Pricing the Planet's Future


Book Description

Today, the judge, the citizen, the politician, and the entrepreneur are concerned with the sustainability of our development.




What's Next?


Book Description

The world spins in economic turmoil, and who can tell what will happen next? Cold numbers and simple statistical projections don't take into account social, financial, or political factors that can dramatically alter the economic course of a nation or a region. In this unique book, more than twenty leading economists and experts render thorough, rigorously researched prognoses for the world's major economies over the next five years. Factoring in such varied issues as the price of oil, the strength of the U.S. dollar, geopolitics, tax policies, and new developments in investment decision making, the contributors ground their predictions in the realities of current events, political conditions, and the health of financial institutions in each national economy. The most comprehensive volume on the global economy available today, this book presents up-to-date research on Russia, Australia, Europe, sub-Saharan and South Africa, the major Asian economies, North America, and the largest economies of Latin America. With unsurpassed expertise, the authors explain what's going on in individual countries, how important current global issues will impact them, and what economic scenarios they most likely will face in upcoming years.




Earth in Human Hands


Book Description

NASA Astrobiologist and renowned scientist Dr. David Grinspoon brings readers an optimistic message about humanity's future in the face of climate change. For the first time in Earth's history, our planet is experiencing a confluence of rapidly accelerating changes prompted by one species: humans. Climate change is only the most visible of the modifications we've made--up until this point, inadvertently--to the planet. And our current behavior threatens not only our own future but that of countless other creatures. By comparing Earth's story to those of other planets, astrobiologist David Grinspoon shows what a strange and novel development it is for a species to evolve to build machines, and ultimately, global societies with world-shaping influence. Without minimizing the challenges of the next century, Grinspoon suggests that our present moment is not only one of peril, but also great potential, especially when viewed from a 10,000-year perspective. Our species has surmounted the threat of extinction before, thanks to our innate ingenuity and ability to adapt, and there's every reason to believe we can do so again. Our challenge now is to awaken to our role as a force of planetary change, and to grow into this task. We must become graceful planetary engineers, conscious shapers of our environment and caretakers of Earth's biosphere. This is a perspective that begs us to ask not just what future do we want to avoid, but what do we seek to build? What kind of world do we want? Are humans the worst thing or the best thing to ever happen to our planet? Today we stand at a pivotal juncture, and the answer will depend on the choices we make.




A Better Planet


Book Description

A practical, bipartisan call to action from the world’s leading thinkers on the environment and sustainability Sustainability has emerged as a global priority over the past several years. The 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change and the adoption of the seventeen Sustainable Development Goals through the United Nations have highlighted the need to address critical challenges such as the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, water shortages, and air pollution. But in the United States, partisan divides, regional disputes, and deep disagreements over core principles have made it nearly impossible to chart a course toward a sustainable future. This timely new book, edited by celebrated scholar Daniel C. Esty, offers fresh thinking and forward-looking solutions from environmental thought leaders across the political spectrum. The book’s forty essays cover such subjects as ecology, environmental justice, Big Data, public health, and climate change, all with an emphasis on sustainability. The book focuses on moving toward sustainability through actionable, bipartisan approaches based on rigorous analytical research.




Changing Circumstances


Book Description

Changing Circumstances - Looking At The Future Of The Planet is an expansive presentation of international contemporary photography, video, and new media art addressing the challenges presented by global change. The book shows the works of over 30+ leading international artists, focusing on the ways in which photographic, video and digital art reflects on our relationship, as individuals and as a society, to the natural environment around us. An important aspect of this presentation is how individual artists are using their work to initiate and actively support change that seeks to correct the negative impact of human behaviour on the natural environment. The purpose of the book is to provoke, through visual art, new ways of thinking about how we see our role within the natural environment and our connection(s) to the rest of the planet - and how this affects our future. While we cannot ignore the problems of the planet today, the book will not simply be a recitation of negative prognoses. Rather it will look at ways in which artists and scientists are re-visioning our relationship with the earth and space. The artists and artworks address a broad range of issues that we understand as key challenges to the future of the earth - including climate change, migration, water, energy production, and natural resources. Many of the works present atypical uses of visual art and photography to address these changes with new media, moving image, performance, and text. Lead essays will be provided by the pioneering curator Wendy Watriss, Co-Curator of the Changing Circumstances Exhibition and Co-Founder of FotoFest International, and by FotoFest Executive Director and Co-Curator of the Changing Circumstances Exhibition, Steven Evans. The authors will look at the shifting relationships between contemporary art photography, issues of global change, and activism. Co-Founder of FotoFest International and Changing Circumstances Co-Curator Frederick Baldwin, with Watriss and Evans, will provide a philosophical overview of the project in the introduction. The Artists Amy Balkin (USA) Mandy Barker (UK) Daniel Beltrá (Spain) Atul Bhalla (India) Edward Burtynsky (Canada) Barbara Ciurej and Lindsay Lochman (USA) Pedro David (Brazil) Luis Delgado-Qualtrough (Mexico/USA) Susan Derges (UK) Nigel Dickinson (UK) Dornith Doherty (USA) David Doubilet (USA) Peter Fend (USA) Roberto Fernández Ibáñez (Uruguay) Karen Glaser (USA) Gina Glover (UK) Ingo Günther (Germany/USA) Niklas Goldbach (Germany) Lucy Helton (UK/USA) Chris Jordan (USA) Isaac Julien (UK) David Liittschwager (USA) Pablo Lopez Luz (Mexico) Evelyn Messinger and Kim Spencer (USA) Vik Muniz (Brazil) Robert Harding Pittman (Germany/USA) Meridel Rubenstein (USA) Joel Sartore (USA) Toby Smith (UK) Jamey Stillings (USA) Martin Stupich (USA) Brad Temkin (USA)




