Book [PDF] Civilizations Crisis A Set Of Linked Challenges Download

Civilization's Crisis: A Set Of Linked Challenges

Author: John Scales Avery
Publisher: World Scientific
ISBN: 9813222476
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 416

Get Book Here

Book Description
Modern civilization faces a broad spectrum of daunting problems, but rational solutions are available for them all. This book explores the following issues: (1) Threats to the environment and climate change; (2) a growing population and vanishing resources; (3) the global food and refugee crisis; (4) intolerable economic inequality; (5) the threat of nuclear war; (6) the military-industrial complex; and (7) limits to growth. These problems are closely interlinked, and their possible solutions are discussed in this book.

Civilization's Crisis

Author: John Avery
Publisher: World Scientific Publishing Company
ISBN: 9789813222458
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 416

Get Book Here

Make, Think, Imagine

Author: John Browne
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 164313275X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 261

Get Book Here

Book Description
Today's unprecedented pace of change leaves many people wondering what new technologies are doing to our lives. Has social media robbed us of our privacy and fed us with false information? Are the decisions about our health, security and finances made by computer programs inexplicable and biased? Will these algorithms become so complex that we can no longer control them? Are robots going to take our jobs? Can we provide housing for our ever-growing urban populations? And has our demand for energy driven the Earth's climate to the edge of catastrophe?John Browne argues that we need not and must not put the brakes on technological advance. Civilization is founded on engineering innovation; all progress stems from the human urge to make things and to shape the world around us, resulting in greater freedom, health and wealth for all. Drawing on history, his own experiences and conversations with many of today's great innovators, he uncovers the basis for all progress and its consequences, both good and bad. He argues compellingly that the same spark that triggers each innovation can be used to counter its negative consequences. Make, Think, Imagine provides an eloquent blueprint for how we can keep moving towards a brighter future.

A User's Guide to the Crisis of Civilisation

Author: Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed
Publisher: Pluto Press
ISBN: 9780745330549
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
It often seems that different crises are competing to devastate civilization. This book argues that financial meltdown, dwindling oil reserves, terrorism and food shortages need to be considered as part of the same ailing system. Most accounts of our contemporary global crises such as climate change, or the threat of terrorism, focus on one area, or another, to the exclusion of others. Nafeez Ahmed argues that the unwillingness of experts to look outside their specialisations explains why there is so much disagreement and misunderstanding about particular crises. This book attempts to investigate all of these crises, not as isolated events, but as trends and processes that belong to a single global system. We are therefore not dealing with a "clash of civilizations," as Huntington argued. Rather, we are dealing with a fundamental crisis of civilization itself. This book provides a stark warning of the consequences of failing to take a broad view of the problems facing the world.

The Age of Disintegration

Author: Bill Jordan
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030414450
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 96

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book addresses the disintegration of collective units of all kinds, under the twin pressures of economic globalisation and technological automation. At the level of super-states, the constituent nations of the European Union and the former Soviet Union, and of the United Kingdom, have demonstrated this dynamic; and their constituent groups, associations and communities have done so too. The author analyses the causes and consequences of these processes, at the global, national and local levels, the significance of increased mobility and migration, and the politics of resistance to some damaging effects. He recommends ways in which public policy can offset some of the latter, including radical changes in tax-benefits systems, already being trialled in several countries worldwide.

The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order

Author: Samuel P. Huntington
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1416561242
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 553

Get Book Here

Book Description
The classic study of post-Cold War international relations, more relevant than ever in the post-9/11 world, with a new foreword by Zbigniew Brzezinski. Since its initial publication, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order has become a classic work of international relations and one of the most influential books ever written about foreign affairs. An insightful and powerful analysis of the forces driving global politics, it is as indispensable to our understanding of American foreign policy today as the day it was published. As former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski says in his new foreword to the book, it “has earned a place on the shelf of only about a dozen or so truly enduring works that provide the quintessential insights necessary for a broad understanding of world affairs in our time.” Samuel Huntington explains how clashes between civilizations are the greatest threat to world peace but also how an international order based on civilizations is the best safeguard against war. Events since the publication of the book have proved the wisdom of that analysis. The 9/11 attacks and wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have demonstrated the threat of civilizations but have also shown how vital international cross-civilization cooperation is to restoring peace. As ideological distinctions among nations have been replaced by cultural differences, world politics has been reconfigured. Across the globe, new conflicts—and new cooperation—have replaced the old order of the Cold War era. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order explains how the population explosion in Muslim countries and the economic rise of East Asia are changing global politics. These developments challenge Western dominance, promote opposition to supposedly “universal” Western ideals, and intensify intercivilization conflict over such issues as nuclear proliferation, immigration, human rights, and democracy. The Muslim population surge has led to many small wars throughout Eurasia, and the rise of China could lead to a global war of civilizations. Huntington offers a strategy for the West to preserve its unique culture and emphasizes the need for people everywhere to learn to coexist in a complex, multipolar, muliticivilizational world.

