The First Global Revolution


The First Global Revolution is a book written by Alexander King and Bertrand Schneider, and published by Pantheon Books in 1991. The book follows up the earlier 1972 work-product from the Club of Rome titled The Limits to Growth. The book's subtitle is A report by the Council of the Club of Rome. The book was intended as a blueprint for the 21st century putting forward a strategy for world survival at the onset of what they called the world's first global revolution.
A second edition was published by Orient Longman in 1993.

Contents

  • The Problematique
  • '''The Resolutique'''

Overview

The book is a blueprint for the twenty-first century at a time when the Club of Rome thought that the onset of the first global revolution was upon them. The authors saw the world coming into a global-scale societal revolution amid social, economic, technological, and cultural upheavals that started to push humanity into an unknown. The goal of the book was to outline a strategy for mobilizing the world's governments for environmental security and clean energy by purposefully converting the world from a military to a civil economy, tackling global warming and solving the energy problem, dealing with world poverty and disparities between the Northern Hemisphere and the Southern Hemisphere.
The book saw humankind at the center of the revolution centered on:
  • Global economic growth
  • New technologies
  • Governments and the ability to govern
  • Mass Media
  • Global food security
  • Water availability
  • Environment
  • Energy
  • Population growth
  • Learning systems
  • Values/Religions
  • Materials
The product of a think tank, the book attempted to transcend the nation-state governance paradigm of the nineteenth-century and the twentieth-century and sought a way to eliminate some of the challenges seen inherent with those older systems of global governance. As such, it explored new and sometimes controversial viewpoints.