Jeremy Rifkin creates the biggest picture: an Age of Progress superseded by an Age of Resilience
Click here (or on the image above) to go straight to Jeremy’s starting presentation
We have long praised and learned from the veteran environmentalist and economist Jeremy Rifkin (see our archive),. However, we missed his 2022 book The Age of Resilience: Reimagining Existence on a Rewilding Earth. We’ve now caught up via his office reprobating it, as a herald of the “final hours of the age of progress”. As the blurb says:
Available here - and see media kit
What would happen if we were to awaken one day – all 8 billion of us – only to realize that the world we live in and experience and are deeply attached to suddenly appeared eerily alien as if we’d been teleported to some other distant world where identifiable markers by which we’ve come to understand our existence were simply missing – no less our sense of agency? That frightening prospect is now.
Apocalyptic spring floods, deadly summer droughts, heatwaves and wildfires, and catastrophic autumn hurricanes and typhoons, each devastating the planet’s ecosystems with the loss of human life and the lives of our fellow creatures along with untold destruction of the societal infrastructure, is taking us into the Sixth Extinction of life on Earth.
In his new book, Jeremy Rifkin, addresses “the great unspoken.” Rifkin argues that the Age of Progress, which took our species to the commanding heights as the dominant species on Earth, but at the expense of the wholesale destruction of life on the planet, is on a death spiral and a nascent Age of Resilience is quickly trending with a new meta-narrative that fundamentally transforms the way our species will live and flourish on a rewilding Earth.
We’ve posted a clear and motivating speech by Rifkin on his book, given in June this year in a German context - embedded above. But we also want to share the summary of Rifkin’s book given by his publisher below:
A New Story for Humanity
A sweeping new interpretation of the history of civilization and a transformative vision of how our species will thrive on a rewilding Earth
By Tim Bartlett, Executive Editor, St. Martin’s Press
In The Age of Resilience, the renowned economic and social theorist asks where do we go from here knowing that we are careening into the sixth mass extinction of life on Earth. If there is a change to reckon with argues Rifkin, it’s that we are realizing that the human race never had dominion over the earth and that the agencies of nature are far more formidable than we thought.
While our species seems much smaller and less significant in the bigger picture of our evolving planet, undermining our long-cherished world view. The Age of Progress, once considered sacrosanct, is unraveling while a powerful new narrative, The Age of Resilience, is taking hold.
Rifkin takes us on a path-breaking journey exploring new ways of stewarding life on the planet. Re-conceptualizing time and the navigation of space sets the context for the paradigm shift.
During The Age of Progress, efficiency was the gold standard for organizing time, locking our species into the unrelenting quest to optimize the expropriation, commodification, and consumption of the Earth’s bounty, at ever greater speeds and in ever shrinking time intervals. The objective was to be increasing the opulence of human society but at the expense of the depletion of nature.
Space, observes Rifkin, became synonymous with passive natural resources, while a principal role of government and the economy was to manage nature as property. This long adhered to temporal/spatial orientation, writes Rifkin, has taken humanity to the commanding heights as the dominant species on Earth and to the ruin of the natural world.
In the emerging era, says Rifkin, efficiency is giving way to adaptivity as the all-encompassing temporal value, while space is perceived as animated, self-organizing, and fluid. A younger generation is already pivoting from
growth to flourishing,
finance capital to ecological capital,
productivity to regenerativity
hyper-consumption to eco-stewardship,
gross domestic product (GDP) to quality of life indicators (QLI),
intellectual property rights to open-source sharing of knowledge,
globalization to glocalization,
geopolitics to biosphere politics,
nation-state sovereignty to bio-regional governance,
and representative democracy to citizen assemblies and distributed peerocracy.
Future generations, suggests Rifkin, will likely experience existence less as objects and structures and more as patterns and processes. They will come to understand that each of us is literally an ecosystem made up of the microorganisms and elements that comprise the hydrosphere, lithosphere, atmosphere, and biosphere.
The autonomous self of the Age of Progress is giving way to the ecological self of the Age of Resilience. The now worn Scientific Method that underwrote The Age of Progress is also falling by the wayside, making room for a new approach to science called Complex Adaptive Social/Ecological Systems modeling.
Likewise, detached reason is weakening while empathy and biophilia are mainstreaming. With human anguish mounting, Rifkin offers up a bold new blueprint for rethinking our way of life and how the human race and our fellow creatures might flourish in the coming Age of Resilience.