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  3. New Directions in Sustainability and Society

Published in conjunction with the School of Sustainability, Arizona State University, New Directions in Sustainability and Society features a program of books that offer solutions for the design of a sustainable future. Collectively, they demonstrate that sustainability research requires engagement with a range of fields, including philosophy, sociology and anthropology, among social sciences and humanities subjects. They will show how behavioural change is necessary for sustainability and the need to motivate people in ways that are guided by religion, belief and culture. Books in the series will show that the transition to a sustainable future will depend on the recognition of the true cost of current human-environment interactions at the local, regional and global scales. They will offer strategies to make environments more resilient. Acknowledging the importance of scientific research, books in the program will be geared primarily to the social science and humanities communities.

  • General Editors: Norman Yoffee, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Christopher Boone, Arizona State Unviersity

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6 results in New Directions in Sustainability and Society

Consumption, Status, and Sustainability
  • Ecological and Anthropological Perspectives
  • Edited by Paul Roscoe, Cindy Isenhour
  • Published online:
    30 July 2021
    Print publication:
    12 August 2021
  • This volume addresses current concerns about the climate and environmental sustainability by exploring one of the key drivers of contemporary environmental problems: the role of status competition in generating what we consume, and what we throw away, to the detriment of the planet. Across time and space, humans have pursued social status in many different ways - through ritual purity, singing or dancing, child-bearing, bodily deformation, even headhunting. In many of the world's most consumptive societies, however, consumption has become closely tied to how individuals build and communicate status. Given this tight link, people will be reluctant to reduce consumption levels – and environmental impact -- and forego their ability to communicate or improve their social standing.  Drawing on cross-cultural and archaeological evidence, this book asks how a stronger understanding of the links between status and consumption across time, space, and culture might bend the curve towards a more sustainable future.

Social Sustainability, Past and Future
  • Undoing Unintended Consequences for the Earth's Survival
  • Sander van der Leeuw
  • Published online:
    13 December 2019
    Print publication:
    13 February 2020
  • In this book, Sander Van der Leeuw examines how the modern world has been caught in a socio-economic dynamic that has generated the conundrum of sustainability. Combining the methods of social science and complex systems science, he explores how western, developed nations have globalized their world view and how that view has led to the sustainability challenges we are now facing. Its central theme is the co-evolution of cognition, demography, social organization, technology and environmental impact. Beginning with the earliest human societies, Van der Leeuw links the distant past with the present in order to demonstrate how the information and communications technology revolution is undermining many of the institutional pillars on which contemporary societies have been constructed. An original view of social evolution as the history of human information-processing, his book shows how the past offers insight into the present, and can help us deal with the future. This title is also available as Open Access.

Nature, Society, and Justice in the Anthropocene
  • Unraveling the Money-Energy-Technology Complex
  • Alf Hornborg
  • Published online:
    24 June 2019
    Print publication:
    27 June 2019
  • Are money and technology the core illusions of our time? In this book, Alf Hornborg offers a fresh assessment of the inequalities and environmental degradation of the world. He shows how both mainstream and radical economists are limited by a particular worldview and, as a result, do not grasp that conventional money is at the root of many of the problems that are threatening societies, not to mention planet Earth itself. Hornborg demonstrates how market prices obscure asymmetric exchanges of resources - human labor, land, energy, materials - under a veil of fictive reciprocity. Such unequal exchange, he claims, underpins the phenomenon of technological development, which is, fundamentally, a redistribution of time and space - human labor and land - in world society. Hornborg deftly illustrates how money and technology have shaped our thinking and our social and ecological relations, with disturbing consequences. He also offers solutions for their redesign in ways that will promote justice and sustainability.

Traditional Ecological Knowledge
  • Learning from Indigenous Practices for Environmental Sustainability
  • Edited by Melissa K. Nelson, Daniel Shilling
  • Published online:
    21 September 2018
    Print publication:
    11 October 2018
  • This book examines the importance of Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) and how it can provide models for a time-tested form of sustainability needed in the world today. The essays, written by a team of scholars from diverse disciplinary backgrounds, explore TEK through compelling cases of environmental sustainability from multiple tribal and geographic locations in North America and beyond. Addressing the philosophical issues concerning indigenous and ecological knowledge production and maintenance, they focus on how environmental values and ethics are applied to the uses of land.Grounded in an understanding of the profound relationship between biological and cultural diversity, this book defines, interrogates, and problematizes, the many definitions of traditional ecological knowledge and sustainability. It includes a holistic and broad disciplinary approach to sustainability, including language, art, and ceremony, as critical ways to maintain healthy human-environment relations.

The Give and Take of Sustainability
  • Archaeological and Anthropological Perspectives on Tradeoffs
  • Edited by Michelle Hegmon
  • Published online:
    04 July 2017
    Print publication:
    24 April 2017
  • Sustainability strives to meet the needs of the present without compromising the future, but increasingly recognizes the tradeoffs among these many needs. Who benefits? Who bears the burden? How are these difficult decisions made? Are people aware of these hard choices? This timely volume brings the perspectives of ethnography and archaeology to bear on these questions by examining case studies from around the world. Written especially for this volume, the essays by an international team of scholars offer archaeological and ethnographic examples from the southwestern United States, the Maya region of Mexico, Africa, India, and the North Atlantic, among other regions. Collectively, they explore the benefits and consequences of growth and development, the social costs of ecological sustainability, and tensions between food and military security.

Sustainability in the Global City
  • Myth and Practice
  • Edited by Cindy Isenhour, Gary McDonogh, Melissa Checker
  • Published online:
    18 December 2014
    Print publication:
    05 March 2015
  • Cities play a pivotal but paradoxical role in the future of our planet. As world leaders and citizens grapple with the consequences of growth, pollution, climate change, and waste, urban sustainability has become a ubiquitous catchphrase and a beacon of hope. Yet we know little about how the concept is implemented in daily life, particularly with regard to questions of social justice and equity. This volume provides a unique and vital contribution to ongoing conversations about urban sustainability by looking beyond the promises, propaganda, and policies associated with the concept in order to explore both its mythic meanings and the practical implications in a variety of everyday contexts. The authors present ethnographic studies from cities in eleven countries and six continents. Each chapter highlights the universalized assumptions underlying interpretations of sustainability while elucidating the diverse and contradictory ways in which people understand, incorporate, advocate for, and reject sustainability in the course of their daily lives.