Mysteries of male elderhood: testosterone, presence and purpose.

When I turned sixty in 2008, I set a clear intent of moving into elderhood, growing beyond my prevailing warrior-hero approach to life. Six years on, I can report good progress but further mysteries.

For most of my adult life, I have been a happy workaholic: drawn to situations where I had lots of challenge and responsibility, working in a state of high adrenaline which gave purpose and structure to my life, and paved over the murky depths beneath.

All this has been dissolving and under scrutiny since I turned 50. I have made numerous descents into the murky depths, sometimes just falling in, sometimes an orderly visit properly equipped with a therapist. I aim to be friends with the early wounds and neurotic habits which still thrash around in those depths: I don’t believe they ever disappear, but an elder has their measure.

Quick Book Notes – Charles Eisenstein: The more beautiful world our hearts know is possible

This book is a sort of guide to the New Story: not what it is but, a clear, compassionate process of how to move into it.  He illuminates the personal and societal habits and mindsets holding us back, and their benign successors.

He sums up the New Story as “the story of Interbeing, the Age of Reunion... the world of the gift.”  Whereas, “More than anything external, it is our own habits that draw us back into the old story... habits of scarcity,...judgement, and... struggle.”  But as he points out, giving attention to a habit and the feelings underlying it weaken its addictive power.

Since the New Story is about interconnection, he warns against its advocates feeling righteous, which perpetuates separation and alienates others.  “Today, our economic environment screams at us, “Scarcity!” ... political... “Us versus them”, ... medical... “Be afraid!”  Together they keep us alone and scared to change.”  Whereas in truth “fundamentally we are the same being looking out at the world through many sets of eyes”.

Book Review: Freefall by Joseph Stiglitz

Joseph Stiglitz

This is a clear and level-headed book on the causes of the American financial crash and the botched solutions to it. Joseph Stiglitz is  a winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, and a former head of the World Bank: hardly a political firebrand, but his book is deeply critical of the malfunctioning of the financial institutions and regulators which led to the crash, and the lack of truly systemic solutions since then. I have summed up key points from the book below.

• The flaky mortgage lending was aimed at exploiting the lower classes - he would say, deliberately.
• There is a need for better measures of individual wellbeing - there is one created by the UNDP.
• The US has limited individual security benefits, for fear of rewarding laziness or incompetence, yet in effect it has increased corporate security benefits (bailouts etc.)
• "Rugged individualism combined with rampant materialism has led to an undermining of trust".
• "Securitization" removed any personal relationship between borrowers and lenders, and hence any scope to adjust or restructure problem loans.
• "This crisis has exposed fissures in our society, between Wall Street and Main Street".
• We have seen an increasing short-termism, on the part of individuals, firms and government".
• He sees part of the role of government as to have a vision, to think longer-term. The system of campaign contributions and lobbyists makes this very difficult.
• In 2010 "the total gap between what American homeowners owed and the value of their homes (was) between $700 and $900 billion."
• Commercial real estate also has a big "underwater" problem, i.e. the value of loans exceeds total value of property.
• The way the Obama Government intervened to 'rescue' the banking sector has not restored lending to small/medium businesses, which is well below pre-2008 levels.
• He cites evidence that the US treasury is overly identified with the interests of the building sector.
• he talks of 'Keynesian' versus Hooverite approaches to recession, the first being that Government must increase spending, the latter that deficits must be cut to restore confidence. He gives many examples where this hasn't worked.

The Dodd Frank Act of 2010, aimed at reforming financial regulation, is described by Stiglitz as "a Swiss cheese bill - seemingly strong, but with large holes". Key elements are:

1. Creation of an independent Consumer Financial Protection Bureau - a hopeful step.
2. A systematic regulator - merely a council who advise the Fed.
3. Curbs on excessive risk taking: pretty weak in actuality.
4. Carbon derivatives: pretty weak in actuality.

He believes that the US "faces the risk of another major crisis within the next fifteen years" - most of the problems have barely been addressed. Trust remains low, and the global credibility of the US has been much weakened.

