The 4 books to understand unsustainability causes and solutions.

Julio F. Campos

This article provides a list of four of the most important books on sustainability that one need to read to both understand the causes of our problems and the ways to solve them

The Coal Question; An Inquiry Concerning the Progress of the Nation, and the Probable Exhaustion of Our Coal Mines; William Stanley Jevons; 1865.

Concerned with the fast rates in which the coal was being consumed due to high demand by industries, Jevons approached the issue analyzing how the technological development of equipment efficiency and its consequent reduction in coal use could prevent it exhaustion or scarcity.

Over a century before the definition of the eco-efficiency term in 1992, in what become known as "The Jevons' Paradox", Jevons observed that the constant increase in efficiency could if fact leads to increase in recourses use, resulting in a fast decline of resource stocks.

While still trying to be disproved by the efficiency advocates, the number of scientific studies and data verifying the reality of the paradox build up.

https://books.google.com.br/books/about/The_Coal_Question.html?id=TlcNAwAAQBAJ&source=kp_cover&redir_esc=y

The Entropy Law and the Economic Process; Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen; 1971.

Mathematician, Economist, and  Statistician, by verifying how the economics worked under the fundamental thermodynamic law of entropy, Georgescu-Roegen exposed how and why any resource the goes through the economic system goes irreversibly degraded.

At a direct collision course with neoclassical theory, and its derivatives, Georgescu-Roegen, in what would be called today a disruptive thinking innovation,  created an irreversible schism on how the economy and our current civilization should think about the resources, launching the cornerstone to the birth of ecological economics, with its opposing vision to the neoclassical proposals.

 Gaeanautes.

https://books.google.com.br/books/about/The_Entropy_Law_and_the_Economic_Process.html?id=fOyenQEACAAJ&source=kp_cover&redir_esc=y

The Limits to Growth (The Meadows Report); Meadows; 1972.

As Jevons, a century before, the concern to understand how resources limits use under the current economic system could affect our civilization, an MIT group of scientists were commissioned by the Club of Rome.

With the purpose to create a simulation computer model, named World 3, to simulate and predict the results of the human systems interactions with the planets.

As the report concluded that the economy is constrained by a finite world and human industrial system and population would collapse around 2072 if business as usual was to be maintained, it became clearly unpopular amongst those who wanted to believe that any sort of sustainable economic growth was possible, and have been severely criticised as an alarmist, even Malthusian, diagnosis.

With the verification that its prediction between 1972-2012 was, in fact, accurate those criticisms became clearly undermined by the reality check of the facts, and the report is coming back to the limelight with the proper attention that is deserved.

https://us.resiliencesystem.org/looking-back-limits-growth

http://collections.dartmouth.edu/teitexts/meadows/diplomatic/meadows_ltg-diplomatic.html

A Prosperous Way Down: Principles and Policies; Howard T. Odum; 2001.

Concerned about how the mankind could go through the increasing energy demands and growing social pressures in an unsustainable and inequal world, focusing on how to face the current energy and social problems while providing a pragmatic proposal for a transition to a sustainable world.

Odum's last book allows us to understand that under the correct policies and actions, the apocalyptical BAU advocates of a "back to middle ages" scenario is an utter nonsense and that mankind already have the needed knowledge to do the transition.

https://www.amazon.com/Prosperous-Way-Down-Principles-Policies/dp/0870819089

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