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RETURN TO SCALE: ALTERNATIVES TO GLOBALISATION
30 YEARS ON - ECONOMICS AS IF PEOPLE AND THE PLANET MATTERED
Scale matters. A single painkiller can cure a headache, but swallow a whole bottle and it will kill you. Cut down a few trees and you can call it woodland management - clear fell a forest and an entire ecosystem is destroyed. Whether something is beneficial or destructive can simply be a function of the scale at which it happens. A firework is fun, a cluster bomb is not.
The theme of nef's latest book, "Return to Scale", is scale. In an age of globalisation, everything seems to float up to the top. But the authors here, writing on issues ranging from corporations to food, energy, democracy, education, trade, work, health, money and time itself, all argue that our well-being lies closer to home. Many of the chapters grew out of a collaboration between nef and London's Institute of Contemporary Arts, a two year series of events on the title theme. All the authors are leading figures in their field.
After high profile demonstrations and the big international conferences, critics of globalisation were attacked for having no alternatives. Moving from opposition to proposition, nef and the ICA staged a series of events to show that far form being no alternatives to business as usual, there are many. This collection gives a flavour of the better ways to solve the world's problems.
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