Guest Blog: Towards 9 Billion Book Series Released
This e-book series
is about an exploring new ideas; it will hopefully provide some inspiration
about how we might think differently about a sustainable future and the route
to achieving it. –Joss Tantram
What’s it all about?
The quest for a sustainable future is all
about questions. Some are big and some are small. Some are about the nature and
purpose of our systems of value, and some about how we value our loved ones.
Sometimes the smallest questions have the biggest answers.
Children’s ability and commitment to asking
questions often outstrips our ability to answer them. This is not merely that
an incessant stream of ‘why?’ questions is tiring, it’s also that some of the
time we genuinely don’t know the answers to the questions we are asked or are
unprepared to deal with their true implications.
As we grow up, we often keep questioning, but the scope of those questions can narrow due to the practical need to balance a sense of wonder with passing an exam or earning an income. We still question aspects of life but often these become more about the details and less about the overall purpose. This ‘bounded rationality’, keeps our questions within a less examined frame of reference and is one of the challenges our species faces in breaking away from unsustainable ways of being and creating new ones that may differ slightly or radically.
Some questions demand answers
In essence, sustainability is about one of
two things; doing the same things very differently or doing very different
things.
Maintaining our status-quo commits us to a
collision course with the very real limits to possibility on this wonderful
though populous planet.
Sustainability is about one of two things; doing the same things
very differently or doing very different things.
To follow a path to sustainability we need
to ask and then answer some fundamental questions of economics, finance,
culture and business. Not just “can we do business with less impact?” but “how do we connect finance with a flourishing future in the
first place?”
Over previous centuries immense logic and ingenuity have been applied in the creation of our systems of value and enterprise. However, we face challenges which require a rejuvenation of our thinking because the logic of the past often falls short of the obstacles of the future.
Unless we ask the big questions “What is the point of capitalism?” and “How do we value a sustainable future?” we will be unlikely to find answers which meet the scale of the challenge.
The current rules of the game for capitalism are undermining its own
long-term existence.
The current rules of the game for
capitalism are undermining its own long-term existence. Any game includes
winners and losers, creativity, luck, cooperation and competition, and should
do so in order to deliver creativity, innovation and the chance of individual
and collective choice, reward and well-being.
Changing the rules of the game such that capitalism seeks to deliver sustainability wouldn’t affect the range of possible outcomes and types of choices within the game. Indeed it would guarantee that we all had more chance to play for longer, and indeed might guarantee that more of us might ‘win’.
Whatever will be, will be
Towards 9 Billion asks some big questions
about the nature of things and some naïve questions as to whether things must
be as they are.
Humans tend to love and despise systems in equal measure. The systems of economics, capitalism and enterprise which surround and drive us are required and beloved but also feared and doubted.
Our writing is intended to present and
explore new ideas and hopefully provide some inspiration about how we might
think differently about a sustainable future and the route to achieving it.
·
Why do our systems of value and
production function as they do and might they be capable of becoming truly
planetarily compatible? How can our markets give rise
to behaviour so perverse that it’s in no one’s interest to leave them
untouched?
·
Might there be a larger purpose
behind these systems and might we aspire to more human approaches for the good
our home and our species?
·
Do our current systems of value
contain the seeds of the next ones?
·
Must profit for one always mean
loss for another?
·
Must we learn to leave behind
our expectations of linear cause and effect in an increasingly changeable
world?
·
How do we move to a positive
sum economy, where common good and private interest naturally align?
Out now – Towards 9 Billion book series
We
have packaged a range of our writing over the last few years into a series of
short, E-books, which are available now. There are 5 in the series and
are free to download. Please visit our site to access them today. www.terrafiniti.com/towards-9-billion-books
Book one in the Series: What’s the point of
Capitalism?
Here are just some of the kind things
people have said about the books:
“Big ideas for massive challenges:
Terrafiniti’s Towards 9 Billion provides a wide range of solution-oriented
perspectives on the prospect – often seen as daunting – of accommodating 9
billion people within the remits of our one planet.”
David
Nussbaum, Chief Executive, WWF-UK
“Towards 9 Billion addresses the
critical issues that face our planet in the 21st century, from business and
economics to sustainable energy and technology. I love its wide-ranging
intelligence, lucid prose and interdisciplinary approach to scoping a new
economics for our age.”
Jane Gleeson-White, author
of “Six
Capitals: The revolution capitalism has to have – or can accountants save the
planet?”
“With this series of e-books,
Terrafiniti continue to not only pose the most important questions of our time
– namely, how do we sustain and thrive on a planet of 9 billion people – but
also propose some fantastic ideas as to how we might do just that. A must read
for anybody interested in where the planet is headed – and finding solutions to
our most pressing challenges.”
Jeremy Leggett, author,
environmentalist, activist and solar pioneer.
Sowing the seeds of a sustainable world?
Just as plants and animals broadcast seed
and progeny in vast numbers in the hope that some will survive and flourish, we
hope that our ideas might have the chance to do the same; to find receptive
places in which to thrive.
We hope that our writing and the books
might play a small but useful role in imagining and building a future fit for
people and the planet.
Comments
Post a Comment