Rethinking Our World

A compelling and persuasive look at the social transformations needed to cope with our environmental crises.

Our world is at a tipping point, and we feel it every day. On the one hand, we have never been so well off; on the other hand, we find destruction and crisis everywhere we look. Whether throughout the environment or within society, our systems are under stress.

In this book, Maja Gopel, co-founder of the Scientists for Future initiative and secretary-general of the German Advisory Council on Global Change, explains that this new reality didn't just happen overnight, but rather is a result of our continuous actions—actions propelled by principles and beliefs, which have shaped us as a society over generations. We do not solely face an environmental crisis, but also a social one. It's time to question our principles, set new goals, and re-evaluate our priorities. It's time to rethink our world, because if we want to keep our livelihoods, we need to find a way of living without draining our planet any further. We need a fair distribution of wealth and a way to reconcile the social with the ecological.

Critical, yet full of encouragement, Maja Gopel chooses surprising and enlightening examples to illustrate how we can leave behind our familiar ways of living to achieve a better future. With that, she invites us to look at this future we are shaping every day in a new and completely different way.

After so much fake information born of post-factual hoaxes, this level-headedly argued book by economist Maja Gopel for a reform of our economic system is an insanely soothing read ... Maja Gopel's pleasantly unagitated written book helps to understand this new reality.
-Denis Scheck, ARD broadcasting service

Maja Gopel's book is a successful attempt to pack human history from the evolution of Homo Sapiens to Greta Thunberg, economic theory from Adam Smith to Thomas Piketty, environmental research and system criticism into a concise space in an entertaining read - and she does it well.
-Jessica von Blazekovic, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

Her findings are precise, her book comes at the right time - a time when the consequences of climate change are just as unmistakable as the half-heartedness of politics. It is a forcefully presented plea for future-oriented thinking, "an invitation" that one wishes many would accept.
-Ralph Gerstenberg, Deutschlandfunk Kultur