‘Tis the season to be reading! In a sweeping panoramic new book titled The World in 2050: Four Forces Shaping Civilization’s Northern Future, UCLA professor Laurence C. Smith delivers a well-written and comprehensive account of the key drivers shaping the next four decades of evolution in our global civilization and eco-system—and the intimate relationship between the two.
Smith treats four key drivers in a constant and complex interplay: demographics, resource consumption, globalization, and climate change. But there is a fifth, he adds without hesitation: technology. Technology will shape our adaptation to the future environment, but in an incremental and practical way. Indeed, as Smith promises at the outset of the book: no silver bullets, no World War III, and no hidden genies. In other words, let’s be pragmatic about how we approach the future rather than wait or hope for Black Swans, either positive or negative.
Smith turns Jared Diamond’s famous question about why civilizations to collapse on its head, asking: what causes civilizations to grow? And where are they growing? Smith takes us to the places we would least expect to find the answer: the societies of the Arctic Circle.
World in 2050 is a lively hybrid of academic reportage. Smith traveled on ice-breakers in the Arctic Ocean and visited indigenous communities in Finland to gather revealing stories of how the Far North is by necessity ahead of the rest of us in adapting to a warmer future. In fascinating ways—such as animal and insect life migrating to higher altitudes and latitudes—human civilization is in fact moving northward. The quite radical shifts in lifestyle we might experience by 2050 emerge through such gradual shifts we can already witness today.
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