What will Spring be like? deserves the widest possible audience – I wish your project well.
Gordon Brown
This is a thought-provoking and passionate book book which advocates an agenda calling for action and change in response to the Covid pandemic. It is a vision of human flourishing together and embedded in nature. We have come to a turning point in our value system. You can read an extract entitled elements of human flourishing here.
If you are passionate about racial injustice, should you also be an advocate of environmental action? If yes to the above, should you also be concerned that those on whom our way of life is so dependent should be properly valued? Would you also be in favour of genuine economic value that provides worthwhile jobs for worthwhile people? What does all that sit with social solidarity and the value of community we have re-discovered? What these have in common is that they are different dimensions of genuine value and represent a crisis in the human spirit. This book brings these different together. Taking the ideas that are lying around, it is citizens coming together who give politicians courage to act.
Wanted: antibodies for the virus in the mind. Faced with pent up anger against racial injustice, glaring social inequalities exposed by the pandemic, the economy falling off a cliff and the crisis of nature that hadn’t gone away, history didn’t come much bigger than this. Deep global transformations were needed. ‘What will Spring be like?’ articulates the social investments that were crucial to help ensure proofing against pandemics and the kind of ‘spiritual stockpiling’ that builds resilient communities. How did we build on what came to the fore as vital to value (economic value, people’s lives no matter the colour of their skin, the value of social solidarity and the value we place on the natural world that had given us such a sharp shock?) The people who turned out to be so crucial to our way of life had been massively under-valued. This is now a tipping point. The moment could became a momentum; then a movement.
This is a potentially creative moment that comes along once every several generations. It is our opportunity to imagine the future and build a better world.
“Make big plans…deep into the future
Aim high in hope and work.
Have faith, remembering that a Noble plan, once recorded, will never die
But long after we are gone
Will still be a living thing ” [Goethe]
The author implores leaders and intelligent thinkers to respond with empathy and imagination to this current crisis and provide page-turning, epochal leadership: “What is vital now is for high quality social analysts to combine with activists and show what a new future looks like; where every life really does matter and people flourish alongside each other and nature.”
What will Spring be Like? is a forward-thinking ‘Report from the Future’ that sets out an agenda for change. There are four dimensions that have come to the fore during the pandemic that enable people and nature to flourish:
- lives to keep the nation going, black lives and all versions of life,
- social solidarity, as loneliness was exposed as a strategic issue,
- the economy as the sphere on which people depended for their livelihood, and
- the natural world that had respite care and our vulnerability to it exposed.
The book draws inspiration from the Beveridge agenda for change which followed the fall-out from the second world war, stimulating a renewed world which rebuilt itself for the better with improved public healthcare, international institutions and an established universal human rights movement.
What will Spring be Like? is an enlightening book that will appeal to serious thinkers, academics and students alike. System change at a global level is both needed and happening before our eyes and this masterpiece takes a bold, visionary look at reshaping a better world from the chaos of this pandemic:
“The moment became a momentum; then a movement…”
