Supply-side sustainability / T. F. H. Allen, Joseph A. Tainter, Thomas W. Hoekstra.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

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.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Preface (p. xi)
• 1. The Nature of the Problem (p. 1)
• A New Global System (p. 1)
• Economics, Society, and Ecology (p. 9)
• Comprehending Sustainability (p. 12)
• Manage Systems, Not Outputs (p. 14)
• Manage Contexts (p. 16)
• Supply What Systems Need (p. 19)
• Let the Ecological System Subsidize Management (p. 19)
• Understand Problem Solving (p. 20)
• Sustainability in a Social Context (p. 20)
• Paying for Sustainability (p. 27)
• Maintaining the Political Context (p. 28)
• The Ecology of Sustainability (p. 29)
• Driven Between Disciplines by Technology (p. 29)
• Prediction in Large Systems (p. 33)
• Standard Practice for Different Reasons (p. 43)
• Social and Biogeophysical Integration (p. 49)
• I. Complexity, Problem Solving, and Social Sustainability
• 2. Complexity and Social Sustainability: Framework (p. 55)
• Monitoring, Predicting, and Problem Solving (p. 56)
• Complexity and Problem Solving (p. 61)
• Producing Resources (p. 67)
• Resources, Intensification, and Sustainability (p. 82)
• Producing Knowledge (p. 83)
• Summary and Implications for Sustainability (p. 95)
• 3. Complexity and Social Sustainability: Experience (p. 99)
• Collapse of the Western Roman Empire (p. 101)
• Understanding Roman Unsustainability (p. 121)
• The Early Byzantine Recovery (p. 122)
• Collapse of the Abbasid Caliphate (p. 136)
• Development of Modern Europe (p. 140)
• Consequences of European Wars (p. 148)
• Implications for Sustainability (p. 149)
• Some Characteristics of Sustainability (p. 161)
• II. A Hierarchical Approach to Ecological Sustainability
• 4. The Criteria for Observation and Modeling (p. 167)
• The Organism (p. 171)
• Sustaining the Umwelt (p. 174)
• Habits and Familiar Settings (p. 176)
• Rare and Endangered Umwelts (p. 178)
• Stress and Unmet Umwelts (p. 183)
• The Human Umwelt and Sustainability of Other Species (p. 185)
• Living Systems Theory (p. 189)
• Minimal Viable Systems (p. 192)
• Organisms as Fragile Systems (p. 194)
• The Landscape (p. 197)
• Historical Landscapes in Context (p. 199)
• Implications of Landscapes in a Human Context (p. 225)
• Policy Implications on Landscapes (p. 227)
• Landscapes Cast the Problem (p. 231)
• The Population (p. 235)
• Sustainable Populations (p. 236)
• Sustainability in Aquatic Populations (p. 239)
• Sustainability and Human Populations (p. 245)
• Modern Conservation Biology (p. 246)
• Hierarchical Structure in Populations: Metapopulations (p. 248)
• The Community (p. 251)
• Community as Opposed to Population (p. 253)
• Forest Stand Simulators: Community-Population Hybrids (p. 259)
• Dynamics of the General Community Model (p. 261)
• Taking the Community Model Through Scale Changes (p. 270)
• Implications for Sustainability (p. 275)
• Conclusion (p. 282)
• 5. Biomes and the Biosphere (p. 284)
• The Biome Criterion (p. 289)
• Biomes and Climate Change (p. 289)
• Sustainability of Agricultural Systems as Biomes (p. 293)
• Lack of Sustainability in Paleobiomes (p. 300)
• Global Ecology (p. 315)
• 6. Ecosystems, Energy Flows, Evolution, and Emergence (p. 320)
• Definition of Ecosystem (p. 322)
• The Essential Dichotomy in Biology (p. 327)
• The Duality of Evolution and Thermodynamics (p. 328)
• A Primer on the Mechanics of Thermodynamic Emergence (p. 334)
• The Thermodynamics of Ecosystems (p. 338)
• Experiments on the Generative Function (p. 343)
• Observations on Ecosystems and Sustainability (p. 351)
• Evolution, Emergence, and Diminishing Returns (p. 352)
• Implications for the Contemporary Period (p. 359)
• Supply-Side Sustainability and Resource Management Scale (p. 370)
• Conclusion (p. 378)
• 7. Retrospect and Prospects (p. 380)
• Sustainability and Problem Solving (p. 381)
• Unsustainable Problem Solving in Natural Resource Management (p. 382)
• Sustainable Problem Solving: Managing Systems (p. 385)
• Technological Optimism and Sustainability (p. 388)
• Models of Sustainable and Unsustainable Futures (p. 389)
• Management and Basic Research (p. 392)
• Energy Subsidies (p. 400)
• Societal Demands (p. 412)
• Ecosystems, Complex Societies, and Self-reflective Science (p. 418)
• References (p. 427)
• Index (p. 451)

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

Societies, ancient and modern, necessarily become more complex over time. But a point of diminishing returns per unit of effort (or resources) always emerges, whether, e.g., for agricultural yields or patents per given number of scientists. At some point, there is an increase in complexity just to maintain the status quo. Energy and information can be substituted for natural resources, but again only up to a point. Sustainability does not emerge just from activities such as recycling or conserving biodiversity; it requires problem solving. This, too, costs more and more for ever-smaller amounts of information, but Allen (botany, Univ. of Wisconsin, Madison) and Tainter and Hoekstra (both, USDA Forest Service) offer recommendations for reducing costs. A good case is made that humans have impacted most of the world for a long time, so we cannot know what nature without humans was really like. Thus, we must decide on what to sustain and for whom. Some of the book flows easily, but too much is dense, making it difficult to pull out the good, but embedded, case studies and examples. Nonetheless, this reader found the effort worthwhile, and the importance of how a society can become sustainable makes the effort vital. ^BSumming Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. M. K. Hill University of Maine