An impressively detailed and knowledgeable primer on environmental, social, and governance issues in the workplace.
Sustainability expert Waite, leader of the Climate Finance Fund, offers a comprehensive overview of environmental, social, and governance initiatives at work.
The author delivers asecond edition of her slim book, first published in 2017, on the importance and practicality of various sustainability measures in all kinds of industries and at various scales. This new edition features new chapters on climate-related careers (involving supply chain, end users, stakeholder relations, and future sustainability) and another on justice, equity, diversity and inclusion, and how they intersect with climate change and other issues. The book also acknowledges recent changes in office life, including a greater emphasis on remote work. Overall, her definition of sustainable development is an institutional structure that meets “the needs of all generations, present and future, while improving their well-being through social, economic, environmental, and intergenerational efforts.” Waite organizes her overview into what she refers to as the four pillars of sustainability—society, economy, environment, and future generations—and she builds up on a “SURF” Framework, comprised of “Supply Chain” (“the building blocks that constitute a product or help bring about a service”), “User” (the consumer, the customer, the citizen, or the client), “Relations” (“Do employees feel that there is a positive, inclusive work environment?”), and “Future” (the ethically obligation to look out for generations yet to come). Waite alternates between broader observations—backed up by extensive research—and personal stories of people who faced sustainability challenges in their workplace, such as Pia Malmquist, a pediatrician at Stockholm’s Karolinska University Hospital, whose job of caring for patients regularly touched on many aspects of environmental responsibility. The sheer range of Waite’s book is a marvel, as she covers sustainability’s history, economic feasibility, ethics, and the practicality of specific tools, such as printing presses using vegetable-based inks and chlorine-free paper. She also insightfully touches on the ways that the climate crisis has exacerbated social inequalities. Her narrative drive and remarkable talent for concision pulls these topics together into readable chapters that never feel overcrowded, and may convince even the most skeptical readers.
An impressively detailed and knowledgeable primer on environmental, social, and governance issues in the workplace.Pub Date: June 19, 2024
ISBN: 9781032615837
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Routledge
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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