Social Sustainability, Past and Future

Undoing Unintended Consequences for the Earth's Survival

Sander van der Leeuw author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Cambridge University Press

Published:13th Feb '20

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

Social Sustainability, Past and Future cover

A novel, integrated approach to understanding long-term human history, viewing it as the long-term evolution of human information-processing. This title is also available as Open Access.

For a professional, educated non-academic audience, this book asks how our societies were caught in a socio-economic dynamic causing the sustainability conundrum. It develops an original view of social evolution as the history of human information-processing, studying the past to understand the present in order to deal with the future. This title is also available as Open Access.In this book, Sander Van der Leeuw examines how the modern world has been caught in a socio-economic dynamic that has generated the conundrum of sustainability. Combining the methods of social science and complex systems science, he explores how western, developed nations have globalized their world view and how that view has led to the sustainability challenges we are now facing. Its central theme is the co-evolution of cognition, demography, social organization, technology and environmental impact. Beginning with the earliest human societies, Van der Leeuw links the distant past with the present in order to demonstrate how the information and communications technology revolution is undermining many of the institutional pillars on which contemporary societies have been constructed. An original view of social evolution as the history of human information-processing, his book shows how the past offers insight into the present, and can help us deal with the future. This title is also available as Open Access.

'… an unequivocally masterful and absolutely brilliant description of dynamically complex and correlated cultural milieus and environmental systems as a cautionary tale for the ages.' R. G. Mendoza, Choice

ISBN: 9781108498692

Dimensions: 250mm x 215mm x 40mm

Weight: 700g

350 pages