What would happen if we were to awaken one day – all 8 billion of us – only to realize that the world we live in and experience and are deeply attached to suddenly appeared eerily alien as if we’d been teleported to some other distant world where identifiable markers by which we’ve come to understand our existence were simply missing – no less our sense of agency? That frightening prospect is now.
Apocalyptic spring floods, deadly summer droughts, heatwaves and wildfires, and catastrophic autumn hurricanes and typhoons, each devastating the planet’s ecosystems with the loss of human life and the lives of our fellow creatures along with untold destruction of the societal infrastructure, is taking us into the Sixth Extinction of life on Earth.
In his new book, The Age of Resilience: Reimagining Existence on a Rewilding Earth, social and economic theorist, and advisor to heads of state around the world, Jeremy Rifkin, addresses “the great unspoken.” Rifkin argues that the Age of Progress, which took our species to the commanding heights as the dominant species on Earth, but at the expense of the wholesale destruction of life on the planet, is on a death spiral and a nascent Age of Resilience is quickly trending with a new meta-narrative that fundamentally transforms the way our species will live and flourish on a rewilding Earth.
Here's What Forbes and the Financial Times are
Saying about
The Age of Resilience
Viral pandemics, wind-swept fires, droughts, floods and roiling hurricanes will keep wreaking their havoc on what the brilliant, bestselling author and economist, Jeremy Rifkin, calls a rewilding earth. “We long thought that we could force the natural world to adapt to our species,” Rifkin writes. “We now face the ignominious fate of being forced to adapt to an unpredictable natural world.” While our Industrial Revolutionary past gave rise to the Age of Progress with its focus on efficiency and productivity, we are now in what Rifkin calls in the title of his book, The Age of Resilience, requiring a re-focus on adaptivity and regeneration. Rifkin makes a compelling case that the Age of Resilience is both now and necessary. It’s not some potential future but already happening in sweeping shifts from growth to flourishing, ownership to access, linear processes to circularity, globalization to glocalization, consumerism to eco-stewardship, gross domestic product (GDP) to quality-of-life indicators (QLI), and more. It’s also necessary because the economic thinking fortifying the Age of Progress ignores a great deal, including the intrinsic value of nature, the laws of thermodynamics and so-called “externalities,” where the true price of progress gets paid. As always, ignorance leads to suffering and our economic ignorance has led to destabilized societies due to vast wealth disparities, destabilized systems trying to deal with the fallout and a destabilized climate increasingly inhospitable to human life. If there is a happy next chapter in the human story amidst this unfolding mayhem, it is because this Age of Resilience also motivates a sea change in leadership. We will find our adaptivity and regenerative spirit in this time inasmuch as we can flip from detached rationality to one-withness, from control to connection and from “It’s all about me” to “I’m all about it. - Forbes
The influential US thinker and prolific author, Jeremy Rifkin, has a new book, The Age of Resilience: Reimagining Existence on a Rewilding Earth. Rifkin’s earlier titles — The End of Work, The Third Industrial Revolution, The Green New Deal — have attracted fans in government departments and bookshops alike. In his new work, he returns to a familiar theme: what he calls the “efficiency imperative”, or the relentless quest to consume and discard natural resources to increase material wealth. This concept underpinned what Rifkin calls the age of progress. But now, in an increasingly alarming world of warming temperatures and global pandemic, he thinks humanity is shifting to an age of resilience that could transform our relationship with the natural world and each other. How might this play out? Rifkin sees a future of sweeping economic and social shifts where productivity gives way to regenerativity and gross domestic product to quality of life indicators. Consumerism, corporate conglomerates and globalisation all wither while “eco-stewardship”, high-tech co-operatives and “glocalisation” flourish. The book will undoubtedly prove beguiling for many readers, even as it infuriates others. It is rarely different for a writer who has spent decades warning of the need to address environmental problems that the human species caused and is still struggling to fix. - Financial Times
On hold at my public library; first in line. Yay!?