The Way—An Ecological Worldview (Buch von 2014)

Angaben

Edward Goldsmith: The Way—An Ecological Worldview. Veltune Publishing, 2014.

Special edition; earliest edition appeared in 1992.

Klappentext

Edward Goldsmith argues that there are no technological fixes for the crises facing society and the natural world today—no technology that can restore a family, restabilise society, repair the climate, or regenerate an ecosystem. Only the innate self-organising processes of society and the natural world can restore themselves—if allowed to do so.

Bringing together insights from a broad range of subjects—from ecology, anthropology, and economics, to epistemology and systems theory, along with a wealth of examples and quoted sources—Goldsmith outlines the general behaviour of living systems at all levels of the biosphere, how they naturally maintain their stability and that of the larger living systems of which they are a part, and how in turn those larger systems maintain and regulate them.

Noting this tendency of the biosphere to maintain its stability in the face of external challenges, Goldsmith shows how the modern industrial world—or technosphere—with its unbridled economic growth and unceasing technological expansion, embodies just such a challenge that is directly threatening the biosphere’s survival and hence our own.

From this, the author explains how today’s industrial society—contrary to popular opinion—is not the solution to but the very cause of our social, economic, and environmental problems, and which can thereby only fail to sustain itself in the long run. Consequently, the author turns to the wisdom of traditional peoples—rather than to ideological utopias—for the underlying blueprint to our future on this planet.