Growing a peaceful, sustainable Earth through Communications

Published by Lighthouse Books, ISBN 0907637248

price £12 (UK)

Extracts available below to download in pdf format or BUY NOW.

See some reviews and comments on eGaia

Are these your concerns?

1. •Are you worried about the natural environment?
   

2. •Are you worried about the economy and where it is going?
   

3. •Do you have a sense of hopeless despair about wars and ethnic cleansing?
   

4. •Do you have nagging doubts about your government?
   

5. •Are you concerned about the decline of relationships and communities?
   

This book is for people who want to see major changes in these areas, who want to be clearer as to what is desirable and what kind of change is possible.

The message

The problems which humanity has created for the natural world and for itself - extinction of species, loss of habitat, damage to agriculture, climate change, wars, hunger, poverty, family and community disintegration and financial instability - are severe enough that the metaphor of a global cancer seems appropriate. To counter that global cancer, this book sets out a Utopian yet practical agenda for change that harnesses the exciting potential of electronic communication to launch a new era of community regeneration.

1. •It proposes a system of relationships - with the Earth as a living organism, and among the people living in it - that embody principles of collaboration and sustainability.
   

2. •It offers a path to a future with a co-operative free-market economy.
   

3. •It shows how electronic communications can be used so that the driving force of the economy is the health of the environment and the well being of all of humanity rather than money flows.
   

All of eGaia is available to be downloaded, but the physical book is beautifully designed and printed on recycled paper, and is much easier to read. Order it now!

Other papers on coherent cultures

1. (1979) Towards an Alternative Future: A Communication-Based Framework. An early paper written while I was Director of the Energy Research Group. It describes an idealised, communication-based framework for society and uses it to examine some of the conventional assumptions about production and exchange in modern societies.
   

2. (1984) 'Becoming Friends' Approaching world harmony through social learning' A paper presented to the American Society for Cybernetics conference on Autonomy, Intervention and Dependence, in November, 1984.
   

3. (1995) The Five Billion Year Story uses the history of the Earth and the evolution of life on it to displays the connections between life, and between people, on a physical and biological level. It shows that the explanation of the evolution of life as a war-like competition for survival shaped by random accidents is grossly inadequate and partial. (A later version of this forms Part II of my book, eGaia.)
   

4. (2000) Information Based Tools for Building Community and Sustainability Published in Futures 32 (2000) pp. 317-337, Elsevier/Pergamon. This paper looks at the prospects for using the new information and communications technologies (ICTs) to support sustainable economic activity.
   

5. (2002) eGaia, Growing a Peaceful, Sustainable Earth Through Communications, Lighthouse Press. Order a copy.
   

6. (2003) - "Envisioning Planetary Citizenship through its software support" A paper and talk for the Planetwork conference, Networking a Sustainable Future. Download a copy as a word file (820KBytes) or as a pdf file (5 MBytes).
   

7. (2003) "Online Tools for a Sustainable Collaborative Economy", a chapter in Environmental Online Communications, edited by Arno Scharl; published by Springer-Verlag London Ltd, ISBN: 1-85233-783-4. Reviews existing projects, describes a new approach: 'community support providers' as well as theory of a collaborative economy. Download as a Word document (244 KB) or as a pdf file (276 KB).