Abundant Earth

Author: Eileen Crist
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022659680X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 316

Get Book Here

Book Description
In Abundant Earth, Eileen Crist not only documents the rising tide of biodiversity loss, but also lays out the drivers of this wholesale destruction and how we can push past them. Looking beyond the familiar litany of causes—a large and growing human population, rising livestock numbers, expanding economies and international trade, and spreading infrastructures and incursions upon wildlands—she asks the key question: if we know human expansionism is to blame for this ecological crisis, why are we not taking the needed steps to halt our expansionism? Crist argues that to do so would require a two-pronged approach. Scaling down calls upon us to lower the global human population while working within a human-rights framework, to deindustrialize food production, and to localize economies and contract global trade. Pulling back calls upon us to free, restore, reconnect, and rewild vast terrestrial and marine ecosystems. However, the pervasive worldview of human supremacy—the conviction that humans are superior to all other life-forms and entitled to use these life-forms and their habitats—normalizes and promotes humanity’s ongoing expansion, undermining our ability to enact these linked strategies and preempt the mounting suffering and dislocation of both humans and nonhumans. Abundant Earth urges us to confront the reality that humanity will not advance by entrenching its domination over the biosphere. On the contrary, we will stagnate in the identity of nature-colonizer and decline into conflict as we vie for natural resources. Instead, we must chart another course, choosing to live in fellowship within the vibrant ecologies of our wild and domestic cohorts, and enfolding human inhabitation within the rich expanse of a biodiverse, living planet.

Digital Transformation in Islamic Finance

Author: Yasushi Suzuki
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000827275
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 301

Get Book Here

Book Description
The ongoing digital transformation is shaping the Islamic mode of financial intermediation and the impact on the faith-based financial mode has been multifaceted. This has raised a host of interesting questions: what is the degree of penetration of Islamic finance in the fintech industry? Are Islamic financial institutions (IFIs) or banks ready to embrace fintech? Is fintech an enabler or barrier to achieve the intended purpose of Islamic finance? Will technology narrow the division between Islamic and conventional finance in the future? These are existential questions for Islamic finance and the book endeavors to examine the impact of financial technology on the industry. The book assesses various fintech business models and how they could be a threat or an opportunity. It also examines whether fintech provides IFIs an edge to serve clients following the Shariah norms and how the adoption of fintech in the Islamic mode is required for meeting the maqasid Al Shariah. The book discusses applicability of fintech like blockchain, digital currency, big data, and AI to different branches of Islamic finance. This book will interest students, analysts, policymakers, and regulators who are working on Islamic finance, financial economics, Islamic economics, and development finance.

The Limits of Civilization

Author: Andrew Targowski
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781634634236
Category : Civilization
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book has been inspired by Dennis Meadows's (et al) The Limits to Growth, published 41 years ago. It forewarned the general public about the exhaustion of strategic resources of the planet as known at that time, unless economic and population expansions were halted. This resulted in the world becoming aware of the crisis of civilisation. Measures were taken to reduce the consumption of the strategic resources, including the promotion of recycling resources used. Efforts were made internationally to introduce the practice of climate and environmental protection, to little avail. The present book has a wider scope of analysis and synthesis, and even gloomier conclusions than those found in the two pioneering books. This author has arrived at the following conclusions: The plight of civilisation is doomed by the sun expiring within 4.5 billion years. It is also determined by the exhaustion of the known and the potential resources of the small planet Earth around the year 5,000. The future of civilisation (considered in the time frame imaginable to man) is swayed by its current crisis, which results from the Triangle of Civilization Death (the combination of the bombs of population, ecology and depletion of strategic resources), which will be felt around 2050; The future of civilisation is dependent on its capability of entering the phase of Wise and Universal Civilisation in the years to come. This is conditioned upon the abandonment of the known socio-political and economic systems: capitalism, socialism, communism and their hybrids. These systems are based on the constant growth of population and the economy, which is unsustainable any longer; Democratic Ecologism ought to be the new system, securing a wise and sustainable functioning of civilisation; it would prioritise the ecosystem in the choices made by man and societies. What must be observed, too, is tolerance based on Spirituality 2.0. It is based on the Decalogue of Complementary Values derived from the main religions 1.0, which the world is now practicing. Is it possible to introduce these solutions to practical life? This is up to people becoming wiser. Alas, so far people do not even know what wisdom is since wisdom is not taught at school or college. And without wisdom, no civilisation stands any chance of success in the universe of systemic chaos.

Collapse

Author: Jared Diamond
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0141976969
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 608

Get Book Here

Book Description
From the author of Guns, Germs and Steel, Jared Diamond's Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive is a visionary study of the mysterious downfall of past civilizations. Now in a revised edition with a new afterword, Jared Diamond's Collapse uncovers the secret behind why some societies flourish, while others founder - and what this means for our future. What happened to the people who made the forlorn long-abandoned statues of Easter Island? What happened to the architects of the crumbling Maya pyramids? Will we go the same way, our skyscrapers one day standing derelict and overgrown like the temples at Angkor Wat? Bringing together new evidence from a startling range of sources and piecing together the myriad influences, from climate to culture, that make societies self-destruct, Jared Diamond's Collapse also shows how - unlike our ancestors - we can benefit from our knowledge of the past and learn to be survivors. 'A grand sweep from a master storyteller of the human race' - Daily Mail 'Riveting, superb, terrifying' - Observer 'Gripping ... the book fulfils its huge ambition, and Diamond is the only man who could have written it' - Economis 'This book shines like all Diamond's work' - Sunday Times