SPSF 2023-1: What is sustainability?

Book 1. Thompson & Norris (2021) 

Sustainability: What Everyone Needs to Know,, Oxford U Pr.  https://amzn.to/3PXc31c

Sustainability: What Everyone Needs to Know® (English Edition)

Chap. 1: What is sustainability?

Big systems: composed of smaller-scale practices that affect one another.
Sustainability reflects a judgment about whether a process/practice should continue.

Where to start?

More than the environment?

Achievable?

Resilience?

Further reading

The Age of Resilience: Reimagining Existence on a Rewilding Earth

Fashionable?

Q1. Why are there some limits on what can be achieved by global summits such as Rio+20 and Kyoto Protocol? Do you support the international systems based on nation-state sovereignty ?

Q2. Can you pick up one example of possible “greenwashing” in your consumption? How do you live with them?

Q3. Do you agree that we are now in the Anthropocene? Explain the reasons why you agree/disagree.

Book 2. Mulligan, M. (2018).

An Introduction to Sustainability: Environmental, Social and Personal Perspectives, Routledge https://amzn.to/3wLgMcu

An Introduction to Sustainability: Environmental, Social and Personal Perspectives (English Edition)

Chap. 1: Introduction

"Our Common Future" as the Brundtland Report, named after three-times Norwegian prime minister Gro Harlem Brundtland. The section 3, para 27, shows the definition of sustainable development - development sustainable to ensure that it meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs - followed by the poverty issue. The definision is humna-centered.

Successes & Failures since 1987

• Failures >>> successes: esp. envirnmental issues
• The triple bottom line model (p.4, Fig. 1.1) by John Elkington, an Enligh planner and psychologist in 1994: Social - Environmental - Economic.

Working between the Global and the Local

• global issues as "wicked problems" to be discussed in Chap.4
• Rachel Carson: the mother of the modern environmental movement. "Silent Spring"

Bringing in the Personal

• Social Ecology model (p.7, Fig. 1.2): shifting economic thinking into the social sphere in order to make way for naming the "personal" as a major sphere for acting on sustainability challenges 
• Social Ecolody model helps to bring the personal into view and this has strong pedagogical merit... Bringing sus. back to the personal scale can also help to counter some of the despair we may feel when we contemplate global trends and challenges.

Chap. 2: Biography of a concept

Early Influences: Spaceship Earth & "Limits to Growth",

• by the lead author Donella Meadows, who also wrote about the systems thinking (ST). SPSF 3rd-year seminar uses ST for a project for sustainable futures.
• Stockholm 1972, Rio 1992, MDGs 2000, Johannesburg 2005, Rio+20 2012, SDGs 2015, Stockholm+50 2022.

Herman Daly's sus principles:

1. Limit the human scale to that which is within the Earth's capacity
2. Ensure that technological progress is efficiency increasing rather than throughput increasing
3. For reviewable resources, harvesting rates should not exceed regeneration rates and waste emissions should not exceed the assimilative capacities of receiving environments.
4. Non-renewable resources should be explored no faster than the rate of creation of reviewable resources. (p.27)

Successes & Failures at a global level

• ozone hole
• human-induced climate change

G. activity

Greenwashing? "Home" & "Experts" G.

Japanese entry