The Age of Resilience Reimagining Existence on a Rewilding Earth. Jeremy Rifkin: The Great Transformation from the Age of Progress in a new worldview.
What would happen if we were to awaken one day – all 8 billion of us – only to realize that the world we live in and experience and are deeply attached to suddenly appeared eerily alien as if we’d been teleported to some other distant world where identifiable markers by which we’ve come to understand our existence were simply missing – no less our sense of agency? That frightening prospect is now.
Apocalyptic spring floods, deadly summer droughts, heatwaves and wildfires, and catastrophic autumn hurricanes and typhoons, each devastating the planet’s ecosystems with the loss of human life and the lives of our fellow creatures along with untold destruction of the societal infrastructure, is taking us into the Sixth Extinction of life on Earth.
In his new book, The Age of Resilience: Reimagining Existence on a Rewilding Earth, social and economic theorist, and advisor to heads of state around the world, Jeremy Rifkin, addresses “the great unspoken.” Rifkin argues that the Age of Progress, which took our species to the commanding heights as the dominant species on Earth, but at the expense of the wholesale destruction of life on the planet, is on a death spiral and a nascent Age of Resilience is quickly trending with a new meta-narrative that fundamentally transforms the way our species will live and flourish on a rewilding Earth.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Part One
EFFICIENCY VS. ENTROPY: THE DIALECTIC OF MODERNITY
1) Masks, Ventilators, and Toilet Paper: How Adaptivity Trumps Efficiency
2) Taylorism and the Laws of Thermodynamics
3) The Real World: Nature’s Capital
Part Two
PROPERTIZING THE EARTH AND PAUPERIZING THE WORKFORCE
4) The Great Disruption: The Planetary Enclosure of Time and Space
5) The Ultimate Heist: Commodifying the Earth’s Spheres, Gene Pool, and Electromagnetic Spectrum
6) The Catch-22 of Capitalism: Increased Efficiency, Fewer Workers, and More Consumer Debt
Part Three
HOW WE GOT HERE: RETHINKING EVOLUTION ON EARTH
7) The Ecological Self: We Are Each a Dissipative Pattern
8) A New Origin Story: The Biological Clocks and Electromagnetic Fields That Help Synchronize and Shape Life
9) Beyond the Scientific Method: Complex Adaptive Social/ Ecological Systems Modeling
Part Four
THE AGE OF RESILIENCE: THE PASSING OF THE INDUSTRIAL ERA
10) The Resilient Revolution Infrastructure
11) The Ascendance of Bioregional Governance
12) Representative Democracy Makes Way for Distributed Peerocracy
13) The Rise of Biophilia Consciousness
Jeremy Rifkin is an American economic and social theorist, writer, public speaker, political advisor, and activist. Rifkin is the author of 21 bestselling books about the impact of scientific and technological changes on the economy, the workforce, society, and the environment. The books have been translated into more than 35 languages. His most recent books include the international bestsellers, The Age of Resilience (2022), The Green New Deal (2019), The Zero Marginal Cost Society (2014), The Third Industrial Revolution (2011), The Empathic Civilization (2010), The European Dream (2004), The Hydrogen Economy (2002), The Age of Access (2000), The Biotech Century (1998), and The End of Work (1995).
Jeremy Rifkin has been an advisor to the leadership of the European Union since 2000. He has advised three past presidents of the European Commission – Romano Prodi, Jose Manuel Barroso, and Jean-Claude Juncker – and is advising the current European Commission under the presidency of Ursula von der Leyen, as well as the former president of the European Parliament, David Sassoli. Mr. Rifkin has also advised numerous EU heads of state over the past twenty years, including Germany’s Angela Merkel, on the ushering in of a smart green Third Industrial Revolution economy.
Mr. Rifkin’s New York Times bestselling book, The Third Industrial Revolution, provided the blueprint for the economic transition to a post-carbon ecological society across the European Union. According to The European Energy Review, “perhaps no other author or thinker has had more influence on the EU’s ambitious climate and energy policy than the famous American ‘visionary’ Jeremy Rifkin.” In the words of Vice Chancellor and Economy Minister of Germany, Sigmar Gabriel, Jeremy Rifkin “is the economic and ecological worldwide ambassador of the energy transition… Rifkin presents a grand scenario for the future: a visionary approach unlike anyone has dared to put forward in the last fifty years that will boost our thinking and help with our orientation.”