The interdisciplinary field of sustainability studies aims to integrate the scientific, political, and ethical dimensions of sustainability, a term that has become more loosely defined as it has become more widely used. Leslie Paul Thiele, who directs such a program at the University of Florida, wrote this book “with students in mind” (p. ix), collecting many of the concepts and teaching points used by scholars in the environmental social sciences into an eminently readable assemblage of familiar pieces, gleaned from a wide variety of sources and arranged in coherent and often innovative ways. While those looking for new theoretical insights into the nature of objectives of sustainability will not find them in this compact but wide-ranging book, those looking to integrate various aspects will find a rich collection of insights and examples that stimulate broad-based thinking about the concept and present a well-organized and unifying approach for introducing it to students.
For Thiele, sustainability is more than a descriptive term by which things or states of affairs can be measured, or even an evaluative standard by which actions or groups can be assessed. As he writes and describes, it resembles an ideology in many respects, as “it constitutes a coherent set of interrelated beliefs and values that establish how collective life might be better organized” (pp. 1–2). He suggests, but stops short of, endorsing the view that sustainability is “the rising ideology of our times,” but is on firmer ground in claiming that “learning to live and work sustainably is the practical challenge of our times” (p. 2).
The book is organized into seven thematic chapters, with each exploring a distinct dimension of sustainability. The first explores its relationship to time, including the longer time horizons and concerns for future generations that the concept entails. As Thiele notes, sustainability requires a commitment to equity over time, but this chapter also explores issues over geologic time scales, from humanity’s relatively recent appearance on the planet to the unprecedented anthropogenic disturbances in carbon cycle that result in climatic change. Chapter 2 treats geography, which introduces a second equity dimension, as the view of sustainable development expressed in the 1997 Brundtland Report challenges us to share resources across national boundaries as well as over time. Here, Thiele examines social movements that call for environmental justice and locavore food, casting these as inhabiting a dynamic space between local and global that embraces glocality, or the pursuit of sustainability by “reinforcing connections between the local, regional, national, and global” (p. 63).
Chapter 3 examines scientific concepts of ecological resilience and environmental health, doing so in an accessible and nontechnical way, while also exploring economic and noneconomic accounts of the value of ecosystems and biodiversity. Thiele also explores the role of emotions like biophilia in ethical actions toward nature in the chapter, and argues for a vision of environmental stewardship that is concerned with more than pollution prevention, endorsing James E. Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis as a metaphor for the objectives and challenges of a sustainable planet. Chapter 4 takes up the role of technology, as the cause of and solution to environmental problems, tacking between the unjustified optimism of Prometheanism and the technophobia that has led some to decry the use of technology altogether. Referencing the scientific pragmatism of adaptive management as a model, the author calls for the development of a “practical wisdom” by which humans can “learn from our mistakes” in what Wendell Berry termed “solving for pattern” (p. 113), casting sustainability as requiring a kind of mind-set or outlook, rather than treating it as a measurement standard or ethical norm.
The final three chapters explore law and politics, economics, and culture, each of which offers obstacles to the transition to a sustainable society in their more traditional guises but also means for that transition in some more critical forms. Thiele touts transparency systems that mobilize the public through “right to know” programs and information systems, multilateral environmental agreements like the Basel Convention and the Kyoto Protocol, and civil society activism as a corrective for the democratic deficits implicit in state institutions. Reprising the ecological limits debates of the 1960s and 1970s for the reader, he provides context for Herman Daly’s development of ecological economics and for current concerns with peak oil or neoliberal trade regimes. He finds social sources for environmental values in religion and aesthetics, as well as “lifestyle” movements like bioregionalism and voluntary simplicity. Together, these chapters present a contrast between a politics, economics, and culture that have not yet grasped the challenges of sustainability, but which in many cases retain some force on our actions and beliefs, and those that are more enlightened. None of the latter offers solutions in themselves, for as Thiele notes, “the time for silver bullets and panaceas has passed” (p. 197), but the diversity of efforts at social and cultural reform that he explores suggest the kind of overarching concern that the book promises.
As a concept, sustainability has invited criticism for being overly malleable, lacking any core meaning and therefore open to being appropriated by interested parties for insidious purposes. Thiele is aware of this critique but does little to counter it, framing sustainability as a vast and accommodating concept through which a wide variety of plans and ideals might be cast. His big-tent vision of sustainability as an enterprise and ethos seeking to “balance sound economies with social empowerment, ecological health, and cultural creativity grounded in learning” (p. 197) are attractive and reflect associations that others have staked to sustainable societies. However, one might wonder what is lost in wrapping the concept’s environmental and economic imperatives together with its ethical sensibilities and cultural and political manifestations, as if all derive from the same source. Indeed, Thiele offers the reader good reasons for viewing political ideals like democracy or international equity in terms of environmental health and resilience, but such an encompassing vision risks undercutting the other bases for embracing such ideals, or seeking to build them into the fabric of contemporary societies. The singular vision of sustainability that the author develops throughout the book, even if “Janus-faced and two-handed” (p. 198), minimizes the numerous internal conflicts among the factions of those claiming to embrace or advance sustainability, rendering its politics and ethics misleadingly homogenous. As a result, readers may be led to believe that there is but one clear path to a sustainable society, as the cover photograph for the book implies, despite Thiele’s repeated insistence to the contrary.
Perhaps an exaggerated coherence may be a fair price for such a deft interweaving of what might otherwise appear to be disparate parts into a compelling whole in which the concept of sustainability comes across as a worthy subject of interdisciplinary study. While Thiele eschews the conceptual policing that might be used to criticize corporate or university sustainability programs as inadequate or ill-advised, he effectively casts the concept as more social and normative than technical and empirical, inviting rather than seeking to preempt the kind of contestation that often surrounds such trendy but amorphous buzzwords. For the purpose of exciting the concerns of undergraduate students for the human and ecological communities we inhabit, Thiele’s intellectually expansive and copiously illustrated but focused and accessible book is well suited.
