The project will organize an international and interdisciplinary workshop with invited participants immediately followed by a public meeting at Litteraturhuset for the purpose of dissemination and debate. The project will also produce a scientific paper summing up the experiences of the project and produce a new follow-up project proposal.

The aim om the main workshop (3 days) is two folded:

1. to explore the possibilities for a new common theoretical ground for the social sciences and biology based on certain recent advances within social anthropology, econimics and evolutionary biology and
2. to test some of these new general concepts and theories against an empirical example, Norwegian aquaculture.

The theoretical work will start with an exploration of the concept of sustainability (including the transtion to a more sustainable future) in light of Terrence W. Deacon's recent theories of basic self-preserving dynamics. Although the main empirical example will be the Norwegian program on preserving rainforests, empirical examples will also be taken from other large projects currently headed by participants of SUSTAINABILITY: Prof. Thomas Hylland Eriksen: "Overheating: the three crisis of globalization" an ERC Advanced grant project (http://www.uio.no/overheating/)