{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.027636363636363636, 'fraction_numerical': 0.005818181818181818, 'mean_word_length': 5.088495575221239, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Book Review: Technology and the Contested Meanings of Sustainability

Sustainabilityas a catchword in international development discourse no longer has the emotive force it did in the 1980s and early 1990s, but it can still evoke emo tional responses. However, as Aidan Davison suggests in his title, Technology and the Contested Meanings of Sustainability , these responses to the term sustainability can be extremely diverse, stretching from one end of the political spectrum to the other— and along many other dimensions as well. What Davison attempts in this book is to rescue the term (and, he would say, the reality) from its most popular contemporary locus—its widespread use among international development policy experts, in what Davison calls “the core technological development institutions of the North,” to give an environmental cast to positive attitudes toward development—and instead to give it a new meaning. His own preferred meaning he attaches to another term, sustenance , and he talks about a “yearning to rewrite the unjust terms of [our] affluence. . . . It is my hope that the essential qualities of our yearning for and experience of embodied sustenance call forth certain systemic, paradigmatic features of our technological world.” He admits that he may be speaking only to “those who share my [perspective on an] unsustaining world,” but he adds,