BiblioVault - Books about Sustainable development

Casa Pueblo

A Puerto Rican Model of Self-Governance

Alexis Massol González, Translated by Ashwin Ravikumar and Paul Schroeder Rodríguez

Lever Press, 2022

As a community-based organization in the mountains of south-central Puerto Rico, Casa Pueblo implements alternatives to extractive capitalism that do not rely on governments or distant non-profits. In this book, Alexis Massol-González, Casa Pueblo’s founder, reflects on its extraordinary forty-year history of experiments with community self-governance. Massol-González received the prestigious Goldman Prize (popularly known as the Green Nobel) for the organization’s initiatives to protect the environment, affirm cultural and human values, and create sustainable economic alternatives. This collective translation was undertaken in the spirit of the organization and offers a chronological account of Casa Pueblo’s evolution from a small group of concerned citizens to an internationally recognized model for activism.

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Challenging Nature

Local Knowledge, Agroscience, and Food Security in Tanga Region, Tanzania

Philip W. Porter

University of Chicago Press, 2005

Tanga Region, Tanzania, is an area of persistent rural poverty with a long history of drought, floods, food shortages, famine, and social and economic disruption. Though farmers have been cultivating the land there for hundreds of years, they have consistently been unable to supply adequate food for the region's inhabitants. In Challenging Nature, Philip Porter examines eighteen farming communities to understand what the farmers there know about their environment and which historical and economic factors play into the lack of food security.

Porter first began work on this project in 1972, asking 250 farmers in the region about life history, environmental and agricultural changes, types of crops grown and methods of planting, environmental assessments, agricultural practices, food and water supplies, training and education, and attitudes toward nature. Twenty years later, he returned and reinterviewed as many farmers as could be found from the first survey. The result contextualizes the environmental history of the region while informing current and future agricultural development.

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The Chicken Came First

A primer for renewing and sustaining our communities

William Henry Asti, AIA

Parkhurst Brothers, Inc., 2011

“Sustainability is not a buzz-word anymore; it’s a matter of survival. Meaningful achievement in sustainability will require significant paradigm shifts in attitudes about how we live, how we consume resources, how we govern ourselves and how we transport people and goods. Asti’s excellent exploration of the issues is a must-read.”
-- Subrata Basu, AIA, AICP                                                                                                                                       Miami-Dade County Department of Planning and Zoning

“Industries, health care, education and others are trying to tread more lightly on our environment. To achieve sustainability goals our times demand, we must work together to maximize the benefit to our communities. Asti has always seen the larger picture and encouraged orchestration of diverse initiatives. The Chicken Came First is full of knowledge, sensitivity, and insights certain to advance the achievement of sustainable communities.”
                --Richard Renfro, AIA
                Renfro Design Group, AIA, New York City

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Cities as Sustainable Ecosystems

Principles and Practices

Peter Newman and Isabella Jennings

Island Press, 2008

Modern city dwellers are largely detached from the environmental effects of their daily lives. The sources of the water they drink, the food they eat, and the energy they consume are all but invisible, often coming from other continents, and their waste ends up in places beyond their city boundaries.

Cities as Sustainable Ecosystems shows how cities and their residents can begin to reintegrate into their bioregional environment, and how cities themselves can be planned with nature’s organizing principles in mind. Taking cues from living systems for sustainability strategies, Newman and Jennings reassess urban design by exploring flows of energy, materials, and information, along with the interactions between human and non-human parts of the system.

Drawing on examples from all corners of the world, the authors explore natural patterns and processes that cities can emulate in order to move toward sustainability. Some cities have adopted simple strategies such as harvesting rainwater, greening roofs, and producing renewable energy. Others have created biodiversity parks for endangered species, community gardens that support a connection to their foodshed, and pedestrian-friendly spaces that encourage walking and cycling.

A powerful model for urban redevelopment, Cities as Sustainable Ecosystems describes aspects of urban ecosystems from the visioning process to achieving economic security to fostering a sense of place.

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The City, Revisited

Urban Theory from Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York

Dennis R. Judd

University of Minnesota Press, 2011

The contributors to The City, Revisited trace an intellectual history that begins in 1925 with the publication of the influential classic The City, engaging in a spirited debate about whether the major theories of twentieth-century urban development are relevant for studying the twenty-first-century metropolis.

