A Better Planet: New Book Offers
Big Ideas for a Sustainable Future
The Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies this week released a book, “A Better Planet: 40 Big Ideas for a Sustainable Future,” in which dozens of experts from a range of disciplines, backgrounds, and political perspectives share their suggestions tackling global environmental challenges. In a series of essays, the authors suggest new ways to think about many of the most pressing threats facing the planet — and, in many cases, concrete strategies to address them.
The book was published by Yale University Press.
The essays cover such subjects as ecology, environmental justice, Big Data, public health, and climate change, all with an emphasis on sustainability. The book focuses on moving toward sustainability through actionable, bipartisan approaches based on rigorous analytical research.
Authors include Nobel Prize-winning economist William Nordhaus; Jane Lubchenco, former NOAA director; Thomas Lovejoy, a conservation biologist and “father of biodiversity”; and Susan Biniaz, the former lead climate lawyer for the U.S. State Department who helped negotiate the Paris Agreement. The book was edited by Daniel Esty, Hillhouse Professor of Environmental Law and Policy at F&ES and Yale Law School. View the full list of authors and their abstracts.
The book was produced by the Yale Environmental Dialogue (YED), an F&ES-based initiative that aims to transform the national discussion on environmental policy. Created in 2017, the initiative has brought together experts from a range of disciplines, backgrounds, and political perspectives to engage in meaningful discussions about challenges facing the planet and discuss potential solutions.
While sustainability has emerged as global priority over the past several years, partisan divides have stalled many efforts to address critical threats, said F&ES Dean Indy Burke, one of the book’s contributors.
“We know that we’re living at a time, especially here in the U.S., when political division and deep disagreements over core principles have stalled so many important urgent conversations about the environmental challenges we face,” she said. “It doesn’t need to be this way. In fact, if we are to address these challenges in a meaningful way we have to do the hard work of bridging these divides.”
The essays cover such subjects as ecology, environmental justice, Big Data, public health, and climate change, all with an emphasis on sustainability. The book focuses on moving toward sustainability through actionable, bipartisan approaches based on rigorous analytical research.
Authors include Nobel Prize-winning economist William Nordhaus; Jane Lubchenco, former NOAA director; Thomas Lovejoy, a conservation biologist and “father of biodiversity”; and Susan Biniaz, the former lead climate lawyer for the U.S. State Department who helped negotiate the Paris Agreement. The book was edited by Daniel Esty, Hillhouse Professor of Environmental Law and Policy at F&ES and Yale Law School. View the full list of authors and their abstracts.
The book was produced by the Yale Environmental Dialogue (YED), an F&ES-based initiative that aims to transform the national discussion on environmental policy. Created in 2017, the initiative has brought together experts from a range of disciplines, backgrounds, and political perspectives to engage in meaningful discussions about challenges facing the planet and discuss potential solutions.
While sustainability has emerged as global priority over the past several years, partisan divides have stalled many efforts to address critical threats, said F&ES Dean Indy Burke, one of the book’s contributors.
“We know that we’re living at a time, especially here in the U.S., when political division and deep disagreements over core principles have stalled so many important urgent conversations about the environmental challenges we face,” she said. “It doesn’t need to be this way. In fact, if we are to address these challenges in a meaningful way we have to do the hard work of bridging these divides.”
Exploring ‘Big Ideas’ at Climate Week NYC
The Yale Environmental Dialogue, an F&ES-based initiative that aims to add new energy to the national conversation about environmental issues, hosted an event at the Yale Club of New York to kick off Climate Week NYC. Read more
PUBLISHED: October 22, 2019
Note: Yale School of the Environment (YSE) was formerly known as the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies (F&ES). News articles posted prior to July 1, 2020, refer to the School's name at that time.
