Gary E. Machlis is an author, conservation scientist, university professor of environmental sustainability, and advocate for the forgotten. He lives in Central, South Carolina.
Featured Book Published in 2024
Sustainability for the Forgotten by Gary E. Machlis, University of Utah Press, 2024, 262 pages.
Available in paperback, hardback, and e-book.
About Sustainability for the Forgotten
Opening with the extraordinary story of a young French priest working in 1968 amongst impoverished villages of northeast Brazil, struggling to bring sustenance, sustainability, and hope to these disregarded and willfully ignored communities, this book asks a broad and far-reaching question that challenges the contemporary sustainability movement: What about sustainability for the forgotten?
Sustainability for the Forgotten is an incendiary book that confronts the history, policies, and practices of sustainability. It interrogates the usefulness of current sustainability approaches for the poorest of the poor, the chronic underclass, victims of natural disasters, refugees, the oppressed, and asks, how can we do better? With examples that range from the coffeelands of El Salvador to the coal country of American Appalachia, from the streets of Detroit to refugee camps in Greece and the upscale metro centers of the affluent, sustainability is examined with a critical eye and with an emphasis on insuring that the forgotten are heard.
At once well-researched and passionate, wide-ranging and sharply focused, Sustainability for the Forgotten is unlike any other book on the sustainability movement. Written with a distinctive voice that is reasoned, unflinching, and often poetic, the book challenges the sustainability movement to follow "a just and necessary path." The result is a provocative statement on the future of sustainability and a call to action that is ultimately hopeful.
Praise for Sustainability for the Forgotten
“I read Sustainability for the Forgotten with a feeling of awe. Gary Machlis has unearthed an interwoven history of environmental sustainability and anti-poverty activism that few Americans know anything about. He helps clarify the point that a movement for sustainability has to be driven by the needs of those with the least resources, not the most. A valuable, crucial book.”—Jess Row, author of White Flights and The New Earth
"As a citizen of one of the oldest colonies in the world, I have often felt a sense of invisibility that comes from exclusive decision-making processes. Reading Sustainability for the Forgotten made me realize (with staggering examples) that there are many shades of invisibility, and for so many people, we have erased them through our collective and individual actions (and inactions). Machlis offers a clear strategy for true social justice and sustainability."—Elvia J. Meléndez-Ackerman, Professor of Environmental Sciences, University of Puerto Rico-Rio Piedras
"Gary Machlis's Sustainability for the Forgotten is a heartfelt and erudite critique of conventional approaches to sustainability, with valuable practical suggestions for how the concept, and the practices associated with it, might be refined and improved."—Amitav Ghosh, author of The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable and The Nutmeg's Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis
"Machlis has powerfully focused on the marginalized, the unnoticed, the invisible. Sustainability for the Forgotten stands as a major achievement."—Robert Chambers, Professor, Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex, and author of Rural Development: Putting the Last First