Inextricably Coupled

摘要

Sometimes it pays to start reading a book near the end, as that clarifies how the story's many lines fit in a cohesive plan. Such is the case with Roland Scholz's Environmental Literacy in Science and Society. Scholz (a sustainability scientist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology) aims to promote the "efficient use of scientific knowledge" that we require to cope with 21 st-century environmental problems. The book's first several sections systematically explore an abundance of concepts (drawn from biology, psychology, sociology, economics, and industrial ecology) and transdisciplinary approaches and offer a comprehensive introduction to sustainability science. However, the full picture only emerges in the penultimate section, "A framework for investigating human-environment systems (HES)."