How to Thrive in the Next Economy: Designing Tomorrow's World Today
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3.7 • 3 Ratings
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
A visionary yet practical guide to building a more sustainable future, by one of the most important voices in environmentally aware design
Are there practical solutions to the many global challenges—climate change, poverty, insufficient healthcare—that threaten our way of life? Author John Thackara has spent a lifetime roving the globe in search of design that serves human needs. In this clear-eyed but ultimately optimistic book, he argues that, in our eagerness to find big technological solutions, we have all too often ignored the astonishing creativity generated when people work together and in harmony with the world around them.
Drawing on an inspiring range of examples, from a temple-led water management system in Bali that dates back hundreds of years to an innovative e-bike collective in Vienna, Thackara shows that below the radar of the mainstream media there are global communities creating a replacement economy—one that nurtures the earth and its inhabitants rather than jeopardizing its future—from the ground up. Each chapter is devoted to a concern all humans share—land and water management, housing, what we eat, what we wear, our health, how and why we travel—and demonstrates that it is possible to live a rich and fulfilling life based on stewardship rather than exploitation of the natural environment.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This peppy but insubstantial offering from event planner Thackara (In the Bubble) takes on the need to shift the economy's focus from constant, relentless growth to a more sustainable model that will be good for both the environment and business. He describes a movement that runs counter to both the apocalyptic view that civilization is headed for collapse and the utopian faith in the power of green tech. This new phenomenon is a "social and solidarity economy" made up of the many people dedicating their working lives to environmental rejuvenation, in widely varied ways. Humans are using more and more energy, and looking for ways of getting it more and more cheaply. But as Thackara observes, this unquenchable desire for growth in companies and industries has a cost. He covers land stewardship, eradication of world hunger, transportation, housing, and soil maintenance, highlighting the various organizations and companies working on these issues. Thackara asserts that "the interdependence between healthy soils, living systems, and the ways we can help them regenerate, finally addresses the why' of economic activity that we've been lacking." This view of a "living economy" is interesting, but the what-next suggestions aren't meaty enough to hold the reader's attention.
