America’s Most Sustainable Cities and Regions

John W. Day, Jr. is Distinguished Professor Emeritus in the Department of Oceanography and Coastal Sciences, School of the Coast & Environment at Louisiana State University, where he has taught since 1971. He has published extensively on the ecology and management of coastal and wetland ecosystems and has over 100 peer-reviewed publications. He received his PhD in marine sciences and environmental sciences from the University of North Carolina in 1971 working with Dr. H.T. Odum.  Since then, he has conducted extensive research on the ecology and management of the Mississippi Delta and deltas in the Mediterranean and Latin America. Charles Hall is a Systems Ecologist who received his PhD under Howard T. Odum at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Dr. Hall is Professor Emeritus at the College of Environmental Science and Forestry at the State University of New York, and the author or editor of twelve books and nearly 300 scholarly articles. He has worked ortaught in some 30 different countries. He is best known for his development of the concept of EROI, or energy return on investment, which is an examination of how organisms, including humans, invest energy into obtaining additional energy to improve biotic or social fitness. He has applied these approaches to fish migrations, carbon balance, tropical land use change, the extraction of petroleum and other fuels, and how EROI influences the ability of society to achieve different levels of economic and social development. Presently he is developing a new field, BioPhysical Economics, as a supplement or alternative to conventional neoclassical economics, while applying systems and EROI thinking to a broad series of resource and economic issues. Hall's work on EROI has been featured in such media outlets as Scientific American (most recently in April, 2013), Forbes Magazine, and the Discovery Channel.

• Introduction.- Manifest Destiny and the Growth of America: Cheap Energy and Spending Natural Capital.- The Myth of Urban Self Sufficiency.- A Tale of Twelve Cities and Ten Regions.- The Wealth of Nature is the Wealth of Nations: Ecosystem Services and Their Value to Society.- Global Climate Change: A Warmer and More Unpredictable Future.- Energy – The Master Resource.- Feeding America’s Cities: Putting Food on the Table in the 21st Century.- Moving Away From a Ptolemic View of the Human Economy.- Revisiting the Cities and Regions.- Summing It Up: Alternative Routes for the Way Forward.

"The book, written for non-scientists, is wide-ranging and cross-disciplinary, recounting the historical, biophysical, economic, and social underpinnings of certain large-scale, rapidly emerging shifts ... . the authors have taken pains to provide plenty of references, maps, data, and explanation, so readers might better understand the lay of the proverbial land. Hall and Day, above all, seem earnest-earnest in their desire to help us all consider how we might better plan to live in this uncharted twenty-first century world." (Nalini Raghavan, Country Roads, countryroadsmagazine.com, September, 2016) "The authors do provide a systematic way of looking at sustainability, which can be applied to cities across the USA and around the world. ... John W. Day and Charles Hall have provided a great overview of the factors that can make a city and a region sustainable ... . this book may also serve as a road map to a reasonably prosperous future." (Bart Hawkins Kreps, resilience.org, February, 2016)