What is Sustainability?: Economics, Science, and Ethics
John M. Gowdy is past president of the U.S. Society for Ecological Economics and is President-Elect of the International Society for Ecological Economics. He has been a Fulbright scholar at the Economic University of Vienna, Leverhulme Professor at Leeds University and a visiting scholar at the Autonomous University in Barcelona, the University of Zurich, the Free University of Amsterdam, the University of Queensland and Tokushima University. He has published more than 150 academic articles and has authored or co-authored 10 books. His most recent books are Microeconomic Theory Old and New: A Student’s Guide (Stanford U. Press, Summer 2009), Paradise for Sale: A Parable of Nature, co-authored with Carl McDaniel, University of California Press, and Frontiers in Ecological Economic Theory and Application, Edward Elgar Press, co-edited with Jon Erickson.
In this talk he'll give a brief history of the economic conception of sustainability and how it has evolved after the debate over the Nicholas Stern Review on the economics of climate change. He'll briefly discuss the latest thinking on climate change and its likely consequences and the related issue of biodiversity loss. He will end with a discussion of the possibility of Homo sapiens making a Great Transition to an ecological sustainable way of living.