Resource Bank
Here you will find useful resources and links to help you get the most out of the course. Sustainability Toolkit This is a summary of tips and links for increasing …
Course: Sustainability, Society and You
Sustainability: Impact of Chemical Fertilizers
In India there is now considerable debate about the future of farming as international conglomerates aggressively push forward mono-cultural practices using high-yield crops underpinned with the use of agrochemical fertilizers. …
Energy and Efficiency
In this article and the one that follows we examine energy efficiency in the domestic, service, transport and industrial sectors of society. We look at why and how we waste …
Where does our energy come from?
Please read the article by our geographer Simon Gosling in the PDF below. In this article, Simon introduces the sources of our energy and highlights some of the major issues …
Food and identity
Cultural anthropologists and sociologists have long recognised that food fulfils far more than biological need – this is clear from the fact that no society on the planet consumes all …
What’s in your kitchen?
Watch the video to join Thom as he meets our engineer, Mike Clifford, in the typically British kitchen of Cripps House for a discussion about sustainability at home. Those of …
The Dublin Principles on water and the environment
In 1992 the International Conference on Water and the Environment was held in Dublin, Ireland. The output from this conference was a declaration regarding water that was presented to the …
Sustainable living
This week we have 3 short videos, all filmed in Cripps House, a 1950s British house on the University Park campus in Nottingham. We chose Cripps House because it can …
Predictions and politics
Concerns about our planetary limits are not new. Economists and scientists have been voicing their concerns for centuries, even if they haven’t always used the ‘s’ word. For example, we …
2015 – a turning point?
2015 has seen some significant pronouncements or policies linking the sustainability and health agendas. Here we briefly look at two of these. The Lancet Commission on Health and Climate Change …
Drinking Water: Supply, Scarcity and Debt
Some of us take water for granted, some of us don’t have enough of it. Water, perhaps more than any other resource, encapsulates the imbalances within our society. In this …
The three pillars of sustainability
Sustainability is often represented diagrammatically. The figure at the top of this page suggests that there are three pillars of sustainability – economic viability, environmental protection and social equity. Other …
Models for understanding how sustainability relates to us
To help us relate sustainability to our lives, a number of models have been developed. All of these models are about interconnections – about the relationships between our environment and …
Landscapes – historic and wild
Landscape is seen as central to the perpetuation of local identities, a vital income stream through the promotion of tourism, and, crucially an essential element in the forging of sustainable …
Ethics and sustainability
We finish week 1 of the course by considering some of the ethical dimensions of the sustainability agenda. Dr Neil Sinclair, Assistant Professor in Philosophy, challenges us to consider the …
