Environment

2021/04/242021/04/24

Earth must come first

Earth Day was on 22 April and while searching for a bit of background and resources for this day, I came across the Earth Overshoot Day 2021 contest where you can guess, on what date the impacts of human activities will have exceeded the carrying capacity of the planet’s biosphere this year. Next to the realization that some countries like e.g. Austria did already have their national Earth Overshoot Day (it was 7 April 2021), this got me thinking about the need for speed when it comes to reducing humanity’s footprint on the Earth’s biosphere and ecosystems.… Read more

2016/06/20

Sustainability as a Key Idea informing Social Practice and Order

tl;dr: Sustainability is a social phenomenon of political, economic and ethical struggles to change social practices towards more ecological and societal equity with care.

Why on Earth another scholarly book, an introduction even, on Sustainability? Because most introductions focus on a list of definitions, principles, and cases for Sustainability and sustainable development. They present a panopticum of »everything sustainable« but lack the focus on its social and political nature. This is often reserved for more advanced texts but we – Thomas Pfister, Martin Schweighofer, and I – were deeply convinced that you have to introduce Sustainability as essentially political and thus essentially contested.

2014/08/152014/08/15

Ecological Allowance – Accounting for the Triple Bottom Line

When John Elkington popularized the triple bottom line concept for accounting companies’ performance more holistically, the notion of people, planet and profit – or the ecological, economic and social dimensions of sustainability – immediately caught the attention of business people, consultants and researchers. The only problem was: there is no tripple bottom line. With a bottom line you draw the net value of a balance sheet of whatever kind. You add and subtract the ‘goods’ and ‘bads’ and arrive at a bottom line value that tells you if there is more ‘good’ than ‘bad’ in your balance.… Read more