Book Review: Resilience by Liggy Webb

A sound basic guide to personal resilience

If you do a web search for books on personal resilience, this one comes up as well rated. It is a clear, common-sense self-help guide to the basics of the topic.

The book is easy to use, with a mix of checklists, exercises, anecdotes, and resources guides at the back. It handles such issues as dealing with strong emotions in a sensible style which avoids New Age jargon.

Resilience has useful brief sections on the valuable deeper approaches, such as Daniel Goleman’s Emotional Intelligence, and the Kubler Ross Grief Cycle model.

I agree with Liggy that handling conflicts well is a key part of personal resilience, and she has a good chapter on this, including understanding your own ‘conflict style’, core skills for handling conflict, and the Cool Down Model.

There are also chapters on such topics as looking after yourself, improving relationships with others, and creating and achieving a positive vision. I liked the appendix with top 20 Survival Songs – an intriguing mix, ranging from Monty Python through Sugababes to Vera Lynn. There are also some useful website listings.

For me, the main limitation of this book is that it does not go deep enough in its guidance or self-help processes on some key issues, such as facing, clearing and reframing negative emotions. However, I would happily recommend it as a sound basic starter to the subject.

How to enjoy a wet May: Finding your inner fire when the sun won't shine

This is an update on a blog I wrote two years ago: I am very aware of the wet bits of May 2014, having spent a week on an off-grid camp where it rained almost continually. I was leading groups on resilience at this camp, and it was touching to see how the community dug deep to find reserves of kindness and tolerance as the mud got deeper too.

Living in mud for a week is a great model for modern life in general. You could see the mud as yukky and dismal, or choose to change the story, remember the playful child in you, and see it all as an adventure... Now back to the 2012 blog:

I am writing this at Hazel Hill Wood, sitting at the foot of my favourite beech tree, with a struggling campfire.  It has been raining heavily for days, now it’s merely a light drizzle pushed along by a strong South-Westerly wind.  This seems to be the shape of May 2012.

Early May is my favourite time of the year, especially at Hazel Hill: the bluebells are usually abundant, the birdsong is intense, and there is new growth everywhere.  As you may guess, this year it’s all pretty subdued.  Many bluebells haven’t even flowered.  The wood is damp and chilly like early March, and yet the Spring growth is here.  The green of young beech leaves is brilliant, almost electric, even in this weather.  But the lack of sun has shown me how much I, and probably most people, depend on Spring sunshine for our own sense of growth and renewal.

I know many organic farmers and gardeners who say that it’s best not to water and fertilise your plants too much.  Their approach forces the plants to root deeper in order to find water and nutrients.  There’s a useful parallel here for humans in a wet Spring.

The silver lining in these clouds is the chance to strengthen your will and intent, and dig deeper in yourself, in order to find the inner fire to fuel your Spring growth.  It’s like cycling instead of driving a car: not so easy and convenient, but it makes you fitter, stronger, less dependent on outside support.

How to do this?  Robert Osborn, who co-leads some Men Beyond 50 groups, offers this method: Find a quiet place outdoors, and sit comfortably on the earth.  Now imagine you are like a tree, and that your spine extends into roots below the ground, and branches with leaves above your head.  Visualise drawing deep red fire, the physical vitality of the earth, up through your roots.  Then combine this with drawing white fire down through your leaves from the sky, the inspiration of spirit in whatever form you conceive it.

Nature remains one of our greatest teachers.  Even in a dismally damp May, the trees’ roots are reaching into the warmer earth below ground, their leaves are finding whatever light there is, and they are growing with the season.  To quote from a song by James Burgess:

 By the fire that is under the earth,
 By the fire that is over the earth,
 By the fire in the heart of heroes… 

Spiritual Roots for Personal Resilience

A valuable deeper dimension... at least for some

My own resilience benefits from spiritual roots, but it’s a topic I rarely speak about.  It seems that many people are averse to the idea of a spiritual dimension in life, so this blog feels like a risky experiment in describing what spiritual resilience means to me.

