Barbara Ward and the Origins of Sustainable Development
Author: David Satterthwaite
Publisher:
Published: 2006
Total Pages: 76
ISBN-13: 9781843696544
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Defining Sustainable Development for Our Common Future
Author: Iris Borowy
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2013-12-04
Total Pages: 278
ISBN-13: 1135961220
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe UN World Commission on Environment and Development, chaired by former Norwegian Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland, alerted the world to the urgency of making progress toward economic development that could be sustained without depleting natural resources or harming the environment. Written by an international group of politicians, civil servants and experts on the environment and development, the Brundtland Report changed sustainable development from a physical notion to one based on social, economic and environmental issues. This book positions the Brundtland Commission as a key event within a longer series of international reactions to pressing problems of global poverty and environmental degradation. It shows that its report, "Our Common Future", published in 1987, covered much more than its definition of sustainable development as "development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs" for which it became best known. It also addressed a long list of issues which remain unresolved today. The book explores how the work of the Commission juggled contradictory expectations and world views, which existed within the Commission and beyond, and drew on the concept of sustainable development as a way to reconcile profound differences. The result was both an immense success and disappointment. Coining an irresistibly simple definition enabled the Brundtland Commission to place sustainability firmly on the international agenda. This definition gained acceptability for a potentially divisive concept, but it also diverted attention from underlying demands for fundamental political and social changes. Meanwhile, the central message of the Commission – the need to make inconvenient sustainability considerations a part of global politics as much as of everyday life – has been side-lined. The book thus assesses to what extent the Brundtland Commission represented an immense step forward or a missed opportunity.
Evidence for Hope
Author: Nigel Cross
Publisher: Earthscan
Published: 2003
Total Pages: 251
ISBN-13: 1853838543
DOWNLOAD EBOOKSince the first international environment conference in Stockholm in 1972, there has been unprecedented public concern for the future of the planet and a growing awareness that future development has to be sustainable. The International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) has been at the heart of this growing agenda. In this volume, to mark the IIED's 30th anniversary, leading figures involved during this period draw on their accumulated experience to reflect on the lessons learned and to chart the path for future policy and practice. This covers the spectrum of policy areas from agriculture and resource management to energy, industry and institutional change. It offers an authoritative perspective on three decades of development and green debates, as well as a lively history of this unique institution.
Of Limits and Growth
Author: Stephen Macekura
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2015-07-15
Total Pages: 349
ISBN-13: 1316467759
DOWNLOAD EBOOKOf Limits and Growth connects three of the most important aspects of the twentieth century: decolonization, the rise of environmentalism, and the United States' support for economic development and modernization in the Third World. It links these trends by revealing how environmental NGOs challenged and reformed the development approaches of the US government, World Bank, and United Nations from the 1960s through the 1990s. The book shows how NGOs promoted the use of 'appropriate' technologies, environmental reviews in the lending process, development plans based on ecological principles, and international cooperation on global issues such as climate change. It also reveals that the 'sustainable development' concept emerged from transnational negotiations in which environmentalists accommodated the developmental aspirations of Third World intellectuals and leaders. In sum, Of Limits and Growth offers a new history of sustainability by elucidating the global origins of environmental activism, the ways in which environmental activists challenged development approaches worldwide, and how environmental non-state actors reshaped the United States' and World Bank's development policies.
Rise of the International
Author: Richard Devetak
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2024-05-06
Total Pages: 369
ISBN-13: 0192871641
DOWNLOAD EBOOKRise of the International brings together scholars of International Relations and History to capture the emergence and development of the thought, the relations, and the systems that have come to be called international in western discourse.
Of Limits and Growth
Author: Stephen Macekura
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2015-07-15
Total Pages: 349
ISBN-13: 1107072611
DOWNLOAD EBOOKOf Limits and Growth offers new perspectives on environmentalism, post-1945 international history, and the origins of sustainability.
Barbara Ward
Author: Jean Gartlan
Publisher: A&C Black
Published: 2010-12-30
Total Pages: 226
ISBN-13: 1441155570
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe first major study of the immensely influential political economist Barbara Ward, drawing heavily on her own writings.
The Postwar Origins of the Global Environment
Author: Perrin Selcer
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2018-09-25
Total Pages: 405
ISBN-13: 0231548230
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn the wake of the Second World War, internationalists identified science as both the cause of and the solution to world crisis. Unless civilization learned to control the unprecedented powers science had unleashed, global catastrophe was imminent. But the internationalists found hope in the idea of world government. In The Postwar Origins of the Global Environment, Perrin Selcer argues that the metaphor of “Spaceship Earth”—the idea of the planet as a single interconnected system—exemplifies this moment, when a mix of anxiety and hope inspired visions of world community and the proliferation of international institutions. Selcer tells the story of how the United Nations built the international knowledge infrastructure that made the global-scale environment visible. Experts affiliated with UN agencies helped make the “global”—as in global population, global climate, and global economy—an object in need of governance. Selcer traces how UN programs such as UNESCO’s Arid Lands Project, the production of a soil map of the world, and plans for a global environmental-monitoring system fell short of utopian ambitions to cultivate world citizens but did produce an international community of experts with influential connections to national governments. He shows how events and personalities, cultures and ecologies, bureaucracies and ideologies, decolonization and the Cold War interacted to make global knowledge. A major contribution to global history, environmental history, and the history of development, this book relocates the origins of planetary environmentalism in the postwar politics of scale.
The Great Acceleration
Author: J. R. McNeill
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 2016-04-04
Total Pages: 284
ISBN-13: 0674545036
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe Earth has entered a new age—the Anthropocene—in which humans are the most powerful influence on global ecology. Since the mid-twentieth century, the accelerating pace of energy use, greenhouse gas emissions, and population growth has thrust the planet into a massive uncontrolled experiment. The Great Acceleration explains its causes and consequences, highlighting the role of energy systems, as well as trends in climate change, urbanization, and environmentalism. More than any other factor, human dependence on fossil fuels inaugurated the Anthropocene. Before 1700, people used little in the way of fossil fuels, but over the next two hundred years coal became the most important energy source. When oil entered the picture, coal and oil soon accounted for seventy-five percent of human energy use. This allowed far more economic activity and produced a higher standard of living than people had ever known—but it created far more ecological disruption. We are now living in the Anthropocene. The period from 1945 to the present represents the most anomalous period in the history of humanity’s relationship with the biosphere. Three-quarters of the carbon dioxide humans have contributed to the atmosphere has accumulated since World War II ended, and the number of people on Earth has nearly tripled. So far, humans have dramatically altered the planet’s biogeochemical systems without consciously managing them. If we try to control these systems through geoengineering, we will inaugurate another stage of the Anthropocene. Where it might lead, no one can say for sure.
Only One Earth
Author: Barbara Ward
Publisher: W W Norton & Company Incorporated
Published: 1983
Total Pages: 225
ISBN-13: 9780393301298
DOWNLOAD EBOOKOnly One Earth remains a classic study of the environment on a global scale....The organization and subject matter of Down to Earth reflect the metamorphosis of the environmental issue in ten years. Walt Patterson, New Statesman"
