11 books on the future of humanity that everyone should read

No one knows for sure what the next decade, century, or millennium will look like.
But many writers have imagined the future in their work, inviting us to travel through time.

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/08/11-books-on-the-future-of-humanity-that-everyone-should-read

Catalyst

A good job, hard work, IQ, EQ, good communication skills--these are all ingredients for a successful life. The presence of these elements alone, however, does not guarantee success. To convert them into long-term success, you need certain stimuli which precipitate or accelerate your growth. This robustly effective book identifies the various catalysts that you can cultivate and how you can leverage them to propel yourself in your work and life.
Accessible, engaging and easy to follow, and written by someone who has experienced all this in real life and not in theory, Catalyst will arm you with the right tools to succeed at your work place and get the most out of every moment, every day.

The Abundance of Less: Lessons in Simple Living from Rural Japan

Andy Couturier captures the texture of sustainable lives well lived in these ten profiles of ordinary—yet exceptional—men and women who left behind mainstream existences in urban Japan to live surrounded by the luxuries of nature, art, friends, delicious food, and an abundance of time. Drawing on traditional Eastern spiritual wisdom and culture, these pioneers describe the profound personal transformations they underwent as they escaped the stress, consumerism, busyness, and dependence on technology of modern life. This intimate and evocative book tells of their fulfilling lives as artists, philosophers, and farmers who rely on themselves for happiness and sustenance. By inviting readers to enter into the essence of these individuals’ days, Couturier shows us how we too can bring more meaning and richness to our own lives.

Moong over Microchips: Adventures of a Techie-Turned-Farmer

Venkat Iyer was living a fast-paced life in the IT world in Mumbai when he decided to stop and take a long, hard look at where he was headed. Disheartened by his stressful existence in the city, he decided to give it all up and take up organic farming in a small village near Mumbai. But it wasn't easy. With no experience in agriculture, his journey was fraught with uncertainty. He soon went from negotiating tough clients, strict deadlines and traffic to looking forward to his first bumper crop of moong. As he battled erratic weather conditions and stubborn farm animals, he discovered a world with fresh air and organic food, one where he could lead a more wholesome existence. At times hilarious, and other times profound, this book follows his extraordinary story.

Mother Earth, Sister Seed: Travels through India's Farmlands

In Mother Earth, Sister Seed, landscape designer Lathika George looks at India's traditional agricultural communities and the changes-some good, some not-that modernization and urbanization have wrought. Paying tribute to the ancient systems of farming, George talks about the men and women whose livelihoods are derived from the land and the sea. An organic gardener herself, she takes you through the changing seasons of agriculture as she travels around the country, from Rameshwaram in Tamil Nadu and Coorg in Karnataka to the Khasi Hills in Meghalaya and Chamba in Himachal Pradesh, documenting the celebrations, rituals, folklore and recipes associated with each.

Mother Earth, Sister Seed is a lyrical journey dedicated to ways of life that are vanishing. It captures the myriad ways in which the food we eat is produced and brings to life the industrious farmers, fi shermen and forest folk behind it.

Join longtime ecological farming author/researcher Harold Willis as he explains the foundation concepts of natural farming and issues the call for cleaner forms of food and fiber production. In this single volume, the author details the interconnections between soil chemistry, microbial life, plants and livestock. He discusses the current problems in agriculture and suggests how lessons from nature provide the roadmap to efficiency, effectiveness and profitability. This book does not stop at providing recipes of what farmers need to do to farm better, but also passes along an understanding of the why of ecological agriculture. This book is certain to become a classic of clean farming and one of the most heavily bookmarked volumes on a farmer's shelf.

Discover the hidden power soil has to reverse climate change, and how a regenerative farming diet not only delivers us better health and wellness, but also rebuilds our most precious resource—the very ground that feeds us.

Josh Tickell, one of America’s most celebrated documentary filmmakers and director of Fuel, has dedicated most of his life to saving the environment. Now, in Kiss the Ground, he explains an incredible truth: by changing our diets to a soil-nourishing, regenerative agriculture diet, we can reverse global warming, harvest healthy, abundant food, and eliminate the poisonous substances that are harming our children, pets, bodies, and ultimately our planet.