To give some context, my spiritual path has been evolving for over 40 years, and feels like a personal tapestry, woven from many traditions, especially the Christian, Sufi and Buddhist.  Only in 2001 did I start leading retreats and workshops with an explicitly spiritual flavour.  Since 2011, I have facilitated a dozen groups on spiritual resilience, with such titles as ‘Inner Peace in a Changing World’: it is on these recent groups that this blog is based.  It’s impractical to convey the rich delights of a group journey through this material in a short blog, so I will simply focus on ways that a spiritual dimension can add to regular personal resilience approaches:

Divine Unity: Many Middle Eastern traditions use variants of the same word, Alaha, to describe sacred unity.  In the desert, it is easier to see humanity as just one part of a universe which is all divine.

Creation spirituality: this is the idea that creation is not a historical event, but an ongoing process, and our role as humans is to embody divine qualities and contribute to the ongoing process.  For more on this, see the Thomas Berry book review.

Changing the Story: The need for a new story to realign humanity’s relation with the planet is much discussed currently, and links to the need for each individual to find a new story which takes us beyond material hedonism.  This can be helped by sensing our personal link with divine unity, a personal role in creation, and seeing the whole natural world, including humanity, as a single divine entity which needs re-creating.  Again, see Thomas Berry for more.

The Three Jewels: this is the Buddhist concept of three key parts to a spiritual path: the Buddha (all the enlightened teachers), the Dharma (the teachings, and how we embody them in daily life and work), and the Sangha (the community of mutual support for this journey).  All three elements reinforce each other.

Gratitude and celebration:  what the spiritual dimension can add to these qualities is the sense of expressing them to divine unity, to the creating power in all life, including ourselves.  The groups I lead draw on teachings from several spiritual positions, and are offered for people to use or not as they wish, so there is no evangelistic edge.  Given a safe space to experience these approaches, people taking part in these groups get a lot from them. 

How to bring these qualities into more mainstream groups remains an open question, which I would welcome your views and experience.

Book Brief: Thomas Berry: ‘The Dream of the Earth’

Is myth both the problem and the solution?

Berry has an unusual, eloquent, and valuable view of how we humans got into the current crisis, and how to move out of it.  This view is powerfully presented in the ‘Dream of the Earth’, one of his many books.

Thomas Berry described himself as a cosmologist and Earth Scholar – he was also a Catholic priest, who was born and lived in the USA, and died in 2009 at the age of 94.  The idea of the universe as our context, and the universe as a story that we need to read and contribute to, were crucial to his work.

Berry has a clear and stark view of the current situation: “we could describe our industrial society as the addictive, paralysing manifestation of a deep cultural pathology...”  He comments that not only does materialist society regard the planet as something to be used, but also our cultural and even spiritual values see humans as separate from the Earth and other life on it.

Berry believes that an important reason for this situation is a rise of ‘redemption spirituality’, which largely regards this world as a vale of pain to escape from.  By focussing too much on the link between human and divine, “We have lost contact with the revelation of the divine in nature.”

Berry believes that myth is at the root of both the problem and the solution: “the main difficulty in replacing the industrial order is not the physical nature of the situation, but its mythic entrancement... the myth is primary... so far the energy evoked by the ecological vision has not been sufficient to offset the energies evoked by the industrial vision – even when its desolation  becomes so obvious...”

This new myth “must emerge from our new story of the universe.  This... can be understood as soon as we recognise that the evolutionary process is from the beginning a spiritual as we as a physical process.”  He comments that, “The human community must assume adult responsibilities in our role on Earth.  The recent centuries have been like an adolescent period in humans’ handling of this power.” To do this, “we must invent, or re-invent, a sustainable human culture by a descent into our pre-rational, our instinctive, resources.”

So it’s crucial to the new story that we humans see ourselves as part of the continuing story of creation, “as that being in whom the universe reflects on and celebrates itself.”   This is the essence of creation spirituality, which is well explored in the book Genesis Meditations by Neil Douglas Klotz.

Deeper contact with nature is crucial, both to give us the insights to move forward, and the passion to act on them and preserve this planet where, in truth, we are “a species among species”.  As Berry says, “The mythic dimension of the ecological age is... a deep insight into... the entire earth process.  This includes its seasonal rhythms as well as its historical transformations, its revelatory communication as well as its pragmatic functioning.”

