Towards an Environmental Society?

This book was inspired by the upcoming United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development planned for Rio de Janeiro in June 2012. Over the past few years, we have asked one basic question of our colleagues at international scientific activities in Europe and the US: Are we seeing a shift of world society towards one that we can say is an “environmental society”? The result is this book, and in it readers will find the responses of scholars and thinkers from Canada, United States, China, and Europe. The framework of the book is based on a structure that begins with theory and then extends to the practical and material outputs of environmental policy. We have tried to give a candid picture of slices of reality at the beginning of the second decade of the 21st century, with suggestions for the future construction and implementation of sustainable development.