Introduction

The new conditions of the twenty-first century beckon us with a future offering both enormous promise and unparalleled risk. Like the age of Dickens' two cities, the twenty-first century presents opposing faces. It will be either the century of sustainability or the century of ecological collapse. It will be the century where the continuation of the unsustainable economic practices of today precipitates irreversible catastrophes. Or it will be the century where small local successes in implementing sustainable practices and processes proliferate and transform the global economy into a balance-seeking relationship with our natural ecosystem. It may be the century where the analytical, reductionist methods of science and industry, which are the sources of both our progress and our increasingly unsustainable way of life, will continue as the central economic paradigm. Or it will be the century where a new integrative economic paradigm emerges which promises to reconcile humankind with the natural environment, whose health is the precondition for all human activity.

We are confronted with ecological and social choices of continuing our descent into the realm of unsustainability (denying all the while that it is the consumerist-materialist path that is the problem), or shifting to a new emerging paradigm. Unfortunately, in order for massive popular support to emerge to accomplish such a paradigm shift, there must first be a widespread belief that a larger, attractive, sustainable, new societal project exists and can succeed.