Through fascinating and accessible interviews with celebrity chefs, ranchers, farmers, and top scientists, this remarkable book, soon to be a full-length documentary film narrated by Woody Harrelson, will teach you how to become an agent in humanity’s single most important and time sensitive mission. Reverse climate change and effectively save the world—all through the choices you make in how and what to eat.

Do you sometimes feel tired, lethargic and spiritless? How can Ayurveda help in a simple, practisable manner?

Time is scarce and precious in today's world, and we seek solutions that are quick. While allopathic medicine tends to focus on the management of disease, the ancient study of dinacharya provides us with holistic knowledge of preventing disease and eliminating its root cause.

Taking us through a day in the life of Ayurveda living, Dr Bhaswati Bhattacharya illustrates the core principles of Ayurveda and shows us how to incorporate these in our routine. She explains the logic behind the changes she recommends and how they benefit us. Informative and accessible, Everyday Ayurveda is the perfect lifestyle guide designed to maximize health, longevity and happiness the natural way.

Tough on bullshit. Tough on the causes of bullshit.

Never before have we had so much information available to us about food and health. There's GAPS, paleo, detox, gluten-free, alkaline, the sugar conspiracy, clean eating.. Unfortunately, a lot of it is not only wrong but actually harmful. So why do so many of us believe this bad science?

Assembling a crack team of psychiatrists, behavioural economists, food scientists and dietitians, the Angry Chef unravels the mystery of why sensible, intelligent people are so easily taken in by the latest food fads, making brief detours for an expletive-laden rant. At the end of it all you'll have the tools to spot pseudoscience for yourself and the Angry Chef will be off for a nice cup of tea - and it will have two sugars in it, thank you very much.

From eating the right meals to buying a utility product, from finding a good educational institution to investing money in an asset - everyone has numerous decisions to make in their lives. But not everyone ends up making the best choice for themselves. Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness from Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein focusses on providing direction to readers, so that they are able to pick the best choices

A diet that allows red wine, chocolate and the most delicious Italian food you can imagine? The Pioppi Plan offers just that, but so much more - lose weight, de-stress and live healthier and longer with this revolutionary new programme. Pioppi itself, a small Italian village which is home to the healthiest, longest-living people in the world, offers secrets that have never before been shared: until now.

Based on five years of research and drawing on over 100 studies on Pioppi, Dr Aseem Malhotra, a trained cardiologist, has created a plan which is designed to provide readers with the joy and wellbeing of a Mediterranean lifestyle by making small 'marginal gains' over a 21-day period. Each little change the book encourages you to make will add up to weight lost and years gained, across eight key areas: diet, movement, sleep, stress management, sunshine, exercise, posture and social interaction. This isn't a diet or lifestyle which requires saying 'no' to the things you love, nor exercising for hours upon end, but rather making simple, achievable and long-lasting changes.

In our search for truth, how far have we advanced? This uniquely human quest for good explanations has driven amazing improvements in everything from scientific understanding and technology to politics, moral values and human welfare. But will progress end, either in catastrophe or completion - or will it continue indefinitely? In this profound and seminal book, David Deutsch explores the furthest reaches of our current understanding, taking in the Infinity Hotel, supernovae and the nature of optimism, to instill in all of us a wonder at what we have achieved - and the fact that this is only the beginning of humanity's infinite possibility.

For decades we have been told a story about the divide between rich countries and poor countries.

We have been told that development is working: that the global South is catching up to the North, that poverty has been cut in half over the past thirty years and will be eradicated by 2030. It’s a comforting tale and one that is endorsed by the world’s most powerful governments and corporations. But is it true?

Since 1960, the income gap between the North and South has roughly tripled in size. Today 4.3 billion people, 60 per cent of the world's population, live on less than $5 per day. Some 1 billion live on less than $1 a day. The richest eight people now control the same amount of wealth as the poorest half of the world combined.

What is causing this growing divide? We are told that poverty is a natural phenomenon that can be fixed with aid. But in reality it is a political problem: poverty doesn’t just exist, it has been created.

