The continuing post-Copenhagen debate on Climate Change and Global Warming is not the only major threat confronting the people and politicians of the world; and it may not even be the greatest threat.

The 21st Century challenges we face in the coming decades also include Super Automation, Structural Unemployment, the failure of Conventional Market Systems, Super-Urbanization and Over Population. Are we, like the dinosaurs, an endangered species threatened by mass extinction? In “MegaCrunch”, authors Joseph N. Pelton and Peter Marshall outline ten survival strategies we need to pursue to survive as a species.

Deleting Dystopia confirms that the existential threats posed by the misuse of advanced digital technologies are real. But, in place of apathy and fatalism, Slaughter explores ways of understanding the threat, conceptualising solutions and identifying strategies that lead away from digital authoritarian futures towards those funded on humanly viable values and practices.

The way we manage organizations seems increasingly out of date. Survey after survey shows that a majority of employees feel disengaged from their companies. The epidemic of organizational disillusionment goes way beyond Corporate America-teachers, doctors, and nurses are leaving their professions in record numbers because the way we run schools and hospitals kills their vocation. Government agencies and nonprofits have a noble purpose, but working for these entities often feels soulless and lifeless just the same.

All these organizations suffer from power games played at the top and powerlessness at lower levels, from infighting and bureaucracy, from endless meetings and a seemingly never-ending succession of change and cost-cutting programs.

“The best science-fiction nonfiction novel I’ve ever read.” —Jonathan Lethem

“If I could get policymakers, and citizens, everywhere to read just one book this year, it would be Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future.” —Ezra Klein (Vox)

The Ministry for the Future is a masterpiece of the imagination, using fictional eyewitness accounts to tell the story of how climate change will affect us all. Its setting is not a desolate, postapocalyptic world, but a future that is almost upon us. Chosen by Barack Obama as one of his favorite books of the year, this extraordinary novel from visionary science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson will change the way you think about the climate crisis.

Source: Amazon

“This book helped launch modern environmental computer modeling and began our current globally focused environmental debate . . . . a scientifically rigorous and credible warning.”—The Nation

In 1972, three scientists from MIT created a computer model that analyzed global resource consumption and production. Their results shocked the world and created stirring conversation about global ‘overshoot,’ or resource use beyond the carrying capacity of the planet. Now, preeminent environmental scientists Donnella Meadows, Jorgen Randers, and Dennis Meadows have teamed up again to update and expand their original findings in The Limits to Growth: The 30 Year Global Update.

“On the Creation of a Just World Order” is part of the “Urgent Issues in American Society Series”.

The book, published by Free Press on January 1, 1975, focuses on the pursuit of establishing a fair and equitable global system.

These books offer diverse perspectives and analyses on the concept of world order, covering areas like international law, human rights, and the dynamics of global power structures. They also provide valuable insights into the historical context and potential pathways for creating a more just and peaceful global society.

A Foreign Affairs Best Book of the Year

From the front lines of economics and policymaking, a compelling case that economic growth is a force for good and a blueprint for enrolling it in the fight against climate change.

Economic growth is wrecking the planet. It’s the engine driving climate change, pollution, and the shrinking of natural spaces. To save the environment, will we have to shrink the economy? Might this even lead to a better society, especially in rich nations, helping us break free from a pointless obsession with material wealth that only benefits the few? Alessio Terzi takes these legitimate questions as a starting point for a riveting journey into the socioeconomic, evolutionary, and cultural origins of our need for growth. It’s an imperative, he argues, that we abandon at our own risk.

Source: Amzon

A provocative examination of how the great religious traditions can remain relevant in modern times by incorporating scientific truths learned about human nature over the last century

A single purpose lies at the heart of all the great religious traditions: awakening to the astonishing reality of the true nature of ourselves and the universe. At the same time, through centuries of cultural accretion and focus on myth and ritual as ends in themselves, this core insight has become obscured.

Source: Amazon

We are on the brink of catastrophe and cutting emissions alone won’t be enough. There is a second crisis happening in our ecosystems. To tackle it, we should recognise that the natural world is not only priceless, but has measurable economic value. Restoring biodiversity aided by technological and financial innovation will unlock environmental protections and economic benefits.

The Case for Nature sets out with powerful clarity how protecting nature is both the right thing to do, and in our economic interests; how, taking a cue from a range of indigenous worldviews, nature must be woven into our modern societies, not set apart. Siddarth Shrikanth, an expert in green investing, introduces the pioneers of the nature-positive revolution, and gives us the tools to understand how we can work with, not against, our living planet.

Source: Amazon

Winners Take All meets Nickel and Dimed in this provocative debunking of accepted wisdom, providing the pathway to a sustainable, survivable economy. 

Confronted by the terrifying trends of the early twenty-first century – widening inequality, environmental destruction, and the immiseration of millions of workers around the world – many economists and business leaders still preach dogmas that lack evidence and create political catastrophe: Private markets are always more efficient than public ones; investment capital flows efficiently to necessary projects; massive inequality is the unavoidable side effect of economic growth; people are selfish and will only behave well with the right incentives.

