Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 March 2012
Summary
An Unsustainable World in Crisis
Between 2001 and 2009, five signal events shaped the contemporary localnational- regional and global scene in the first decade of the new millennium in ways that will reverberate throughout the world for years, perhaps decades, to come. These events were: the war on terrorism precipitated by the events of September 11, 2001; the shift in global population from the rural countryside to towns and cities heralded by the United Nations (UN); the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's Assessment Report declaring that the evidence for global warming was unequivocal; the global economic crisis triggered by the financial meltdown of major banks and insurance firms beginning in July and cresting in early September 2008; and the prospect of reaching peak oil production between 2008 and 2010, coupled with the specter of a multitude of other resource scarcities.
Since 9/11, the global war on terrorism has cast a long shadow over the shape of world politics and American foreign and domestic politics. It has threatened – and continues to threaten – to marginalize the national environmental agenda, spawned by the movement politics of the sixties and informed by the legacy of the progressive conservationism and preservationist schools of the early twentieth century. Meanwhile, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released its fourth major report on global warming in early 2007, which stated that warming of the climate system is unequivocal and attributing the rise in average global temperatures with 90 percent likelihood to anthropogenic (i.e., human and social) sources.
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- The City as Fulcrum of Global Sustainability , pp. xv - xxxiiPublisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2011