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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The End of Sustainability: Resilience and the Future of Environmental Governance in the Anthropocene

The End of Sustainability: Resilience and the Future of Environmental Governance in the Anthropocene

Benson, Melinda Harm
Craig, Robin Kundis

Hardcover

Series: Environment and Society

Environmental StudiesGeneral LawGeneral Political Science

ISBN10: 070062516X
ISBN13: 9780700625161
Publisher: Univ Pr Of Kansas
Published: Nov 30 2017
Pages: 248
Weight: 1.35
Height: 1.00 Width: 6.30 Depth: 9.20
Language: English
The time has come for us to collectively reexamine--and ultimately move past--the concept of sustainability in environmental and natural resources law and management. The continued invocation of sustainability in policy discussions ignores the emerging reality of the Anthropocene, which is creating a world characterized by extreme complexity, radical uncertainty, and unprecedented change. From a legal and policy perspective, we must face the impossibility of even defining--let alone pursuing--a goal of sustainability in such a world.

Melinda Harm Benson and Robin Kundis Craig propose resilience as a more realistic and workable communitarian approach to environmental governance. American environmental and natural resources laws date to the early 1970s, when the steady-state Balance of Nature model was in vogue--a model that ecologists have long since rejected, even before adding the complication of climate change. In the Anthropocene, a new era in which humans are the key agent of change on the planet, these laws (and American culture more generally) need to embrace new narratives of complex ecosystems and humans' role as part of them--narratives exemplified by cultural tricksters and resilience theory.

Updating Aldo Leopold's vision of nature and humanity as a single community for the Anthropocene, Benson and Craig argue that the narrative of resilience integrates humans back into the complex social and ecological system known as Earth. As such, it empowers humans to act for a better future through law and policy despite the very real challenges of climate change

Melinda Harm Benson is an associate professor in the Department of Geography and Environmental Studies at the University of New Mexico.

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