Call of the Reed Warbler
Author: Charles Massy
Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing
Total Pages: 530
Release: 2018-08-31
Genre: Technology & Engineering
ISBN: 1603588140

“Charles Massy has written a definitive masterpiece that takes its place along with the writings of Aldo Leopold, Wendell Berry, Masanobu Fukuoka, Humberto Maturana, and Michael Pollan. No work has more brilliantly defined regenerative agriculture and the breadth of its restorative impact upon human health, biodiversity, climate, and ecological intelligence." --Paul Hawken In Call of the Reed Warbler, Charles Massy explores regenerative agriculture and the vital connection between our soil and our health. It is the story of how a grassroots revolution—a true underground insurgency—can save the planet, help reduce and reverse climate change, and build healthy people and healthy communities, pivoting significantly on our relationship with growing and consuming food. Using his personal experience as a touchstone—from an unknowing, chemical-using farmer with dead soils to a radical ecologist farmer carefully regenerating a 2000-hectare property to a state of natural health—Massy tells the real story behind industrial agriculture and the global profit-obsessed corporations driving it. With evocative stories, he shows how other innovative and courageous farmers are finding a new way. At stake is not only a revolution in human health and in our communities, but the very survival of the planet. For farmers, backyard gardeners, food buyers, health workers, policy makers, and public leaders alike, Call of the Reed Warbler offers a tangible path forward and a powerful and moving paean of hope. It’s not too late to regenerate the earth. Call of the Reed Warbler shows the way forward for the future of our food supply, our planet, and our health.

Teaching Sustainability

Teaching Sustainability
Author: Wendy Petersen Boring
Publisher: Stephen F. Austin University Press
Total Pages: 292
Release: 2013
Genre: Architecture
ISBN:

"American colleges and universities have been relatively quick to address the challenge of sustainability in operations. Ironically, they have been slower to respond in regard to their core mission: educating students. Teaching sustainability aims to redress this shortcoming by opening doors to education for sustainability in the humanities and social sciences. The essays in this collection are richly diverse. They investigate ways sustainability education "pushes back" against traditional disciplines while it simultaneously benefits from the perspectives and skills these fields have to offer. They also address "big questions" such as how to make education meaningful, how to examine hidden assumptions underlying current curricula, and how a focus on sustainability can answer critics of contemporary higher education. The heart of teaching sustainability is reflection and advice on pedagogy. From these richly diverse case studies important common themes emerge: the "symbiotic relationship" between classroom and campus operations; techniques for transforming the campus itself from merely a setting to a "learning laboratory;" and the potential of community partners for teaching sense of place. An equally significant theme is the overlap between sustainability education and emerging best practice in pedagogy. Essays on theory and practice, individual and collaborative projects, service learning, and consequential activities, all exemplify how sustainability and deep learning go hand and hand. Like sustainability itself, the volume infuses theory with practical application. The contributors demonstrate the ways in which a single course can serve as a powerful change agent for an entire campus, how to build bridges between faculty and administrators, and even how to move forward on modest budgets. The authors themselves constitute a network of advisors." -- Publisher's description

Flourishing

Flourishing
Author: Andrew J. Hoffman
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 161
Release: 2017-09-08
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1351277227

This astonishing book invites you into a conversation between a teacher, John R. Ehrenfeld, and his former student now professor, Andrew J. Hoffman, as they discuss how to create a sustainable world. Unlike virtually all other books about sustainability, this one goes beyond the typical stories that we tell ourselves about repairing the environmental damages of human progress. Through their dialogue and essays that open each section, the authors uncover two core facets of our culture that drive the unsustainable, unsatisfying, and unfair social and economic machines that dominate our lives. First, our collective model of the way the world works cannot cope with the inherent complexity of today's highly connected, high-speed reality. Second, our understanding of human behavior is rooted in this outdated model. Driven by the old guard, sustainability has become little more than a fashionable idea. As a result, both business and government are following the wrong path – at best applying temporary, less unsustainable solutions that will fail to leave future generations in better shape. To shift the pendulum, this book tells a new story, driven by being and caring, as opposed to having and needing, rooted in the beauty of complexity and arguing for the transformative cultural shift that we can make based on our collective wisdom and lived experiences. Then, the authors sketch out the road to a flourishing future, a change in our consumption and a new approach to understanding and acting. There is no middle ground; without serious change at the most basic level, we will continue to head down a false path. Indeed, this book is a clarion call to action. Candid and insightful, it leaves readers with cautious hope.

Waste

Waste
Author: Catherine Coleman Flowers
Publisher: The New Press
Total Pages: 226
Release: 2020-11-17
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1620976099

The MacArthur grant–winning environmental justice activist’s riveting memoir of a life fighting for a cleaner future for America’s most vulnerable A Smithsonian Magazine Top Ten Best Science Book of 2020 Catherine Coleman Flowers, a 2020 MacArthur “genius,” grew up in Lowndes County, Alabama, a place that’s been called “Bloody Lowndes” because of its violent, racist history. Once the epicenter of the voting rights struggle, today it’s Ground Zero for a new movement that is also Flowers’s life’s work—a fight to ensure human dignity through a right most Americans take for granted: basic sanitation. Too many people, especially the rural poor, lack an affordable means of disposing cleanly of the waste from their toilets and, as a consequence, live amid filth. Flowers calls this America’s dirty secret. In this “powerful and moving book” (Booklist), she tells the story of systemic class, racial, and geographic prejudice that foster Third World conditions not just in Alabama, but across America, in Appalachia, Central California, coastal Florida, Alaska, the urban Midwest, and on Native American reservations in the West. In this inspiring story of the evolution of an activist, from country girl to student civil rights organizer to environmental justice champion at Bryan Stevenson’s Equal Justice Initiative, Flowers shows how sanitation is becoming too big a problem to ignore as climate change brings sewage to more backyards—not only those of poor minorities.

2052

2052
Author: Jorgen Randers
Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing
Total Pages: 419
Release: 2012-06-13
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1603584226

With clarity, conscience, and courage, global-systems pioneer Jorgen Randers and his distinguished contributors map the forces that will shape the next four decades. Forty years ago, The Limits to Growth study addressed the grand question of how humans would adapt to the physical limitations of planet Earth. It predicted that during the first half of the 21st century the ongoing growth in the human ecological footprint would stop-either through catastrophic "overshoot and collapse"-or through well-managed "peak and decline." So, where are we now? And what does our future look like? In the book 2052, Jorgen Randers, one of the coauthors of Limits to Growth, issues a progress report and makes a forecast for the next forty years. To do this, he asked dozens of experts to weigh in with their best predictions on how our economies, energy supplies, natural resources, climate, food, fisheries, militaries, political divisions, cities, psyches, and more will take shape in the coming decades. He then synthesized those scenarios into a global forecast of life as we will most likely know it in the years ahead. The good news: we will see impressive advances in resource efficiency, and an increasing focus on human well-being rather than on per capita income growth. But this change might not come as we expect. Future growth in population and GDP, for instance, will be constrained in surprising ways-by rapid fertility decline as result of increased urbanization, productivity decline as a result of social unrest, and continuing poverty among the poorest 2 billion world citizens. Runaway global warming, too, is likely. So, how do we prepare for the years ahead? With heart, fact, and wisdom, Randers guides us along a realistic path into the future and discusses what readers can do to ensure a better life for themselves and their children during the increasing turmoil of the next forty years.