期刊名称：The Journal of Transdisciplinary Environmental Studies
印刷版ISSN：1602-2297
出版年度：2014
卷号：13
期号：1
页码：16-17
出版社：Roskilde Univ
摘要：This collection of ten commissioned, scholarly essays by noted European scholars investigates in various ways the apparently vague and often contested concept of sustainability, with a focus on conceptualisation and emerging methodologies. While in engineering and sciences, sustainability is sometimes seen as a license for an almost unlimited exploitation of nature and resources, other thinkers, mainly social scientists, environmental educators, and especially sociologists (but not all of them) remain highly critical and suspicious toward sustainability as a “green” label because it implicitly implies an overexploitation of resources within a very short period of time, without ever thinking about complex problems such as overconsumption, waste, and the issue of unstoppable growth. As Henrike Rau and Ricca Edmondson explain in Chapter 9 (entitled “Time and Sustainability”), these very different views regarding “human society, sustainability and the nature of society-environment relations may come to the fore and even clash during the research process” (p. 186). As a consequence, co-editors Henrike Rau and Frances Fahy (both from NUI in Galway, Ireland) acknowledge the fact that some scholars now prefer to refer to sustainability instead of sustainable development, in order to avoid semantic or conceptual debates and focus on the future: “There are also proposals to substitute ‘sustainability’ instead of ‘sustainable development’ ” (p. 5). Some academics have even considered ‘sustainability’ (or the underlying ‘sustainability research’) as going beyond disciplines into the spectrum of transdisciplinarity, within which sustainability would represent “a goal, an ideal, an umbrella, and a sub-discipline of multiple disciplines” (p. 11). Incidentally, many interrogations related to development studies will reappear in many of the following chapters.
