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This chapter provides a comprehensive overview of the way evolving models of human organization—from hunter-gatherer to megacities—have an impact on human psychology, human relations, and the development of alienation. The idyllic paradigm, according to some researchers, was the low-population-density hunter-gatherer societies based on mutual exchange and shared resources. The principal organizing mechanism in these societies was kinship, which offered a defined behavioral guide. Eventually, the discovery and development of agriculture led to the Agricultural Revolution, and village-based sedentary societies supplanted the small hunter-gatherer units. Human interaction became more complex and impersonal in the higher-density towns and villages, and the sharing society evolved into one based on private property, trade, and the development of elite social classes. The next critical turning point following the Agricultural Revolution was the Urban Revolution. Several classical and contemporary theorists developed the concept of “social alienation” to describe the impact of the rushed pace of city life and the ephemeral nature of relationships on mental attitudes and social relations. Indeed, the rise of globalization, megacities, and migration in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century revived interest in the alienation theories of the 1950s and 1960s. The chapter then describes the American developmental psychologist Erik Erikson’s eight stages of psychosocial identity development.

As hard as it might be to believe, the world once made do without the words “sustainable” and “sustainability.” Today they’re nearly ubiquitous. At the grocery store we shop for “sustainable foods” that were produced, of course, from “sustainable agriculture”; ministries of natural resources in many parts of the world strive for “sustainable yields” in forestry; the United Nations (UN ) has long touted “sustainable development” as a strategy for global stability; and woe be the city dweller who doesn’t aim for a “sustainable lifestyle.” Sustainability first emerged as an explicit social, environmental, and economic ideal in the late 1970s and 1980s. By the 1990s, it had become a familiar term in the world of policy wonkery—President Bill Clinton’s Council on Sustainable Development, for instance— but the embrace wasn’t universal. Bill McKibben, perhaps the most prominent environmentalist of the past 30 years, wrote an opinion piece in the New York Times in 1996 in which he dismissed sustainability as a “buzzless buzzword” that was “born partly in an effort to obfuscate” and which would never catch on in mainstream society. In McKibben’s view, sustainability “never made the leap to lingo”— and never would. “It’s time to figure out why, and then figure out something else.” (McKibben preferred the term “maturity.”) Many others have since accused “sustainability” and “sustainable development” of being superficial terms that mask ongoing environmental degradation and facilitate business-as-usual economic growth. Those are debatable points that will be discussed in this book. But one thing is clear: McKibben was quite wrong about the quick decline of “sustainability.” One way to demonstrate this growing interest is to look at book titles that bear the word “sustainable” or “sustainability.” It’s difficult to find books published before 1976 that employ these words as titles or even as keywords. Indeed, as Figure 1 shows, no book in the English language used either term in the title before 1970. But since 1980 there has been an explosion of books and articles that not only use those words as titles but also deal with the many facets of sustainability.