ABSTRACT
The challenge of reconciling societal aspirations and environmental limits is
captured by the term “sustainability.” There are good reasons to believe that
society is on an unsustainable path for the longer term. And, while no one knows
exactly what a sustainable path might look like, we think we know good ways
to start down that path-reducing fossil fuel dependencies, for example. We
are told nearly every day that global climate change is the most urgent con-
sequence of our current unsustainable path, and a complex web of causes and
effects can already be seen in recent spikes in oil and food prices all around
the planet. These ripples in the global economy illustrate how everything
really is connected to everything else, how the long-term consequences of
actions taken in the present are very difficult to predict, how the social, environ-
mental, and economic costs and benefits of even well-intentioned actions may
be unevenly distributed, and how the momentum of a society committed to con-
tinual economic growth via competitive markets can be extraordinarily difficult
to redirect.
