ABSTRACT
In a telling sign of the times, in 2008 Kings County, Washington (Seattle), instituted a new rule for building plans, public works projects, and land use. Would a particular development increase or decrease the region’s greenhouse gas emissions? Said then county executive Ron Sims, “We are totally committed to reducing emissions, but it requires rethinking the way we do our activities.” Where people previously based such decisions on quite different criteria, Sims noted that times have changed: “That way doesn’t work in an age of global warming.”1 From cities in the vanguard of the sustainability movement, such as Seattle and Portland, Oregon, to colleges and universities across the nation, new approaches to construction, housing, transportation, food production, and energy use increasingly are being endorsed and put into action. Although these developments hardly signal a fundamental societal transformation in the United States or elsewhere in the world, they do point to the emergence of sustainability as a major concern domestically and internationally.
