Fun book, no quotes.

(tags: family sheep agriculture community landscape environmentalism farming lake-district nature-writing )

Marcelo at work mentioned that he was reading this book, sounded good. Took awhile to complete, felt like it repeated a lot of the same topics but a good one to understand global politics over the last 20 years and for the next 50. Quotes:

• "In social psychology, distinctiveness theory holds that people define themselves by what makes them different from others in a particular context… a woman psychologist in the company of a dozen women who work at other occupations thinks of herself as a psychologist; when with a dozen male psychologists, she thinks of herself as a woman…. As increased communications, trade, and travel multiply the interactions among civilizations, people increasingly accord greater relevance to their civilizational identity. Two Europeans, one German and one French, interacting with each other will identify each other as German and French. The same two, interacting with two Arabs, will define themselves as Europeans and Arabs."
• The most obvious, most salient, and most powerful cause of the global religious resurgence is precisely what was supposed to cause the death of religion: the processes of social, economic, and cultural modernization that swept across the world in the second half of the twentieth century. Longstanding sources of identity and systems of authority are disrupted. People move from the countryside into the city, become separated from their roots, and take new jobs or no job. They interact with large numbers of strangers and are exposed to new sets of relationships. They need new sources of identity, new forms of stable community, and new sets of moral precepts to provide them with a sense of meaning and purpose. Religion, both mainstream and fundamentalist, meets these needs. As Lee Kuan Yew explained for East Asia:
  We are agricultural societies that have industrialized within one or two generations. What happened in the West over 200 years or more is happening here in about 50 years or less, It is all crammed and crushed into a very tight timeframe, so there are bound to be dislocations and malfunctions. If you look at the fast-growing countries – Korea, Thailand, Hong Kong, and Singapore – there’s been one remarkable phenomenon: the rise of religion. The old customers and religious – ancestor worship, shamanism – no longer completely satisfy…. This is associated with periods of great stress in society."
• "Apart from Russia the most populous and most important former Soviet republic is Ukraine. At various times in history Ukraine has been independent.
  Yet during most of the modern era it has been part of a political entity governed from Moscow. The decisive event occurred in 1654 when Bohdan Khmelnyt-sky, Cossack leader of an uprising against Polish rule, agreed to swear allegiance to the tsar in return for help against the Poles. From then until 1991, except for a briefly independent republic between 1917 and 1920, what is now Ukraine was controlled politically from Moscow. Ukraine, however, is a cleft country with two distinct cultures. The civilizational fault line between the West and Orthodoxy runs through its heart and has done so for centuries. At times in the past, western Ukraine was part of Poland, Lithuania, and the Austro-Hungarian empire. Historically, western Ukrainians have spoken Ukrainian and have been strongly nationalist in their outlook. The people of eastern Ukraine, on the other hand, have been overwhelmingly Orthodox and have in large part spoken Russian. In the early 1990s Russians made up 22 percent and native Russian speakers 31 percent of the total Ukrainian population. A majority of the elementary and secondary school students were taught in Russian.’ The Crimea is overwhelmingly Russian and was part of the Russian Federation until 1954, when Khrushchev transferred it to Ukraine ostensibly in recognition of Khmelnytsky’s decision 300 years earlier."

(tags: history conflict civilization foreignpolicy worldpolitics identity ideology international-relations )

Two thumbs up.

(tags: terraforming colonization future science-fiction dystopia environmentalism biodiversity posthumanism genetic-engineering climate-change interplanetary-travel human-evolution )