In July 2011, Rebecca Prince-Ruiz challenged herself to go plastic free for the whole month. Starting with a small group of people in the city of Perth, the Plastic Free July movement has grown into a 250-million strong community across 177 countries, empowering people to reduce single-use plastic consumption and create a cleaner future. This book explores how one of the world’s leading environmental campaigns took off and shares lessons from its success. From narrating marine-debris research expeditions to tracking what actually happens to our waste to sharing insights from behavioral research, it speaks to the massive scale of the plastic waste problem and how we can tackle it together. Interweaving interviews from participants, activists, and experts, Plastic Free tells the inspiring story of how ordinary people have created change in their homes, communities, workplaces, schools, businesses, and beyond. It is easy to feel overwhelmed in the face of global environmental problems and wonder what difference our own actions could possibly make. Plastic Free offers hope for the future through the stories of those who have taken on what looked like an insurmountable challenge and succeeded in innovative and practical ways, one step—and one piece of plastic—at a time.

Sustainability Made Simple is an introduction to sustainability and sustainable living that explores the relationship between everyday life and the intricate global environmental issues of today, including air and water pollution, deforestation, and climate change. Rosaly Byrd and Laurèn DeMates offer an optimistic yet realistic perspective on our impact on the environment, giving much needed guidance to those who are interested in finding new and relatively easy ways to incorporate sustainability into daily life. An excellent resource for those who are interested in learning what sustainability is about and picking up habits to be more sustainable, Sustainability Made Simple shows that adopting a sustainable lifestyle doesn’t require “going off the grid” or making drastic life changes that take time and cost money. Instead, Byrd and DeMates focus on the advantages and transformative changes associated with sustainability, demonstrating that although society is facing unprecedented environmental challenges, working towards sustainability is an opportunity to do things differently and do things better, enhancing aspects of life, such as health, work and community.

Provides alternative solutions to such global problems as population control, emerging water shortages, eroding soil, and global warming, outlining a detailed survival strategy for the civilization of the future.

In Inspired Sustainability, Lothes, a professor at the College of St. Elizabeth in New Jersey, analyzes the insights of activists and scholars who are deeply committed to environmental sustainability. Their insights illuminate the positive experiences and effective processes that empower community leaders to engage others and move past these conflicts. She combines empirically-based focus group data with interdisciplinary research and theological analysis. Inspired Sustainability's most important accomplishment is a unique analysis of the barriers to sustainable decision-making, including the cognitive, behavioral, and emotional conflicts inherent in confronting climate change. Lothes' focus groups show that scientific literacy, a commitment to social justice, awareness of global interdependencies, and the support of working in small communities foster new interpretations of traditional worldviews. These new interpretations are powered by an awareness of their complicity in a morally globalized world, and the possibility of consciously choosing to live in just and sustainable ways.

Seeds of Sustainability is a groundbreaking analysis of agricultural development and transitions toward more sustainable management in one region. An invaluable resource for researchers, policymakers, and students alike, it examines new approaches to make agricultural landscapes healthier for both the environment and people. The Yaqui Valley is the birthplace of the Green Revolution and one of the most intensive agricultural regions of the world, using irrigation, fertilizers, and other technologies to produce some of the highest yields of wheat anywhere. It also faces resource limitations, threats to human health, and rapidly changing economic conditions. In short, the Yaqui Valley represents the challenge of modern agriculture: how to maintain livelihoods and increase food production while protecting the environment. Renowned scientist Pamela Matson and colleagues from leading institutions in the U.S. and Mexico spent fifteen years in the Yaqui Valley in Sonora, Mexico addressing this challenge. Seeds of Sustainability represents the culmination of their research, providing unparalleled information about the causes and consequences of current agricultural methods. Even more importantly, it shows how knowledge can translate into better practices, not just in the Yaqui Valley, but throughout the world.

As we increase our awareness of the planetary challenges and how they intersect with the discipline or profession we choose to focus on, we have put our attention on the external forces and impacts. What remains untouched however is the set of beliefs, values, assumptions, mental processes, and paradigms that we hold and share: our mindset. But how do we change a mindset? This book is the first to introduce the 12 Principles for a Sustainability Mindset, presenting educators with a framework that makes it easy to include them into teaching plans and lessons of any discipline. Written in a very clear and practical way, the book provides examples, checklists, tips, and tools for professionals and educators. It transforms the development of a much-needed mindset for sustainability into an accessible, fun and intuitive task. The book is written with educators from a variety of disciplines in mind, including but not limited to management educators, coaches, and trainers. No other book comes close to providing such a well-organized and solid way of starting to shift our mindsets in the direction of sustainability.

"Describes strategies for greening the campus and the curriculum, conducting environmental audits, rethinking school food, and transforming schools into models of sustainable community"-- P. [4] of cover.

An energy tycoon, real estate developer, and philanthropist, George P. Mitchell is also an idealist, a big thinker who gave his time and fortune to the study of sustainability long before it became a household word. Jurgen Schmandt, who has worked for Mitchell for many years, explains and traces the idea of a sustainable society, from its origin in the eighteenth-century concept of the "commons" to its twentieth-century iteration in the 1987 United Nations report "Our Common Future." He then chronicles Mitchell’s commitment to this idea from the early 1960s, when the focus was on population growth, to today, when climate change and global warming dominate the debate. Mitchell advanced his belief that humankind could create "a balance between economic and ecological well-being" by organizing and hosting conferences, awarding prizes, supporting scholars and scientists, and funding research and publications. He did it at the Aspen Institute, at The Woodlands Conferences, at the National Academy of Sciences, at the Mitchell Center for Sustainable Development, and at the Houston Advanced Research Center. (Paradoxically, he did not always do it in his own energy company.) Documenting one important man’s engagement with one important idea, Schmandt has preserved a significant episode in the ongoing quest to create societies that are "capable of reaching and then sustaining a decent quality of life for their citizens."

This book uses the concept of sustainability in science to address problems afflicting the environment, and to devise measures for improving economies, societies, behaviors, and people. The book pursues a scientific approach, and uses scientific evidence as the basis for achieving sustainability. The key topics addressed include: unemployment, health and disease, unsustainable production, our common future, renewable energies, waste management, environmental ethics, and harmful anthropogenic activities. Whereas past literature has mainly examined sustainability as an environmental issue, this book expands the conversation into various sciences, including mathematics, biology, agriculture, computer science, engineering, and physics, and shows how sustainability could be achieved by uniting these fields. It offers a wealth of information across various disciplines, making it not only an intriguing read but also informative and insightful.