Poor countries are poor because they are integrated into the global economic system on unequal terms. Aid only works to hide the deep patterns of wealth extraction that cause poverty and inequality in the first place: rigged trade deals, tax evasion, land grabs and the costs associated with climate change. The Divide tracks the evolution of this system, from the expeditions of Christopher Columbus in the 1490s to the international debt regime, which has allowed a handful of rich countries to control economic policies in the rest of the world.

Because poverty is a political problem, it requires political solutions. The Divide offers a range of revelatory answers, but also explains that something much more radical is needed – a revolution in our way of thinking. Drawing on pioneering research, detailed analysis and years of first-hand experience, The Divide is a provocative, urgent and ultimately uplifting account of how the world works and how it can change.

In an age of great economic uncertainty when everyone is concerned about money and how they spend what they have, this updated edition of the bestselling Your Money or Your Life is an essential read. Millennial Money's Grant explains: "The premise of it is that you exchange your time for money. And when you start thinking about how many hours of your life it took to save up the money to buy something, you really start thinking twice about your purchases."

In Your Money or Your Life, Vicki Robin shows readers how to gain control of their money and finally begin to make a life, rather than just make a living. With this book, you'll learn how to:

• Get out of debt and develop savings
• Save money through mindfulness and good habits, not strict budgeting
• Declutter your life and live well for less
• Invest your savings and begin creating wealth
• Save the planet while saving money
• And much more!

One is not born, but rather becomes, woman'

First published in Paris in 1949, The Second Sex by Simone de Beavoir was a groundbreaking, risqué book that became a runaway success. Selling 20,000 copies in its first week, the book earned its author both notoriety and admiration.

Since then, The Second Sex has been translated into forty languages and has become a landmark in the history of feminism. Required reading for anyone who believes in the equality of the sexes, the central messages of The Second Sex are as important today as they were for the housewives of the forties.

Is it time the medical profession rethought its approach to the old and terminally ill? In what way? Should doctors be trained to prepare people to die rather than simply be kept alive as long as possible? In Being Mortal, Atul Gawande addresses these questions and argues that an acceptance of mortality must lie at the heart of the way we treat the dying. Questioning, profound and deeply moving, Being Mortal is a must-read.

'A very good guide to the state we're in' Paul Krugman, New York Review of Books 'A well-written, thought-provoking book by one of America's leading economic thinkers and progressive champions.' Huffington Post Do you recall a time when the income of a single schoolteacher or baker or salesman or mechanic was enough to buy a home, have two cars, and raise a family? Robert Reich does - in the 1950s his father sold clothes to factory workers and the family earnt enough to live comfortably. Today, this middle class is rapidly shrinking: American income inequality and wealth disparity is the greatest it's been in eighty years. As Reich, who served in three US administrations, shows, the threat to capitalism is no longer communism or fascism but a steady undermining of the trust modern societies need for growth and stability. With an exclusive chapter for Icon's edition, Saving Capitalism is passionate yet practical, sweeping yet exactingly argued, a revelatory indictment of the economic status quo and an empowering call to action.

A fresh look at how three important twentieth-century British thinkers viewed capitalism through a moral rather than material lens What's wrong with capitalism? Answers to that question today focus on material inequality. Led by economists and conducted in utilitarian terms, the critique of capitalism in the twenty-first century is primarily concerned with disparities in income and wealth. It was not always so. The Moral Economists reconstructs another critical tradition, developed across the twentieth century in Britain, in which material deprivation was less important than moral or spiritual desolation. Tim Rogan focuses on three of the twentieth century's most influential critics of capitalism--R. H. Tawney, Karl Polanyi, and E. P. Thompson. Making arguments about the relationships between economics and ethics in modernity, their works commanded wide readerships, shaped research agendas, and influenced public opinion. Rejecting the social philosophy of laissez-faire but fearing authoritarianism, these writers sought out forms of social solidarity closer than individualism admitted but freer than collectivism allowed. They discovered such solidarities while teaching economics, history, and literature to workers in the north of England and elsewhere. They wrote histories of capitalism to make these solidarities articulate. They used makeshift languages of "tradition" and "custom" to describe them until Thompson patented the idea of the "moral economy." Their program began as a way of theorizing everything economics left out, but in challenging utilitarian orthodoxy in economics from the outside, they anticipated the work of later innovators inside economics. Examining the moral cornerstones of a twentieth-century critique of capitalism, The Moral Economists explains why this critique fell into disuse, and how it might be reformulated for the twenty-first century.

