Bringing sustainability to the ground level: competing demands in the Yellowstone River Valley

Using the iconic Yellowstone River Valley of Montana as a case setting, this book is perfect for students with limited prior understanding of sustainability issues, theory, or science. The case explains how economic, environmental, and social concerns are threaded together as challenges that communities face when they imagine their long-term futures. Readers with business interests will appreciate the attention given to issues involving long-term profitability, while natural resource managers will appreciate the discussions of physical processes and nonhuman species. Others will be interested in the discussions of public policy concerns, including water law and endangered species. The case also intersects with interests of American Indians, especially concerning historical water rights. While useful and practical understandings of sustainability concepts are stressed, the details of the case expose complexities associated with improving community resilience. The authors give attention to how the valley's people express sustainability concerns, and readers are likely to recognize similar concerns in watersheds where they live. The case can, thus, function as a first step in a scaffolded curriculum designed to move students from understanding complexity into data gathering, analyses, and decision making. It provides platforms for exploring practical, theoretical, and scientific issues as linked exercises or as advanced projects. The case can also be used as a catalyst for identifying dozens of career trajectories. The National Science Foundation provided funding to pilot a similar version of this text, and the majority of the content has been empirically tested for its ability to connect STEM-based analyses to sustainability questions.