"Learning, Natural Capital and Sustainable Development "explores the economic metaphor of 'natural capital' in the context of human behaviour towards the environment. It argues that the dominant model of sustainable development, underpinned by a particular understanding of this metaphor, is impeding progress towards genuine sustainability. To move forward it is vital that 'natural capital' is recognised as a metaphor and, crucially, that metaphor is recognised as an essentially open-ended learning tool.
This book breaks new ground as it explores and develops just that. It presents an...

Over the past two decades we have witnessed something of a revolution in the natural sciences as thermodynamic thinking evolved from an equilibrium, or 'classical', perspective, to a nonequilibrium, or 'self organisational' one. In this transition, thermodynamics has been applied in new ways and in new fields of inquiry. Chemical and biological (evolutionary) processes have been analysed, increasingly, in non equilibrium thermodynamical terms. Economics has, since the late 19th century, relied heavily upon metaphors and analogies derived from the natural sciences - mechanical analogies cast...