Berry has a sense of optimism about the future, which may seem surprising.  It arises from his sense of the intelligence of Gaia, and a belief that if Gaia allowed humans to create this mess, it must be a huge growth opportunity for both humans and the planet: “the basic mood of the future might well be one of confidence in the continuing revelation that takes place in and through the earth.  If the dynamics of the universe... guided us safely through the turbulent centuries, there is reason to believe that this same guiding process is precisely what has awakened in us our present understanding of ourselves and our relation to this stupendous process.”

For more on Thomas Berry and his work see: www.thomasberry.org

Book Brief: Active Hope by Macy and Johnstone

An excellent guide to personal resilience

I have taken part in workshops led by both Joanna Macy and Chris Johnstone, and regard them as two of the best teachers on personal resilience in a full sense of the phrase.  This book is a clear, concise guide to their approach, and has the authority and richness that comes from their many years of teaching.

Their work is known by various names, including Deep Ecology, and the Work That Reconnects.  It draws from a range of sources, including Buddhist teachings and general systems theory. 

One of their key ideas is that there are three ‘stories of our time’, and it is empowering to name them, and choose the one we live by:

-          Business as Usual: this is the story that governments and business would like us to trust in them.  There’s nothing basically wrong, and a bit more economic growth and technology will sort things out soon.

-          The Great Unravelling: worsening climate change is only one of several huge problems which show that the world is falling apart and it’s too late to save it.

-          The Great Turning: whilst this story is less visible in mass media it is already happening in many ways across the globe.

To some extent, all three stories are happening, but only the third one encourages us to act and believe we can make a difference.  The book highlights three Dimensions of the Great Turning:

·         1. Holding actions: this means actions to reduce or stop the damage caused by Business as Usual to the climate, ecosystems and lots more. Whilst some of the big changes need to come from government and business, we can change our own lifestyle, and participate in campaigns, boycotts and more.

·         2. Life-sustaining systems and practices: in every sector, including banking, food and transport, sustainable approaches are already available.  Individuals can choose to make such changes now.  But it requires big changes to spending priorities and to the patterns of Business as Usual, which will require much wider popular pressure on governments.

·         3. Shift in Consciousness: this is a sense of belonging and connectedness with all life on Earth.  As we deepen this, it brings a sense of urgency, and a passion for positive change. 

Much of the book is about how to achieve this change in consciousness, and act upon it. Central to this is a four-stage process which Joanna and Chris have evolved over years: I have led it with several groups, and found it very effective. This process, the Work that Reconnects, recognises that many people feel pain and distress at the state of the world and the way things are going, but don’t know how to handle it, so deny it, stuff it down, which keeps them in tension and inertia.

Their four-stage process offers a safe, supportive way to help people face their pain, move through it, and find ways to engage actively with positive change. The process is described in the book, but is best done in facilitated groups, since witnessing and support from others is a key element.

 

The book has a whole chapter on each of the four steps in this process, plus valuable chapters on such topics as Catching an Inspiring Vision, Building Support around you, and Maintaining energy and enthusiasm. Unlike some books in this sector, this one is well written, and pretty concise at 238 pages. The passion, wisdom and huge experience of both authors shines through, and I can wholeheartedly recommend it. It gracefully interweaves large perspectives, wisdom from great teachers, real-life examples, and self-help exercises.

Living our future out : brilliant insights

This is a situation where I’m delighted to admit to bias: I have loved The Who and their music since they exploded into my life in the Sixties. I have regarded Pete Townshend as a genius since Tommy, and his book, Who I am provides ample support for my view.

One of my favourite verses in Quadrophenia runs:

I have to be careful not to preach,

I can’t pretend that I can teach,

And yet I’ve lived your future out

By pounding stages like a clown.

Peter Townshend really has lived out many of the major issues around resilience, and this book is a superb description of his shipwrecks and re-inventions, embodying many of the insights and approaches offered in my book, Out of the Woods: A Guide to Life for Men Beyond 50.

