Utilizes Heidegger in rethinking common environmental paradigms.

“In the heart of this world, the Lord of life, who loves us so much, is always present. He does not abandon us, he does not leave us alone, for he has united himself definitively to our earth, and his love constantly impels us to find new ways forward. Praise be to him!” – Pope Francis, Laudato Si’ In his second encyclical, Laudato Si’: On the Care of Our Common Home, Pope Francis draws all Christians into a dialogue with every person on the planet about our common home. We as human beings are united by the concern for our planet, and every living thing that dwells on it, especially the poorest and most vulnerable. Pope Francis’ letter joins the body of the Church’s social and moral teaching, draws on the best scientific research, providing the foundation for “the ethical and spiritual itinerary that follows.” Laudato Si’ outlines: The current state of our “common home” The Gospel message as seen through creation The human causes of the ecological crisis Ecology and the common good Pope Francis’ call to action for each of us Our Sunday Visitor has included discussion questions, making it perfect for individual or group study, leading all Catholics and Christians into a deeper understanding of the importance of this teaching.

Human health is facing unprecedented threats from global environmental change. This book describes the challenges and opportunities to safeguard health.

Thirty years ago, the UN report Our Common Future placed sustainable development firmly on the international agenda. The Imperatives of Sustainable Development takes the ethical foundations of Our Common Future and builds a model that emphasizes three equally important moral imperatives – satisfying human needs, ensuring social justice, and respecting environmental limits. This model suggests sustainability themes and assigns thresholds to them, thereby defining the space within which sustainable development can be achieved. The authors accept that there is no single pathway to the sustainable development space. Different countries face different challenges and must follow different pathways. This perspective is applied to all countries to determine whether the thresholds of the sustainability themes selected have been met, now and in the past. The authors build on the extensive literature on needs, equity, justice, environmental science, ecology, and economics, and show how the three moral imperatives can guide policymaking. The Imperatives of Sustainable Development synthesizes past reasoning, summarizes the present debate, and provides a clear direction for future thinking. This book will be essential reading for everyone interested in the future of sustainable development and in the complex environmental and social issues involved.

Our Common Future is a joint work produced in 1987 by a United Nations commission headed by former Norwegian Prime Minister, Gro Brundtland. Also known as The Brundtland Report, it offers a classic approach to problem solving by first asking a productive question. How do we protect the world we live in for future generations, while at the same time stimulating economic and social development right now? The solution the work proposes is “sustainable development”, defined in the report as humanity’s ability “to ensure that it meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” The key conclusion the report came to – that we need long-term strategies to manage the earth’s natural resources – proved to be so universally welcomed it introduced the term “sustainability” into the everyday language of international politics. Solving the problem of workable sustainable development became a hot topic, leading to the birth of a new academic discipline, environmental economics. The book offered a solution to the problem of ensuring sustainable development by highlighting the critical importance of international cooperation.

Opens up new ways of thinking about and debating the consequences of sustainable urbanism as it moves from planning to practice. In the context of urban sustainable development, the “details” of sustainability’s current expressions perpetuate environmental injustice, untenable growth, and the destruction of functioning ecosystems. In response to this state of affairs, Adventures in Sustainable Urbanism aims to prompt new debates about the consequences of sustainable urbanism as it moves from planning to practice. Contributors explore policy, practice, and experience from cities around the world, including Calgary, Christchurch, Dortmund, Vancouver, and others. Written by scholars who live in these cities, chapters offer empirically rich descriptions for opening up new lines of thinking, theorizing, and debate about the sustainable city and its actual material expressions in place. By examining the sustainable city through various analytical framings, contributors urge readers to move from viewing the sustainable city as something everyone can agree on, to a highly politicized and contested process. Additional resources are provided for readers who may wish to extend their own research into a city or theme. “This is a very compelling book that clearly conveys the multiple and contested meanings and practices of sustainable urban development. In the end, the reader is left to consider not only the plurality of understandings of sustainability—clearly not an innocent or neutral concept—but the varied interests sustainability may serve. This book represents a unique contribution to the field.” — Byron Miller, coeditor of The Routledge Handbook on Spaces of Urban Politics