Sustainable Development - the Cultural Perspective

Book excerpt: "This current volume is a result of the Seventh and Eighth International Forum on Sustainable Technological Development in a Globalizing World. The Seventh Forum was held June 9-12, 2010 in Berlin. The Karlsruhe Institute of Technology hosted the event, which was organized around culture and sustainability. What we each value as a society, as a country, in our culture, is what we want to protect. What is sustainable is only what we value. This applies all the more to sustainable development which is planned for long time scales and therefore to go beyond individual sustainable technology solutions as well as economic and political cycles. What we hold in high regard is the result of cultural influences. Consequently, we need cultural change in the sense of sustainable development in order to secure sustainability pathways in the long term. The key question arising is whether and how this change can be brought about. The following Introduction leads us into the specific discussion. At the end of the Seventh Forum, participants concluded that more specific case studies would be useful and recommended that the Eighth Forum provide a focus for case studies. Since the remainder of the Eighth Forum, held March 8-10, 2011, in Melbourne, Florida, focused on Alternative Energy with oral papers not really appropriate as written papers, it was decided to include the case studies in combination with those papers from Berlin to provide a holistic discussion of culture and sustainability. That is the concept for this volume."--P.13-14.