My New Book: A User's Guide to the Crisis of Civilization
My new book, A User's Guide to the Crisis of Civilization: and how to save it, published by Pluto Press in the UK and distributed by Palgrave Macmillan in North America and Australia, is due out this August, and is available for pre-order. You can get it from Amazon UK, Amazon USA, or, for the best price of £14:99, order directly from the publisher here.
It often seems that different crises are competing to devastate civilisation. This book argues that financial meltdown, dwindling oil reserves, terrorism and food shortages need to be considered as part of the same ailing system.
Most accounts of our contemporary global crises such as climate change, or the threat of terrorism, focus on one area, or another, to the exclusion of others. Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed argues that the unwillingness of experts to look outside their own fields explains why there is so much disagreement and misunderstanding about particular crises. This book attempts to investigate all of these crises, not as isolated events, but as trends and processes that belong to a single global system. We are therefore not dealing with a 'clash of civilisations', as Huntington argued. Rather, we are dealing with a fundamental crisis of civilisation itself.This book provides a stark warning of the consequences of failing to take a broad view of the problems facing the world and shows how catastrophe can be avoided.