Wolfgang Sachs

Wuppertal Institute

Wolfgang Sachs, Ph.D., is a German researcher and author with many books including Fair Future, Environment and Human Rights, and Jo’burg Memo. He is also the editor of the Development Dictionary. He suggests (see Sachs, 1996) three ways to reach sustainable development, three perspectives which are related to a security crisis: the home perspective, the perspective of an astronaut, and the endogenous perspective. He is currently working and lecturing at the Wuppertal Institute in Germany. He is the head of the Cross-cutting Project “Globalization and Sustainability” and PhD Collegium “Environment and Fairness in the World Trade Regime” in the Wuppertal Institute. Wolfgang Sachs is known as one of the many followers of Ivan Illich. His critical works on development idea influenced the green and ecological movements. Sachs participated in the Stock Exchange of Visions project in 2007.

\
  • Fair Future

    Resources Conflicts, Security and Global Justice

    By Wolfgang Sachs and Tilman Santarius     January 2007

    This is a book that cuts across the outdated divide of North and South to address the twin global questions of our age: social justice and environmental sustainability. It asks how the material needs of the poor can be met on a planet already exhibiting signs of acute environmental stress. By laying out fundamentals of shared analytical understanding, ethical commitment and practical institutional and policy changes, the authors provide the necessary intellectual and moral platform for progress in the 21st century.

  • Planet Dialectics

    Explorations in Environment and Development

    By Wolfgang Sachs     January 1999

    Sachs is one of the most thoughtful and appealing intellectuals to deal with the dual crisis in the Western world’s relations with nature and social justice. In this book readers-be they concerned citizens, environmentalists, development specialists or cultural historians-will find trenchant and elegant explorations of some of the foremost issues the world faces at the beginning of the new century: Efficiency, the mantra of our times; Globalization, a market inevitability and the juggernaut of history; Sustainability, oxymoron as rhetoric; Development, the 20th century’s great undelivered promise; and Limits, a new principle for the coming century.

  • Global Ecology

    A New Arena of Political Conflict

    Edited by Wolfgang Sachs     January 1993

    Behind the public’s hope of effective action by governments on environmental issues lie a complex terrain of conceptual confusion, conflicts of interest and philosophical dispute. This is hwy some of the world’s leading environmental thinkers have come together in this volume to probe critically the new languages being developed by the environmental professionals.