Towards a Sustainable Technological World

This book is about global limitations and local solutions found by local societies. A Sustainable Technological World is defined in balance with the other great mass and energy streams in the geosphere and biosphere and in balance within the position of mankind in the biosphere.

The local societies are characterized in terms of population size and cultural dimensions and these interlinked properties give rise to sociodiversity. Sociodiversity and in its wake different appreciation of artifacts are a prerequisite for finding the pathway to sustainable development on a global scale.

This book is written top-down and in line with this kind of thinking

Contents: Preface  1 Introduction  2 Back Casting World Spheres  3 A Sustainable Technological World  4 Artifacts Design  5 Life Cycles Artifacts  6 Learning Societies  7 Towards  Appendix. Society Data  Index

Recommendation by prof.dr.ir J.L.A. Jansen

This book presents an unusual if not a unique view on the achievement of a Sustainable Technological World. Usually the challenge of a sustainable development starts with today's society and looks for paths to optimise, improve and renew current practises in transition processes. Even in those approaches oriented at future ambitions inspired by 'limits to growth' the process is bottom up departing from and reconstructing today's technological world.

In this book a top down approach is chosen. The reader is invited to follow an unconventional but nevertheless self-evident line of thought. The question is to find the conditions for a technological world fitting into an equilibrium with the energy and mass streams of the geosphere and its subspheres: the atmosphere, the hydrosphere and the lithosphere. In a top down approach this means finding the basic mass and energy streams between these spheres, finding the limitations thereof for a man-made Sustainable Technological World and to derive the conditions to design processes and products which together make up a Sustainable Technological World and its different regional subsystems.

The reader is warned, the invitation is challenging and leads along classifications, estimations and calculations which are not every days stuff.

URL http://www.vssd.nl/hlf/b011.htm