The Sustainability Handbook: The Complete Management Guide to Achieving Social, Economic and Environmental Responsibility by William R. Blackburn provides a blueprint for how organizations of all sizes can reach or exceed economic, social, and environmental excellence.
The California Tourism and Travel Commission has a $20 million budget to market California to the world. The state funds are matched by assessments on member-businesses. The commission funds marketing efforts and works with local businesses through regional visitors bureaus.
In Omnivore’s Dilemna: a Natural History of Four Meals (2006), reporter Michael Pollan follows “the food chains that sustain us, all the way from the earth to the plate.” The book represents investigative, and participatory, journalism at its best, as Pollan tries to understand what he terms the “American paradox–that is, a notably unhealthy people obsessed byt the idea of eating healthy.”
While Interior Secretary for President Clinton, Bruce Babbitt lead restorations efforts from the Florida Everglades to dam removal on the Neuse River in North Carolina and the reintroduction of the gray wolf to Montana and Idaho. In his 2005 book, Cities in the Wilderness: a New Vision of Land Use in America, he argues the Bureaus of Land Management and Reclamation, and the Army Corps of Engineers drive federal land use decision. Given this cast of character, it’s not surprising that land use priorities are grazing and mining, dam construction, and water projects that have wreaked environmental havoc.
Energy is a national security issue, argues author David Goldwyn in his new book, Energy and Security: Toward a New Foreign Policy Strategy. As long as the U.S. remains “addicted to oil,” securing access to petroleum will drive our foreign policy.
The federal government has created a comprehensive website to track the latest information about the avian flu:
PandemicFlu.gov | U.S. information on pandemic flu and avian influenza.
Architect Sim Van der Ryn and scientist Stuart Cowan develop the concept of ecological design, design that “minimizes environmentally destructive impacts by integrating itself with natural processes.” The authors acknowledge that “sustainability has become a kind of mantra of the 1990s,” used to “justify a wide variety of connventional large-scale development schemes.” As an alternative, they posit “ecological sustainability” that involves conservation, regeneration and stweardship.