Meditations on environmental change and the necessity of a pact between Earth and its inhabitants

This open access book is a 2022 Nautilus Gold Medal winner in the category "World Cultures' Transformational Growth & Development". It states that the societal fault lines of our times are deeply intertwined and that they confront us with challenges affecting the security, fairness and sustainability of our societies. The author, Prof. Dr. Patrick Huntjens, argues that overcoming these existential challenges will require a fundamental shift from our current anthropocentric and economic growth-oriented approach to a more ecocentric and regenerative approach. He advocates for a Natural Social Contract that emphasizes long-term sustainability and the general welfare of both humankind and planet Earth. Achieving this crucial balance calls for an end to unlimited economic growth, overconsumption and over-individualisation for the benefit of ourselves, our planet, and future generations. To this end, sustainability, health, and justice in all social-ecological systems will require systemic innovation and prioritizing a collective effort. The Transformative Social-Ecological Innovation (TSEI) framework presented in this book serves that cause. It helps to diagnose and advance innovation and spur change across sectors, disciplines, and at different levels of governance. Altogether, TSEI identifies intervention points and formulates jointly developed and shared solutions to inform policymakers, administrators, concerned citizens, and professionals dedicated towards a more sustainable, healthy and just society. A wide readership of students, researchers, practitioners and policy makers interested in social innovation, transition studies, development studies, social policy, social justice, climate change, environmental studies, political science and economics will find this cutting-edge book particularly useful. “As a sustainability transition researcher, I am truly excited about this book. Two unique aspects of the book are that it considers bigger transformation issues (such as societies’ relationship with nature, purpose and justice) than those studied in transition studies and offers analytical frameworks and methods for taking up the challenge of achieving change on the ground.” - Prof. Dr. René Kemp, United Nations University and Maastricht Sustainability Institute

The foundation of the book—a ten-point Contract with the Earth—promotes ingenuity over rhetoric as the way forward.

Marginalized by the scientific age the lessons of the senses have been overtaken by the dominance of language and the information revolution. With The Five Senses Serres traces a topology of human perception, writing against the Cartesian tradition and in praise of empiricism, he demonstrates repeatedly, and lyrically, the sterility of systems of knowledge divorced from bodily experience. The fragile empirical world, long resistant to our attempts to contain and catalog it, is disappearing beneath the relentless accumulations of late capitalist society and information technology. Data has replaced sensory pleasure, we are less interested in the taste of a fine wine than in the description on the bottle's label. What are we, and what do we really know, when we have forgotten that our senses can describe a taste more accurately than language ever could? The book won the inaugural Prix Médicis Essai in 1985. The Revelations edition includes an introduction by Steven Connor.

Without immediate action to combat global warming, we face losing 5 to 20 per cent of the world's Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Our biosphere is in jeopardy: increased desertification, deforestation, air and soil pollution, dwindling biodiversity, water crises and the degradation of the oceans. A new approach to our economy is needed, one that fosters less material forms of production, reduces superfluous consumption and wastes less raw material. We have to create and implement new styles of development that, without halting growth, spare the planet and preserve biodiversity. It is time, as this volume proposes, for humanity to make a new pact, a 'natural contract', of co-development with the planet. UNESCO is actively involved in this debate, as reflected in its 21st Century Talks series, which open a forum for discussion on key issues of the future.--Publisher's description.

"Violation of biological command has been the failure of social man. Vertebrates though we may be, we have ignored the law of equal opportunity since civilization's earliest hours. Sexually reproducing beings though we are, we pretend today that the law of inequality does not exist. And enlightened though we may be, while we pursue the unattainable we make impossible the realizable." In his two previous books, Robert Ardrey exploded a series of philosophical landmines. African Genesis (1961) introduced his new evolutionary approach to an understanding of men. Then came The Territorial Imperative (1966), whose title is now a common phrase in our language. The Social Contract is the third in the series, and it denies that men are created equal - but that they deserve absolute equality of opportunity. Robert Ardrey maintains that since the publication of Rousseau's Social Contract two centuries ago, men have wasted social resources, converted much of education into a process of brain-washing, committed themselves to one political insane asylum after another, all in pursuit of a goal that is a natural impossibility in any sexually reproducing species. Discarding the myth, Robert Ardrey combines his wealth of knowledge of animal ways with the new insights of modern biology and the newest revelations concerning human evolution to probe perplexing contemporary problems: the revolt of the young, the status struggle and the role of leadership, population control, urban overcrowding, violence in civilized life. This brilliant classic offers a powerful challenge to accustomed thought. Praise for the 1970 edition: "Robert Ardrey's The Social Contract is as imaginative and exciting as his African Genesis or The Territorial Imperative, but this new book is broader in scope, better balanced, and more philosophical than its predecessors. I disagree with some of Ardrey's opinions concerning human aggression, because I have greater faith than he has in the power of environmental conditioning. But this does not affect my conviction that The Social Contract will be of immense value in helping the public to probe into the dark and misty areas where zoology, anthropology, and prehistory join to account for the origins of man as a social animal." - Rene Dubos, Rockefeller University

Examines the history of the liberty of contract and shows how this right has been continuously diminished by court decisions and by our country's growing regulatory and welfare state.