Pragmatic Sustainability: Theoretical and Practical Tools

Though many disciplines have been advocating the need to create a world which is sustainable, too often the theories and ideas are discipline specific and too narrow for comprehensive adoption. The authors of this book – all leading thinkers in their fields – instead propose a more general way of thinking, a pragmatic and pluralistic approach. Rather than suggesting a single solution to the problem of how to live sustainably, this collection instead discusses broader approaches to social and environmental change.

The ideas here contribute to important cross-disciplinary discourses which emphasize the need to think beyond the present and consider the consequences of our actions. Utilizing knowledge from architecture, business, economics, engineering, history, philosophy, planning, science and technological studies this book supports a constantly changing approach to the issues we currently are, and will shortly be, facing in our planet’s future.

Aimed primarily at students, this text appeals to undergraduates and postgraduates in almost any discipline, especially those interested in how to secure a future in which we can live productively but not destructively with those other humans and non-humans which inhabit the Earth.

Steven A. Moore is Bartlett Cocke Professor of Architecture and Planning, Director of the Graduate Program for Sustainable Design and Co-Founder of the University of Texas Center for Sustainable Development, Austin, TX.