Global Threats, Global Futures: Living with Declining Living Standards
'Thayer Scudder is one of those gifted authors who have the experience and the vision to span multiple sectors and far flung sites in assessing where humankind and its habitat are heading. His restless curiosity in everything around him has led him to become not simply the world's leading authority on the impacts on the lives of people resettled by dam-building projects but an innovative thinker about development anthropology and the threats to the globe from poverty, fundamentalism in all its pernicious forms and environmental degradation. This iconoclastic book assails sacred cows ranging from the World Bank to the malign role of Buddhist priests in the late civil war in Sri Lanka. The work is not reassuring. But its conclusion that humans can learn to live with declining living standards is more uplifting than doom-laden.' --- David McDowell, Former Director General of the IUCN and New Zealand Ambassador to the United Nations