THE AGE OF RESILIENCE

A scattered invocation of the better future that will come when we give up on the idea of progress.

“Like it or not, each of us is caught up in a giant biosphere classroom where we are learning the lesson that each and every act we engage in requires some change, no matter how trifling, in the natural world we inhabit,” writes Rifkin, noting that as a species we’ve done more than trifling damage to the world. As he enumerates, if we each ate 300 trout per year, then those trout would have had to eat 90,000 frogs, which in turn ate 27 million grasshoppers. Given that we eat cows, chickens, and pigs, and not so many trout, our food chain is a kind of economic transaction with “a long entropic tail.” Blame it on a system that assumes that nature is there for our convenience and the point of life is to accrue profit by being efficient actors in the marketplace. Against this, sounding like Charles Reich, Rifkin intones such mantras as “Biophilia is the next evolution of empathic consciousness.” That’s all well and good, but while we’re learning to love our fellow creatures, the world is rapidly disintegrating, and one wonders whether there’s enough time to become resilient—adaptable, that is—enough to embrace the author’s program. Among its tenets: The natural world must be restored, climate change has to be fought, communities need to become “peerocracies,” and children should be educated in such a way that “the natural biophilic impulse embedded in a child’s genetic makeup be expressed and flourish in preschool and continue to mature throughout the schooling experience.” It’s a big program, and Rifkin tries to say too much in too few pages; this book is less on point than some of his previous ones, especially Beyond Beef: The Rise and Fall of Cattle Culture.

A well-intentioned work with some worthy ideas, but spread much too thin.