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Books helping us address sustainable development challenges

This page provides a gateway to books from amazon.com. The books featured here are ones that have interested me, and that are in keeping with the aims and topics on this site. There are, of course, an enormous number of good books out there, so please use the search box below and look around. If you do find really good books, please e-mail and let me know.

Sustainability: A Philosophy of Adaptive Ecosystem Management

While many disciplines contribute to environmental conservation, there is little successful integration of science and social values. Arguing that the central problem in conservation is a lack of effective communication, Bryan Norton shows in Sustainability how current linguistic resources discourage any shared, multidisciplinary public deliberation over environmental goals and policy. In response, Norton develops a new, interdisciplinary approach to defining sustainability�the cornerstone of environmental policy�using philosophical and linguistic analyses to create a nonideological vocabulary that can accommodate scientific and evaluative environmental discourse. Emphasizing cooperation and adaptation through social learning, Norton provides a practical framework that encourages an experimental approach to language clarification and problem formulation, as well as an interdisciplinary approach to creating solutions. By moving beyond the scientific arena to acknowledge the importance of public discourse, Sustainability offers an entirely novel approach to environmentalism.


Creating a Climate for Change: Communicating Climate Change and Facilitating Social Change

The need for effective communication, public outreach, and education to increase support for policy, collective action and behavior change is ever present, and is perhaps most pressing in the context of anthropogenic climate change. This book is the first to take a comprehensive look at communication and social change specifically targeted to climate change. It is a unique collection of ideas examining the challenges associated with communicating climate change in order to facilitate societal response. It offers well-founded, practical suggestions on how to communicate climate change and how to approach related social change more effectively. The contributors of this book come from a diverse range of backgrounds, from government and academia to non-governmental and civic sectors of society. The two editors are Susanne Moser and Lisa Dilling. The book is accessibly written, and any specialized terminology is explained. It will be of great interest to academic researchers and professionals in climate change, environmental policy, science communication, psychology, sociology, and geography.