Supply-side sustainability
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Supply-side sustainability
（Complexity in ecological systems series）
Columbia University Press, c2003
- : pbk
Available at / 7 libraries
-
No Libraries matched.
- Remove all filters.
Note
Bibliography: p. [427]-449
Includes index
Description and Table of Contents
- Volume
-
ISBN 9780231105866
Description
The authors outline a strategy for dealing with the new challenges of sustaining natural resources and human institutions. Without compromising their scientfic objectivity, they argue that sustainability is a matter of human values. Since it affects many people, discussions of sustainability inevitably enter the political arena. The authors maintain that big (and increasingly complex) government may reduce sustainability and they see commerce as a having a central and potentially very positive role in sustainaiblity. On the other hand, they do show explicit concern for the factors that many economists dismiss as "externalities". The authors use the concepts of scale, hierarchy and the criteria of organism, landscape, population and community to address the central issues of ecological sustainability with concrete implications for ecology and management.
- Volume
-
: pbk ISBN 9780231105873
Description
While environmentalists insist that lower rates of consumption of natural resources are essential for a sustainable future, many economists dismiss the notion that resource limits act to constrain modern, creative societies. The conflict between these views tinges political debate at all levels and hinders our ability to plan for the future. Supply-Side Sustainability offers a fresh approach to this dilemma by integrating ecological and social science approaches in an interdisciplinary treatment of sustainability. Written by two ecologists and an anthropologist, this book discusses organisms, landscapes, populations, communities, biomes, the biosphere, ecosystems and energy flows, as well as patterns of sustainability and collapse in human societies, from hunter-gatherer groups to empires to today's industrial world. These diverse topics are integrated within a new framework that translates the authors' advances in hierarchy and complexity theory into a form useful to professionals in science, government, and business. The result is a much-needed blueprint for a cost-effective management regime, one that makes problem-solving efforts themselves sustainable over time.
The authors demonstrate that long-term, cost-effective resource management can be achieved by managing the contexts of productive systems, rather than by managing the commodities that natural systems produce.
Table of Contents
Preface 1. The Nature of the Problem Part I. Complexity, Problem Solving, and Social Sustainability 2. Complexity and Social Sustainability: Framework 3. Complexity and Social Sustainability: Experience Part II. A Hierarchical Approach to Ecological Sustainability 4. The Criteria for Observation and Modeling 5. Biomes and the Biosphere 6. Ecosystems, Energy Flows, Evolution, and Emergence 7. Retrospect and Prospects References Index
by "Nielsen BookData"
