Public policy recommendations are one way academics seek to influence the world. That said, I fear we often don’t give our recommendations much thought. They are tacked onto the end of papers to make the years of work done on the problem seem important enough to publish. This week, rather than look at a paper…
Category: Sustainability
Roots Of Unsustainability
A major paper in the history of sustainability is Lynn White Jr’s The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis. This sought to describe the roots of unsustainability. His conclusion zeroed in on religion — specifically Western Christianity — as the culprit. Start By Putting Off The Reader Academic writing has changed a lot in the…
Measuring Impact On Climate
Mike Berners-Lee just over a decade ago wrote a book measuring the impact on climate of various goods, activities, and spending. (Mike is the brother of Tim Berners-Lee — who invented the World Wide Web. I feel a bit sorry for Mike, it would be really hard not to feel like a failure in that…
Profound Market Shifts Towards Sustainability
John Elkington is a leading thinker in business sustainability. He is likely best known for advancing the idea of the Triple Bottom Line, see here. He has a somewhat positive take on where humanity is going regarding sustainability. He sees profound market shifts towards sustainability coming. He calls these Green Swans. Green Swans, Black Swans,…
Sustainable Marketing And Commerciality
My regular collaborator, Jonathan Knowles, has a new piece in the Journal of Sustainable Marketing. He tackles the idea of sustainable marketing and the role of marketers in the world of for-profit companies. What then does he have to say about sustainable marketing and commercialism? For-Profit Organizations And Social Progress Knowles starts by arguing that…
Population As A Disaster
Paul Ehrlich wrote The Population Bomb in 1968. I read a version printed in 1988 which had a 1978 update. It is a gloomy book that makes bold claims of famine and crises. There have certainly been problems in the last 55 years but nothing like Ehrlich predicted. It is an over-the-top book written by…
History Of Sustainability
Jeremy Caradonna wrote a history of sustainability in his book, Sustainability. (I read the revised edition from 2022). This work draws linkages from early ideas of sustainability and looks at where we are now. Things have moved forward, and back, on the sustainability front. There is some interesting history. As someone who lives in Georgia,…
Eliminating The Concept Of Waste
In their book Cradle to Cradle, sustainability writers William (Bill) McDonough and Michael Braungart argued that we should be thinking not in terms of Cradle to Grave — birth to death — for products. Instead, we should be thinking of reuse. Their second book along those lines, Upcycle, goes further. Their basic argument is that…
The Path To 2050
How can the world get to carbon neutral by 2050? This is the date the Paris Agreement specified for getting away from the activities that produce greenhouse gasses (see here). Many would argue that that the Paris agreement was not ambitious enough. Still, we don’t currently have a clear plan to reach carbon neutral by…
Triple Bottom Line
John Elkington gave us the idea of the Triple Bottom Line (TBL) in 1994. In 2018 he proposed that the idea be recalled for a retooling. Things hadn’t worked out as he hoped. The Triple Bottom Line The idea behind the Triple Bottom Line is simple. Rather than fixating on financial performance alone, the bottom…
