This third volume in the Gaia Future Series shows how readers can create a healthy, sustainable and environmentally sound world without sacrificing wealth and happiness. It reveals the hidden costs of many "profitable" enterprises and the sacrifices we make to satisfy the market. Maps and photographs throughout.

Understanding the Global Economy names the first step in coping with or transforming the flawed global ethics. To that end, the author explains the economic theory, social science, and thought that formed the basis of the global system. Applied to the sense of our current crisis, this book shows the ethics and forces that make the global market work as it does and how it fails. It presents a balance of the historical basis for global markets with the relevant economic theories, ethics, ideology, inclusive research of all the leading scholars, the current issues of the crisis, and the failed solutions. Through the intellectual background with an expose of the current crisis, the author leads us to a seemingly ironic prescription, which he lives—the willing, caring heart of humanity that knows no bounds. The book presents the solution by an analysis of the economic history from antiquity through the present, observations and research of the likely solutions, and decades of proactive work to enact the lasting solution.

For the first time since its publication in l984, a completely updated and revised edition of this best-selling atlas which brings it into the 1990s, incorporating the new events, issues, and statistics of the past decade.

""Attached Files"" is a selection of lectures and papers written by Imre Lázár, a medical anthropologist with twenty-five years of experience, situated at the crossroads and frontiers of several disciplines, including anthropology, health sciences, religious studies, human ecology, and environmental ethics. The shared focus, connecting these borderlands into a common semantic network, is the problem of the synergic logic of human bonds and attachment embodied by somatic, social, institutional a...

A visionary ecopsychologist examines the rift between human beings and nature and shows what can be done to bring harmony to both the ecosystem and our own minds. • Shows that the solution to our ecological dilemma lies in our own consciousnesses. It is becoming more and more apparent that the causes and cures for the current ecological crisis are to be found in the hearts and minds of human beings. For millennia we existed within a religious and psychological framework that honored the Earth as a partner and worked to maintain a balance with nature. But somehow a root pathology took hold in Western civilization--the idea of domination over nature--and this led to an alienation of the human spirit that has allowed an unprecedented destruction of the very systems which support that spirit. In Green Psychology Ralph Metzner explores the history of this global pathology and examines the ways that we can restore a healing relationship with nature. His search for role models takes him from shamanic ceremonies with the Lacandon Maya of Mexico to vision quests in the California desert, from the astonishing nature mysticism of Hildegard von Bingen to the Black Goddesses and Green Gods of our pagan ancestors. He examines the historical roots of the split between humans and nature, showing how first sky-god worshiping cultures, then monotheisms, and finally mechanistic science continued to isolate the human psyche from the life-giving Earth. His final chapters present a solution, showing that disciplines such as deep ecology and ecofeminism are creating a worldview in which the mind of humanity and the health of the Earth are harmoniously intertwined.

This work proposes a framework based on the concept of a fair distribution of environmental space to include the diverse needs of North and South. Drawing on research in 38 countries, it aims to give an equitable basis for global development in order to achieve sustainable consumption by the year 2050. The environmental space approach seeks to explain the limitations of the global market economy as a tool of development and to give us the means to alter it in order to achieve a genuine quality of life, rather than simple economic growth. In addition, this book seeks to urge all countries and peoples to consider and evaluate the environmental space approach and to join in a movement towards sustainable production and consumption for the 21st century.

Aaron Wildavsky, along with Mary Douglas, identified what they called grid-group theory. Wildavsky began calling this "cultural theory," and applied it to an astounding array of subjects. The essays in this volume exemplify the theory's potential contributions to three seemingly disparate, but related, areas: the social construction of meaning, normative/analytic political philosophy, and a theory of rational choices. This book is the first in a series of Aaron Wildavsky's collected writings being published posthumously by Transaction. Wildavsky selected, sequenced, and grouped all but three of the essays included in Culture and Social Theory prior to his death. Some are presented here for the first time. Wildavsky's cultural theory provides ways to organize and interpret the world. In the first section, he shows how social scientists, particularly economists and sociologists, apply the theory. Wildavsky argues that concepts such as externalities, public goods, altruism, and even risk and rape are tools of rival, ubiquitous cultures engaged in perpetual struggle with one another. The second section deals with cultural theory as a way to interpret the works of normative and analytic political philosophers, including Thomas Hobbes and John Stuart Mill, on competing human objectives. Wildavsky argues that particular types of interaction among a society's cultures are necessary for effective realization of basic concepts such as democracy. In the third section, Wildavsky applies cultural theory in conjunction with instrumental rationality, the former as a theory of preference formation, the latter as a device for realizing preferences efficiently. High-priority objectives, and thus the character of norms and rational action, shift across cultures. The world and its various elements comprise a complex, frequently changing, and thus ambiguous reality, nowhere more so than in the dynamic contours of the United States. For cultural theory, individualistic, hierarchical, and egalitarian interpretations of the world are the only ones capable of forming and sustaining institutions and related patterns of social relations that will support human social groups. Wildavsky's central objective is to strip away the camouflage and to reveal varying domains of social life as fields of cultural competition. Culture and Social Theory will be a necessary addition to the libraries of political scientists, economists, and policymakers, not to mention all those who admire Aaron Wildavsky and his work.