Chapter 19 covers ACCESSING DATA FROM PUBLIC USE SOURCES and includes the following specific topics, among others: Good Research Questions, Desirable Features of Public Use Data, and Accessing Publicly Available Datasets.

Nature provides the resources for human life and activity. Different categories are distinguished: renewable when the resource renews itself within certain domains of use, and non-renewable when this happens not at all or very slowly. Two key renewable resources are fish and forests. Simple, generic models have been developed for their exploitation. Fish supply from world fisheries has declined since the end of the twentieth century; marine fisheries have reached their limits, with a large fraction of fishing ground overexploited. Further growth in fish supply is from aquafarming. Technology is a major driver of productivity increase; supply and trade are increasingly in the hands of a few global corporations. Governments tend to support these trends, and the livelihood of local fishermen communities is often at stake. Similar developments did and do happen in forests. For both resources, proper stock assessments and modelling are difficult and should incorporate humans as key actors. Here, too, the future depends on which values, beliefs and interests will dominate in designing, implementing and enforcing regulations, in balancing large-scale versus small-scale, and in protection of ecosystems and their biodiversity.

In Parts I–III, I have discussed how sustainability and sustainable development have become prominent in public discourse and proposed a framework to engage with the values and beliefs surrounding them. In Part IV, an introduction is given on epistemological questions and on various methods which are being developed and applied in sustainability science. In Part V, I use the previous reflections, concepts and methods to explore themes of health, biodiversity, food and water provision, and use of energy and materials from the perspective of (the quest for) sustainable development.

This chapter is an introductory chapter on the subsequent nine thematic chapters. Some schemes have been constructed to put various themes (food, water, energy, etc.) in a larger integrating context. Most widely known are the PSIR-framework, the planetary boundaries and the doughnut scheme. Another issue in thematic chapters is proper understanding and methods of data collection, processing and assessment (MFA, LCA, CBA, I-O). To link data and assessments to communication and decision-making requires formulation and use of indicators. Some well-known indicators (HDI, GPI, EF) have found their way in sustainability science and policy-making. A last connection to the thematic chapters are consumer expenditures, because, after all, that represents an indicator of the ultimate driver of anthropogenic change.

The word development has a long history. The word sustainable is of more recent coinage. Nowadays, it is used in many different contexts and in, sometimes, bewildering ways: sustainable water, sustainable livelihoods, sustainable technology, sustainable cities, sustainable traffic, sustainable banking – and even sustainable growth. Derivatives like sustainability and sustainable development have undergone the same fate, often in unison with words like green, bio and eco. Yet, despite scepticism, criticism and proposals for alternatives, such as resilience and viability, the word sustainability seems to endure (although in sometimes unbearably diluted or perverted forms). I therefore use sustainable development in this book as the core term and, in Chapter 1, explore (the ideals of) development and sustainability.

Imagine a Martian scholar who aims to understand the linguistic diversity on Planet Earth. One way this imaginary alien scholar might go about this research is by exploring Google Translate. However, doing so would offer our imaginary extraterrestrial scholar only a very biased and rather misleading picture. As of November 2022, Google Translate supports 134 languages, which constitutes about 2 percent of the world’s 7,151 languages identified by Ethnologue. Not only is it a small fraction of the total number of languages, but the list is not representative of global linguistic diversity: of the 134 Google Translate languages, 64 (or nearly half) are Indo-European languages.

To understand the human predicament in the Anthropocene, it is helpful to investigate the rise, maintenance and fall of social complexity in the past. Tribal communities, early states and large empires have all been confronted with extra-human, inter-human and intra-human dynamic processes. Local and regional biogeography often played a major role (resources, threats), but in combination with technical and organizational skills and sociopolitical and cultural (elite) behaviour. Reconstructions of ancient civilzations (Mesopotamia, Egypt, Indus, Rome, China and others) suggest the mechanisms and contingencies in societal growth, expansion and decline. One feature is the capability to collect and interpret long-term changes or lack thereof.

