How To Thrive In The Next Economy: Designing Tomorrow’s World Today

September 1, 2015

Drawing on a lifetime of travel in search of real-world alternatives that work, How To Thrive In The Next Economy: Designing Tomorrow’s World Today describes how communities the world over are creating a replacement, leave-things-better economy from the ground up.

Each chapter is about creative ways to tackle timeless needs that matter: restoring the land, sharing water, making homes, journeying, growing food, designing clothes, journeying, and caring for each other. I write of soil restorers and river keepers; seed savers and de-pavers; cloud commuters and e-bike couriers; care farmers; food system curators; fibershed stewards; money designers and more – from Bali to Brazil, as well as Delhi, London, and California.

Chapter extracts

 

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Are there practical solutions to the many global challenges―climate change, poverty, insufficient healthcare―that threaten our way of life? Author John Thackara has spent a lifetime roving the globe in search of design that serves human needs. In this clear-eyed but ultimately optimistic book, he argues that, in our eagerness to find big technological solutions, we have all too often ignored the astonishing creativity generated when people work together and in harmony with the world around them.

Drawing on an inspiring range of examples, from a temple-led water management system in Bali that dates back hundreds of years to an innovative e-bike collective in Vienna, Thackara shows that below the radar of the mainstream media there are global communities creating a replacement economy―one that nurtures the earth and its inhabitants rather than jeopardizing its future―from the ground up. Each chapter is devoted to a concern all humans share―land and water management, housing, what we eat, what we wear, our health, how and why we travel―and demonstrates that it is possible to live a rich and fulfilling life based on stewardship rather than exploitation of the natural environment.

Published January 2016

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