The goals of this project were first to investigate farming methods that provided a good standard of living, reasonable financial returns, and a healthy environment and community. The second goal was to identify the organizational barriers to adoption of a sustainable agricultural system. I sought this knowledge in the role of an activist and as a farmer interested in making a quality life. Throughout this research, I spoke with many people who grow food and steward the land for a variety of reasons. I discovered that most people are interested in farming as a lifestyle with a wealth of personal benefits, even if they are not the most financially feasible operations. Farmers displayed a real interest in caring for the land that supports them, and for the quality of their communities. This thesis concludes with a variety of recommendations for both producers as well as the governments who represent them.

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The signing of Agenda 21 by the UK government committed local authorities in England to drawing up local action plans for sustainable development in partnership with their citizens. This Local Agenda 21 (LA21) initiative appeared to provide the opportunity for radical changes in the trajectory of development and in the nature of local governance. This research set out to explain why this did not take place and what happened instead. It investigated how the nature of public involvement in LA21 was shaped by the local authority policy making processes through which it was developed, based on the premise that these involved the working out of the ambiguous and contested concepts of public involvement and sustainable development in a complex policy and institutional environment. Two contrasting LA21 processes were studied in detail, primarily through interviews with key policy actors, supplemented by observation and documentary evidence. The research showed that public involvement in LA21 was the outcome of contestation between actors with differing interpretations of the key concepts, who also had a range of other policy and institutional goals which affected their attitudes towards the initiative. Outcomes were determined by which interpretations were present and the ability of actors to control policy making processes to promote their goals. This explains both the variation within the LA21 initiative as a whole and the absence of 'radical' impacts: such goals were simply not present or they were suppressed by more powerful actors. The thesis develops more practically adequate characterisations of both sustainable development and public involvement. It also challenges Agenda 21's concept of a consensual participative planning process for sustainable development. It concludes by suggesting that policy making for sustainable development is inherently conflictive, and that public involvement in it is both a tool for policy makers and a channel for democratic input into policy making.

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Aquaculture, as an aquatic based economic activity, has risen from relative obscurity to a position of global recognition in just over two decades, and is forecast to become increasingly important in the next century. This growth, however, has been accompanied by increasing concerns over the environmental and social costs associated with the exploitation of the natural resource base on which it depends. This occurs in the broader context of increasing awareness of the finite capacity of the global system, and the need for development of more sustainable resource management regimes. The objective of the study is to examine if and how 'sustainability' can be brought into assessment for aquaculture development. The main concepts of sustainability are discussed, and key issues for assessment identified. The range of impacts associated with aquaculture development is reviewed, and broad categories of sectoral sustainability indicators proposed. Specific issues and assessment approaches are examined in three case studies, focusing on environment interactions, resource use assessment, and the rural development context, respectively. There follows a structured analysis of applicability of selected generic appraisal methods, concluding that while all may contribute, none is sufficiently broad to account for all sustainability perspectives. A more comprehensive framework for the assessment is therefore proposed, by which sustainability features of any system can be described, potential indicators and methods of assessment identified, and results communicated to the decision making process. This does not offer a definitive judgement on sustainability, but presents an holistic view, allowing explicit recognition of trade-offs involved between conflicting sustainability objectives. It is concluded that sufficient information is available for this approach to be developed and applied on a wider basis. Constraints to more sustainable development relate more to the social, political and economic environment than to problems of uncertainty in forecasting biological and physical systems.

As the world population moves toward 10 billion people over the next 50 years environmental decline seems inevitable unless changes are implemented. Issues of ecology, sustainability and the city are now being recognised as critical. The systemic and holistic nature of the problem means that sustainable policies must address a wide range of social issues, political attitudes, economic practices and technological methods. Volume One offers a wide-ranging and comprehensive review of Environmental Problems and Sustainability and seeks to map out both the historical and contemporary basis for a widespread transition towards a more sustainable society. The world's cities now offer the critical context within which sustainable strategies can be developed and tested. Much current academic and policy literature describes a range of sustainable development models representing radically different views of how the processes leading towards the planning and implementation of cities needs to b e realised. Volume Two describes Paolo Soleri's Arcology Model and the Arcosanti Laboratory as a relevant methodology and case study. The arcology model attempts to address issues of sustainability by advocating a balanced relationship between urban morphology and performance within cities designed to conform to the complexity - miniaturization - duration (CMD) paradigm. The methodology recognises the need for the radical reorganisation of urban sprawl into dense, integrated compact urban structures in which material recycling, waste reduction and the use of renewable energy sources are part of a sustainable strategy aimed at reducing the flow of resources and products through the urban system. As governments, eager to deliver major environmental improvements, press on with, as yet, untried and untested 'centrist' urban policies, there is a need to research relevant models of compaction. Over the last ten years, as the criteria of urban sustainability have become more widely accepted and understood the relevance of the Soleri's model has become clearer. Arcosanti in Arizona, begun in 1970, offers a laboratory for testing the validity of the theory. Volume Two concludes by critically reviewing arcology and Arcosanti in the context of the discourse on sustainability offered in Volume One. Since the energy crisis of the mid-1970s efforts at Arcosanti have been directed toward the definition and testing of various architectural effects that, when combined, could offer a response to many of today's environmental problems. But today progress is painstakingly slow. Lacking the level of funding and resources that would enable it to be convincing, it now represents not so much a specific prototypical solution but an activist engaged strategy that advocates the possibility of building our dreams and visions. In a world plagued by so many problems, and so few alternatives, it continues to offer a beacon of hope for a sustainable future.

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This thesis studies the issues on sustainability with nonrenewable resources and on practical problem with environment: regulation to control pollution. The first essay proves the converse of Hartwick's rule with general production function. Hartwick's rule shows that if one reinvests all the rents from nonrenewable resource, then constant sustainable consumption can be maintained. This ensures intergenerational equity. The converse of Hartwick's rule is proved by directly solving ordinary differential equations. It means the constant consumption must imply the total reinvesting of the rents from the exhaustible resource, and so the Hartwick's rule prescribes the unique sustainable policy. / In the second essay, Rawls' "just saving principle" is fonnulated with a model for constant utility in an intergenerational allocation framework. A term comparing consumption of adjacent generations is added to the utility function. The model is analyzed in the context of optimal control theory. In a two-sector economy, consumption growth is incorporated with equity. This property removes the disadvantage that a society starting out poor will be in such poverty forever, which is inherent in the model of constant consumption with nonrenewable resources. Different forms of generalized Hartwick's Rule are obtained. Optimal consumption path is characterized to achieve the highest utility. / The third essay investigates the optimal emission tax schemes for oligopolistic firms with differentiated goods. In the model, pollution stock creates disutility on social welfare. Firms play dynamic games against themselves, trying to maximize the long-run profit given the tax rules and their opponents' behavior. Open-loop and Markov Nash Equilibria are studied. The model is analyzed with optimal control theory and differential game theory. Time-independent tax rules are shown to exist that guide polluting oligopolists to produce along socially optimum path. For linear market demand and quadratic damage function, the tax rules are shown to be linear in the pollution stock. Numerical examples show that even the polluting firm can receive subsidy at the periods when initial pollution stock is low. The optimal tax in general is dependent on the current pollutant stock. The results shed a light on policy making of the related market structure.