The Real Wealth of Nations: From Global Warming to Global Partnership
Riane Eisler
Center for Partnership Studies
DOI: https://doi.org/10.24926/ijps.v4i3.182
Keywords: partnership system, domination system, climate change, caring economics, gender, childhood, neuroscience, global warming, values, cultural transformation
Abstract
In a speech delivered September 16, 2009 in New York City, at the United Nations' special meeting on climate change hosted by the Caribbean island-country of Grenada, Riane Eisler proposed a new approach for prevention and mitigation of global warming. She placed our climate change crisis in its social and historical context. She highlighted the connection between high technology and an ethos of Domination in bringing on our current crises, and why successfully resolving them requires an understanding of the configurations of the Domination System and the Partnership System as two underlying social configurations. These social configurations transcend conventional categories such as right vs. left, religious vs. secular, or Eastern vs. Western, which fail to take into account the crucial interactions between the cultural construction of our basic childhood and gender relations and politics and economics. As a result, regressions to the Domination side of the Partnership/Domination continuum have punctuated our forward movement, including a disregard for both people and nature. She showed that going back to the old “normal” is not an option, and outlined how, together, we can build a new normal in which caring for people and nature is a top priority.