Worldwatch Institute Books

The book explores the limitations of traditional military security in addressing global stability, highlighting that true security stems from understanding and mitigating underlying vulnerabilities like environmental degradation, poverty, and inequity. It emphasizes the interconnectedness of these issues alongside the risks posed by population growth and weapon proliferation. Offering a vision for a more secure world, it advocates for necessary reforms in governance, economics, ethics, and education, supported by accessible charts and tables to illustrate these critical points.

Growing evidence suggests that the global economy, rooted in ideas and assumptions that were progressive two hundred years ago, is now destroying its own ecological base and offering little to billions of impoverished people. In response, pioneers are creating the architecture of sustainable economies, one innovation at a time. State of the World 2008 describes these innovations from microfinance to closed-loop manufacturing and the use of trusts to protect common resources as well as identifying the obstacles that prevent a critical mass of people and organizations from moving toward sustainability, and rallying coalitions of stakeholders that can produce win-win solutions and strategies for achieving specific sustainability goals.