I’m eager to share with you my good news. As evidenced by the attached promotional flyer, my new book (with commons scholar David Bollier) has been just recently published/released from Cambridge University Press: Green Governance: Ecological Survival, Human Rights, and the Law of the Commons. It also has been posted on Amazon.com, complete with seven early “reviews”: http://www.amazon.com/Green-Governance-Ecological-Survival-Commons/dp/1107034361/ref=sr_1_8?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1358267294&sr=1-8&keywords=burns+weston―including an endorsement from James Hansen, Director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City who, as you know, early sounded the alarm about global warming and climate change some 30 years ago. Judging from these early “reviews,” we like to think that we may have produced a policy game-changer of sorts. At least we hope so.
That's the good news. The unhappy news is that, because the book is published as an academic treatise whose primary purchasers are college and university libraries, the price is distressingly steep. However, we were able to persuade Cambridge to release a less costly Kindle edition via Amazon.com, now online, and they are now discounting the cost of the book itself by 20%. Also they will publish an even less expensive paperback edition next year. Perhaps you can use your organizational affiliations to acquire a copy for yourselves; but in any case we hope you will be able to spread the word about our book to relevant policy-makers, colleagues, libraries, bookstores, and friends. In our humble opinion, we think it worthy of widespread responsible attention.
Allow me, please, to explain this blunt talk: David Bollier‘s and my book is not your ordinary academic book. Scholarly though it be, it is also, even fundamentally, a call to (peaceful) arms to get serious―humanly, in contrast to technologically―about the environmental degradation that is all around us from local to global and including, of course, global warming and climate change which, as you well know, is the greatest threat facing humankind today excepting perhaps nuclear proliferation. Embedded in our book’s Appendix, indeed, is a Universal Covenant Affirming A Human Right to Commons- and Rights-based Governance of Earth’s Natural Wealth and Resources that we prepared which calls upon “all citizens, organizations, and governments of the world to commit themselves to recovering the Earth and humanity’s shared inheritance and future creations”―and to do so with a keen sense of urgency about “taking decisive, collective action to transform existing systems and structures of ecological governance so as to reduce climate change, loss of biodiversity, and other severe threats to Earth’s life-giving and life-sustaining capacity.” Our Covenant, based on and built from our book, will soon be going viral over the Internet, and will be launched, internationally, as the basis for an extended engagement and campaign in a forthcoming edition of the Journal of Human Rights and the Environment, specifically to excite scholarly engagement with the Covenant as the basis for future reflection, action and hopefully, transformation. We hope, thus to make waves as well as news worldwide.
Kind and hopeful greetings,
Burns Weston (and David Bollier)
To unsubscribe from the GNHRE list, click the following link:
https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?SUBED1=GNHRE&A=1