Right Relationship: Building a Whole Earth Economy

Zusatztext 57517649 Informationen zum Autor PETER G. BROWN is a professor in the School of Environment, the Department of Geography, and the Department of Natural Resource Sciences at McGill University. Before going to McGill, he was Professor of Public Policy at the University of Maryland’s graduate School of Public Affairs; while at Maryland he founded the Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy, and the School of Public Policy itself, and also established the School’s Environmental Policy Programs. He is a graduate of Haverford College, and holds a master’s degree in the philosophy of religion from Union Theological Seminary and Columbia University, and a Ph.D. from Columbia in philosophy. GEOFFREY GARVER is an environmental con- sultant and lecturer in law in Montreal. From 2000 to 2007, he was a senior official at the North American Commission for Environmental Cooperation (www.cec.org), 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 en- force its environmental law. At the CEC, he wrote reports on enforcement of laws on water pollution from Canadian pulp and paper mills, harm to fish habitat from logging in British Columbia, and the killing of migratory birds by timber harvesting in the United States. Previously, he spent nine years with the U.S. Justice Department’s Environment and Natural Resources Division, first as a trial attorney and then as 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 the Everglades’ water quality, winter use and bison management in Yellowstone National Park, and water rights in Idaho and Oregon. Klappentext 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,...

Product details

• Authors: Peter Brown, Peter G. Brown, Geoffrey Garver
• Publisher: Berrett Koehler Publishers
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 12.01.2009
• EAN: 9781576757628
• ISBN: 978-1-57675-762-8
• No. of pages: 240
• Dimensions: 155 mm x 230 mm x 17 mm
• Series: BK Currents; Bk Currents
• Subject: Social sciences, law, business > Business