New book: Cultural sustainability and the nature-culture interface: Livelihoods, policies, and Methodologies (Routledge, 2018), edited by Inger Birkeland, Constanza Parra, Rob Burton and Katriina Soini
Understanding how culture can act as a resource to promote sustainability, rather than a barrier, is the key to the development of cultural sustainability.
This book explores the interfaces between nature and culture through the perspective of cultural sustainability. A cultural perspective on environmental sustainability enables a renewal of sustainability discourse and practices across rural and urban landscapes, natural and cultural systems, stressing heterogeneity and complexity. The book focuses on the nature-culture interface conceptualised as a place where experiences, practices, policies, ideas and knowledge meet, are negotiated, discussed and resolved. Rather than looking for lost unities, or an imaginary view of harmonious relationships between humans and nature based in the past, it explores cases of interfaces that are context-sensitive and which consciously convey the problems of scale and time.
While calling attention to a cultural or ‘culturalised’ view of the sustainability debate, this book questions the radical nature-culture dualism dominating positive modern thinking as well as its underlying view of nature as pre-given and independent from human life.
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