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Wolfgang Sachs and Tilman Santarius, Fair Future: Resource Conflicts, Security and Global Justice.

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Wolfgang Sachs and Tilman Santarius, Fair Future: Resource Conflicts, Security and Global Justice (Black Point, NS: Fernwood Publishing Company 2007)

IN 1987 THE RELEASE of the Brundtland Commission's Our Common Future cast international attention, as never before, on the connections between ecological sustainability and social justice. Yet subsequent global negotiations over the past three decades, be they focused on climate change, biodiversity, forest and soil loss, or persistent pollutants, have largely failed to develop a just framework for future global environmental governance. Instead much of the focus of these multilateral discussions has resulted in business transactions over specific items, like load limits or tradable carbon emissions and sinks, that have not only reinforced but exacerbated the hegemonic control of the powerful and rich to the ongoing detriment of the poor and weak.

In Fair Future, a group of researchers associated with the Wuppertal Institute for Climate, Environment, and Energy in Germany, refocus attention on the relationship between global justice and the fate of the biosphere. They frame their investigation by posing the following question: how in the future will it be possible for increased numbers of humans to have dignified...

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