OUR WORLD
REVIEW & INTERVIEW
Sustainable Economics:
Context, Challenges and Opportunities
for the 21st Century Practitioner
T
by Keith Skene and Alan Murray
his book provides an impressively wide-ranging overview
of the interrelationships and
interdependencies among the
environmental, economic, sociological, and political issues
at play in the world today. They
feed into the rather pressing question of whether humanity will be able to continue its existence on this planet with some semblance of
order and dignity, or whether our social and environmental systems will break down into chaos.
As clearly evidenced from the exhaustive annotation and impressive detail, the book is aimed at academics, researchers, and decision-makers charged
with navigating their companies, organizations or
political institutions into the precarious and unknown territory ahead. While the authors are both
academics, their roots are firmly planted in the real
world and the warnings and conclusions they offer
cannot be lightly dismissed. This book is at once
sober and sobering. For example, according to the
World Wildlife Fund, 35% of the world’s natural
wealth has been lost over the past 30 years alone.
Lay on top of that the growing inequalities between
rich and poor; the dwindling supplies of mined and
extracted resources like fresh water, oil, uranium,
rare earths, lithium (for batteries), which have all
reached peak status; climate change; environmental degradation due to agricultural and industrial
pollution; and the growing pressures of developing
countries understandably wanting to move into a
Western-style consumer society. Coupled with the
exponential rise in the world’s population, it does
not take a PhD to appreciate that our current global standard of living, particularly in the West, is not
only unsustainable, but precarious in the extreme.
I would say that one of the greatest contribu-
58 | NEW CONSCIOUSNESS REVIEW
tions of this book is to point out the insular and
self-serving nature of academic, governmental
and corporate research, and to issue a clarion
call for interdisciplinary collaborations in order
to have some chance of coming up with workable
solutions to benefit the greater whole. Make no
mistake, playtime is over as is business as usual.
It’s time for all of us to step into our responsibilities as grown-ups and to demand urgent action
from those in power, as well as to take those individual actions and choices that we know in our
hearts can make a difference, however small.
While this book is valuable in defining the problems and indicating where we need to change, at
the end of the day it’s up to each of us. The authors
are optimistic that we will collectively step up to
the plate. Let’s hope that we do so before we’ve
passed the final tipping point.
Reviewed by Miriam Knight
INTERVIEW
Keith Skene is director of the Biosphere Research Institute, an independent, international and multidisciplinary centre for global sustainability. He is the co-author of Sustainable
Economics – Context, Challenges and Opportunities for the 21st Century Practitioner. More
information at www.biosri.org
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