Adam Rome, a professor of history and English and the Unidel Helen Gouldner Chair for the Environment at the University of Delaware in Newark, recently published on article on Nature.com, highlighting five books that first made sustainability a public issue in the 1960s and 1970s.
He explains the books of this decade demonstrate that building a sustainable civilization is multidimensional. Rome stated that we cannot “advance in a straight line. We need to approach the goal from many directions, with flexibility and tenacity.”
Rome described Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things, written by William McDonough and Dr. Michael Braungart, as a much better introduction to sustainable design compared to R. Buckminster Fuller’s Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth. Although in 1969, Fuller’s Operating Manual was new and inspiring. Inspiring particularly to those individuals who strived to invent eco-efficient ways of providing energy, building things and managing wastes.
See Adam Rome’s full list of prescient classics here.
