Congratulations to Earth Fever for winning a 2011 Nautilus Award in the Green Living and Sustainability category!
Nautilus Book Awards, a leading book awards organization for cutting-edge books, announced that Earth Fever by Canadian Judy McAllister and Dutchmen Erik van Praag and Jan Paul van Soest, has been awarded the 2011 Nautilus Silver Award in the “environment and green values” category.
We recommend this book to which Hazel Henderson, our editor-in-chief, wrote the foreword:
I welcome this English edition of Earth Fever, a timely and highly original approach to climate change. The author’s rigorous analysis of the latest scientific findings then moves to the political social, cultural and spiritual lessons we humans need to learn. The multi-dimensional actions are reviewed that can still keep our planet’s atmosphere from further warming beyond the average 2 centigrade considered vital to prevent catastrophic outcomes.
Beyond the careful analyses of all those issues and choices for our common human future, this book then breaks important new ground. The global climate crisis is viewed as a systemic learning experience and an opportunity for a rapid evolution of humanity’s planetary awareness and expansion of consciousness of our interdependence. It is as if Gaia, our wondrous living planet, is now our programmed learning environment – teaching us directly about our myopic thinking and careless technologies.
I came to a similar conclusion in many of my own books. I learned from my service on the Technology Assessment Advisory Council to the US Congress from 1975 until 1980, that our fossil-fuel based industrialism was already loading the atmosphere with CO2 . I also promoted the series of studies the US Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) on alternatives to the internal combustion engine and the possibilities of a transition to solar, wind, ocean and geothermal sources of energy. The “policy tyrants” the authors describe: “denial,” “yes, but” (change is too expensive) and “over-optimism” were much in evidence in the US Congress and led to the shutting-down of OTA in 1996. Thankfully, the Obama administration understands the climate issue and the enormous potential of a transition to a low-carbon economy that I described in The Politics of the Solar Age in 1981. There is even a move in Congress to restore funding to the OTA now that “junk science” no longer dominates in Washington.
While the authors of Earth Fever examine these technological possibilities and the many ways they can be accelerated, they also provide the deepest analyses yet of the possibilities that humans are becoming more aware of their place in our planetary biosphere. Mass media, the internet, socially-responsible investors and asset managers, companies discovering the savings in energy efficiency, even the “green washing” of much corporate advertising – are contributing to this growing awareness.
As someone who has been involved in these processes for many years, I have also witnessed this evolution of public awareness. As Herman Wijfells, one of many experts interviewed says, “the laggards are in politics and finance.” I agree! The advance in human understanding is led by NGO groups, courageous individuals and those from many spiritual traditions. The collapse of the global financial casino of 2008-9 is now seen as an opportunity to correct our limited views of “progress” and to redefine “success” (see our TV series “Ethical Markets” on PBS stations and also at www.ethicalmarkets.tv).
Money is not wealth, but merely one form of information – a brilliant invention to track and keep score of human transactions between each other and the ecosystem services of our planet. Economic textbooks are obsolete, disproved each day by new research into the value of eco-system services (roughly equivalent to the money denominated production we do count in GDP), the value of unpaid human services (volunteering, caring for the young, elderly and sick, growing food, building houses, etc.) which constitutes 50% of all annual production in OECD countries and as much as 65% in more traditional, developing countries. All this is ignored in economic textbooks and even their core tenet: that rational humans maximize their own self-interest in competition with all others – is now disproved by behavioral sciences and brain researchers.
Humans have a full behavioral repertoire from conflict and competition to caring for each other, sharing resources and cooperation. Re-evaluation of Charles Darwin’s The Descent of Man by David Loye in Darwin’s Lost Theory of Love (2000) finds that he only mentions competition briefly and actually emphasized humans’ genius for bonding, sharing and cooperation as the key to our species’ success in colonizing the biosphere. Even “the survival of the fittest” was a phrase coined by Herbert Spencer in The Economist, rather than by Darwin.
Thus, Earth Fever explores our ability to cooperate and how this human skill can be amplified by the challenge of climate change. I have been operating on this same assumption, and today, it’s application to the climate issue is vital. We must change the debate over climate: from the economic approach (which believes that money is the constraint) to a more realistic view that money is not the issue, but time is the real constraint. Even the well-meaning studies cited such as those of Britain’s Sir Nicholas Stern are still in the language of economics and money. Costs to the incumbent fossil fuel sectors are still the focus, while the positive benefits, savings and revenues for ramping up the low-carbon economy globally (estimated for those who think in money terms at over $1 trillion a year) are not well-analyzed.
I and my colleagues around the world in the Climate Prosperity Alliance are proposing investments of $1 trillion per year for the next 10 years to double annual installations of solar, wind, geothermal and ocean technologies, saving forests, smart electric infrastructure, for a total of $10 trillion. This is less than the US has spent in bailing out Wall Street, auto companies and other unsustainable sectors, and is only 10% of the world’s pension fund assets of $120 trillion.
Thus, I and my colleagues, including Jim Garrison and others interviewed in this book, understand that even though money is worthless (just a numeraire) one must engage a money-obsessed society in the metaphors of finance and investment. Our conscious evolution can be mapped by our understanding of the role of money in our societies and how it is evolving in this Information Age, as in Jordan Macleod’s New Currency (2009). Ever more trade and transactions are made without money, as pure information-based trading (see diagram), e.g., Ebay, Craigslist, Freecycle, GlobalGiving, Microplace, and P2P lending sites like Prosper, Zopa and Qifang in China.
Thus the twin crises of our global financial casino and climate change are indeed providing the breakthroughs in our understanding of how to create a saner, ecologically sound and more equitable future. In the depth and breadth of understanding of humanity’s real options for the future, Earth Fever breaks important new ground for us all.