While many experts point to the enormous complexity in addressing issues ranging from the destruction of ecosystems to the loss of millions of species, Thich Nhat Hanh identifies one key issue as having the potential to create a tipping point. He believes that we need to move beyond the concept of the "environment," as it leads people to experience themselves and Earth as two separate entities and to see the planet only in terms of what it can do for them. Thich Nhat Hanh points to the lack of meaning and connection in peoples' lives as being the cause of our addiction to consumerism. He deems it vital that we recognize and respond to the stress we are putting on the Earth if civilization is to survive. Rejecting the conventional economic approach, Nhat Hanh shows that mindfulness and a spiritual revolution are needed to protect nature and limit climate change.

Love Letter to the Earth is a hopeful book that gives us a path to follow by showing that change is possible only with the recognition that people and the planet are ultimately one and the same.

Conversations With God: 1 is a religious self-help book written by Neale Donald Walsch.

Walsch presents readers with a question that if they could have an encounter with God, what would they ask Him? He claims that he had this opportunity presented to him and it is possible for anyone. God provides clear and understandable answers about anything from love to death.

Walsch was going through a low period in his life when he had decided to write a letter to God to vent his frustrations. He did not actually expect to be given a response. As he wrote the letters, he kept receiving extraordinary answers to his questions. This book presents the very answers that he received that helped him to change himself, his life and the way he saw everyone else.

It argues that words are not the decisive truth and are rather symbols which are open to interpretations. The readers should consult their own feelings to determine their own truth while reading the book. The book looks at getting the readers to take dictation from God. There is a dialogue taking between God and people all the time. The question isn't who God talks to but who listens to him.

Conversations With God: 1 was published by Mobius in 2007. This book is the New Ed edition and is available in paperback.

Key Features:
Conversations With God is a series with a set of nine books. It was adapted into a movie in USA in 2006. Walsch was played by Henry Czerny in the film.

Spanning the globe and several centuries, The Gene is the story of the quest to decipher the master-code that makes and defines humans, that governs our form and function.

The story of the gene begins in an obscure Augustinian abbey in Moravia in 1856, where a monk stumbles on the idea of a ‘unit of heredity’. It intersects with Darwin’s theory of evolution, and collides with the horrors of Nazi eugenics in the 1940s. The gene transforms post-war biology. It reorganizes our understanding of sexuality, temperament, choice and free will. Above all, this is a story driven by human ingenuity and obsessive minds–from Charles Darwin and Gregor Mendel to Francis Crick, James Watson and Rosalind Franklin, and the thousands of scientists still working to understand the code of codes.

This is an epic, moving history of a scientific idea being brought to life, by the author of The Emperor of All Maladies. But woven through The Gene, like a red line, is also an intimate history–the story of Mukherjee’s own family and its recurring pattern of mental illness, reminding us that genetics is vitally relevant to everyday lives. These concerns reverberate even more urgently today as we learn to ‘read’ and ‘write’ the human genome–unleashing the potential to change the fates and identities of our children. Majestic in its ambition, and unflinching in its honesty, The Gene gives us a definitive account of the fundamental unit of heredity–and a vision of both humanity’s past and future.

From Doris Lessing, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, this is the first instalment in the visionary novel cycle ‘Canopus in Argos: Archives’.

The story of the final days of our planet is told through the reports of Johor, an emissary sent from Canopus. Earth, now named Shikasta (the Stricken) by the kindly, paternalistic Canopeans who colonised it many centuries ago, is under the influence of the evil empire of Puttiora. War, famine, disease and environmental disasters ravage the planet. To Johor, mankind is a ‘totally crazed species’, racing towards annihilation: his orders to save humanity set him what seems to be an impossible task.

Blending myth, fable and allegory, Doris Lessing’s astonishing visionary creation both reflects and redefines the history of our own world from its earliest beginnings to an inevitable, tragic self-destruction.