Macroshift: Navigating the Transformation to a Sustainable World - Hardcover

Laszlo, Ervin

 
9781576751633: Macroshift: Navigating the Transformation to a Sustainable World
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 1576751635 ISBN 13: 9781576751633
Verlag: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2001

Inhaltsangabe

We live in the midst of one of the greatest technological revolutions in history, an era of deep-seated transformation-a macroshift in civilization, says preeminent scholar and futurist Ervin Laszlo. Its signs and manifestations are all around us, from the deadly HIV/AIDS epidemic sweeping Africa and the dangerous fire-trap sweatshops routinely killing workers in Bangladesh, to the environmental havoc created by genetic engineering, power plant pollution and mechanized agriculture. The application of new technologies has turned into a double-edged sword.
The world is growing together in some respects, but is coming apart in others. Worldwide economic globalization, another sign of the macroshift, all too often benefits the few rather than the many. Hundreds of millions live at a higher material standard of living, but thousands of millions are pressed into abject poverty. The richest 20% earn ninety times the income of the poorest 20%, consume eleven times as much energy, and eat eleven times as much meat.
There have been other macroshifts in human history, but they spanned centuries, allowing cultural values, beliefs, and change to occur gradually. Today, technology has reduced our time to adapt; the entire critical period of change is compressed into the lifetime of a generation.
Today's macroshift, explains Laszlo, harbors great promise, as well as grave danger. He outlines two possible scenarios: "The Breakdown," where we choose to drift without a change in our current direction toward chaos, anarchy, and destruction, or "The Breakthrough," where we collectively transform our thinking and behavior to produce creative, sustainable solutions to dangerous global problems. And he shows what each of us can do-politically, professionally, and privately-to bring about the Breakthrough and shape a humane and sustainable global future.
While technology is what drives the unprecedented speed of this macroshift, it is our vision, values, and actions now that will ultimately determine the outcome. The choice is up to us-the power is in our hands.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Ervin Laszlo is the author or editor of sixty-nine books translated into as many as seventeen languages, and has over four hundred articles and research papers and six volumes of piano recordings to his credit. He serves as editor of the monthly World Futures: The Journal of General Evolution and of its associated General Evolution Studies book series.
Laszlo is generally recognized as the founder of systems philosophy and general evolution theory, serving as founder-director of the General Evolution Research Group and as past president of the International Society for the Systems Sciences. He is the recipient of the highest degree in philosophy and human sciences of the Sorbonne, the University of Paris, as well as of the Artist Diploma of the Franz Liszt Academy of Budapest. His numerous prizes and awards include four honorary doctorates.

