BOOK REVIEW

Robert Costanza and Ida Kubiszewski (eds): Creatinga sustainable and desirable future: Insightsfrom 45 global thought leaders

Glenn Strachan

Published online: 30 July 2014# AESS 2014

Constanza and Kubiszewski have produced a book aimed ataddressing concerns about the future of humanity and thefuture of the planet as a whole. The challenge this poses isreflected in the first sentence of chapter 1: ‘Creating a sharedvision of a sustainable and desirable future is the most criticaltask facing humanity today.’ The enormity of the challenge isexposed when you consider the questions inherent in thisinitial sentence. Who is included in the shared vision? Is itlocal or global? Is it possible to achieve a consensus on what isdesirable? And, probably most important of all, how can youmake the vision a reality? Through the four distinct parts ofthis book, Constanza and Kubiszewski address these ques-tions with the aid of 45 distinguished thinkers, many of whomwill be familiar to readers.

The authors of the chapters bring viewpoints from a rangeof backgrounds, and they include distinguished academicsfrom the fields of economics, ecology, psychology, engineer-ing and design; founders and leaders of civil society organi-zations and companies and voices from the world of politicsand government. With so many contributors and with many ofthe chapters originally written for other publications, it is notsurprising that there is a great deal of diversity in terms of bothstyle and content. The book offers perspectives on the future atdifferent levels, from global governance to community andhousehold actions and solutions through to Tim Kasser’svalue-based perspective which is concerned with finding thesolutions within ourselves. There is a bias towards American/Western worldviews in the book, although in terms of solu-tions there are examples from other parts of the world includ-ing a chapter from the first democratically elected primeminister of Bhutan.

Despite the diversity of contributions, there are some com-mon, related themes that reoccur through the chapters. Theseinclude the need for a new economic framework and a newapproach to value; the need to reduce high levels of consump-tion, realigning human activity with the natural world and theassumption that there will be some form ofmajor transition (or‘the great turnaround’ as Ronald Colman puts it in chapter 11).The notion of transition is a theme that emerges in differentcontexts throughout the book. A transition to new forms ofsocial organisation is presented by Paul D Raskin in chapter 7;a potential transition to 350 ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere isdescribed by Walsh and Croner in chapter 20; and in chapter27, Tucker and Swimme explore how individuals might trans-form their views on their place in the universe.

While the book focuses on a sustainable and desirablefuture, and the positive steps that can be taken towards it,there is recognition of the fact that this goal might not beachieved. Many authors acknowledge that even if it isachieved, the journey though the transition is likely to be aharsh and painful one for many people.

Part 1 of the book is concerned with the power ofenvisioning as part of the change process. This includes achapter from the late Donella Meadows whose enduring in-fluence is also detected in subsequent chapters through refer-ences to her work. The chapters in Part 1 argue that we shouldnot look to governments to provide the vision of the sustain-able future we want; rather, inspiration is likely to come fromnon-governmental organizations and corporations. At thesame time, the authors acknowledge the presence of vestedinterests as barriers to achieving the vision. Frances MooreLappé encourages the reader to adopt an ecological perspec-tive in seeking a vision and to recognise the qualities ofconnectedness, continuous change and cocreation.

Parts 2 and 3 of this book contain visions, or elements ofvisions, for a sustainable and desirable future. The chapters inPart 2 adopt a viewpoint from around the year 2050, a ‘future

G. Strachan (*)Education for Sustainability Programme, London South BankUniversity, London, UKe-mail: glenn@glennstrachan.co.uk

J Environ Stud Sci (2014) 4:265–266DOI 10.1007/s13412-014-0179-7

histories’ perspective presenting a description of various aspectsof life in the future and looking at the changes that have takenplace over the previous decades. In chapter 5, Robert Costanzaand colleagues use the five capitals model to describe how theworld has changed, while in chapter 8 Les Kuzyk takes thereader through an environmental history exam from 2052 whichcovers the previous five decades. Kuzyk and others reference theeconomic downturn of 2008 as a trigger point for significantchange. From the contemporary perspective of 2014, there seemsto be a greater danger of slipping back into business as usual thanthere was in 2008, but the book is clear that business as usual hasno place in a vision of the future.

Part 3 describes various elements of a future world that thevarious authors assume people would want to live in. Thechapters in this part provide examples of what some majorissues, which are of concern to people now, will be like at theend of the twenty-first century. These include new economicframeworks; new approaches to well-being and to happiness;the positive impact of genuine gender equality; the manage-ment of the Earth’s resources, security, climate change and aconceptual design for a future transport network.

Achieving consensus on what sustainability might be andwhat a sustainable future might look like is difficult enough andmaking it desirable to the majority just adds to the task. How-ever, Part 4 of this book takes onwhat might be seen as the evengreater challenge of how the vision of a sustainable future canactually be achieved, or as the book puts it, ‘how we get fromhere to there.’ In the final 20 chapters, which is over 40% of thebook, the editors have assembled examples of how the visionmight be achieved. The book should be commended for devot-ing its largest section to going some way to answering the‘how’ questions that will be raised by reading the earlier chap-ters. But it is the nature of the complex changes needed to movetowards a sustainable future in these latter chapters that will alsoleave the reader with many questions.

The areas of debate raised in Part 3 are all here in the final20 chapters. Using economic drivers and particularly changesin the tax regime and changes to GDP as a key indicator areamongst the most discussed areas with alternative economicviewpoints coming from authors such as Ernest Callenbach,Van Jones, L Hunter Lovins and Eckart Wintzen. MhanMunasinghe introduces the concept of the MillenniumConsumption Goals in one of several chapters on the

ways in which consumerism could be addressed. Manag-ing the Earth’s resources; the roles played by science,ecology and education; and the ways in which we mightshift individual world views are all present. In the main,these debates take place between the chapters rather thanwithin the chapters as different authors offer solutionsfrom different perspectives.

Many of the contributors to this book have producedwhole books on specific aspects of sustainable develop-ment or achieving change towards sustainability. For ex-ample: Peter Senge on organizations; David Orr on designand Bill McKibben on climate change. This book isdifferent because it pulls together many of the facets ofsustainability into one volume and taken as a whole itdoes offer a broad view of potential futures and strategiesfor getting there. Inevitably, however, the diverse contri-butions mean that it is a compendium rather than a round-ed thesis. Its real value is in the fact that it offers astimulating range of individual think pieces most of whichhave the potential to be triggers for discussion and debatein educational contexts.

This book will be of interest to anyone with a broadconcern about the social, political and economic changes thatare needed for a shift towards living within the ecologicallimits of the planet. Individuals working as agents for changein a community context or an institutional context may drawideas and inspiration from this book. In the academic sphere, afuture’s perspective has relevance in many disciplines and thefact that individual chapters can stand alone makes this bookan accessible reference text for students on the increasingnumber of degree level and higher degree level courses thatengage with sustainability issues.

Books about the future will always be contested, butthat is part of the process of debate. Speculation about thefuture of humanity and the future of the planet as a wholeis far from new; the contribution of this book to thedebate is to bring together existing views from a widerange of distinguished thinkers. Producing a book thatseeks to make a significant contribution to moving hu-manity towards a sustainable and desirable future is insome respects an impossible task. But it is a necessarytask and I, for one, am grateful to Costanza andKubiszewski for rising to the challenge.

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