Living System – Making Sense of Sustainability

Living System – Making Sense of Sustainability

Bruce NixonManagement BooksCirencester,Glouc., UKJune 2006160 pp.ISBN 1852525193£9.89

The book takes a broad, whole system look at the situation at the beginning of twenty-first century. It defends the view that the underlying system gets in the way of our changing things for the better and that this is why progress in tackling the urgent issues of climate change and poverty is so slow. The author believes that inequalities in wealth and power have grown enormously, rather than lessened, since the 1970s and that efforts to help poor countries have largely failed so that there is a need to understand and address the system, a living system, rather than create a wild succession of short-term fixes that do not work.

Climate change, degradation of the soil, water and oil shortage and the loss of species are seen in the book as warnings. It examines the failures of current attempts to bring about change.