Right Relationship: Building a Whole Earth Economy

Erscheinungsjahr 2009
ISBN: 978-1-57675-762-8
Verlag: Berrett-Koehler Publishers

Buch, Englisch, 240 Seiten, Format (B × H): 151 mm x 232 mm, Gewicht: 342 g

Reihe: BK Currents

Most citizens have been conditioned to accept the operation of the current economic system as an article of faith. Unlimited growth and wealth accumulation are seen as the “natural law” of the economy and nothing can be done to alter this fact even if it means the integrity of Earth’s ecological and social systems are weakened and severely damaged in the process. This “inconvenient truth” is now a moral challenge. We are faced with a choice: bring the economy into right relationship with the planet and its inhabitants, or suffer the consequences—the increasing destruction of the Earth’s life support systems and social structures.Peter Brown, Geoffrey Carver and their colleagues at the Quaker Institute for the Future have accepted this challenge. Drawing on the core Quaker principle of “right relationship,” they have launched a campaign to bring our economy, our ethics, and our environment into alignment. A handbook for this movement, Right Relationship proposes an alternative economic model that fuses science and ethics with the earth care teachings of the world’s great religions. “Wrong relationships” close down trust and cooperative reciprocity at the social, ecological and biotic levels, and they degrade moral integrity and adaptive coherence. “Right relationships,” by contrast,” are characterized by interactions that satisfy mutually beneficial goals and advance the common good. Economics and finance have become, in effect, the modern world’s established religion, with constant growth and wealth accumulation the religion’s unquestioned dogma. This system is obviously unsustainable our resources are not infinite. In contract, Right Relationship not only offers the promise of an equitable, sustainable future but also an opportunity to touch the fullness of human meaning, and, some would say, the presence of the Divine. We now need, for the sake of the human future and the future of the whole community of life, the same wind of moral change that Quakers brought to the economy of slavery. Inspired by this heritage, this guide links minds, hearts, and hands with all those who are rising up in search of ecological integrity, ethical development, and governance for the common good.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Brown, Peter G.

Brown, Peter

Garver, Geoffrey

Fachgebiete

• Wirtschaftswissenschaften Betriebswirtschaft Betriebswirtschaft: Theorie & Allgemeines

Über Autor(innen)

Brown, Peter
Peter J. Brown teaches at Emory University. He is a professor in the Department of Anthropology, Emory College of Arts and Sciences and also a professor in the Hubert Department of Global Health, Rollins School of Public Health. He serves as the Director of Emorys Center for Health, Culture and Society. He has co-edited: The Anthropology of Infectious Diseases; Emerging Illnesses and Society: Negotiating the Public Health Agenda; Applying Anthropology (9th edition); and Applying Cultural Anthropology (8th edition). His research primarily deals with sociocultural aspects of malaria and its control, and he serves on a malaria-related Scientific Advisory Committee for the World Health Organization. He has an additional research interest on cultural issues in obesity and its related chronic diseases. Recipient of several teaching awards, he is a director of a new program "Global Health, Culture and Society" at Emory College.

Peter G. Brown holds academic appointments at McGill in the Departments of Geography, and Natural Resource Sciences, as well as the School of Environment. Brown is also the author of Restoring the Public Trust: A Fresh Vision for Progressive Government in America (Beacon Press, 1994), and Ethics, Economics, and International Relations: Transparent Sovereignty in the Commonwealth of Life (Edinburgh University Press, 2000); this was re-published in Canada by Blackrose Press (2001) under the title The Commonwealth of Life: A Treatise on Stewardship Economics.Geoff Garver is an environmental consultant and lecturer in law in Montreal, Quebec. From 2000 to 2007, he was a senior official at the North American Commission for Environmental Cooperation, directing the unit that publishes detailed factual investigations of complaints by North American citizens that one of the NAFTA countries – Mexico, the United States and Canada – is failing to effectively enforce its environmental law.Previously, he spent nine years with the U.S. Justice Department's Environment and Natural Resources Division as a trial attorney and then an Acting Assistant Chief handling cases dealing with land and natural resource management, water rights and environmental impact assessment. Some of his major cases concerned Everglades water quality, winter use and bison management in Yellowstone National Park and water rights in Idaho and Oregon.