Can you please stop telling me 'all people are different'? A textbook on sustainable development should address public decision making and politics. Politics can be described as the area in society where issues transcending mere individual needs and activities are debated and decided and where disagreement is legitimate. It has its own rules and rites. [...]
An analysis of the outcomes of the World Value Survey (§4.2) over the period 1989-2004 has been used to identify popular support for the transition to a market economy in India and China (Migheli 2010). It is based on a set of questions about the role of competition, government intervention, income inequality, hard work and [...]
Cultural Theory interprets social-cultural change as a continuous, dynamic interplay between the adherents of the four perspectives (Thompson 1992, 1997; Vries 2023). Individuals alter their perspective when it is no longer reconcilable with their experience. Collective, institutional change happens whenever larger groups of people start to doubt the correctness and adequateness of the dominant perspective [...]
The energy needed to deliver energy has always been a concern for societies. ‘All our societies require enormous flows of high-quality energy just to sustain, let alone raise, their complexity and order (to keep themselves [ . . . ] far from thermodynamic equilibrium) ... [and] after a certain point in time, without dramatic new [...]
[see also this link here.] Global Sustainability 27 september 2019 (e18). The seven-plus billion human beings on the planet are increasingly connected through material and informational exchanges. Their everyday behaviour and their desires, emotions, aspirations and expectations are still very different and diverse, yet there seems to be a shared universal idea(l) about ‘the good [...]
Living on a plane. "Ana-Maria P. is the president of Powerstorm, a US company working on sustainable telecom solutions focused on reducing CO2 emissions in emerging markets. How often do you travel? I basically live on a plane. I recently calculated this and in the last four years, I spent only three months at home…The [...]
The consumption of meat is increasingly becoming controversial as a spectrum of activists point at the negative side-effects for animal welfare, human health, local pollution and climate change inducing greenhousegas emissions. The meat industry and its suppliers see their profits and expansion opportunities under threat, arguing that there are already many regulations in place and [...]
Every now and then I meet friends who have given up on changing the world: “It is too complex, too violent, too far away, and I feel powerless in the face of it. So I try to focus on my own family, neighbourhood…”. Somewhat paradoxical, this attitude is partly a response to the information overload [...]
Reading the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) that were agreed upon by the United Nations in 2015 in the document Transforming our world: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (sustainabledevelopment.un.org), I am struck by the high level of aspiration not to say idealism. The Goals do indeed demand a transformation and, besides focused technological innovations, crucial [...]