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Welcome
Welcome to the UIC Library's Sustainability Research Guide! This guide is intended to support anyone in the UIC community conducting research on sustainability. It contains links to helpful resources at the library, the university, and beyond. Use the tabs above to navigate its contents.
Sustainability can be defined as "Meeting the [environmental, social, and economic] needs of the present generation without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs." -- Learn About Sustainability, epa.gov
Please let us know if you have suggestions for books, websites, or articles that we should link to from this research guide.
Tree planting -- photo courtesy of UIC Office of Planning, Sustainability and Project Management
Open Access Text
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Sustainability: A Comprehensive Foundation is a free, open-source textbook written by faculty from the University of Illinois.
It can be viewed from any internet browser, downloaded as a PDF file, or printed.
From the publisher: "First and second-year college students are introduced to this expanding new field, comprehensively exploring the essential concepts from every branch of knowledge – including engineering and the applied arts, natural and social sciences, and the humanities. As sustainability is a multi-disciplinary area of study, the text is the product of multiple authors drawn from the diverse faculty of the University of Illinois: each chapter is written by a recognized expert in the field."
- Sustainability and the U.S. EPA"This framework, Sustainability and the U.S. EPA, provides recommendations for a sustainability approach that both incorporates and goes beyond an approach based on assessing and managing the risks posed by pollutants that has largely shaped environmental policy since the 1980s. Although risk-based methods have led to many successes and remain important tools, the report concludes that they are not adequate to address many of the complex problems that put current and future generations at risk, such as depletion of natural resources, climate change, and loss of biodiversity. Moreover, sophisticated tools are increasingly available to address cross-cutting, complex, and challenging issues that go beyond risk management."
