True Wealth
How and Why Millions of Americans Are Creating a Time-Rich, Ecologically Light, Small-Scale, High-Satisfaction Economy
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
A groundbreaking statement about ecological decline, suggesting a radical change in how we think about consumer goods, value, and ways to live.
In True Wealth , economist Juliet B. Schor rejects the sacrifice message, with the insight that social innovations and new technology can simultaneously enhance our lives and protect the planet. Schor shares examples of urban farmers, DIY renovators, and others working outside the conventional market to illuminate the path away from the work-and-spend cycle and toward a new world rich in time, creativity, information, and community.
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Schor (Born to Buy) introduces her concept of plenitude as a way forward after the recent shattering of global capitalism and continued rise in CO2 emissions. Plentitude is a commitment to enjoying not exploiting nature's richness, to envisioning environmental, economic, and psychological health as braided and capable of growing symbiotically and more securely than the business as usual practices that imploded in 2008. Schor pleads for avoiding planetary ecocide : even though the polar ice caps are shrinking and 38% of the 45,000 species studied by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature are under threat of extinction, the West particularly Americans continue to create waste and gobble up resources at unsustainable rates (in 2006, the U.S. emission of CO2 was 19.7 metric tons per capita, compared to 1.3 in India). Fortunately, the interest in alternative energy, recycling, and clean nanotechnologies is increasing, and Schor encourages readers to match it by breaking out of a work hard/spend hard cycle, thereby improving both the environment and quality of life. It might be utopian, but it's also fresh, persuasive, and passionately argued, speaking to the individual and the collective.