Industrialization could not have happened without abundant, easy-to-store-and-transport fossil fuels (coal, oil and gas). They and the technologies that mined, traded, processed and used them satisfied needs which they also created (including wars). They provided the heat, power and feedstock to run factories, operate transport systems and shape household living conditions (space heating--cooling, appliances). Energy use has exponentially risen in the last two centuries, to an average 2 kW/cap for poor and over 20 kW/cap for rich people, and supply is still dominated by fossil fuels. Modernization has become closely linked to provision of ’modern’ energy carriers (energy ladder). Apart from corporate and state super-profits and power and associated turmoil, it has brought enormous environmental destruction and harm, some of it affecting many generations to come. The most serious impact, climate change from greenhouse gas emissions, is stimulating a transition away from fossil fuels and towards efficient use and non-carbon supply (renewable, nuclear). This process is confronted with the divergence in worldviews, around issues such as risks, use of land and materials, lifestyle changes versus high-tech, role of decentral versus central supply, and private or public ownership.

Chapter 13 covers ONE-WAY ANALYSIS OF VARIANCE and includes the following specific topics, among others: Between Group Variance, Withn Group Variance , The R-Ratio, ANOVA Summary Table, Effect Size, Post-Hoc Multiple Comparison Tests , The Bonferroni Adjustment, and Power Analyses.

Worldviews are defined as combinations of value orientations and belief systems. Both are an inevitable part of the sustainability disourse. Both can be correlated to the worldview dimensions (previous chapter). Values are empirically explored through surveys; several value categories have been proposed. Beliefs tend to be linked to values; they are difficult to explore empirically. Important beliefs have to do with the place of humans in Nature, the roots of good and evil, the role of human ingenuity, the constraints of the collective on the individual, and the balance between coordination and competition. Throughout the sustainability discourse, ethical questions about how to reconcile individual desires with what is considered collectively desirable emerge. I consider here briefly the roots and critique of Modernity ethics, and discuss some alternative and new ethical positions (virtue ethics, development and eco-spiritual ethics).

To engage with sustainable development and the SDGs, I present a heuristic framework to explore the underlying aspirations and actions from different perspectives: the worldview framework. In essence, it distinguishes the dimensions of I--local--particular from We--global--universal, and body--material from soul--immaterial. It is a methodology to experiment with, not a (scientific) theory. Its conceptualization is based on a historical analysis of Modernity (previous chapters), on insights from perennial philosophy and on empirical surveys. The four corners of this space are denoted Subjective Materialism (A2), Objective Materialism (A1), Objective Idealism (B1) and Subjective Idealism (B2). I apply it to interpret the roots of Modernity in European history and I offer a tentative social dynamics theory as a broad canvas for exploring sustainable pathways. The centre of this worldview space is the locus of the integral worldview, where dialogue, partnerships and coalitions are the means to overcome the -- often polarized -- differences in values and ideas of the competing worldviews.

Ferdinand de Saussure, a Swiss linguist considered to be one of the fathers of modern linguistics, in his Cours de linguistique générale (Course in General Linguistics, 1916) defines language as “a product of the collective mind of linguistic groups”. But this definition hardly helps us in drawing the boundary between one language and another: how can we tell who is or is not to be included in any given “linguistic group”? Take any two people, even close relatives, and they are sure to speak at least slightly differently. Yet it is not insightful to say that there are as many languages in the world as there are individual people!

Chapter 16 covers AN INTRODUCTION TO MULTIPLE REGRESSION and includes the following specific topics, among others: Confidence Intervals, Statistical Significance of b-Weight, Fit of the Overall Regression Equation, R and R-squared,Adjusted R-squared, Semipartial Correlation, Partial Slope, Confounding, and Statistical Control.

After millennia of modest growth, the human population started growing exponentially in the last few centuries. The human habitat has expanded, with population density primarily a function of NPP, distance to coasts and rivers, and altitude. Population growth in Europe underwent the so-called demographic transition as a consequence of changes in fertility and mortality. This was caused by several developments within the broader transformation into Modernity. It was and is repeated at a faster rate in regions outside Europe. One perspective on human behaviour (and reproduction) stems from evolutionary biology, with views on competition--cooperation, selfishness--altruism and niche construction. Complementary views emphasize the role of environmental and sociocultural factors, describing long-term evolution in terms of regimes and syndromes. Growth of the human population has large inertia, but there is still a wide margin of uncertainty in the estimates of quantity and quality of humans by the end of the twenty-first century. Some uncertainty, for instance about abortion, euthanasia and migration, can be understood in terms of divergent worldviews.