Contributors: Janet Abu-Lughod, Northwestern U and New School for Social Research; Robert Beauregard, Columbia U; Larry Bennett, DePaul U; Andrew A. Beveridge, Queens College and CUNY; Amy Bridges, U of California, San Diego; Terry Nichols Clark, U of Chicago; Nicholas Dahmann, U of Southern California; Michael Dear, U of California, Berkeley; Steven P. Erie, U of California, San Diego; Frank Gaffikin, Queen's U of Belfast; David Halle, U of California, Los Angeles; Tom Kelly, U of Illinois at Chicago; Ratoola Kunda, U of Illinois at Chicago; Scott A. MacKenzie, U of California, Davis; John Mollenkopf, CUNY; David C. Perry, U of Illinois at Chicago; Francisco Sabatini, Ponticia Universidad Catolica de Chile; Rodrigo Salcedo, Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Santiago; Dick Simpson, U of Illinois at Chicago; Daphne Spain, U of Virginia; Costas Spirou, National-Louis U in Chicago.

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The Community Resilience Reader

Essential Resources for an Era of Upheaval

Edited by Daniel Lerch

Island Press, 2017

The sustainability challenges of yesterday have become today’s resilience crises. National and global efforts have failed to stop climate change, transition from fossil fuels, and reduce inequality. We must now confront these and other increasingly complex problems by building resilience at the community level. But what does that mean in practice, and how can it be done in a way that’s effective and equitable?

The Community Resilience Reader offers a new vision for creating resilience, through essays by leaders in such varied fields as science, policy, community building, and urban design. The Community Resilience Reader combines a fresh look at the challenges humanity faces in the 21st century, the essential tools of resilience science, and the wisdom of activists, scholars, and analysts working with community issues on the ground. It shows that resilience is a process, not a goal; how resilience requires learning to adapt but also preparing to transform; and that resilience starts and ends with the people living in a community. Despite the formidable challenges we face, The Community Resilience Reader shows that building strength and resilience at the community level is not only crucial, but possible.

From Post Carbon Institute, the producers of the award-winning The Post Carbon Reader, The Community Resilience Reader is a valuable resource for students, community leaders, and concerned citizens.

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Compass and Gyroscope

Integrating Science And Politics For The Environment

Kai N. Lee; Foreword by Phillip Shabecoff

Island Press, 1993

Using the Columbia River Basin in the Pacific Northwest as a case study, Kai Lee describes the concept and practice of "adaptive management," as he examines the successes and failures of past and present management experiences. Throughout the book, the author delves deeply into the theoretical framework behind the real-world experience, exploring how theories of science, politics, and cognitive psychology can be integrated into environmental management plans to increase their effectiveness.

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Conservation Is Our Government Now

The Politics of Ecology in Papua New Guinea

Paige West

Duke University Press, 2006

A significant contribution to political ecology, Conservation Is Our Government Now is an ethnographic examination of the history and social effects of conservation and development efforts in Papua New Guinea. Drawing on extensive fieldwork conducted over a period of seven years, Paige West focuses on the Crater Mountain Wildlife Management Area, the site of a biodiversity conservation project implemented between 1994 and 1999. She describes the interactions between those who ran the program—mostly ngo workers—and the Gimi people who live in the forests surrounding Crater Mountain. West shows that throughout the project there was a profound disconnect between the goals of the two groups. The ngo workers thought that they would encourage conservation and cultivate development by teaching Gimi to value biodiversity as an economic resource. The villagers expected that in exchange for the land, labor, food, and friendship they offered the conservation workers, they would receive benefits, such as medicine and technology. In the end, the divergent nature of each group’s expectations led to disappointment for both.

West reveals how every aspect of the Crater Mountain Wildlife Management Area—including ideas of space, place, environment, and society—was socially produced, created by changing configurations of ideas, actions, and material relations not only in Papua New Guinea but also in other locations around the world. Complicating many of the assumptions about nature, culture, and development underlying contemporary conservation efforts, Conservation Is Our Government Now demonstrates the unique capacity of ethnography to illuminate the relationship between the global and the local, between transnational processes and individual lives.

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Consumption, Population, and Sustainability

Perspectives From Science And Religion

Edited by Audrey R. Chapman, Rodney L. Petersen, and Barbara Smith-Moran

Island Press, 1999

The combined contributions of science and religion to resolving environmental problems are far greater than each could offer working in isolation. Scientific findings are central to understanding the impact of human populations on the environment, but a more ecologically sustainable future will require radical changes in values, lifestyle choices, and consumption patterns -- a revolution that falls squarely within the domain of the religious community.

