Supply-Side Sustainability

In their 2003 book, Supply-Side Sustainability, Drs. Tainter and Hoekstra, with co-author Dr. T.F.H. Allen (University of Wisconsin, Madison), established the foundation for Sustainability International’s research, technology development, and education activities.

While environmentalists insist that lower rates of consumption of natural resources are essential for a sustainable future, many economists dismiss the notion that resource limits constrain modern, creative societies. The conflict between these views tinges political debate at all levels, and hinders our ability to plan for the future.

Supply-Side Sustainability offers a fresh approach to this dilemma by integrating ecological and social science approaches in an interdisciplinary treatment of sustainability. Written by two ecologists (Allen and Hoekstra) and an anthropologist (Tainter), this book discusses organisms, landscapes, populations, communities, biomes, the biosphere, ecosystems, and energy flows, as well as patterns of sustainability and collapse in human societies, from hunter-gather groups to empires to today’s industrial world.

These diverse topics are integrated within a new framework that translates the authors’ advances in hierarchy and complexity theory into a form useful to professionals in science, government, and business.

The result is a much needed blueprint for a cost-effective management regime, one that makes problem-solving efforts themselves sustainable over time. The authors demonstrate that long-term, cost-effective resource management can be achieved by managing the contexts of productive systems, rather than by managing the commodities that natural systems produce.

 

Columbia University Press. New York. 459 pages. ISBN 0-231-10586-X

Buy this book online at Columbia University Press.

 

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