Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface and Acknowledgments
- List of Tables and Figures
- Introduction
- Part I Strategic Considerations
- Chapter 1 Does Sustainable Development Lead to Sustainability?
- Chapter 2 The Sustainable Cities Manifesto
- Chapter 3 Variations on a “Green” Theme: Overcoming Semantics in the Sustainability Debate
- Chapter 4 Don't Pick the Low-hanging Fruit?
- Chapter 5 From the City to the City-Region: The Sustainable Area Budget, Rural Partnerland and Sustainability Engine
- Chapter 6 The Sustainable City Game as a Game and a Tool of Urban Design
- Part II Sustainable Cities Around the World
- Closing Thoughts
- Appendix
- References
- Index
Chapter 3 - Variations on a “Green” Theme: Overcoming Semantics in the Sustainability Debate
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 March 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface and Acknowledgments
- List of Tables and Figures
- Introduction
- Part I Strategic Considerations
- Chapter 1 Does Sustainable Development Lead to Sustainability?
- Chapter 2 The Sustainable Cities Manifesto
- Chapter 3 Variations on a “Green” Theme: Overcoming Semantics in the Sustainability Debate
- Chapter 4 Don't Pick the Low-hanging Fruit?
- Chapter 5 From the City to the City-Region: The Sustainable Area Budget, Rural Partnerland and Sustainability Engine
- Chapter 6 The Sustainable City Game as a Game and a Tool of Urban Design
- Part II Sustainable Cities Around the World
- Closing Thoughts
- Appendix
- References
- Index
Summary
Sustainability is an idea whose time has come. Clearly, in an age of mounting finite resource scarcities, rapid climate change and continuing global population growth – combined with the growing clamor for economic “development” Western-style – the sustainability movement is not going to go away. Sadly, the meaning of sustainability and sustainable development remains highly contested and subject to ongoing and fierce dispute. Today, this state of affairs is evidenced by the growing shift away from the language of sustainability and its variants to the increasingly popular – and easier to swallow – term, “green.”
In his latest book, Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution – and How It Can Renew America (2008), author and New York Times columnist Tom Friedman both criticizes this confusion over “green” vs “sustainability” and abets it (dubbing the needed sustainability transformation in book subtitle and text as a “green” revolution). His critique in most respects is right on the money. Pointing to the proliferation of books and popular magazine articles on the many ways of “going green,” he scolds: “In the green revolution we're having, everyone's a winner, nobody has to give up anything…That's not a revolution. That's a party. We're having a green party” (Friedman, 2008: 251). What really separates a “green party” from a genuine sustainability revolution? And what light do these two terms shed on the other gradations on the environmentalism to sustainability continuum that have entered the global sustainability debate?
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- The City as Fulcrum of Global Sustainability , pp. 41 - 52Publisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2011