New Directions in Sustainability and Society – Serie

Cities play a pivotal but paradoxical role in the future of our planet. As world leaders and citizens grapple with the consequences of growth, pollution, climate change, and waste, urban sustainability has become a ubiquitous catchphrase and a beacon of hope. Yet we know little about how the concept is implemented in daily life, particularly with regard to questions of social justice and equity. This volume provides a unique and vital contribution to ongoing conversations about urban sustainability by looking beyond the promises, propaganda, and policies associated with the concept in order to explore both its mythic meanings and the practical implications in a variety of everyday contexts. The authors present ethnographic studies from cities in eleven countries and six continents. Each chapter highlights the universalized assumptions underlying interpretations of sustainability while elucidating the diverse and contradictory ways in which people understand, incorporate, advocate for, and reject sustainability in the course of their daily lives.

Sustainability strives to meet the needs of the present without compromising the future, but increasingly recognizes the tradeoffs among these many needs. Who benefits? Who bears the burden? How are these difficult decisions made? Are people aware of these hard choices? This timely volume brings the perspectives of ethnography and archaeology to bear on these questions by examining case studies from around the world. Written especially for this volume, the essays by an international team of scholars offer archaeological and ethnographic examples from the southwestern United States, the Maya region of Mexico, Africa, India, and the North Atlantic, among other regions. Collectively, they explore the benefits and consequences of growth and development, the social costs of ecological sustainability, and tensions between food and military security.

Cities play a pivotal but paradoxical role in the future of our planet. As world leaders and citizens grapple with the consequences of growth, pollution, climate change, and waste, urban sustainability has become a ubiquitous catchphrase and a beacon of hope. Yet we know little about how the concept is implemented in daily life, particularly with regard to questions of social justice and equity. This volume provides a unique and vital contribution to ongoing conversations about urban sustainability by looking beyond the promises, propaganda, and policies associated with the concept in order to explore both its mythic meanings and the practical implications in a variety of everyday contexts. The authors present ethnographic studies from cities in eleven countries and six continents. Each chapter highlights the universalized assumptions underlying interpretations of sustainability while elucidating the diverse and contradictory ways in which people understand, incorporate, advocate for, and reject sustainability in the course of their daily lives.

This book examines the importance of Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) and how it can provide models for a time-tested form of sustainability needed in the world today. The essays, written by a team of scholars from diverse disciplinary backgrounds, explore TEK through compelling cases of environmental sustainability from multiple tribal and geographic locations in North America and beyond. Addressing the philosophical issues concerning indigenous and ecological knowledge production and maintenance, they focus on how environmental values and ethics are applied to the uses of land.Grounded in an understanding of the profound relationship between biological and cultural diversity, this book defines, interrogates, and problematizes, the many definitions of traditional ecological knowledge and sustainability. It includes a holistic and broad disciplinary approach to sustainability, including language, art, and ceremony, as critical ways to maintain healthy human-environment relations.

Are money and technology the core illusions of our time? In this book, Alf Hornborg offers a fresh assessment of the inequalities and environmental degradation of the world. He shows how both mainstream and radical economists are limited by a particular worldview and, as a result, do not grasp that conventional money is at the root of many of the problems that are threatening societies, not to mention planet Earth itself. Hornborg demonstrates how market prices obscure asymmetric exchanges of resources - human labor, land, energy, materials - under a veil of fictive reciprocity. Such unequal exchange, he claims, underpins the phenomenon of technological development, which is, fundamentally, a redistribution of time and space - human labor and land - in world society. Hornborg deftly illustrates how money and technology have shaped our thinking and our social and ecological relations, with disturbing consequences. He also offers solutions for their redesign in ways that will promote justice and sustainability.

This book examines the importance of Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) and how it can provide models for a time-tested form of sustainability needed in the world today. The essays, written by a team of scholars from diverse disciplinary backgrounds, explore TEK through compelling cases of environmental sustainability from multiple tribal and geographic locations in North America and beyond. Addressing the philosophical issues concerning indigenous and ecological knowledge production and maintenance, they focus on how environmental values and ethics are applied to the uses of land.Grounded in an understanding of the profound relationship between biological and cultural diversity, this book defines, interrogates, and problematizes, the many definitions of traditional ecological knowledge and sustainability. It includes a holistic and broad disciplinary approach to sustainability, including language, art, and ceremony, as critical ways to maintain healthy human-environment relations.

Are money and technology the core illusions of our time? In this book, Alf Hornborg offers a fresh assessment of the inequalities and environmental degradation of the world. He shows how both mainstream and radical economists are limited by a particular worldview and, as a result, do not grasp that conventional money is at the root of many of the problems that are threatening societies, not to mention planet Earth itself. Hornborg demonstrates how market prices obscure asymmetric exchanges of resources - human labor, land, energy, materials - under a veil of fictive reciprocity. Such unequal exchange, he claims, underpins the phenomenon of technological development, which is, fundamentally, a redistribution of time and space - human labor and land - in world society. Hornborg deftly illustrates how money and technology have shaped our thinking and our social and ecological relations, with disturbing consequences. He also offers solutions for their redesign in ways that will promote justice and sustainability.

In this book, Sander Van der Leeuw examines how the modern world has been caught in a socio-economic dynamic that has generated the conundrum of sustainability. Combining the methods of social science and complex systems science, he explores how western, developed nations have globalized their world view and how that view has led to the sustainability challenges we are now facing. Its central theme is the co-evolution of cognition, demography, social organization, technology and environmental impact. Beginning with the earliest human societies, Van der Leeuw links the distant past with the present in order to demonstrate how the information and communications technology revolution is undermining many of the institutional pillars on which contemporary societies have been constructed. An original view of social evolution as the history of human information-processing, his book shows how the past offers insight into the present, and can help us deal with the future. This title is also available as Open Access.