| Supply-Side Sustainability Contributor(s): Allen, Timothy (Author), Tainter, Joseph (Author), Hoekstra, Thomas (Author) |
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ISBN: 0231105878 ISBN-13: 9780231105873 Publisher: Columbia University Press OUR PRICE: $54.45 Product Type: Paperback Published: February 2003 Annotation: 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. |
| Additional Information |
| BISAC Categories: - Science | Environmental Science (see Also Chemistry - Environmental) - Science | Life Sciences - Ecology |
| Dewey: 577 |
| LCCN: 2002073814 |
| Lexile Measure: 1270 |
| Series: Complexity in Ecological Systems |
| Physical Information: 0.98" H x 6.02" W x 9.22" (1.41 lbs) 440 pages |
| Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
| Publisher 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. |
Contributor Bio(s): Allen, Timothy: - Timothy F. H. Allen is Professor of Botany at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He is the author of A Hierarchical Concept of Ecosystems (Princeton UP, 1986), and a co-author of Ecology (Oxford UP, 1998) and our own Toward a Unified Ecology (2e 2015). |