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Here is the back cover which introduces the aim of the book.
YES WE CAN
The challenges of this 21st century are awesome. We head into a perfect storm in 2030, because so many disastrous trends are operating on the same time frame - overpopulation, water and food shortages, climate change, depleted oil resources, economic depression, social breakdown and war. Millions of refugees will be fleeing to the few remaining lifeboat nations. Like New Zealand.
Yet a good society is beckoning. This is the conserver society of lazy socialism, the very opposite of today’s selfish capitalism with its mania for an impossible infinite growth.
Shakespeare once described society as “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing”. The phrase is apt today; the sound and fury is all around us today and idiots rule. The parliamentary coup of 1984 wrecked a successful mixed economy and led to the destruction of invaluable institutional memory. One task ahead is to rebuild the nation and regain lost wisdom.
Scientists saw the coming storm 40 and more years ago but those warnings were stifled. We must take the straightjacket off and allow a hundred flowers to blossom, a hundred schools of thought to contend.
The challenges of this 21st century are awesome. We head into a perfect storm in 2030, because so many disastrous trends are operating on the same time frame - overpopulation, water and food shortages, climate change, depleted oil resources, economic depression, social breakdown and war. Millions of refugees will be fleeing to the few remaining lifeboat nations. Like New Zealand.
Yet a good society is beckoning. This is the conserver society of lazy socialism, the very opposite of today’s selfish capitalism with its mania for an impossible infinite growth.
Shakespeare once described society as “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing”. The phrase is apt today; the sound and fury is all around us today and idiots rule. The parliamentary coup of 1984 wrecked a successful mixed economy and led to the destruction of invaluable institutional memory. One task ahead is to rebuild the nation and regain lost wisdom.
Scientists saw the coming storm 40 and more years ago but those warnings were stifled. We must take the straightjacket off and allow a hundred flowers to blossom, a hundred schools of thought to contend.
This includes the following Call to arms.
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It’s your life
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If you are twenty, you will live for the next sixty years in a destroyed economy of continuing high unemployment, with luxury for the powerful and suffering of the poor. The global collapse of 2008 on will build on the misery created by 25 years of far-right greed.
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All life is precious but the amazing environment which flourished before people came to this land is gone. We are each born into a human race which acts only for itself, worshiping the god of growth. Numbers continue to spiral upwards – 3 billion in 1960, 6 billion in 2000, 9 billion in 2040. This is all a result of past human success in spreading across the world - conquering new places, destroying forests and driving other animals out. We belong to a species with an extraordinary range of capabilities, but who do not know when to stop and who now threaten the destruction of our own kind. We have become a human plague.
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The whole picture has been clear for 40 years now yet the reaction has been to hide heads in the sand with denial and continuation of the behaviour which has itself created this monster. The people now in charge are the people who led us into this mess, with climate change, oil peak, water shortage, economic collapse, species extinctions, overpopulation and conflict.
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Not everyone has been so willfully blind. Some of us saw the challenge 30 and 40 years ago and have worked and written of the global collapse. When we started it was something for the future; now it is under way all around us. Our forecasts are proving robust.
