This challenging science-based book reviews today's global situation as well as our long evolution to humanness. It uncovers a crisis in policy and behavior impending since 1990—one stemming from earlier, but long-outmoded assumptions that now threaten future development in common. Feasible reforms, global and national, are outlined.
Ranging widely through time, space, and subject-matter, and moving from earth and life history to economics and new vistas in brain science, Dilloway marshals analysis, ideas, and proposals to lay bare a climactic crisis that, since 1990 in particular, has been systematically concealed from view by the fresh force of a current conventional wisdom.
Successive chapters review our global situation in its major demographic, environmental, economic, and human rights aspects. Our entire time perspective is then examined to throw new light on powerful human capacities and the way they are now being contradicted by assumptions—seemingly rational two centuries ago—that have become outmoded, yet still decisive, in the century now ending. Dilloway next looks at recent economic history to see how this now-obsolete philosophy has come to prevail and how massively it opposes the cooperative social basis of our entire human potential. After reviewing a many-sided United Nations push based on environmental conservation, development, and human rights, Dilloway arrives at feasible, yet far-reaching proposals for stronger international government and matching basic reforms at the level of the advanced nation-state.