Synopses & Reviews
Sustainability is a nearly ubiquitous concept today, but can we ever imagine what it would be like for humans to live sustainably on the earth? No, says Bryan G. Norton in
Sustainable Values, Sustainable Change. One of the most trafficked terms in the press, on university campuses, and in the corridors of government, sustainability has risen to prominence as a buzzword before the many parties laying claim to it have come close to agreeing how to define it. But the termandrsquo;s political currency urgently demands that we develop an understanding of this elusive concept.
While economists, philosophers, and ecologists argue about what in nature is valuable, and why, Norton here offers an action-oriented, pragmatic response to the disconnect between public and academic discourse around sustainability. Looking to the arenas in which decisions are madeandmdash;and the problems that are driving these decisionsandmdash;Norton reveals that the path to sustainability cannot be guided by fixed, utopian objectives projected into the future; sustainability will instead be achieved through experimentation, incremental learning, and adaptive management. Drawing inspiration from Aldo Leopoldandrsquo;s famed metaphor of andldquo;thinking like a mountainandrdquo; for a spatially explicit, pluralistic approach to evaluating environmental change, Norton replaces theory-dependent definitions with a new decision-making process guided by deliberation and negotiation across science and philosophy, encompassing all stakeholders and activists and seeking to protect as many values as possible. Looking across scales to todayandrsquo;s global problems, Norton urges us to learn to think like a planet.
Review
"Dale Jamieson is a philosopher and a realist. He was been working on climate change for a quarter of a century, alongside both scientists and policy makers. He argues that we are heading down a dangerous road and will likely have to face a much more difficult world. But he also argues that there is so much we can do individually and collectively to make a difference, and warns that the best must not be the enemy of the good. This is a very thoughtful and valuable book and should be read by all those who would wish to bring reason to a defining challenge of our century."--Nicholas Stern, Chair of the Grantham Research Institute, The London School of Economics and Political Science
"No one but Dale Jamieson could write an eminently readable book about climate change that ranges over the full sweep of the problem from the historical to the ethical, the scientific to the political. By placing this vexing issue into the broader context of the human condition, Jamieson guides the reader's mood from pessimism to optimism, and finally realism about our prospects."--Michael Oppenheimer, Albert G. Milbank Professor of Geosciences and International Affairs, Princeton University
Review
"An invaluable contribution to the dialogue about how to minimize the inevitable social and environmental devastation that looms large in our future."
-- Booklist
"This book is a must read by all who wish to bring reason to the challenges [of climate change] we are going to face very soon, whether we want to or not..." --Green Energy Times
"Jamieson provides a wide-ranging account, looking at the lack of political incentives to act and at the influence of organised climate denial...Jamieson concludes with some observations about things we can definitely do for the better right away (abandon coal), and with shrewd reflections on living with the knowledge that we flunked the climate test." --Times Higher Education
"Part requiem for our failed hopes and part vision for our uncertain future, this remarkably far-ranging work by the philosopher who has thought longest and hardest about climate change could inspire fruitfully radical reassessment of our attitudes toward the most far-reaching challenge of our lifetimes. The climate is changing -- can we?"
--Henry Shue, Centre for International Studies, University of Oxford
"A highly informative, wise, and thought-provoking discussion of some of the greatest problems that humanity faces, and of some possible solutions."
--Derek Parfit, All Souls College, Oxford
"Dale Jamieson is a philosopher and a realist. He was been working on climate change for a quarter of a century, alongside both scientists and policy makers. He argues that we are heading down a dangerous road and will likely have to face a much more difficult world. But he also argues that there is so much we can do individually and collectively to make a difference, and warns that the best must not be the enemy of the good. This is a very thoughtful and valuable book and should be read by all those who would wish to bring reason to a defining challenge of our century."
--Professor Lord Nicholas Stern
Review
andldquo;Norton has greatly expanded our understanding of sustainability as an idea, as a practice, and as a decision challenge. No one writing today can match his intellectual rigor and disciplinary breadth on this topic. This book makes it clear that those who would dismiss sustainability as an intellectually vacuous notion or impugn it as a morally flabby argument about caring for the future are just not doing their homework. Norton, however, has done his homework (and created some for the rest of us!). Even better, he has fashioned a new way to think about sustainability and the philosophy of valuation and decision making it requires, especially under conditions of global change. Tight, compact, and accessible, magnifying and further developing the theme of evaluating sustainable change, this is an excellent distillation of Nortonandrsquo;s extensive and groundbreaking work.andrdquo;
Review
andldquo;Sustainable Values, Sustainable Change distills the considerable wisdom that Bryan Norton has acquired over four decades at the forefront of environmental philosophy and policy analysis. It provides a concise and readable entrandeacute;e to his thought while providing significant new insights into the link between pragmatist epistemology and Nortonandrsquo;s advocacy of a procedural approach to democratic decision making in environmental matters.andrdquo;
Review
andldquo;Environmentalists, economists, and philosophers have continued to debate the concept and goal of sustainability for decades. In this engaging and important book, Norton moves beyond these often futile debates to develop an action-oriented pragmatic approach to defining and achieving sustainability through experimentation, incremental change, and adaptation. By focusing on the mechanisms of decision analysis, and reflecting Nortonandrsquo;s decades of engagement with the search for sustainability, this book fundamentally changes the conceptual and practical background in which future discussions of sustainability must take place.andrdquo;
Synopsis
From the 1992 Rio Earth Summit to the 2009 Copenhagen Climate Conference there was a concerted international effort to stop climate change. Yet greenhouse gas emissions increased, atmospheric concentrations grew, and global warming became an observable fact of life.
