Critical Sustainability Sciences


Book Description

This book explores Critical Sustainability Sciences, a new field of scientific inquiry into sustainability issues. It builds on a highly novel integration of elements from relational ontologies, critical theory, political ecology, and intercultural philosophy in support of emancipatory perspectives on sustainability and development. The book begins by uncovering the weaknesses of mainstream sustainability science and debates on sustainable development. The new field of Critical Sustainability Sciences has grown out of a deep engagement with relational ontologies, which helps to overcome the dualist ontology underlying mainstream notions of sustainability and development. Dualist ontologies reinforce problematic anthropocentric divisions, for example, between humans and nature, subjects and objects, mind and matter, body and soul, etc. Examples from indigenous peoples in Bolivia, India, and Ghana – as well as integrative movements in Chile, Brazil, and Europe – show that relational conceptions of life, rooted in ecosophy and cosmosophy, can provide an intercultural philosophical foundation for Critical Sustainability Sciences. The book concludes by describing three key topics for exploration in Critical Sustainability Sciences: societal reorganization in view of emancipatory, existential, and cognitive self-determination; living labor and commons; and the development of new comprehensive relational scientific paradigms. This book will be of great interest to students, scholars, and practitioners of emancipatory and intercultural approaches to sustainability and development.




Sustainability Science


Book Description

Sustainability Science: Key Issues is a comprehensive textbook for undergraduates, postgraduates, and participants in executive trainings from any disciplinary background studying the theory and practice of sustainability science. Each chapter takes a critical and reflective stance on a key issue or method of sustainability science. Contributing authors offer perspectives from diverse disciplines, including physics, philosophy of science, agronomy, geography, and the learning sciences. This book equips readers with a better understanding of how one might actively design, engage in, and guide collaborative processes for transforming human-environment-technology interactions, whilst embracing complexity, contingency, uncertainties, and contradictions emerging from diverse values and world views. Each reader of this book will thus have guidance on how to create and/or engage in similar initiatives or courses in their own context. Sustainability Science: Key Issues is the ideal book for students and researchers engaged in problem and project based learning in sustainability science.




Sustainability Science


Book Description

This textbook surveys key issues of sustainability - energy, nature, agro-food, resources, economics - for advanced undergraduate and graduate level courses.




Sustainability: Sustainability indicators


Book Description

Introducing the reader to 'sustainability' as a concept, a contested idea and a political goal, this book brings together a range of articles and published papers that have influenced the course of thinking in social science. It examines the links between the natural and social sciences, as well as the public policies.




Sustainability Science


Book Description

Continues to fill gaps between the descriptive, conceptual, and transformative sustainability science Sustainability is increasingly important across functional sectors and scientific disciplines. Policy-makers, practitioners, and academics continue to wrestle with the complexity of risk, resilience, and sustainability, but because of the necessary transdisciplinary focus, it is difficult to find authoritative content in a single source. Sustainability Science: Managing Risk and Resilience for Sustainable Development, Second Edition, contributes to filling that gap and is completely revised with several new chapters. It asserts that all efforts for the sustainability of humankind are undermined by the four fundamental challenges of complexity, uncertainty, ambiguity, and dynamic change. While there are no silver bullets, this book contends that we need systems approaches, risk approaches, participatory approaches, and resilience approaches to address each of them and endeavours to provide such. With that in mind, this book describes the state of the world (Part I), proposes a way to approach the world (Part II), and suggests how to set out to change the world (Part III). ? Introduces a new agenda for sustainable development that reflects current thinking in sustainability science.? Draws lessons from the entire history of humankind to help us understand our present and inform decisions for ourfuture.? Operationalises key concepts to provide a clear link between theory to practice.? Combines a stern message about staggering sustainability challenges with advice for practical action and calls for hope.? Includes new chapters on complexity–what it is, how it manifests, and its consequences–on resistance to knowledge and change–focusing on the drivers behind the phenomena and how to overcome them–and more.




Reconstructing Sustainability Science


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.




Sustainability Science for Strong Sustainability


Book Description

øThe dynamism of science has been catalytic for human prosperity in recent history. Conventional perspectives of the ivory tower model of modern science are, however, rivalled by the failure of humanity to tackle global crises of an economic, environme




Innovation in Environmental Leadership


Book Description

Introduction / Benjamin W. Redekop, Deborah Rigling Gallagher, and Rian Satterwhite -- The seven unsustainabilities of mainstream leadership / Jem Bendell, Richard Little, and Neil Sutherland -- A case for universal contexts : intersections of the biosphere, systems, and justice using a critical constructionist lens / Rian Satterwhite -- The eco-leadership paradox / Simon Western -- Sustainable leadership : toward restoring the human and natural world / Tina Evans -- Eco-leadership, complexity science, and 21st century organizations : a theoretical and empirical analysis / D. Adam Cletzer and Eric K. Kaufman -- Towards an understanding of the relationship between the study of leadership and the natural world / Robert McManus -- The unseen revolution : leadership for sustainability in the tropical biosphere / Paul Kosempel, Linda G. Olson, and Filiberto Penados -- Heroes no more : businesses practice collaborative leadership to confront climate change / Deborah Rigling Gallagher -- Climate change leadership : from tragic to comic discourse / Benjamin Redekop and Morgan Thomas -- Followers' self-perception of their role in addressing climate change : a cultural comparison / David J. Brown and Robert M. McManus -- Ending the drought : nurturing environmental leadership in Ethiopia / Fentahun Mengistu, Girma Shimellis, and Vachel Miller -- We don't conquer mountains, we understand them : embedding indigenous education in Australian outdoor education / Shawn Andrews -- Critical internal shifts for sustainable leadership / Kathleen E. Allen -- From peril to possibility : restorative leadership for a sustainable future / Seana Lowe Steffen -- Conclusion / Benjamin W. Redekop, Deborah Rigling Gallagher, and Rian Satterwhite




Sustainability Science


Book Description

The object of this book is to highlight how the nascent field of sustainability science is addressing a key challenges for scientists; that is, understanding the workings of complex systems especially when humans are involved. A consistent thread in the sustainability science movement is the wide acknowledgement that greater degrees of integration across what are now segmented dimensions of extant Science and Technology systems will be a key factor in matching the most appropriate science and technology solutions to specific sustainability problems in specific places.




Situating Sustainability


Book Description

Situating Sustainability reframes our understanding of sustainability through an emerging international terrain of concepts and case studies. These approaches include material practices, such as extraction and disaster recovery, and extend into the domains of human rights and education. This volume addresses the need in sustainability science to recognize the deep and diverse cultural histories that define environmental politics. It brings together scholars from cultural studies, anthropology, literature, law, behavioral science, urban studies, design, and development to argue that it is no longer possible to talk about sustainability in general without thinking through the contexts of research and action. These contributors are joined by artists whose public-facing work provides a mobile platform to conduct research at the edges of performance, knowledge production, and socio-ecological infrastructures. Situating Sustainability calls for a truly transdisciplinary research that is guided by the humanities and social sciences in collaboration with local actors informed by histories of place. Designed for students, scholars, and interested readers, the volume introduces the conceptual practices that inform the leading edge of engaged research in sustainability.