Principles of Sustainability (Dresner, 2008)

Principles of Sustainability (Dresner, 2008)

'An entertaining, informative and sometimes downright irreverent romp through the ragged peaks and swampy hinterland of sustainability, Dresner's book deserves to be read by students, practitioners and aficionados of sustainable development alike' Tim Jackson, Professor of Sustainable Development, University of Surrey

'The author has worked arduously and consciously in handling the central theme of sustainability, from a measured distance. He has been careful not to vent his opinion over others. In the bargain, the text becomes pregnant with information on the subjects of development, economic growth and power politics, which is quite understandable given the scope of the theme' Tourism Recreation Research

'A great refresher course for those already somewhat familiar with the ideas. It's very thorough, describing the crucial events, introducing the necessary jargon, summarizing the various points of view' Clean Slate

At a time of increasingly rapid environmental deterioration and climate change, sustainability is one of the most important issues facing the world. Can we create a sustainable society? What would that mean? How should we set about doing it? How can we bring about such a profound change in the way things are organized? This text tackles these questions directly. It covers: historical development of the concept of sustainability; contemporary debates about how to achieve it; and obstacles and the prospects for overcoming them.

This fully revised edition covers the latest on the climate change front, particularly the advances in scientific understanding and political awareness of climate change. Other updates include more recent economic analyses, particularly the Stern Report, and an examination of the global shift away from faith in markets and towards statism over the past five years.

p.1 the Brundtland report... defined [sustainable development] as development that "meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs".

p.3 Environmental economists define sustainability in terms of non-depletion of capital.

p.14 [Ted] Benton argues that each form of social life does indeed have its own specific material constraints and limits. However, it is possible to adopt social and technical strategies to deal with these limits.

p.84-85 Cambridge economics professor Partha Dasgupta... goes on to ask the question "What should be sustained?" He says that sustaining current well-being is not a coherent answer because current well-being is not a given... Dasgupta... thinks a better approach would be to look at the total well-being of future generations over different paths of development.

p.89 Critical natural capital includes only those aspects of the ecosphere known to be vital for the maintenance of the Earth's life support systems.

p.91 Environmental utilisation space (or environmental space) is a concept which reflects that at any given point in time, there are limits to the amount of pressure that the earth's ecosystem can handle without irreversible damage to these systems or to the life support processes that they enable. This suggests to search for the appropriate threshold levels beyond which actual environmental systems might become damaged in the sense indicated above, and to regard this set of deductively determined critical values as the operational boundaries of the environmental space...

p.143 Sustainability is concerned with the positive freedom of people in future generations to be able to meet their needs.

p.179 There appear to be reasons in principle why we cannot have sufficient information or foresight to design institutions that can successfully deal with very complicated reflexive problems... We know something about the principles that would underlie sustainability and it is possible to suggest measures that would move us in its direction, but reflexivity [JLJ - from Wikipedia, Reflexivity refers to circular relationships between cause and effect. A reflexive relationship is bidirectional; with both the cause and the effect affecting one another in a situation that renders both functions causes and effects] means that it is impossible to draw up a detailed blueprint of a sustainable society or even of the route to get to it.