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What Is a Macroshift?
OUR FUTURE—THE FUTURE OF HUMANKIND—will be decided by the outcome of today’s macroshift. But what is a macroshift? If our future depends on its outcome, and especially if we can do something about influencing this outcome, understanding today’s macroshift is important. Indeed, it is uniquely and decisively important.
Let us begin at the beginning. The most basic question we can ask about our future is whether we can know it. Very different answers can be given to this simple question. We may shrug and say, “I don’t know and don’t really care—I just take one thing at a time and the future will take care of itself.” Or we may say that there are no answers to this question, or at least none that we could give with any measure of confidence. Prediction, after all, is a difficult business—especially, as the saying goes, when it is about the future. But we can also say that there are reasonable and credible ways to answer questions about our future by looking at the present. Just as the present has emerged out of the past, the future is likely to follow from conditions in the present. After all, where we are going has much to do with where we have been.
Indifference and skepticism are widespread attitudes, but they are not helpful when the world is changing before our eyes. If you choose to opt out of taking real responsibility for the consequences of your actions because such consequences are said to be unforeseeable and, in any case, are none of your business, you may as well quit reading now. But if you believe, or at least are open to the possibility, that we can say something meaningful about where we are going and, even more, that we may have a real role in deciding it, then read on.
6
What is it, then, that we can say with a measure of confidence about the shape of things to come? The simplest and most common answer is that the future will follow from the present and will not be radically different from it. As the French saying goes, plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose (the more things change, the more they are the same). After all, we are dealing with humans and human nature, and these will be pretty much the same tomorrow as they are today. A more sophisticated variant of this popular view adds that long-term ongoing processes of today will introduce some measure of change and make some difference tomorrow. These processes are typically viewed as “trends.” Trends, whether local or global, micro or mega, introduce a measure of difference: as trends unfold, there are more of some things and less of others. The world is still the same, only some people are better off and others worse.
This is the view typically held by futurists, forecasters, and trend analysts in general. A good example of this is the much-publicized report of the U.S. National Intelligence Council, Global Trends 2015: A Dialogue about the Future with Nongovernment Experts (Washington, DC 2000). The view of the world of 2015 that emerges in this nonclassified report is based on the unfolding of key trends, catalyzed by key drivers. The seven key trends and drivers are demographics, natural resources and environment, science and technology, the global economy and globalization, national and international governance, future conflict, and the role of the United States. The way these trends unfold under the impact of their drivers can produce four different futures: a future of inclusive globalization, another future of pernicious globalization, a future of regional competition, or a post-polar world. The main deciders are the effects of globalization—they can be positive or negative—and the level and management of the world’s potential for interstate and interregional conflict.
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When all these factors are taken into account, we get what the experts call “the optimistic scenario.” In this perspective the world of 2015 is much like today’s world except that some population segments (alas, a shrinking minority) are better off and other segments (a growing majority) are less well off. The global economy will continue to grow, although its path will be rocky and marked by sustained financial volatility and a widening economic divide.
Economic growth may be undone, however, by events such as a sustained financial crisis or a prolonged disruption of energy supplies. Other “discontinuities” may occur as well. Here is a short list of possible problems from the Global Trends 2015 report:
• violent political upheavals due to a serious deterioration of living standards in the Middle East;
• the formation of an international terrorist coalition with anti-Western aims and access to high-tech weaponry;
• a global epidemic on the scale of HIV/AIDS;
• rapidly changing weather-patterns that inflict grave damage on human health and on economies;
• the antiglobalization movement growing until it becomes a threat to Western governmental and corporate interests; the emergence of a geo-strategic alliance (possibly by Russia, China, and India) aimed at counterbalancing the United States and Western influence;
• collapse of the alliance between the United States and Europe; or
• creation of a counterforce organization that could undermine the power of the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization and thus the ability of the United States to exercise global economic leadership.
With all these uncertainties and discontinuities we are far from justifying the assumption that the future will be much like the present. It is anybody’s guess whether the world of 2015 will be the same kind of world as the world we live in today—or something quite different.
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Given the unsustainability of many trends and processes in today’s world, the dynamic of development that will apply to our future is not the linear dynamic of classical extrapolation but the nonlinear chaos dynamic of complex-system evolution.
This dilemma highlights the limits of trend-based forecasting. Trends unfold in time, but they can also break down and give rise to new trends and new processes. After all, no trend operates in an infinite environment; its unfolding has limits. These may be natural limits due to finite resources and supplies, or human and social limits due to changing structures, values, and expectations. When a major trend encounters such limits, the world has changed and a new dynamic enters into play. Extrapolating existing trends does not help us define this moment. We need to know what happens precisely when a trend breaks down. This calls for deeper insight. We must go beyond observing current trends and following their expected path. We must know something about the developmental dynamics of the system in which trends appear—and then disappear. Such knowledge is theoretical but it is cogent—and it is available. It comes from the theory of complex systems, popularly known as “chaos theory.”
Given the unsustainability of many trends and processes in today’s world, the dynamic of development that will apply to our future is not the linear dynamic of classical extrapolation but the nonlinear chaos dynamic of complex-system evolution. Few would deny that current trends are building toward some critical threshold—toward some of the famous (or infamous) “planetary limits” that in the 1970s and 1980s were said to be the limits to growth. Whether they are limits to growth altogether is questionable, but they are clearly limits to the kind of growth that is occurring today. As we move toward these limits, we are...

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Verlag
Berrett-Koehler Publishers
Erscheinungsdatum
2001
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1576751635
ISBN 13 
9781576751633
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
240
Kontakt zum Hersteller
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