About the author and social commentator.

Geoff sees the world in a crisis of transition. Old ways of living and organising no longer work. New ways are being created, but have yet to reach critical mass. Much better worlds await us, and the challenge is to minimise the pain before we gain.

The crisis is not just of industrial economies, but of how we live on the planet and how we organise ourselves into large societies. We need not just new ideas but new values, not just a second industrial revolution but a new kind of civilisation.

Not only are there people already demonstrating the practicalities of how industry can function according to the imperatives of the organic world, there are people who are reinventing small community and there are people who understand well where our destructive passions come from and how to manage and heal them. In the words of Stan Dale, we are learning how to replace ignorance and fear with awareness and love.

Some years ago Geoff conceived of merging his rational, scientific self with his emotional, loving, even spiritual self. Rationality and passion each are valuable, but each on its own can be taken to destructive extreme. On the other hand rationality and passion ought to be both more powerful and more humane together than they are apart. His book Economia is a personal expression of that quest, because it uses rational analysis and scientific creativity in the service of a loving heart.

The current crisis seems to require us, singly and collectively, to seek this kind of wholeness, merging our unprecedented fund of scientific knowledge with compassion, old wisdom and new insights into who we are, where we have come from and how we can live healthy and fulfilling lives.