Acting as if Tomorrow Matters: Accelerating the Transition to Sustainability. This book provides a framework for answering perhaps the most important question facing the United States and the world—how to speed up progress toward sustainability. At international conferences on sustainable development and climate change held after this book was published, the U.S. and other countries emphasized the need to “accelerate progress” toward sustainability and the importance of “accelerating the reduction of global greenhouse gases.”
In this book, Dernbach and more than four dozen experts in a variety of fields provide a how-to-guide for making the U.S. more environmentally sustainable. “Using the knowledge and experience of leading sustainability practitioners, this book demystifies the quest for sustainability by providing a checklist of practical and tested ideas that can be used in any place or sector to create an attractive and sustainable future,” says Timothy E. Wirth, President, United Nations Foundation and Better World Fund, and former U.S. Senator (Colorado).
The book can be used as a practical guide by governments, nongovernmental organizations, businesses, and citizens on any sustainability issue. It can also be used as a text in law school, graduate and undergraduate programs.
Reviews
Using the knowledge and experience of leading sustainability practitioners, this book demystifies the quest for sustainability by providing a checklist of practical and tested ideas that can be used in any place or sector to create an attractive and sustainable future.
John Dernbach’s Acting as if Tomorrow Matters is a compelling supplement to his existing body of work on sustainable development. The book articulates the collaborative spirit needed to move the needle on sustainable development, while challenging each of us to play an active role in shaping that sustainable future. Not just a book to read, but one to be taken to heart.
From Rio ’92 to Rio ’12: America’s pledge to achieve sustainability has been honored too often in the breach. The reasons for both failures and successes are many and complex, as are the tasks ahead. Acting as if Tomorrow Matters offers redemption and a vision of success.
Acting as if Tomorrow Matters offers a sweeping review of America’s sustainability journey, tracking progress — and slippage — across a wide range of critical issues over the past 20 years. Even more powerfully, it charts a course toward a truly sustainable future, highlighting the advances in law, governance, incentives, education, and political mobilization that will be required.
A masterful account of sustainability in America since the 1992 Earth Summit and the imperative of where the country should go…filled with hope, imagination and inspiration…essential reading if we are to act as if tomorrow matters.
For many years John Dernbach has led one of the most important studies on sustainability. His unique contribution is that he has skillfully included an ethical and religious approach to this pressing subject. He has woven interdisciplinary responses from science and policy with environmental ethics. For this extraordinary effort and for this excellent book we are all in his debt.
John Dernbach has been the leading chronicler of the 20-year quest for sustainability in the United States since the 1992 Rio Earth Summit. What Professor Dernbach has observed in the United States is reflective what is going on around the world.