What the Future Looks Like: Scientists Predict the Next Great Discoveries and Reveal How Today’s Breakthroughs Are Already Shaping Our World

Science fact, not science fiction, on the cutting–edge developments that are already changing the course of our future

Every day, scientists conduct pioneering experiments with the potential to transform how we live. Yet it isn’t every day you hear from the scientists themselves! Now, award–winning author Jim Al–Khalili and his team of top-notch experts explain how today’s earthshaking discoveries will shape our world tomorrow―and beyond.

Source: Amazon

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “The Uninhabitable Earth hits you like a comet, with an overflow of insanely lyrical prose about our pending Armageddon.”—Andrew Solomon, author of The Noonday Demon

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New Yorker • The New York Times Book Review • Time • NPR • The Economist • The Paris Review • Toronto Star  • GQ • The Times Literary Supplement • The New York Public Library • Kirkus Reviews

It is worse, much worse, than you think. If your anxiety about global warming is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible—food shortages, refugee emergencies, climate wars and economic devastation.

A New York Times bestseller

Superintelligence asks the questions: What happens when machines surpass humans in general intelligence? Will artificial agents save or destroy us? Nick Bostrom lays the foundation for understanding the future of humanity and intelligent life.

The human brain has some capabilities that the brains of other animals lack. It is to these distinctive capabilities that our species owes its dominant position. If machine brains surpassed human brains in general intelligence, then this new superintelligence could become extremely powerful – possibly beyond our control. As the fate of the gorillas now depends more on humans than on the species itself, so would the fate of humankind depend on the actions of the machine superintelligence.

But we have one advantage: we get to make the first move. Will it be possible to construct a seed Artificial Intelligence, to engineer initial conditions so as to make an intelligence explosion survivable? How could one achieve a controlled detonation?

This profoundly ambitious and original book breaks down a vast track of difficult intellectual terrain. After an utterly engrossing journey that takes us to the frontiers of thinking about the human condition and the future of intelligent life, we find in Nick Bostrom’s work nothing less than a reconceptualization of the essential task of our time.

Source: Amazon Books

An argument that humanists have the tools—and the responsibility—to mobilize political power to tackle climate change

As climate catastrophes intensify, why do literary and cultural studies scholars so often remain committed to the separation of aesthetic study from the nitty-gritty of political change? In this thought-provoking book, Caroline Levine makes the case for an alternative view, arguing that humanists have the tools to mobilize political power—and the responsibility to use those tools to avert the worst impacts of global warming. Building on the theory developed in her award-winning book, Forms, Levine shows how formalist methods can be used in the fight for climate justice.

Countering scholars in the environmental humanities who embrace only “modest gestures of care”—and who seem to have moved directly to “mourning” our inevitable environmental losses—Levine argues that large-scale, practical environmental activism should be integral to humanists’ work. She identifies three major infrastructural forms crucial to sustaining collective life: routines, pathways, and enclosures. Crisscrossing between art works and public works—from urban transportation to television series and from food security programs to rhyming couplets—she considers which forms might support stability and predictability in the face of growing precarity. Finally, bridging the gap between academic and practical work, Levine offers a series of questions and exercises intended to guide readers into political action. The Activist Humanist provides an essential handbook for prospective activist-scholars.

A moving portrait of tradition and change in Ladakh, or “Little Tibet,” Ancient Futures is also a scathing critique of the global economy and a rallying call for economic localization.

When Helena Norberg-Hodge first visited Ladakh in 1975, she found a pristine environment, a self-reliant economy and a people who exhibited a remarkable joie de vivre. But then came a tidal wave of economic growth and development. Over the last four decades, this remote Himalayan land has been transformed by outside markets and Western notions of “progress.” As a direct result, a whole range of problems―from polluted air and water to unemployment, religious conflict, eating disorders and youth suicide―have appeared for the first time.

Source: Amazon

Report on a three-year international study that produced three detailed scenarios, conducted 30 national workshops in 29 countries, identified hundreds of action distilled to 93 that were assessed by hundreds of futurists and related experts in over 50 countries.

Source: The Millennium Project

To understand the power of Geographical Information Systems and Geographical Positioning Systems today, it is essential to understand their background and history, and the needs they were designed to answer .This is the first comprehensive history of GIS for both practitioners and students.From GPS systems that help you find your destination in a rented car, to satellite imaging for locating new petroleum reserves, GIS technology is changing the world.

This book brings together for the first time the expert testimonies of the pioneers, key scientists and entrepreneurs who created the GIS field and made it what it is today. It covers both the raster and vector sides of GIS development. From remote sensing to PC-based systems; from Land Information Systems to defense applications, this is the definitive history of GIS.For all GIS and GPS professional practitioners, developers and students.

Source: Amazon Books