I’ve recently become intrigued by the extreme pressures which hit successful pop musicians, as a result of seeing the brilliant film about the Congolese group Benda Bellili – but that’s for another blog. Pop stars need even more resilience than the rest of us: we may not want them as role models, but we can learn from them.

Pete describes these pressures vividly: the abundant booze and drugs, and the gorgeous women throwing themselves at him. Plus the pressure on him, as the songwriter in the group, to keep creating fresh hits. And the chaos in a quartet of half-crazy personalities, on tour for weeks on end.

He writes very honestly of his heavy drinking, of his underlying ongoing anger, and his work addiction “I was a workaholic, running away from the present, and probably the past ... I was myself a really desperate man”. These shipwrecks forced him to dig deep to find his own resilience: “To mature properly, I needed to reach back to my lost youth, the eight-year-old I still carried within me”.

Some people suggest that the underlying crisis of resilience is a spiritual one, and this is echoed by Pete describing his own “deep, nauseating spiritual desperation”. He describes the profound benefits he has found through the teachings of Meher Baba. Overall, I’d rate Pete as  pretty resilient, mature operator in a context that sends many pop musicians crazy. Another fascinating aspect of Who I am is the range of Pete’s musical influences: For example, he writes about Purcell’s use of elongated suspensions, which he used himself in ‘The Kids are Alright’, and how one of my Sufi inspirations, Inayat Kahn, gave him ideas for Lifehouse.

The stories of Pete Townshend and The Who are interwoven with many other great groups and musicians, including The Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton. This book has plenty of vivid scenes, involving all these and more. I rate it as a must-buy!

The New Road: Charting Scotland’s Inspirational Communities

This book does what it says on the cover!

by Alf Young and Ewan Young, Argyll Publishing

This is a truly encouraging book, delightfully written, in the form of a one-week rail and road trip around Scotland, seeing what’s new and working well in raising community resilience. It has just the right amount of practical detail and atmospheric colour.

I also appreciated the way this book has a light touch on editorial, and mostly lets the people and their projects do the talking. The overall picture that emerges has been an important part of my conclusions about how the community resilience sector works in the UK currently. Here are some of my key conclusions, which this book supports:

Transition Town, Forres

·      - There are good working examples of raising resilience in most key aspects (e.g. food, energy, employment), but… these are rarely replicated.

·      - They usually involve an innovative, practical initiative in a physical local community, with a lot of human interaction, and they have deepened the quality of community in that locality.

·      - They were led by and for local people, but mostly initiated and driven along by one or a few superhuman people, pioneers who persisted despite huge obstacles.

·      They often depended on unusual funding sources - for example, raising funds from the community itself, even poor ones, or a brief window when grant funds were available.

·      They managed to engage the hearts, fire up the motivation, overcome the scepticism, of many people in their local community, and gain fairly widespread support and active involvement.

Here are a few of the authors’ perspectives:

Gal Gael, Govan

“For communities to take more responsibility for their own destinies requires an unbelievable amount of hard work...Not just ...the small numbers of people trusts can afford to employ.  Especially from the countless volunteers...”.

“it often feels as if each community setting foot on this new road has to redraw, from scratch, the map that will shape its journey.”

“to prosper in the long-term, we believe all trusts may have to turn themselves into social enterprises of genuine scale”.

Here are some of the specific projects featured in the book:

Dunbar: Artisan bakery, community owned and funded.  The umbrella organisation is a Community Development Trust, which grew out of a local consultation.

Twechar: A rundown former mining village took over the leisure centre from the local authority when it was due for closure, and has made it a real community hub.

Burntisland: Mike Small and the Fife Diet.  It started with communal meals of local produced in the village hall.  Funded by the Climate Challenge Fund.

Fintry, nr Stirling: Development Trust raised funds (from 50% of all local adults) to invest in part of a local commercial wind farm: after 2022 when capital repaid should generate £0.5m annual income.  Also car club and many other community facilities.

Govan, Gal Gael: Centred on a workshop teaching physical skills, eg building traditional boats.  Pioneered a 12 week programme for local young people, ‘Navigate Life’: craft skills and field trips into nature. Thursday evenings open house: music, food, company.

