The Sustainability Mirage

This original and controversial book argues that what is now preventing us from rising to the challenge of battling climate change and global warming is the sustainable development framework itself. Sustainable development thinking got the issues onto the agenda. But its deal between present and future will always bend under pressure, since it is always the present that strikes the deal. Inevitably, that means floating standards, movable targets and action that will always fall short. Sustainable development is the pursuit of a mirage, the politics of never getting there. To break free of the illusion, we must break through to a new way of understanding sustainability: * focusing on the deep needs of the present, not slippery obligations to the future * rising to the carbon challenge now, not trying to micro-manage the longer-term * looking to the science for orders of magnitude and direction, not a game-plan * harnessing the short-term dynamics of capitalism to the cause of learning our way forward. The book outlines that alternative sustainability model and explores how it might work in key areas--energy usage, governance, education and the role of enterprise. This bold new thinking offers a genuinely hopeful practical strategy in place of the mirage.

John Foster is a freelance writer and teacher, and honorary Research Fellow in Philosophy at Lancaster University, UK