Sustainable Futures: Linking Population, Resources and the Environment explores the links between population growth, diminishing resources and environmental challenges, and the implications for Australia's future. Written by leaders in their field, and based on presentations from the 2013 Fenner Conference on 'Population, Resources and Climate Change', this book is a timely insight into the intertwined challenges that we currently face, and what can be done to ensure a sustainable and viable future.
The book identifies the major areas of concern for Australia's future, including environmental, social and economic implications of population growth; mineral and natural resources; food, land and water issues; climate change; and the obstacles and opportunities for action.
Accessible, informative and authoritative, Sustainable Futures: Linking Population, Resources and the Environment will be of interest to policy makers, students and professionals in the fields of sustainability and population growth.
Preface
Introduction
Chapter 1 It's the numbers, stupid!
The environmental implications of population growth
Chapter 2 The environmental implications of population growth
Chapter 3 Whither wildlife in an overpopulated world?
The social and economic implications of population growth
Chapter 4 The outlook for population growth in Australia
Chapter 5 What population growth will do to Australia's society and economy
Chapter 6 Ageing paranoia, its fictional basis and all too real costs
Resources: Oil, minerals, coal and gas
Chapter 7 The propaganda campaign against peaking fossil fuel production
Chapter 8 The coming radical change in mining practice
Chapter 9 Coal: nails in the global coffin
Food, land and water – a blueprint for our future
Chapter 10 Meeting environmental challenges: the example of landscape management
Chapter 11 Food, land and water: lessons from the Murray-Darling Basin
Chapter 12 Balancing water use for food and the environment: Looking to the North based on lessons from the South
Climate change
Chapter 13 Human health: bottom-line integrator of the impacts of the population, resources and climate change nexus
Chapter 14 Climate change: beyond dangerous
Obstacles and opportunities
Chapter 15 Theology Confronts Global Warming and Population
Chapter 16 Denial as a key obstacle to solving the environmental crisis
Chapter 17 Why can’t we win on population?
Chapter 18 Thinking at species level
Towards action
Chapter 19 Nor lose the name of Action!
Conclusion Reflections on the Fenner Conference
Jenny Goldie is national president of Sustainable Population Australia and also active in peak oil and climate change organisations. She is a former science teacher and communicator.
Katharine Betts is a sociologist and author, recently retired from Swinburne University, Melbourne, who has researched population growth for over 35 years.
Contributors:
- Bob Birrell
- Paul Collins
- Julian Cribb
- Chris Dickman
- Rhondda Dickson
- Ian Dunlop
- Michael Jeffery
- Gary Jones
- Michael Lardelli
- David Lindenmayer
- Ian Lowe; Tony McMichael
- Sharyn Munro
- Mark O'Connor
- Jane O'Sullivan
- Paul R Ehrlich
- Roger Short
- Kelvin Thomson
- Haydn Washington