PREFACE: HOW TO READ THIS BOOK

If I were to ask you whether you thought a book about climate change is a good idea, I expect that you would say, “Of course!” “But,” you might ask. “Why a website? Who on earth would ever read a book-length website?”

Of course, I can think of nobody who would read a book-length website. My readers (my audience) will be looking for the answers to the question, “What can I do?” . . . and that is the point of this book: to answer that question. Unfortunately, the answer to that question is different for all of us. We are each following different paths, and we will each pick a different path into a sustainable future. This book embraces that truth and explores and describes a huge variety of paths.

Moreover, there is nothing stationary about climate change. Conditions, paths, and processes are in a constant state of change, and a book dealing with these topics must, necessarily change with them. Only hypertexts are able to quickly make changes over time, and only a hypermedia book is sufficiently expansive to handle the complexities of simulations, animations, and real-time communication. And that brings us to the World Wide Web, the only place capable of hosting such a book and making it publicly available to everyone. And if you cannot find your answer here, there is a blog where you can ask questions and get answers from a group of researchers.

What you will find in this book

This book is made up of “paths,” and only some of them will apply to you. Maybe you are a college student on a very tight budget, and you live in a dorm. You would love to have a battery-powered EV (BEV), but your university has only one charging station, and the next nearest one is at a local mall, ten miles away. Worse, BEVs tend to be new or new-use and expensive. If you can buy an EV, it might be that the best you can do is an old, used Prius. Or worse, maybe you are driving your dad’s old pickup, and that is all you are going to drive until you get through school, get a job, and make some money. This is great! You are one of those rare people who can plan your future. You might get an engineering degree, or business, or construction management, and you might add a sustainability focus to these (or similar) degrees. You can even become certified as a sustainability officer, which would make you valuable for corporations hoping to make themselves more sustainable. Many corporations have whole divisions dedicated to improving their sustainability. In some cases, the pipeline goes up from Sustainability Officer to Director of Sustainability, all the way to Chief Sustainability Officer (CSO) on the Board of Directors in the “C” Suite.

Now, I haven’t been describing a path … I have been describing a whole new collection of related paths that will be opening over the next decade or so … careers of directing corporations into a new and sustainable future.

All of these paths, however, are not restricted to newly minted graduates. My degree was in writing, and through the years, I have been an industrial, institutional, technical, or science writer. At the age of 80, I studied at Massachusetts Institute of Technology for a year, toward becoming a Certified Sustainable Science Writer (you are never too old to upgrade your credentials). The thing about these courses at MIT is there were more than a hundred other students in my cohort, and all of them were mid-career business professionals seeking certification that would allow them to move into an opening sustainability leadership role in their corporations.

So, this book is not about whether you should buy an EV or install solar and batteries. It’s about how you can evolve into a circular lifestyle compatible with the circular economy we will enjoy in the future.