The main focus of this book is the normative or ethical aspects of sustainability, including matters of justice in governance that is important to sustainability. The idea of sustainability is widely perceived as having a normative dimension, often referred to as equity, but the character of this normative dimension is seldom explored. The book aims to fill this gap in the literature of sustainability. It proposes a conceptualization of sustainability that is geared to clarifying its essential ethical structure. It frames (...) sustainability in terms of the capacity of natural systems to provide opportunities to live well, as well as the conduciveness of human practices and systems to preserving such opportunity into the distant future. It develops the idea of sustainability as an art of preserving opportunity to live well – an ethically and scientifically grounded political art of living well together without diminishing opportunity to live well in the future. (shrink)

This book provides an in-depth analysis of consumerism that draws from a wide range of theoretical, clinical and methodological approaches. Contributors demonstrate that consumerism and the culture that surrounds it exert profound and often undesirable effects on both people's individual lives and on society as a whole. Far from being distant influences, advertising, consumption, materialism and the capitalistic economic system affect personal, social and ecological well-being on many levels. Contributors also provide a variety of potential interventions for counteracting the negative (...) influence of consumerism. (shrink)