Change the Story, Change the Future


Book Description

The international bestselling author of When Corporations Rule the World shares a vital new vision for changing humanity’s self-destructive course. We humans live by stories, says David Korten, and the stories that now govern our society have set us on a self-destructive path. In Change the Story, Change the Future, Korten offers a new story that lets us reimagine society and navigate the critical needs of our time. Korten calls our current story Sacred Money and Markets. Money, it tells us, is the measure of all worth and the source of all happiness, while inequality and environmental destruction are unfortunate but unavoidable. Although many recognize that this story promotes bad ethics, bad science, and bad economics, it will remain our guiding story until replaced by one that aligns with our deepest understanding of the universe and our relationship to it. To guide our path to a viable human future, Korten offers a story he calls Sacred Life and Living Earth. It is grounded in a cosmology that affirms we are living beings born of a living Earth itself born of a living universe. Our health and well-being therefore depend on an economy that works in partnership with the Earth's community of life. Offering a hopeful vision, Korten lays out the transformative impact adopting this story will have on every aspect of human life and society.




The Future We Choose


Book Description

A cautionary but optimistic book about the world’s changing climate and the fate of humanity, from Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac—who led negotiations for the United Nations during the historic Paris Agreement of 2015. The authors outline two possible scenarios for our planet. In one, they describe what life on Earth will be like by 2050 if we fail to meet the Paris Agreement’s climate targets. In the other, they lay out what it will be like to live in a regenerative world that has net-zero emissions. They argue for confronting the climate crisis head-on, with determination and optimism. The Future We Choose presents our options and tells us what governments, corporations, and each of us can, and must, do to fend off disaster.




The Future is Degrowth


Book Description

We need to break free from the capitalist economy. Degrowth gives us the tools to bend its bars. Economic growth isn’t working, and it cannot be made to work. Offering a counter-history of how economic growth emerged in the context of colonialism, fossil-fueled industrialization, and capitalist modernity, The Future Is Degrowth argues that the ideology of growth conceals the rising inequalities and ecological destructions associated with capitalism, and points to desirable alternatives to it. Not only in society at large, but also on the left, we are held captive by the hegemony of growth. Even proposals for emancipatory Green New Deals or postcapitalism base their utopian hopes on the development of productive forces, on redistributing the fruits of economic growth and technological progress. Yet growing evidence shows that continued economic growth cannot be made compatible with sustaining life and is not necessary for a good life for all. This book provides a vision for postcapitalism beyond growth. Building on a vibrant field of research, it discusses the political economy and the politics of a non-growing economy. It charts a path forward through policies that democratise the economy, “now-topias” that create free spaces for experimentation, and counter-hegemonic movements that make it possible to break with the logic of growth. Degrowth perspectives offer a way to step off the treadmill of an alienating, expansionist, and hierarchical system. A handbook and a manifesto, The Future Is Degrowth is a must-read for all interested in charting a way beyond the current crises.




The Future Earth


Book Description

The first hopeful book about climate change, The Future Earth shows readers how to reverse the short- and long-term effects of climate change over the next three decades. The basics of climate science are easy. We know it is entirely human-caused. Which means its solutions will be similarly human-led. In The Future Earth, leading climate change advocate and weather-related journalist Eric Holthaus (“the Rebel Nerd of Meteorology”—Rolling Stone) offers a radical vision of our future, specifically how to reverse the short- and long-term effects of climate change over the next three decades. Anchored by world-class reporting, interviews with futurists, climatologists, biologists, economists, and climate change activists, it shows what the world could look like if we implemented radical solutions on the scale of the crises we face. What could happen if we reduced carbon emissions by 50 percent in the next decade? What could living in a city look like in 2030? How could the world operate in 2040, if the proposed Green New Deal created a 100 percent net carbon-free economy in the United States? This is the book for anyone who feels overwhelmed by the current state of our environment. Hopeful and prophetic, The Future Earth invites us to imagine how we can reverse the effects of climate change in our own lifetime and encourages us to enter a deeper relationship with the earth as conscientious stewards and to re-affirm our commitment to one another in our shared humanity.




The Planet in 2050


Book Description

In 2050, the billions of people living on Earth have found a way to manage the planetary system effectively. Everyone has access to adequate food, shelter, and clean water. Human health is no longer considered outside of the health of the ecosystems in which people live. Ecological awareness is an integral part of education. People respond effectively to social and environmental hazards, and societies care for the most vulnerable amongst them. The economy, too, has shifted. Carbon dioxide management is under control, and energy efficiency is the norm. The remaining rainforests have been preserved. Coral reefs are recovering. Fish stocks are thriving. Is any of this really possible? How can our complex social and economic systems interact with a complex planetary system undergoing rapid change to create a future we all want? This book is a contextualised collation of ideas articulated by the 50 participants of the Planet 2050 workshop held in Lund in October 2008, as part of The Planet in 2050, an interdisciplinary Fast Track Initiative of the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme. Participants were selected from academia and the sustainability practice community to give a wide-ranging, multi-cultural, trans-disciplinary set of perspectives. This collection explores four broad sectoral themes: energy and technologies; development, economies and culture; environment; and land use change. By doing so, this book emphasises the importance of a social dialogue on our collective future, and our responsibility to the Earth. It makes strong statements about what needs to happen to the global economy for a sustainable future and documents a new kind of scholarly discussion, engaging people from diverse knowledge communities in a spirit of exploration and reflexivity. The book provides a focus for dialogue and further study for postgraduates and researchers interested in global change as a multi-faceted, socio-environmental phenomenon, and as the book is written in an accessible scholarly style, assuming no prior specialist knowledge, it is also suitable for those involved in sustainability initiatives and policy.