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In this volume, a group of distinguished international scholars provides a fresh investigation of the most fundamental issues involved in our dependence on natural resources. In Scarcity and Growth (RFF, 1963) and Scarcity and Growth Reconsidered (RFF, 1979), researchers considered the long-term implications of resource scarcity for economic growth and human well-being. Scarcity and Growth Revisited examines these implications with 25 years of new learning and experience. It finds that concerns about resource scarcity have changed in essential ways. In contrast with the earlier preoccupation with the adequacy of fuel, mineral, and agricultural resources and the efficiency by which they are allocated, the greatest concern today is about the Earth‘s limited capacity to handle the environmental consequences of resource extraction and use. Opinion among scholars is divided on the ability of technological innovation to ameliorate this 'new scarcity.' However, even the book‘s more optimistic authors agree that the problems will not be successfully overcome without significant advances in the legal, financial, and other social institutions that protect the environment and support technical innovation. Scarcity and Growth Revisited incorporates expert perspectives from the physical and life sciences, as well as economics. It includes issues confronting the developing world as well as industrialized societies. The book begins with a review of the debate about scarcity and economic growth and a review of current assessments of natural resource availability and consumption. The twelve chapters that follow provide an accessible, lively, and authoritative update to an enduring-but changing-debate.
This book brings together geological, biological, radical economic, technological, historical and social perspectives on peak oil and other scarce resources. The contributors to this volume argue that these scarcities will put an end to the capitalist system as we know it and alternatives must be created. The book combines natural science with emancipatory thinking, focusing on bottom up alternatives and social struggles to change the world by taking action. The volume introduces original contributions to the debates on peak oil, land grabbing and social alternatives, thus creating a synthesis to gain an overview of the multiple crises of our times. The book sets out to analyse how crises of energy, climate, metals, minerals and the soil relate to the global land grab which has accelerated greatly since 2008, as well as to examine the crisis of profit production and political legitimacy. Based on a theoretical understanding of the multiple crises and the effects of peak oil and other scarcities on capital accumulation, the contributors explore the social innovations that provide an alternative. Using the most up to date research on resource crises, this integrative and critical analysis brings together the issues with a radical perspective on possibilites for future change as well as a strong social economic and ethical dimesion. The book should be of interest to researchers and students of environmental policy, politics, sustainable development and natural resource management.
Global warming is an increasing problem, tropical forests are being wiped out and major upper watersheds are being degraded. Using insights provided by environmentalism, ecology and thermo-dynamics, this book – first published in 1989 – outlines an economic approach to the use of natural resources and particularly to the problem of environmental degradation. Edward Barbier reviews and critiques the long past of environmental and resource economics and then goes on to elaborate an economics which allows us to develop alternative strategies for dealing with the problems faced. With examples drawn from Latin America and Indonesia, he not only develops a major theoretical advance but shows how it can be applied. Barbier’s work is an important and relevant contribution to the discussion surrounding the economics of environmental sustainability.
Over 20 years ago Philip Sadler, then head of a leading British business school, wrote Managerial Leadership in the Post-Industrial Society. In it he predicted that business would experience the most radical transformation since the Industrial Revolution of the 19th century. This transformation has now taken place. In his latest book, Sustainable Growth in a Post-Scarcity World, Sadler charts developments once envisaged by Keynes, Chase, Galbraith and Packard, and more recent radical thinkers such as Chris Anderson. Sadler describes how many goods and services have moved from relative scarcity to relative abundance, and asks how this trend can be reconciled with the global issues of population growth and climate change. He assesses the impact of new technologies, new energy sources, new materials and the development of artificial intelligence, on business, government and economics, and discusses the challenges ahead – the creation of new business models, the need to meet people's legitimate expectations of improved living conditions while avoiding environmental catastrophe, and the need to adapt ideas developed in scarcity to conditions of abundance. Why is it that in countries foremost in creating post-scarcity conditions, millions are still in poverty, and billions, worldwide, still lack basic necessities of life? Philip Sadler agrees with those who say the relief of global poverty cannot rely on aid and corporate philanthropy. He explores the idea of re-engineering products and delivering them into bottom-of-the-pyramid (BOP) markets, and concludes that the more global companies take this route, as some are already doing, the more profitable they will find it, and this will in turn help the poorest people who currently pay more for goods and services – the 'poverty penalty' – than the rich.
