ABSTRACT
Learning to live sustainably has never been more urgent. The challenges of climate change, peak oil and acute biodiversity loss are converging at a time of global economic disorder and injustice: short-term, national solutions are not an option. Local and global issues are ever more closely interconnected – the global pervades the local, just as the local pervades the global. The global economy, however, is still structured around a model that was devised at the start of the industrial revolution and huge tensions exist between stakeholders at the local and global levels. These are difficult times to try to balance the economic, social and environmental elements, which make up the process of sustainable development (SD). Policy-makers need new tools and new ways of thinking to address these challenges. If we are unable to do this, then we endanger the very fabric of our world that makes human life possible: we are already living way beyond the carrying capacity of the planet and if we do not start now to change our unsustainable ways of living, then we may not have another opportunity.
