Abstract
“Everything is flowing,” said the Greek philosopher Heraclitus of Ephesus, over 2500 years ago. “You cannot step twice into the same river.” Heraclitus’s insight is a key one in understanding the economic and ecological systems within which we have to ask and answer the sustainability question. Even those things that seem unchanging or “in balance” are so because of a tradeoff of changes in different directions. In normal circumstances your blood does not seem to change much from day to day, and yet 100 million red blood cells are being replaced every minute!
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 Springer International Publishing AG, part of Springer Nature
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Roe, J., deForest, R., Jamshidi, S. (2018). Flowing. In: Mathematics for Sustainability. Texts for Quantitative Critical Thinking. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76660-7_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76660-7_2
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-76659-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-76660-7
eBook Packages: Mathematics and StatisticsMathematics and Statistics (R0)