In this book, philosopher Dale Jamieson explains what climate change is, why we have failed to stop it, and why it still matters what we do. Centered in philosophy, the volume also treats the scientific, historical, economic, and political dimensions of climate change. Our failure to prevent or even to respond significantly to climate change, Jamieson argues, reflects the impoverishment of our systems of practical reason, the paralysis of our politics, and the limits of our cognitive and affective capacities. The climate change that is underway is remaking the world in such a way that familiar comforts, places, and ways of life will disappear in years or decades rather than centuries.
Climate change also threatens our sense of meaning, since it is difficult to believe that our individual actions matter. The challenges that climate change presents go beyond the resources of common sense morality -- it can be hard to view such everyday acts as driving and flying as presenting moral problems. Yet there is much that we can do to slow climate change, to adapt to it and restore a sense of agency while living meaningful lives in a changing world.
Synopsis
Sustainability is among the most trafficked of terms now in the press, on university campuses, and in the corridors of government.and#160; Just what does it mean?and#160; Politicians assume a common understanding of the term, economists argue that it is a term definable within mainstream economic growth theory, ecologists insist that it requires resilience of ecosystems which can only be measured by ecologists, and environmental ethicists avow that it must rest on normative or moral principles beyond normal obligations to other humans.and#160; And then, well, to the general population?and#160; It may mean wind turbines, farm-to-table dining, bikes, recycling.and#160;
Sustainable Change is a response to the disconnect between public and academic discourse around sustainability.and#160; While economists, philosophers, and ecologists argue about what in nature is valuable, and why, Norton suggests that the most practical approach is to think about the arenas in which decisions are made, and the problems that are driving them.and#160; There is not likely to be a single, bottom-line measure of what is sustainable, and even if there were, the dynamic systems involved would make any consistent singular understanding utterly elusive.and#160; Sustainability is a value concept--we will have to know what it is that is truly valuable to us if we are to know what we should sustain, and how to live sustainably.
About the Author
Bryan G. Norton is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of philosophy and environmental policy in the School of Public Policy at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He is the author or editor of several books, including Linguistic Frameworks and Ontology, Why Preserve Natural Variety? and Toward Unity among Environmentalists, and the The Preservation of Species. He lives in Atlanta, GA.
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations
Preface
Acknowledgments
Part 1: Change, Complexity, and Decision Contexts
Chapter 1: Responding to Change
1.1. Waves of Change
1.2. Strategies for Achieving Sustainability
1.3. Sustainability: A Contested Concept
1.4. Aldo Leopold and Changing Times
Chapter 2: The Decision Context
2.1. Two Orientations: Theoretical or Practical?
2.2. Decisions in Environmental Conflict Situations
2.3. Most Environmental Problems Are Wicked
2.4. Strategies for Living with Uncertainty
Chapter 3: A Brief Philosophy of Adaptive Ecosystem Management
3.1. The Case against Computation
3.2. The Current Situation in the Field of Evaluation Studies
3.3. Two Kinds of Rationality
3.4. Expect Surprises! Introducing Adaptive Management
3.5. Adaptive Management as Embedded Science
3.6. An Epistemology for Adaptive Management
Chapter 4: Contesting Sustainability: Who Will Own the Word?
4.1. What Is Sustainability? And, What Is to Be Sustained?
4.2. What Should We Measure? Sustainability in Economics and Ecology
4.3. Scale, Boundaries, and Hierarchical Systems
4.4. A Schematic Definition of andldquo;Normative Sustainabilityandrdquo;
4.5. Conclusion of Part 1: A Way Forward
Part 2: A Process Approach to Sustainability
Chapter 5: Introducing and Grounding a Procedural Approach
5.1. Pluralism and Corrigibility
5.2. John Dewey: Publics and the Public Interest
5.3. Heuristic Proceduralism: A General Method
5.4. Public Participation: Dynamic Evaluation and Sustainability
5.5. Method: Toward a More Holistic Approach to Environmental Valuation
Chapter 6: Heuristic Proceduralism: A General Method
6.1. Dynamic Evaluation
6.2. Discourses, Spaces, and the Place of Technical Languages
6.3. The Capabilities Approach
6.4. The Role of Specialized Disciplines in Adaptive Management Processes
Chapter 7: Tools of the Adaptive Trade
7.1. Static and Dynamic Deliberation: Two Functions of Tools of Evaluation
7.2. A Peek into the Box of Dynamic Tools
7.3. Living and Flourishing with Many Tools
7.4. Tools, Heuristics, and Transformatives: A Messy Workshop for Messy Problems
Chapter 8: Constructing Sustainability: Imagining through Metaphors
8.1. A Single Metaphor?
8.2. Moral Imagination and the Role of Metaphor
8.3. Ecology and Metaphor
8.4. Can the Many Metaphors of Conservation and Ecology Be Integrated?
Chapter 9: Adaptive Collaborative Management: Empirical Findings and Case Studies
9.1. Pluralism and the Multigenerational Public Interest
9.2. An Overview of the Literature on Evaluating Collaborative Processes
9.3. Top-Down versus Bottom-Up Motivations
9.4. Endangered Species and the South Platte Water Plan
9.5. Thinking like a Watershed: Remapping the Chesapeake
Chapter 10: Addressing Third-Generation Problems
10.1. Scaling Up: The Emergence of Third-Generation Environmental Problems
10.2. Learning to Think like a Planet
10.3. Ideas and Action: Callicott on Leopold on Planetary Ethics
10.4. The Special Challenges of Rapid Climate Change
Epilogue: Policy Analysis or Problem Solving?
Appendix: Adaptandrsquo;s Ten Heuristics
Glossary
Notes
References
Index