Sustainability management 101

There is joy in education, just not necessarily in 'higher' education.

One of the joys of retiring from a fifty-year career in higher education is the chance to review lectures and materials from years past, with the idea of curating the viable, best-of-the-best materials into a coherent message. The topic is sustainability management and the accompanying files are a simple compilation of related materials, organized in a logical fashion, in a readable if rough form.

Let me make three prefacing remarks:

'Sustainability' is a politically popular and also a vague, widely misunderstood and often misapplied concept. These files should clear up much of this confusion and create a context for better understanding of sustainability, not just an operational definition. And it is not about wind-powered electricity generation, although many people see this is one of the cornerstones of sustainable energy. I don't..
The approach here is more comprehensive than the current, simplistic, "we are killing the planet" cries from alarmists. There are hard decisions, sacrifices, and trade offs. There is no simple, universal, inexpensive solution, and it is not just a matter of 'reduce, re-use, and re-cycle.'
Even if we can agree to the elements and challenges of sustainability, we also need a strategy for going forward, constructively. It is easy to complain about the way the world treats the natural environment. It is almost as easy to make superficial forecasts and false accusations as to the causes of any of our problems. Rather than just complain, the point here is to find a comprehensive, strategic, sustainable management solution for the problem, not one that will necessarily solve all the problems, but one that will lead us toward s solution and more agreement about what and how we have to do things.

Here are the eleven draft chapters.

Sustainability management 101

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