Reinventing Sustainability

Discusses the potential significance for the reintroduction of ancient technologies relating to agriculture and architecture in creating a healthier, more sustainable and environmentally richer planet

Imagine fuel without fear. No climate change. No oil spills, no dead coalminers, no dirty air, no devastated lands, no lost wildlife. No energy poverty. No oil-fed wars, tyrannies, or terrorists. No leaking nuclear wastes or spreading nuclear weapons. Nothing to run out. Nothing to cut off. Nothing to worry about. Just energy abundance, benign and affordable, for all, forever. That richer, fairer, cooler, safer world is possible, practical, even profitable-because saving and replacing fossil fuels now works better and costs no more than buying and burning them. Reinventing Fire shows how business-motivated by profit, supported by civil society, sped by smart policy-can get the US completely off oil and coal by 2050, and later beyond natural gas as well. Authored by a world leader on energy and innovation, the book maps a robust path for integrating real, here-and-now, comprehensive energy solutions in four industries-transportation, buildings, electricity, and manufacturing-melding radically efficient energy use with reliable, secure, renewable energy supplies.Popular in tone and rooted in applied hope, Reinventing Fire shows how smart businesses are creating a potent, global, market-driven, and explosively growing movement to defossilize fuels. It points readers to trillions in savings over the next 40 years, and trillions more in new business opportunities.Whether you care most about national security, or jobs and competitive advantage, or climate and environment, this major contribution by world leaders in energy innovation offers startling innovations will support your values, inspire your support, and transform your sense of possibility.Pragmatic citizens today are more interested in outcomes than motives. Reinventing Fire answers this trans-ideological call. Whether you care most about national security, or jobs and competitive advantage, or climate and environment, its startling innovations will support your values, inspire your support, and transform your sense of possibility.

Project XL (eXcellence and Leadership) was the flagship effort by the Clinton administration for 'cleaner, cheaper, and smarter' regulation. Under Project XL, business promised better performance in exchange for a regulatory approach focused more on results than means, with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) measuring pollution reduction across rather than at individual sources within a facility. Reinventing Environmental Regulation is a compelling account of the breakdown in negotiations to implement Project XL at a tape manufacturing plant of 3M, a company widely recognized as environmentally progressive. Marcus, Geffen, and Sexton discuss the conflicting goals of participants, the influences of personality and organizational culture, and complications caused by changes in 3M‘s external business environment. They compare the 3M case with EPA negotiations involving Intel, Merck, and Weyerhaeuser, finding similarly contentious, though less fatal disagreements about the meaning of 'superior environmental performance.' In common with other recent proposals, Project XL emphasized cooperative, flexible regulatory approaches. Reinventing Environmental Regulation demonstrates the difficulty of putting these appealing ideas into practice, while offering encouragement for continued innovations.

In the US, there is a wide-ranging network of at least 370 food banks, and more than 60,000 hunger-relief organizations such as food pantries and meal programs. These groups provide billions of meals a year to people in need. And yet hunger still affects one in nine Americans. What are we doing wrong? In Reinventing Food Banks and Pantries, Katie Martin argues that if handing out more and more food was the answer, we would have solved the problem of hunger decades ago. Martin instead presents a new model for charitable food, one where success is measured not by pounds of food distributed but by lives changed. The key is to focus on the root causes of hunger. When we shift our attention to strategies that build empathy, equity, and political will, we can implement real solutions. Martin shares those solutions in a warm, engaging style, with simple steps that anyone working or volunteering at a food bank or pantry can take today. Some are short-term strategies to create a more dignified experience for food pantry clients: providing client choice, where individuals select their own food, or redesigning a waiting room with better seating and a designated greeter. Some are longer-term: increasing the supply of healthy food, offering job training programs, or connecting clients to other social services. And some are big picture: joining the fight for living wages and a stronger social safety net. These strategies are illustrated through inspiring success stories and backed up by scientific research. Throughout, readers will find a wealth of proven ideas to make their charitable food organizations more empathetic and more effective. As Martin writes, it takes more than food to end hunger. Picking up this insightful, lively book is a great first step.

Can we ‘save the Planet’? For a resilient, durable and sustainable future for human society, we need to repurpose, reinvent, redesign, remake and recover our human-made world so that our built environment is benignly and seamlessly biointegrated with Nature to function synergistically with it. These are the multiple tasks that humanity must carry out imminently if there is to be a future for human society and all lifeforms and their environments on the Planet. Addressing this is the most compelling question for those whose daily work impacts on Nature, such as architects, engineers, landscape architects, town planners, environmental policy makers, builders and others, but it is a question that all of humanity needs to urgently address. Presented here are two key principles as the means to carry out these tasks – ‘ecocentricity’ being guided by the science of ecology, and ‘ecomimesis’ as designing and making the built environment including all artefacts based on the emulation and replication of the ‘ecosystem’ concept. Designing with ecology is contended here as the authentic approach to green design from which the next generation of green design will emerge, going beyond current use of accreditation systems. For those who subscribe to this principle, this is articulated here, showing how it can be implemented by design. Adopting these principles is fundamental in our endeavour to save our Planet Earth, and changes profoundly and in entirety the way we design, make, manage and operate our built environment.

“An important contribution to the global debate about growth, equality, climate change, and the path to a viable human future.” —David Korten, international bestselling author of When Corporations Rule the World The biggest challenges facing human wellbeing today—widening income inequality, continuing global poverty, and environmental degradation—may be simple to solve in theory. But, because we are required to come up with solutions that are acceptable to a political majority in the rich world, they are much harder to solve in practice. Most of the commonly proposed “solutions” are simply not acceptable to most people. Many of these proposed solutions—like stopping the use of fossil fuels—require a sacrifice today in order to obtain an uncertain advantage in the far future. Therefore they are politically infeasible in the modern world, which is marked by relatively short term thinking. In Reinventing Prosperity, Graeme Maxton and Jorgen Randers provide a new approach altogether through thirteen recommendations which are both politically acceptable and which can be implemented in the current period of slow economic growth around the world. Reinventing Prosperity solves the forty-year-old growth/no-growth standoff, by providing a solution to income inequality, continuing global poverty and climate change, a solution that will provide for economic growth but with a declining ecological footprint. Reinventing Prosperity shows us how to live better on our finite planet—and in ways we can agree on. “An essential guide to those who want to change the world for the better—and for certain.” —Ha-Joon Chang, international bestselling author of 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism “[A] well-argued book . . . explaining complex issues in a style that is clear, logical, and succinct.” —Publishers Weekly

Although environmental health has received some recognition as a field which can positively impact on the social determinants of health, it remains little known outside its immediate sphere of influence. There is also limited literature available to support the potential impact of the profession in public health policy circles, and there has been an overreliance on anecdotal rather than firm evidence. This book presents the findings of an empirical research project focussed on public health policymaking (English Health and Wellbeing Boards), health inequalities and environmental health and provides an insight to the environmental health profession and routes of impact and influence. It discusses environmental health in the context of public health, the role of the profession, issues of visibility and opportunities for impact in today’s policy landscape. In particular, a focus on the local government context is timely given the shifting of the public health function from the National Health Service to local authorities. This book is essential reading for students, practitioners and policymakers in the fields of environmental health and public health.