While environmentalists insist that lower rates of consumption of natural resources are essential for a sustainable future, many economists dismiss the notion that resource limits act to constrain modern, creative societies. The conflict between these views tinges political debate at all levels and hinders our ability to plan for the future. Supply-Side Sustainability offers a fresh approach to this dilemma by integrating ecological and social science approaches in an interdisciplinary treatment of sustainability. Written by two ecologists and an anthropologist, this book discusses organisms, landscapes, populations, communities, biomes, the biosphere, ecosystems and energy flows, as well as patterns of sustainability and collapse in human societies, from hunter-gatherer groups to empires to today's industrial world. These diverse topics are integrated within a new framework that translates the authors' advances in hierarchy and complexity theory into a form useful to professionals in science, government, and business. The result is a much-needed blueprint for a cost-effective management regime, one that makes problem-solving efforts themselves sustainable over time. The authors demonstrate that long-term, cost-effective resource management can be achieved by managing the contexts of productive systems, rather than by managing the commodities that natural systems produce.

Supply-Side Sustainability

Business & Money

Joseph A. Tainter

T. F. H. Allen

Thomas W. Hoekstra

Economics

Columbia University Press

Political disintegration is a persistent feature of world history. The Collapse of Complex Societies, though written by an archaeologist, will therefore strike a chord throughout the social sciences. Any explanation of societal collapse carries lessons not just for the study of ancient societies, but for the members of all such societies in both the present and future. Dr. Tainter describes nearly two dozen cases of collapse and reviews more than 2000 years of explanations. He then develops a new and far-reaching theory that accounts for collapse among diverse kinds of societies, evaluating his model and clarifying the processes of disintegration by detailed studies of the Roman, Mayan and Chacoan collapses.

The Collapse of Complex Societies (New Studies in Archaeology)

Cambridge University Press

History

Ancient Civilizations

How did our thirst for energy, our technological prowess, and the end of easy oil conspire to make the Deepwater Horizon oil spill likely? This book explains what caused the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history, from which it will take decades to recover.

Drilling Down: The Gulf Oil Debacle and Our Energy Dilemma

Tadeusz W. Patzek

Reference

Copernicus

L'effondrement des sociétés complexes

Le Retour Aux Sources

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Books by Joseph A. Tainter