Neilston, south of Glasgow: Development Trust led by a dynamicc local woman: created a Town Charter with 44 project aims by 2030.  Funding a key issue - the 44 would cost £15m or more.  Raised money to buy a share of a local windfarm, will bring in £0.5m per annum from 2018.

Renton, West Dumbartonshire: locals created a Community Housing Association: has refurbished rundown social housing, built mixed tenure new homes, and created a new, 40-apartment, extra care facility for local older people.  It has also created, rented, then sold a successful 3000 square feet retail unit, and has built a new Healthy Living Centre, and a community centre (cafe, sports, meeting rooms).

Comrie, Perthshire: Set up a development trust, bought a redundant military camp with 96 acres - now includes food growing by local people, small business spaces, sports etc.

Forres: Transition Town Forres: Carin Schwartz, ex-Findhorn, a prime mover.  Innovative community allotment.

Sleat, Skye: Sleat Community Trust: took over the petrol station after it shut down, it’s now also the local post office and visitor info centre.  SCT has also bought the 1000 acre Tormore Forest nearby: provides a long-term revenue flow.  The purchase was backed by Highlands & Islands Enterprise Trust, and Triodos Bank.

Eigg: The islanders bought the island.  Have set up their own energy supply company, 90% renewable sources.  It also has a forest business, and a 24-bed luxury hostel and outdoor centre.

Cancel The Apocalypse: book by Andrew Simms Useful, informative and sometimes annoying...

In the Smart Thinking section of a Waterstones, this is one of numerous large, mostly worrying books about the future. I was persuaded to buy this one by its optimistic title, and my good opinion of the author. Andrew Simms is a Fellow of the new economics foundation who has contributed to some good innovative thinking over the past twenty years.

This book has a lot of useful information, insights and piercing statistics about why things are as bad as they are, on many fronts: world economics, banking, food, and lots more. Simms is familiar with a lot of good research and resources, which are well referenced here. But he also rambles and digresses: the 250-page version of this book would be more readable and useful than the actual 474 pages. Some of the many useful insights in the book include:

• Wellbeing vs. Materialism: Simms cites extensive research on the qualities that give most people a sense of wellbeing, alongside depressing evidence that the most materialistic don’t have these qualities, and many systems in developed societies push against them.
• Finance: He explains recent meltdowns clearly, tries applying a natural systems analogy to world finances, and describes a few smaller-scale alternatives.
• Food: He provides strong evidence for the vulnerability of food and fuel supply chains, highlights the role of speculation in driving up consumer prices even further, and provides evidence that food production could be organised to feed the world, given numerous radical changes. He quotes strong evidence to support his doubts about GM, and comments that ‘other non-GM techniques look set to bring dramatic crop improvements.’
• Pay, performance and inequality: Simms adds to the conclusions in the book The Spirit Level that societies with more unequal incomes have many related problems, and even the rich are less happy. He adds some interesting points to this: for example, a wide-ranging research survey which found no evidence that higher pay engenders higher performance, and in fact suggests it can be counterproductive. He also points out that employment is one of the primary drivers of inequality in societies like the UK.
• Advertising: The section on advertising is incisive, with quotes from industry gurus stating that the basic purpose of all this spending is to undermine people’s confidence and independence, and goad them into consumption.
• Cooperation: Simms is eloquent on the many benefits of more cooperative and egalitarian societies, and believes that it’s in human nature to be like this – the problem is simply that our dominant global systems all push in the wrong direction.
• Poverty: His assessment is pretty depressing: for example, if one takes China out of the figures, there has been no reduction in the numbers of global poor from 1980 to 2010. He also points out that the level of trickle-down from world economic growth to those in absolute poverty is tiny and shrinking: from $2.20 per $100 of global economic growth in the 1980s, to $0.60 in the 1990s.

I found it annoying that over 90% of this book is devoted to a range of specific issues, in which the problems are described at length, along with a variety of potential solutions, but mostly potential ones: to be more specific, he quotes details of positive initiatives which are working well somewhere, or bright ideas, but gives very little clue on how all this could be propagated in the mainstream. I became increasingly curious as to what the pivotal final chapter would contain.

