Abstract
Sustainability in North America has long been rooted in significant concerns about the social and environmental consequences of rapid population and economic growth plus the constantly increasing consumption of natural resources. This chapter begins with the sustainability experience in North America and particularly the historical milestones in the United States with respect to sustainable development. Canada’s history and experience has—in some ways and in some points in time—followed the United States and in other ways has diverged significantly. The chapter then details the Canadian experience with sustainable development. While Canada is starting to move toward an integrated sustainable development strategy, more effort is still required for the transition from the current resource-dependent paradigm to a sustainable and even regenerative economy.
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Notes
- 1.
For reasons of simplicity and for the purposes of this chapter, we will use the terms sustainable development and sustainability interchangeably, even though in the academic literature the first term refers to the process and the latter refers to the end goal (Sartori et al. 2014).
- 2.
For more details on the example of Love Canal, see https://www.geneseo.edu/history/love_canal_history.
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Roseland, M., Spiliotopoulou, M. (2018). Sustainability in North America: The Canadian Experience. In: Brinkmann, R., Garren, S. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Sustainability. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71389-2_34
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