A Culture of Sustainability

This book will help the general reader understand sustainability and the role of culture in making our world sustainable. At the beginning, it distinguishes between sustainable development, which focuses on growth to meet human needs, and sustainability, which also seeks balance with nature. It provides a simple explanation of the environment, including clear descriptions of the biosphere, biomes, and ecosystems. It explains culture and its growth through human interactions with the environment, with reference to hunter-gatherer, agricultural, and city cultures. It explores how technology grew with social expectations, and how the Earth came to be considered a warehouse of resources for human use. It points out three elements - technical solutions, changes to the built environment, and changes in behaviour - that created the technological revolution, but which can also be used to achieve sustainability.

The book describes a culture of sustainability, its historical roots, how it is growing, and how we can help it grow more quickly. This is done with reference to the current sustainability crisis. The growth of environmental awareness is traced from the conservation movement to the current sustainability movement. This leads to a discussion of international action for sustainable development, explaining and commenting on endeavours such as the Club of Rome, MAB, the Brundtland Commission, ICLEI, the 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development, Agenda 21, and Agenda 2030. The UN Global Goals (also called the UN Sustainable Development Goals) are discussed in terms of benefits and what could make them easier to implement. An argument is made for strengthening bottom-up leadership for sustainability. This is followed by two chapters on approaches that do this - Biosphere Reserves and Biosphere Eco-Cities. Then three future scenarios are described based on top-down leadership, adding bottom-up leadership, and then adding Indigenous elements. The reader is left with the task of developing ideas for personal actions on sustainability to create a better future.