“We now have an economy that is destroying its natural support systems. … We are liquidating the earth’s natural assets to fuel our consumption,” Academy Fellow Lester Brown writes in his latest book, World on the Edge, the must-read book of 2011.
He warns: “If we continue with business as usual, civilizational collapse is no longer a matter of whether but when—a time period more likely measured in years than decades.” Before offering a road map for change, he tells a gripping tale of converging trends and missed signals.
Brown writes that “The market does many things well,” and that no central planner could imagine, much less achieve, the efficiency with which it allocates resources. “But as the world economy expanded some 20-fold over the last century, it has revealed a flaw—a flaw so serious that if it is not corrected it will spell the end of civilization as we know it. The market, which sets prices, is not telling us the truth. It is omitting indirect costs that in some cases now dwarf direct costs.” …more…
The Quest for Exceptional Leadership: Mirage to Reality by Ravi Chaudhry, is a wise and practical book that provides an action plan for creating a more just and equitable society and a sustainable, humane business ethos through the practice of exceptional leadership.
Interweaving analysis with the lessons of history and ancient wisdom, he shows “how leaders today can help transform societies, by marginally transforming themselves….
Ravi Chaudhry envisions a world in which business schools would change their Masters programs from MBAs (Master in Business Administration) to MBCs (Masters in Business with Conscience) as part of “an unmistakable clarion call” from the business community that it is ready to embrace fundamental change.
Business schools should integrate his book into their curriculum; business leaders will find it “a gentle guide” and a source of conviction that we need a new paradigm of leadership. ... more ...
Don’t miss Bill McKibben’s newest book, Eaarth: Making a life on a Tough New Planet. The first half of the book shows that we no longer live on the same planet that has cradled 10,000 years of human civilization. “The world hasn’t ended but the world as we know it has—even if we don’t quite know it yet. …It’s a different planet. It needs a new name. Eaarth.”
McKibben, the founder of 350.org, marshals the facts that float by us in the news, about how much and how fast our old earth is “suddenly melting, drying, acidifying, flooding, and burning in ways that no human has ever seen.” He shows how “our economic troubles are intersecting with our ecological ones in ways that put us hard up against the limits to growth.”
The book’s second half “is based on the premise that we can build durable and even relatively graceful ways to inhabit this new planet by creating “dispersed and localized societies that can survive the damage we can no longer prevent.” …more…
Why aren’t more people demanding that Congress enact energy and climate change legislation?
Anyone who wants to sort out the climate debate or more effectively argue with the neighbors should read Merchants of Doubt, a new book by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway. The authors show how a handful of scientists who were “implacably hostile to regulation” joined forces with free market fundamentalists to obscure the truth and fight regulation of the tobacco industry as well as regulation to combat acid rain, the ozone hole, and climate change.
They “promoted claims that had already been refuted in the scientific literature, and the media became complicit as they reported these claims as if they were part of an ongoing scientific debate. Often the media did so without informing…[its audience] that the ‘experts’ being quoted had links to the tobacco industry, were affiliated with ideologically motivated think tanks that received money from the tobacco industry (or in later years the fossil fuel industry), or were simply habitual contrarians.”
The book is a fast and engrossing read, places the climate change debate in the context of other battles over laissez-faire economics and various industries’ attempts to escape regulation, and emphasizes what non-scientists may forget: “that science does not provide certainty.” …more…
Moby-Dick and the Mythology of Oil: An Admonition for the Petroleum Age (2010), by Academy Member Robert D. Wagner, Jr., Ph.D., is a wise and gripping exploration of how the mythos of the whaling era, with its compulsion to dominate and exploit nature to ply a commercial trade, still pervades our life today at the pinnacle of the Petroleum Age.
Bob writes with the hope that by understanding this mythos, we can better understand the forces driving American economic society and avoid a catastrophic fate like that of the Pequod whaleship’s crew. …more…