Tomorrow Today – Learning to build a sustainable future

Tomorrow Today
A book by Irina Bokova that is a mid-decade review of the Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (DESD).

The DESD mid-decade review presents four main areas of action as laid out in the Strategy for the second half of DESD and the outcomes from the UNESCO World Conference on ESD (Bonn, Germany 2009), namely; enhancing synergies with educational and development initiatives; developing and strengthening capacities for ESD; building, sharing and applying ESD-related knowledge and advocating ESD and increasing awareness and understanding of the importance of sustainability..

New editions of Alan AtKisson’s Books

The 23rd November 2010, the London-based publisher Earthscan will release new, updated editions of Alan AtKisson’s classic books BELIEVING CASSANDRA and THE SUSTAINABILITY TRANSFORMATION.

The new edition of BELIEVING CASSANDRA includes a stirring new Foreword by Paul Hawken, who calls the book “erudite” and “exceptionally readable” and likens it to a “neurotransmitter” that helps signal the way for forward to a sustainable future. This beautiful new edition also includes fully updated global data, new case studies and examples, as well updates to the memorable anecdotes and diary entries that AtKisson uses to help make sustainability both more personal, and more understandable. The new material in BELIEVING CASSANDRA draws on an additional decade of experience, including work for the United Nations leading up to and including the Copenhagen Climate Summit in 2009.

In THE SUSTAINABILITY TRANSFORMATION, AtKisson and Earthscan have taken the successful 2008 hardback “The ISIS Agreement” and repackaged it in a beautiful paperback edition, with a new preface, a new cover, and even a new title. THE SUSTAINABILITY TRANSFORMATION has become a widely adopted text in sustainability training programs, and the new preface helps to guide professionals and students — as well as general interest readers — to those parts of the book that they will find most immediately useful. Renowned writer, editor, and climate activist Bill McKibben has called THE SUSTAINABILITY TRANSFORMATION “beyond useful — it’s necessary, rigorous, comprehensive, unsentimental, and yet highly readable, even moving.”

For more information see the AtKisson Group or Earthscan web sites.

Requiem for a Species

Requiem for a Species
Why We Resist the Truth About Climate Change
by Clive Hamilton

This book does not set out once more to raise the alarm to encourage us to take radical measures to head off climate chaos. There have been any number of books and reports in recent years explaining just how dire the future looks and how little time we have left to act.

This book is about why we have ignored those warnings, and why it may now be too late. It is a book about the frailties of the human species as expressed in both the institutions we built and the psychological dispositions that have led us on the path of self-destruction. It is about our strange obsessions, our hubris, and our penchant for avoiding the facts. It is the story of a battle within us between the forces that should have caused us to protect the Earth - our capacity to reason and our connection to Nature - and those that, in the end, have won out - our greed, materialism and alienation from Nature. And it is about the 21st century consequences of these failures.

Sustainability Education

Sustainability Education
Perspectives and Practice across Higher Education
Eds. Paula Jones, David Selby and Stephen Sterling

How do we equip learners with the values, knowledge, skills, and motivation to help achieve economic, social and ecological well-being? How can universities make a major contribution towards a more sustainable future? Amid rising expectations on HE from professional associations, funders, policy makers, and undergraduates, and increasing interest amongst academics and senior management, a growing number of higher education institutions are taking the lead in embracing sustainability. This response does not only include greening the campus but also transforming curricula and teaching and learning.

This book explains why this is necessary and - crucially - how to do it.