Although I have numerous tasks to get on with, right now I can barely drag myself away from Feasta’s latest book Fleeing Vesuvius: Overcoming the Risks of Economic and Environmental Collapse. The book draws together many ideas developed over the last few decades and applies these to a single question – how can we resolve the complexity of inter-related issues we find ourselves in?
It proposes that the financial crisis affecting the world's richest countries since 2008 is a turning point in human history because it begins an era wherein economies will tend to decrease rather than grow. Incomes will decline because the natural resources required for growth - particularly oil, the lifeblood of the world economy - can no longer be extracted in increasing quantities. Why? Because the rising global demand for cheap fossil fuels is now head up against a static and eventually depleting supply.
Indeed, as this book shows, the financial crash itself was due to this irresistible force. Its collection of twenty-seven essays by well-known international authors, all leading thinkers in their fields, extrapolates out from this fact across interlinked areas: Energy Availability, Business, Money and Finance, New Ways of Using the Land, Dealing with Climate Change, Changing the Way we Live, Changing the Way we Think and Ideas for Action.
The solutions it puts forward involve changes to our economy and financial system, but they go much further: this substantial, wide-ranging book also looks at the changes needed in how we think, how we use the land and how we relate to others, particularly those where we live.
While it doesn’t discount the complexity of the problems we face, Fleeing Vesuvius is practical and fundamentally optimistic. It can arm readers with the confidence and knowledge they need to develop new, workable alternatives to the old-style expanding economy and its supporting systems. It’s a book that can be read all the way through or used as a resource to dip in and out of.
Timely, practical, and fundamentally optimistic, this is a must-read for anyone concerned with reducing our risk of environmental and societal collapse.
http://www.feasta.org/ Is gradually uploading a free online edition of this book and welcomes comments on each section as they appear online.
