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1. What Is Sustainability?

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1. What Is Sustainability? 1. What Is Sustainability? Further Reading Articles, Chapters, and Papers Barnofsky, Anthony D. et al. “Approaching a State Shift in Earth’s Biosphere.” Nature (June 7, 2012): 52–58. A review of evidence that, as with individual ecosystems, the global ecosystem as a whole can shift abruptly and irreversibly into a new state once critical thresholds are crossed, and that it is approaching a critical threshold as a result of human influence, and that there is a need to improve the detecting of early warning signs of state shift. Boström, Magnus, ed. “Special Issue: A Missing Pillar? Challenges in Theorizing and Practicing Social Sustainability.” Sustainability: Science, Practice, & Policy, vol. 8 no. 12 (winter 2012). Brown, J. and M. Purcell. “There’s Nothing Inherent about Scale: Political Ecology, the Local Trap, and the Politics of Development in the Brazilian Amazon.” Geoforum, vol. 36 (2005): 607–24. Clark, William C. “Sustainability Science: A Room of Its Own.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 104 no. 6 (February 6, 2007):1737–38. A report on the development of sustainability science as a maturing field with a core research agenda, methodologies, and universities teaching its methods and findings. Costanza, Robert et al. “The Value of the World’s Ecosystem Services and Natural Capital.” Nature, vol. 387 (1997): 253–60. Estimates the current economic value of 17 ecosystem services based on both published research and original calculations. Ehrlich, Paul R., Peter M. Kareiva, and Gretchen C. Daily. “Securing Natural Capital and Expanding Equity to Rescale Civilization.” Nature, vol. 486 (June 2012): 68–73. A discussion of the possibilities of addressing the growing condition of global overshoot through reducing inequity, stabilizing population and securing natural capital, while also enhancing the social role of academia. Folke, Carl et al. “Resilience Thinking: Integrating Resilience, Adaptability and Transformability.” Ecology and Society, vol. 15 no. 4 (2010). The meaning of resilience in complex social-ecological systems and the importance of fostering resilience of smaller social-ecological systems that contribute to the resilience of the Earth System. Heinberg, Richard. “What Is Sustainability?” In The Post Carbon Reader: Managing the 21st Century’s Sustainability Crises, ed. Richard Heinberg and Daniel Lerch, 13–20. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010. An overview of the history, definitions, and concepts of sustainability by a senior fellow at the Post Carbon Institute whose work focuses on the transition to a resilient, sustainable, post-carbon world beyond the end of economic growth. Holdren, John P., Gretchen C. Daily, and Paul R. Ehrlich. 1995. “The Meaning of Sustainability: Biogeophysical Aspects.” In Defining and Measuring Sustainability: The Biogeophysical Foundations, ed. M. Munasinghe and W. Shearer, 3–17. Washington, DC: World Bank. Holling, C. S. “Understanding the Complexity of Economic, Social and Ecological Systems.” Ecosystems, vol. 4 (August 2001): 390–405. © 2014 Margaret Robertson Jerneck, Anne et al. “Structuring Sustainability Science.” Sustainability Science, vol. 6 no. 1 (January 2011): 69–82. Kates, R. et al. “Sustainability Science.” Science, vol. 292 (2001): 641–42. Kates, Robert W. “What Kind of a Science Is Sustainability Science?” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 108 no. 49 (December 6, 2011): 19449–50. Keen, Mike F. and Krista Bailey. “The Natural Step for Colleges and Universities.” Sustainability: The Journal of Record, vol. 5 no. 3 (June 2012): 147–51. DOI: 10.1089/sus.2012.9956. Leach, Melissa et al. “Transforming Innovation for Sustainability.” Ecology and Society, vol. 17 no. 2 (2012). Scholars from the Stockholm Resilience Centre, the Tellus Institute, and the STEPS Centre at the University of Sussex argue that, given what is now known about the dimensions of a “safe operating space” for humanity, ambitious sustainable development goals and major transformations in policy, technology, and modes of innovation are now required. Lovejoy, Thomas. “State of the Living Planet.” Sustainability: The Journal of Record, vol. 6 no. 4 (August 2013): 183–85. A brief review of the current state of climate and biodiversity, with the assessment that humanity needs to move beyond a consumptive, destructive lifestyle, and that integrated planning and integrated management are needed. McClure, Max. “Stanford Biologists Call for Humanity to ‘Scale Itself Back.’” Stanford Report, June 8, 2012. http://news.stanford.edu/news/2012/june/daily-ehrlich-sustainability- 060812.html In anticipation of the 2012 United Nations Rio+20 conference, preeminent biologists Paul Ehrlich and Gretchen Daily look at how far we as a species are from sustainability. Penfield, Paul, Jr. “What Is a Discipline?” Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2002. http://www-mtl.mit.edu/~penfield/pubs/abet-02.html Pulliam, H.R. and N.M. Haddad. “Human Population Growth and the Carrying Capacity Concept.” Bulletin of the Ecological Society of America, vol. 75 (1994): 141–57. Rees, William E. “Thinking ‘Resilience.’” In The Post Carbon Reader: Managing the 21st Century’s Sustainability Crises, ed. Richard Heinberg and Daniel Lerch, 25–40. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010. Discussion of the concept of resilience by a fellow of the Post Carbon Institute who originated and developed the Ecological Footprint method (with his former student, Mathis Wackernagel). Rockström, Johan et al. “A Safe Operating Space for Humanity.” Nature, vol. 461 no. 7263 (2009): 472–75. Rockström, Johan et al. “Planetary Boundaries: Exploring the Safe Operating Space for Humanity,” Ecology and Society, vol. 14 no. 2 (2009). These two important articles report on research by an international team of 28 leading scientists to identify thresholds for nine Earth-system processes which have boundaries that mark the safe zone for the planet, the crossing of which could result in irreversible environmental changes. Stiglitz, Joseph, Amartya Sen, and Jean-Paul Fitoussi. “Report of the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress,” 2009. http://www.stiglitz- sen-fitoussi.fr/documents/rapport_anglais.pdf © 2014 Margaret Robertson Walker, Brian et al. “Looming Global-Scale Failures and Missing Institutions.” Science, September 11, 2009: 1345–46. Serious, intertwined global challenges and crises are increasing beyond the ability of human institutions to deal with them. While nation-states can each elicit cooperation within their sovereign boundaries, motivation for cooperation between nations is undermined by national interest. Warde, Paul. “The Invention of Sustainability.” Modern Intellectual History, vol. 8 (2011): 153– 70. Westley, Frances et al. “Tipping Towards Sustainability: Emerging Pathways of Transformation.” Ambio, vol. 40 no. 7 (2011): 762–80. An exploration of the links between institutions, social and technical innovations for navigating large-scale transformations towards global sustainability, and whether social and technical innovations can reverse the trajectory that is approaching critical planetary thresholds. Wilson, Edward O. “Bottleneck.” Scientific American, February 2002: 84–91. A discussion of the convergence of climate change, population growth, and overconsumption, a global bottleneck that could drive half the current species to extinction by the end of the century. Books Birkeland, Janis. Design for Sustainability: A Sourcebook of Integrated Ecological Solutions. London: Earthscan Publications, 2000. Brown, Lester R. Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2009. Written by the prolific and influential Lester Brown, founder and president of the Earth Policy Institute, founder and former president of the Worldwatch Institute, this is a comprehensive and thoroughly researched analysis of the environmental, social, and economic challenges facing the planet together with a plan for how to address them, which Brown tells us must be done “with wartime speed.” Commoner, Barry. The Closing Circle: Nature, Man, and Technology. New York: Knopf, 1971. The book that is best known for Commoner’s four laws of ecology: Everything is connected to everything else; everything must go somewhere; nature knows best; and there is no such thing as a free lunch. Corcoran, Peter Blaze, ed. The Earth Charter in Action: Toward a Sustainable World. Amsterdam: KIT Publishers, 2007. An expanded description of the Earth Charter, a declaration of shared ethical principles from a participatory civil process that grew out of the 1992 Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit. Cunningham, William P. and Mary Ann Cunningham. Environmental Science: A Global Concern, 11th ed. New York: McGraw Hill, 2010. A comprehensive and engaging survey of environmental science, with lots of color diagrams, graphs, and photographs. Devall, Bill and George Sessions. Deep Ecology: Living as if Nature Mattered. Layton, UT: Gibbs Smith, 1985. Edwards, Andrés R. The Sustainability Revolution: Portrait of a Paradigm Shift. Gabriola Island, BC: New Society Publishers, 2005. © 2014 Margaret Robertson A survey of sustainability in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, with clear explanations for people new to the field and numerous exemplars from around the world, providing a glimpse of what is possible. Edwards, Andrés R. Thriving Beyond Sustainability: Pathways to a Resilient Society. Gabriola Island, BC: New Society Publishers, 2010. An optimistic
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