The First Global Revolution

The First Global Revolution
Cover of first edition (paperback)
AuthorAlexander King and Bertrand Schneider
Cover artistFearn Cutler (1991 First Edition)
LanguageEnglish
GenreNon Fiction
PublisherPantheon Books
Publication date
1991
Publication placeUnited States
Media typePrint (Hardback & Paperback)
Pages259 pp
ISBN0-679-73825-8
Preceded byThe Limits to Growth 

The First Global Revolution is a book written by Alexander King and Bertrand Schneider, and published by Pantheon Books in 1991. The book follows up the earlier 1972 work-product from the Club of Rome titled The Limits to Growth. The book's tagline is A Report by the Council of the Club of Rome. The book was intended as a blueprint for the 21st century putting forward a strategy for world survival at the onset of what they called the world's first global revolution.[1]

Contents

  • The Problematique
  • The Whirlwind of Change
  • Some Areas of Acute Concern
  • The International Mismanagement of the World Economy
  • Intimitations of Solidarity
  • The Vacuum
  • The Human Malaise
  • Conclusion: The Challenge
  • The Resolutique
  • Introduction
  • The Three Immediacies
  • Governance and the Capacity to Govern
  • Agents of the Resolutique
  • Motivations and Values
  • Learning Our Way Into a New Era

Overview

The book is a blueprint for the twenty-first century at a time when the Club of Rome thought that the onset of the first global revolution was upon them. The authors saw the world coming into a global-scale societal revolution amid social, economic, technological, and cultural upheavals that started to push humanity into an unknown. The goal of the book was to outline a strategy for mobilizing the world's governments for environmental security and clean energy by purposefully converting the world from a military to a civil economy, tackling global warming and solving the energy problem, dealing with world poverty and disparities between the northern hemisphere and the Southern Hemisphere.

The book saw humankind at the center of the revolution centered on:

  • Global economic growth
  • New technologies
  • Governments and the ability to govern
  • Mass Media
  • Global food security
  • Water availability
  • Environment
  • Energy
  • Population growth
  • Learning systems
  • Values/Religions
  • Materials

The product of a think tank, the book attempted to transcend the nation-state governance paradigm of the nineteenth-century and the twentieth-century and sought a way to eliminate some of the challenges seen inherent with those older systems of global governance. As such, it explored new and sometimes controversial viewpoints.

Because of the sudden absence of traditional enemies, "new enemies must be identified."[2] "In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill...All these dangers are caused by human intervention, and it is only through changed attitudes and behavior that they can be overcome. The real enemy then is humanity itself."[3]

Later editions

An English language edition of this book was published in 1993 (ISBN 978-0001160323) by Orient Longman of Hyderabad, India.

See also

References

  1. ^ Alexander King & Bertrand Schneider - The First Global Revolution (Club of Rome) 1993 Edition Archived 2012-10-26 at the Wayback Machine
  2. ^ Alexander King & Bertrand Schneider. The First Global Revolution (The Club of Rome), 1993. p. 70
  3. ^ King & Schneider, p. 115