Sustainability – Page 2 of 4

2016/11/112017/02/14

Utopian Sustainability, Sustainable Utopia

tl;dr: Utopian Sustainability needs to balance boldness and humbleness to envision a convivial future in which every individual can feel both at home and free.

500 years ago, English lawyer, philosopher and humanist Thomas More published his book »Utopia«. In it he described the »republic’s best state« on the island of Utopia, a fictional place that he used as a criticism and social commentary on the present state of European society at the beginning of the 16th century.… 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.

2015/11/072015/11/07

Re-taking Sustainable Development for Degrowth

In the discourse on degrowth – the deliberate and planned downscaling of production and consumption that increases human well-being and enhances ecological conditions and equity on the planet – the notion of »sustainable development« has sort of a bad rap. In fact, sustainable degrowth is intended to replace sustainable development as the central concept under which ecological and social minded activists and researchers might rally. Serge Latouche, the one who first fired the »missile word« of décroissance into the pubic realm, once held a talk titled »Down with sustainable development!… Read more

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

2014/01/112014/01/14

The Great Transition

An Essay on Organization and Management in the Sustainability Society*

From crisis to meta-crisis

At the Convocation of the United Negro** College Fund in 1959, John F. Kennedy referred to the Chinese word for “crisis” being made up of two symbols, one denoting “danger” (wēi), and the other denoting “opportunity” (jī). Today, many decision makers in politics and the economy use this phrase addressing the slowly retreating economic and financial crisis.… Read more