|
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
From the
former vice president and #1 New York Times
bestselling author comes An Inconvenient Truth
for everything—a frank and clear-eyed assessment of six
critical drivers of global change in the decades to
come.
Ours is a time of revolutionary
change that has no precedent in history. With the same
passion he brought to the challenge of climate change,
and with his decades of experience on the front lines of
global policy, Al Gore surveys our planet’s beclouded
horizon and offers a sober, learned, and ultimately
hopeful forecast in the visionary tradition of Alvin
Toffler’s Future Shock and John Naisbitt’s
Megatrends. In The Future, Gore identifies
the emerging forces that are reshaping our
world:
• Ever-increasing economic
globalization has led to the emergence of what he labels
“Earth Inc.”—an integrated holistic entity with a new
and different relationship to capital, labor, consumer
markets, and national governments than in the past.
•
The worldwide digital communications, Internet, and
computer revolutions have led to the emergence of “the
Global Mind,” which links the thoughts and feelings of
billions of people and connects intelligent machines,
robots, ubiquitous sensors, and databases.
• The
balance of global political, economic, and military
power is shifting more profoundly than at any time in
the last five hundred years—from a U.S.-centered system
to one with multiple emerging centers of power, from
nation-states to private actors, and from political
systems to markets.
• A deeply flawed economic
compass is leading us to unsustainable growth in
consumption, pollution flows, and depletion of the
planet’s strategic resources of topsoil, freshwater, and
living species.
• Genomic, biotechnology,
neuroscience, and life sciences revolutions are
radically transforming the fields of medicine,
agriculture, and molecular science—and are putting
control of evolution in human hands.
• There has been
a radical disruption of the relationship between human
beings and the earth’s ecosystems, along with the
beginning of a revolutionary transformation of energy
systems, agriculture, transportation, and construction
worldwide.
From his earliest days in public
life, Al Gore has been warning us of the promise and
peril of emergent truths—no matter how “inconvenient”
they may seem to be. As absorbing as it is visionary,
The Future is a map of the world to come, from a
man who has looked ahead before and been proven all too
right.
Praise for The
Future
“Magisterial . . .
The passion is unmistakable. So is the knowledge.
Practically every page offers an
illumination.”—Bloomberg
“In The
Future . . . Gore takes on a subject whose scale
matches that of his achievements and ambition.”—The
New York Times Book
Review
“Historically grounded .
. . Gore’s strengths lie in his passion for the subject
and in his ability to take the long view by putting
current events and trends in historical
context.”—Publishers
Weekly
“Provocative, smart, densely
argued . . . a tour de force of Big Picture
thinking.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred
review)
“A luminously intelligent analysis
that is packed with arresting ideas and facts.”—The
Guardian
|
|
