Until recently, there has been a widespread view that we must give up amenities of modern life in order to achieve environmental sustainability. While newspapers and other popular media tend to focus on the negative aspects of environmental change, this volume examines the alternative notion of 'positive ecology'. Initially gleaned from the orientation of 'positive psychology', this argues that environmental science has been all too focused on analysing negative 'pathologies' and forgetting to provide more positive analysis and activism for sustainability. Bringing together a wide range of 'positive ecology' orientated case studies for the first time, the book discusses the wider contexts of how humanity is dependent on a functioning, biodiverse ecosphere of which we are only one part. It provides an original and previously undervalued approach to sustainability, and suggests that work towards sustainability is not only a necessity for our children's future, but necessary, sensible and meaningful in the present.

How the Academic Profession is Changing; Small Worlds, Different Worlds: The Uniquenesses and Troubles of American Academic Professions; The Elusive Academic Profession: Complexity and Change; Uncertainties in the Changing Academic Profession; Stewards of Opportunity: America's Public Community Colleges; Public Universities as Academic Workplaces; Survival of the Fittest? Postgraduate Education and the Professoriate at the Fin de Siècle; Reflections on the Culture Wars; A Blow Is Like an Instrument; The Science Wars and the Future of the American Academic Profession; The Scientist as Academic; The "Place" of Knowledge in the American Academic Profession; Border Crossings: Organizational Boundaries and Challenges to the American Professoriate; The Development of Information Technology in American Higher Education; An International Academic Crisis? The American Professoriate in Comparative Perspective