An argument that resource scarcity and environmental degradation can provide an impetus for cooperation among countries.
Global environmental politics has emerged from its initial incarnation in the arena of 'low politics' and is rapidly becoming a 'high politics' concern. Concern over water pollution, air pollution, deforestation, and related basic environmental issues is giving way to a broader ecological security agenda. In this pathbreaking book, Dennis Clark Pirages and Theresa Manley DeGeest argue for dramatically broadening the context in which security priorities are established in an age of increasing globalization. Addressing the very fundamental question of the sources of premature human deaths and associated insecurity, both historically and in the contemporary world, the authors observe that in the twentieth century starvation killed nearly as many people as did military conflict. But disease was responsible for killing nearly fourteen times as many people as was warfare. And in the contemporary world of the twenty-first century, environmental terrorism and biological warfare are blurring the traditional distinctions between natural disasters, accidental deaths, and military casualties. Ecological Security moves the analysis of global environmental and resource issues to the next level by developing an 'eco-evolutionary' perspective for analyzing emerging problems associated with rapid globalization. Preserving future ecological security will depend upon maintaining dynamic equilibriums among human populations, and between them and pathogenic microorganisms, other species, and the sustaining capabilities of nature. This eco-evolutionary framework is used to anticipate and analyze emerging demographic, ecological, and technological discontinuities and dilemmas associated with rapid globalization. The authors conclude by stressing the need for new kinds of global public goods to mitigate the harshest impacts of these rapid and interrelated changes.
This book examines the links between climate change and resource scarcity to violent conflict. Does climate change cause conflicts? This book analyses the economic, political and social conditions under which countries with low levels of freshwater or arable land experience armed conflict. There are strong theoretic arguments linking climate change and scarcity of livelihood resources to conflict. However, empirical accounts are contradictory. Using qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA), this book compares 22 political, economic and social conditions across 30 countries experiencing scarcity of available freshwater or arable land. The results show that there are three types of resource-scarce countries that experience conflicts: (neo)patrimonial states, oil-rich states that are poorly integrated into the global economy and least developed states. In addition, the results reveal that there are two types of resource scarce countries that remain peaceful: non-agrarian countries with either even development between groups or high integration into the global economy with high levels of adaptive capacities. This explains the contradictory results of previous empirical studies and suggests that resource scarcity might contribute to conflict in least developed countries. This book will be of much interest to students of climate change, critical security, peace and conflict studies, and IR in general.
Making scarcity -- Jean-Laurent Rosenthal: scarcity, language and politics -- Lyla Metha and Amber Huff: untangling scarcity -- Rick Wilk: rethinking the relationships between scarcity, poverty and hunger: an anthropological perspective -- Neil Fromer: renewable energy: a story of abundance and scarcity: a scientific -- Perspective -- The power of projection -- Fredrik Albritton Jonsson: growth in the anthropocene -- Dave Rutledge: the great resources myth -- Jirg Friedrichs: escapology, or how to escape Malthusian traps -- Coping, managing, innovating at different scales -- Hugh Rockoff: U.S. mobilization in World War II as a model for coping -- With climate change -- Walker Hanlon: scarcity and innovation: lessons from the British economy during the U.S. Civil War -- Sigrid Schmalzer: China's great leap famine: Malthus, Marx, Mao, and material scarcity -- Heather Chappells: encounters with scarcity at a micro-scale: householders responses to drought as a continuum of "normal" practice -- Dynamics of distribution -- Elizabeth Chatterjee: a climate of scarcity: electricity in India, 1899-2016 -- David Lamoureux: Lagos "scarce-city": investigating the roots of urban modernity in a colonial capital, 1900-1928 -- Hiroki Shin and Frank Trentmann: energy shortages and the politics of time: resilience, redistribution and "normality" in Japan and East Germany, 1940s-70s -- Emma Stephens: food shortages: the role and limitations of markets in resolving food crises during the 2012 famine in the Sahel
In this classic study, the authors assess the importance of technological change and resource substitution in support of their conclusion that resource scarcity did not increase in the Unites States during the period 1870 to 1957. Originally published in 1963