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Sustainability - What are the Odds? Guessing the Future of our Environment, Economy, and Society
Citation:
Jordan, Steve. Sustainability - What are the Odds? Guessing the Future of our Environment, Economy, and Society. Humanities. MDPI, Basel, Switzerland, 2:119-127, (2013).
Impact/Purpose:
This article is to be submitted to the journal Solutions, as a Perspective. It offers a new perspective on sustainability its value for considering the future of the world's environment, economy, and society.
Description:
This article examines the concept of sustainability from a global perspective, describing how alternative futures might develop in the environmental, economic, and social dimensions. The alternatives to sustainability appear to be (a) a catastrophic failure of life support, economies, and societies, or (b) a radical technological revolution (singularity). The case is made that solutions may be found by developing a global vision of the future, estimating the probabilities of possible outcomes from multiple indicators, and looking holistically for the most likely paths to sustainability. Finally, an intuitive vision of these paths is offered as a starting point for discussion.