A Framework for Sustainability Thinking

Jeremy Van Antwerp earned an M.S. and Ph.D. in chemical engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. He is a Professor of Engineering (chemical concentration) at Calvin University in Grand Rapids, MI, USA, and has been a research affiliate and visiting scholar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a journal editor, and a consultant in the pharmaceutical industry. His research area is systems and process control. He holds one U.S. patent and is the author of Identification and Control of Sheet and Film Pro cesses [1]. His poetry, cartoons, and puzzles have appeared in IEEE Control Systems. He is passionate about excellence and high-impact practices in education. In 2001 he was awarded a Michigan Traditional Arts apprenticeship grant. Matthew Kuperus Heun is a Professor of Engineering (me chanical concentration) at Calvin University in Grand Rapids, MI, USA. He earned an M.S. and Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and later worked at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and at Global Aerospace Corporation. He has been a visiting scholar at the Centre for Renewable and Sustainable Energy Studies at the University of Stellenbosch, South Africa. His long-term research question is "What is the relationship between energy and the economy when viewed through the lens of sustainabil ity?" In addition to scores of articles, he is the lead author of Beyond GDP: National Accounting in the Age of Resource Depletion and a co-editor of Beyond Stewardship: New Approaches to Creation Care.

This book is an introduction to the many challenges of sustainability. The first half of the book develops a framework for sustainability thinking. The second half considers application areas and personal and corporate responses to sustainability challenges. Basic facts, figures, and information related to sustainability are presented in a way that should convey to readers a sense of scale for the many sustainability challenges we face. Throughout, the end-of-chapter projects and discussion questions focus on tradeoffs among competing goods and the ethical and social implications of decisions related to sustainability. This book was written for a university seminar course on sustainability but could be used in other small-group discussion settings. It is intended to be easy to read but hard to digest.

List of Figures.- List of Tables.- Preface.- Acknowledgments.- Introduction.- Planetary Boundaries.- Population.- Affluence.- Resource Intensity of Economic Activity.- Impact of Resources.- Households.- Transportation.- Agriculture.- Land Use.- Collective Action.- Individual Action.- Afterword.- Authors' Biographies.- Index.