Sadly, as with many of these books, Simms has little that’s new or convincing to say about how the large-scale economic, political and social structures of the world or the UK could be transformed into the more localised, collaborative, human approaches which he advocates. His suggestion that we all try to re-invent our sense of place and of time is a good start, but inspiring more than a small minority to do even this seems hard to imagine...

The Great Disruption: Book by Paul Gilding. A useful guide to constructive pessimism

The key message of The Great Disruption that although the world’s eco-systems (and hence economies) are going down the tubes rapidly, the crisis can be resolved if radical, concerted action is taken within the next few years, as Gilding believes it will be. 

Paul Gilding comes with impressive credentials: he has been executive director of Greenpeace Australia and International, and later worked as a consultant with large multinational businesses.  His book is generally well-argued and well-researched, but with a few blindspots: see more later.  Gilding says that, “Every major grouping of qualified scientists that has analysed the issue comes to the same conclusion” regarding climate change: that we are in a major crisis, which can only be resolved by dramatic cuts in human pollution. 

He draws a useful distinction between focussing on what is necessary  to resolve a problem, not what is politically possible; and he makes a strong case that what is really needed is to limit global temperature rise to 1^o C above pre-industrial levels. 

Gilding explains that he got much more attention from business audiences when he spoke about economic impacts, not environmental.  The global economy already puts more demands on the planet than it can sustain, and this is continually exacerbated by population growth: hence he believes the world has to face a fundamental crisis soon that continued economic growth is simply not sustainable.  We have to readjust to a steady state economy.

Gilding points to 2008 as an example of how this will happen in practise: in that year, economic growth led to resource shortages in food, energy and commodities, which produced big price rises, which then deflated the economy.  He expects this cycle to continue until fundamental systemic changes are made.

Whereas many experts, such as James Lovelock and Richard Heinberg, believe the global eco-system is broken beyond repair, Gilding disagrees, and his book includes modelling which he undertook with Professor Jorgen Randers to model how climate change could be pulled back to a one degree rise.  He believes this would require a war footing, with radical initiatives by the governments of major countries around the world, and he quotes World War II as a relevant precedent.  For example, his model includes rationing electricity, forced reductions in air travel, limiting use of gas-guzzling cars, and massive investments in renewable energy.  His model assumes that the ‘One Degree War’ starts in 2018, and that by then, climate changes impacts will become so severe that they force a tipping point in public opinion and government action.  I really hope he is right.

In a chapter titled ‘Are we finished?’, he says, “The attitude we adopt...hope versus despair – is perhaps the most profound issue we will face.  I think it will be more influential on our future than technology, politics or markets.”  He believes that a key to getting beyond denial of a problem is belief that a solution is possible.  Whilst his book helps somewhat, it leaves lots of questions unanswered, and I believe there is huge work urgently needed both to figure out in detail how solutions could work, and then to publicise this. 

Gilding sees two main phases in the big changes ahead.  The first will be government-directed, focussed on climate change.  The second phase is where the end of economic growth will be confronted.  Gilding quotes the book The Spirit Level and other surveys which show that average annual incomes above $15,000 per year do little to increase happiness, and that even the richest people are happier in societies with smaller income differentials. 

In the latter sections of his book, I find numerous blindspots and Utopian thinking: for example the belief that because of this research, governments worldwide will reduce differentials and both nationally and internationally, thus ending world poverty almost at a stroke.  Although the global economy may become steady state, differentials between countries will continue to change, and these tensions are not considered.  Gilding assumes that declining average incomes will be handled smoothly by everyone working part-time, which looks naively optimistic.

The Great Disruption, the One Degree War, and whatever follows it will have absolutely massive impacts socially and economically, which are hardly touched on in this book.  It would be good to see much more detailed consideration of the adverse impacts and how to mitigate them, and with the positive impacts, and how to encourage and accelerate these.  Gilding observes that the skills of personal and community resilience are now urgently needed, and this book gives at least brief glimpses of the impacts those skills will have to cope with.