Sustainability

Kent Portney's Sustainability, part of the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, is a compact introduction to a term that gets used in many different, sometimes conflicting, ways. Portney traces how the idea of sustainability evolved and then examines what it means in practice across a range of settings: economic growth and the consumption of material goods, government policy at international, national and local levels, the private sector's adoption (and at times co-opting) of sustainability language, and city planning, where Portney argues cities have become important testing grounds for sustainability action. The book also looks squarely at political opposition to sustainability, including arguments that its costs are unacceptable or that the concept is unnecessary, and considers how much individual and collective consumption would actually need to change to make sustainability more than a slogan. Credits: Portney, K. (2015). Sustainability. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Massachusetts Institute of Technology.