Sustainability: A Comprehensive Foundation
This text is nothing if not comprehensive. It is so comprehensive, in fact, that one wonders about whether there exists an upper threshold after which it is simply too much. One student could not really consume this much in one semester. That probably is not the authors' intent either; it is intended to be incorporated chapter by chapter, section by section. Chapters 5 (physical resources) and 8 (renewable energy) themselves are a little longer than they need to be, at the risk of turning off students. However, the other chapters are consumable individually.
The only topic that is not covered, and that really should be, is environmental justice. It is mentioned twice in the book but never covered thoroughly.
The book is so vast there are bound to be disputable points. I will first stick to what are a few blatant inaccuracies. In chapter 6 the idea of Tragedy of the Commons is explained but misrepresented. It mentions that Elinor Ostrom found counter examples, but then is dismissive of them. It uses North Atlantic fisheries as an example of the Tragedy of the Commons, when Ostrom and her team helped disprove that. Those fisheries were fished sustainable for at least 300 years before they were overfished, starting in the 1950s. What that shows is that it was technology and the market that did it - social forces quite different from whether property is owned privately or publicly (which is what Garret Hardin was getting at with his thesis).
The Tragedy of the Commons surfaces again in chapter 10. I liked a lot of this chapter, but again the authors seem oblivious to critiques of the idea. Figure 10.3 is a cartoon suggest that the Tragedy of the Commons "lacks dialogue." Unfortunately it seems the authors did not get the joke. The long standing and various criticisms of the Tragedy thesis are that it assumes actors who do not communicate with each other, and that in real world examples of common pool resources they typically do. That was how Ostrom showed the flaw in the theory. The authors seemed to interpret the cartoon as saying that the Tragedy of the Commons thesis argues that people don't communicate enough. The issue is that ignores their actual communication.
Chapter 6 refers to the idea that consumers behave rationally and balance costs/benefits as an "uncontroversial axiom." That is controversial to say the least. Plenty of dispute about that.
Love Canal is discussed without ever mentioning Lois Gibbs or environmental justice. That seems like a huge omission.
Chapter 7 refers to the Clean Air Act of 1955. At that time it was the Air Pollution Act, and was renamed the CAA in 1963. But the components of it recognizable as what we call the CAA were added in 1970, so it seems questionable to refer to it as a 1955 act.
The use of graphs, charts and maps are generally a strength of the book, except that some of them are outdated, at least as of this review. Worldmapper was once great, but reflects 2002 data. There charts in chapter 5 for example that have data from 2000.
The book is so long I doubt it will be easy to update in any way. I didn't see much that was outdated except for the graphics. They also rely on the Brundtland report for virtually all definitions of sustainability which can be problematic.
The writing is clear overall. The only exception is the first chapter, which starts off invoking ideas that introductory students will not be familiar with. It is not well situated in the literature. The chapters following are all much better about that. The entire thing is fairly dry though, and is not inquiry-focused (meaning it provides information but doesn't bring the readers' direction back to a central question).
The book is consistent overall.
With the exception of chapter 1, the book is very modular. Chapters 5 and 8 are on the long side, but otherwise any chapter can work on its own.
I don't see any problem with the structure of the book.
No significant problems in terms of interface, except the minor exception that the way inset charts and figures are referenced in text is a little odd and clunky. The only major exception is that the whole thing is a single PDF on white background, and can be tiresome and dull reading. I doubt the authors could do much about that though.
There are a few grammatical errors, but the frequency of them is somewhat chapter specific. Most chapters are pretty clean.
I'm not sure this is about "cultural relevance," but those considering the adoption of this book should be aware of a couple things. First, chapter 6, on resource and environmental economics, takes an orthodox neo-classical approach, seemingly without being aware there are other approaches. Hence the authors take rational behavioralism as an "uncontroversial axiom." As another example, the authors mention the Coase theorem and all the ways it becomes obsolete in the real world, but then goes on to suggest that it should be the guiding principle of policy, before rapidly changing subjects. In short, the authors of that chapter are clearly economists of a neo-classical stripe. And second, I liked a lot about chapter 10, sustainability and society, and in fact would've preferred it if this was a bigger focus of the entire text. The chapter's case study on Colony Collapse Disorder was excellent. However, it takes a long term evolutionary approach to the issue, which notoriously obscures an incredible amount of geographic and historical specificity. This really comes through when it mentions the J-curve without qualifying it. The J-curve is actually very misleading, because a more historically specific understand of it shows that population growth is leveling off. In fact it didn't grow in the first place because humans are hard wired for that, as an evolutionary approach would assume. Population in general is not discussed adequately in the text.
It has its strengths and weaknesses. In general though, it trends on the technical and policy-wonk side. The discussion of transcendentalism in chapter 2 and some of the case studies in chapter 10 were exceptions to this, but overall it reads like an Encyclopedia of the Environment. Like a massive information dump without much focus or punch. The authors were going for comprehensiveness, which they achieved, but which ultimately created something that feels like a basic reference text for an undergraduate environmental course.