As I may have mentioned, Paul Vare and I have a new book published today:
Learning, Environment and Sustainable Development: a history of ideas
You can buy it here at an immodest price. Here's the blurb:
"This is an introduction to the long history of human learning, the environment and sustainable development – about our struggles with the natural world: first for survival, then for dominance, currently for self-preservation, and in future perhaps, even for long-term, mutually beneficial co-existence. It charts the long arc of human–environment relationships through the specific lens of human learning, putting on record many of the people, ideas and events that have contributed, often unwittingly, to the global movement for sustainable development.
Human learning has always had a focus on the environment. It’s something we’ve been engaged in ever since we began interacting with our surroundings and thinking about the impacts, outcomes and consequences of our actions and interactions. This unique story told by the authors is episodic rather than a connected, linear account; it probes, questions and re-examines familiar issues from novel perspectives, and looks ahead."
It is, of course, our history of ideas; a history that's embedded in our shared cultural heritage and experience. It's no surprise, then, that it's full of Anglo-European-American themes because that's mostly (though not quite all) we know. There are other histories to be written about this. Maybe they will be, but not by us, although we might help.
For my part, it's a book that could only have been written at the end of a career as it afforded an opportunity to look back at what came before my time, and at many still quite unfinished developments that I was a part of. It was hugely enjoyable to write which is as it should be if you are inflicting yet another book on an overburdened world.
Responses
really looking forward to reading this!