Thriving Beyond sustainability: Pathways to a Resilient Society

by Andrés R. Edwards, New Society Publishers, 2010

FOREWORD
by Bill McKibben

I’ve just returned from Denmark, where hopes for a historic worldwide agreement to bring global warming under control went down in, well, flames. The Copenhagen conference was dispiriting in every way—the great powers refused to listen to the small nations, to civil society, to scientists. They signed their own meaningless document—no timetables, no targets—and jetted back to DC and Beijing.

Or rather it was dispiriting in every way but one. In the years since the Kyoto meeting of the late 90s, a huge groundswell has formed across the planet. Every kind of person was on hand—activists, entrepreneurs, people working locally, regionally, in business, in the arts. There’s a critical mass out there—it just hasn’t coalesced yet into something powerful enough to challenge the status quo.

This fine book gives some idea of how that might happen. It offers example after example of what is already working and could be brought to scale. And with its SPIRALS framework and its rhetoric of thrive-ability, it offers some sense of how that scaling-up might happen.

After Copenhagen we’re faced with the fact that our leaders will not solve this problem for us. We’re going to have to do it, one place and one country and one planet at a time. Let’s get to work.

-- Bill McKibben
December 2009