Has Sustainability Failed? Is Global Climate Change Inevitable? After Sustainability Looks at What Is to Come

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The evidence of global warming is all around us, so why can’t we admit what we really all know – that it is now too late to stop dangerous climate change from taking hold? What could we think, and how could we act, if we did admit it? John Foster’s new book, After Sustainability: Denial, Hope, Retrieval, published by Routledge/Taylor & Francis, examines the full extent of denial around this issue, the failure of the sustainability agenda, and what happens after sustainability.

Some people still refuse to accept that climate change is coming; others refuse to accept that we are too late to stop it. Foster argues that both these reactions to climate change spring from the same source: our pathological attachment to ‘progress’, of which sustainability has been one more version.  After Sustainability traces that attachment to its roots in the ways we make sense of ourselves, in order to provide a view of what a habitable future could look like and enable humankind to take action. According to Foster, “You can’t think clearly about what comes next, until you are prepared to challenge the ideology of progress.” 

Paul Kingsnorth, poet, author and Director of the Dark Mountain project, says, “An understanding of the bind we are in, why 'sustainability' has failed to get us out of it, and what an honest alternative might be is long overdue. This book looks beyond false hope and strained optimism to what that future might look like.”

This original and accessible book is written for anyone who has glimpsed our environmental tragedy, cares about our future and wants to give up pretending without giving up hope.

The author will be introducing the book at a seminar at the UCL Institute for Sustainable Resources in London, on October 9th 2014, which is open to the public.  For more information on this seminar, and more about the book, please visit www.routledge.com/u/aftersustainability. To request a review copy, please contact Katy Kasle, Marketing Manager.

Katy Kasle
Marketing Manager
Routledge/Taylor & Francis
711 Third Avenue
New York, NY 10017
P: 212-216-7835
E: katharine.kasle@taylorandfrancis.com

Routledge is a global publisher of academic books, journals and online resources across Social Sciences, the Humanities and Built Environment, with offices in the US, UK, Brazil, Singapore, China and India. We publish a wide range of books and journals, serving scholars, instructors, students and professional communities worldwide. Our current publishing programme encompasses fundamental professional resources, groundbreaking textbooks and premier, peer-reviewed research. We have partnered with many of the most influential societies and academic research bodies to publish their journals and book series. Readers can access tens of thousands of print and e-books from our extensive catalogue of titles. Routledge is part of theTaylor & Francis Group, an Informa business.

Routledge Sustainability has evolved from and incorporates the former Earthscan  imprint and is the leading global publisher in the inter-disciplinary field of Environment and Sustainability studies. We offer a broad array of titles from accessible introductions and supplementary readings to policy-influencing titles, and from important research to cutting-edge series for a range of academics, professionals and general readers. Our publications cover wide-ranging topics from climate change, the sustainable management of natural resources and the environmental humanities to sustainable energy, business and development.

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