Consumption, Population, and Sustainability is an outgrowth of a conference sponsored jointly by the Boston Theological Institute and the American Association for the Advancement of Science that brought together more than 250 scientists and people of religious faith to discuss the environmental impact of consumption patterns and population trends, and to consider alternative and more equitable value systems, economic arrangements, and technologies that will be necessary for achieving a more sustainable future. The book:

provides a brief history of the dialogue between science and religion on environmental issues
outlines potential contributions of the religious community to the debate about global sustainability
offers a science-based assessment of issues such as carrying capacity, sustainability indicators, and the environmental impacts of consumer-based lifestyles
considers religious and theological perspectives on consumption and population from a variety of viewpoints including Roman Catholic, Jewish, Greek Orthodox, and Islamic
examines the ethical and policy dimensions of reorienting today's consumer society to one more focused on values, spiritual growth, and relationships.

Both the scientific and religious communities can make important contributions to understanding and responding to the impact of population growth and consumption patterns on environmental sustainability. This volume represents a significant step in establishing an ongoing dialogue between the communities, and provides a thought-provoking overview of the issues for scientists, theologians, and anyone concerned with the future of global sustainability.

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Contesting the Foreshore

Tourism, Society and Politics on the Coast

Edited by Jeremy Boissevain and Tom Selwyn

Amsterdam University Press, 2005

This collection of essays examines social, political, and economic relations in primarily European coastal locations through the lens of tourism. The contributors explore the intersecting interests of fishing, tourism, and development and the conflict among local communities and market forces, all of which are infused with the symbolism of the sea as a place of mystery and danger. From the tensions between Cornish villagers and city visitors to the explosion of resort development in Gran Canaria, the authors consider the relationship between local residents, businesses, and tourist newcomers as they vie for status, influence, and, ultimately, for space.

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Contours of the Illiberal State

Governing Circulation in the Smart Economy

Edited by Boris Vormann and Christian Lammert

Campus Verlag, 2019

The post-Cold War era was marked by the emergence of unprecedented new networks of international private trade, cooperation, and circulation of goods that promised to render the state nearly obsolete—at least in theory. The essays collected in this book dissect the notions of this so-called “smart economy,” revealing the crucial role that government interventions still play in facilitating the production and the global flow of goods. The contributors focus particularly on the role played by the United States, often incorrectly assumed to be the most liberal and least interventionist in the global order. More than a mere market fixer, the United States has long assumed an outsized position in expediting the global circulation of goods through its supply chains and communication channels. Drawing from such diverse fields as political science, urban sociology, and cultural studies, Contours of the Illiberal State takes a broad interdisciplinary look at how nations became active market enablers.

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Costing the Earth?

Perspectives on Sustainable Development

Bernd Meyer

Haus Publishing, 2009

Our economies must react. "Sustainable behavior must pay off" - this is one of the central tenets of The Sustainability Project. Costing the Earth: Restructuring the Economy for Sustainable Development outlines the economic conditions for achieving the goal of sustainable development, in Europe and around the world. It also explains the incentives for sustainable economic management using economic tools.

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Countering Development

Indigenous Modernity and the Moral Imagination

David D. Gow

Duke University Press, 2008

Cauca, located in southwestern Colombia and home to the largest indigenous population in the country, is renowned as a site of indigenous mobilization. In 1994, following a destructive earthquake, many families in Cauca were forced to leave their communities of origin and relocate to other areas within the province where the state provided them with land and housing. Noting that disasters offer communities the opportunity to remake themselves and their priorities, David D. Gow examines how three different communities established after the earthquake wrestled with conflicting visions of development. He shows how they each countered traditional notions of development by moving beyond a myopic obsession with poverty alleviation to demand that Colombia become more inclusive and treat all of its people as citizens with full rights and responsibilities.

Through ethnographic fieldwork conducted annually in Cauca from 1995 through 2002, Gow compares the development plans of the three communities, looking at both the planning processes and the plans themselves. In so doing, he demonstrates that there is no single indigenous approach to development and modernity. He describes differences in how each community defined and employed the concept of culture, how they connected a concern with culture to economic and political reconstruction, and how they sought to assert their own priorities while engaging with the existing development resources at their disposal. Ultimately, Gow argues that the moral vision advanced by the indigenous movement, combined with the growing importance attached to human rights, offers a fruitful way to think about development: less as a process of integration into a rigidly defined modernity than as a critical modernity based on a radical politics of inclusive citizenship.

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