Saving Our World: Plan B The Citizens’ Mandate for Change, reviewed

We look at Saving Our World: Plan B The Citizens’ Mandate for Change by John Seymour.

Saving Our World: Plan B The Citizens’ Mandate for Change, reviewed

This book is passionate, heartfelt, well researched and well intentioned. There are also lots of great quotes from positive and inspirational people too. The challenge is most definitely, with so many fossil fuel lobby backed people in positions of power, is, still, how on earth does humanity move away from it’s negative and future damaging behaviour. When septuagenarian  are voted into positions of power, dubiously oftentimes too, how on earth are these people credible in terms of thinking about long term, or even middle term, or beyond their next cheese burger. This is the massive challenge we face, on this planet, and for all authors wishing to tackle this topic.

This does not mean we should not engage with it. If we don’t then we are destroying and damaging the quality of life for our own personal relatives, let alone other species, plants, oceans and everything else. Seymour aims to tackle this in a methodical manner, drawing first on a deep dive into the existing and emerging literature on the parlous state that the world is in. The organisation of the chapters in the book follows a systematic approach to naming and being clear what the issues are. Then looking at and evaluating various. solutions, and the role that the individual can play too. You just wish policy at the top was also being guided by people who seemed to even care, rather than being fantasists, engaged in denial based on financial payments received.

Most of the book reads well, and makes sense. At the beginning of Chapter 8, Seymour mentions the hope that one country will make ‘the great transformation’, but despite havin re-read this page several times we were unclear what this transformation was, or would be? Maybe we missed something, but it would have been useful, and ideally positive if it had been more clearly outlined what he was referring to. Apart from this the rest of the book is a useful addition to the growing awareness and need for a Plan B, it just needs to be up and running, and probably about ten years ago. Whether you are glass full or glass half empty, humanity is going in the wrong direction, the challenge is whether it’s members wish to do something about it. Hopefully this book can help to nudge the needle.

More about the book

Endorsements of Saving Our World: Plan B include:

“An important new method for participatory democracy, which is urgently needed as we face the enormous inter-connected challenges of our times.”  Emeritus Professor Peter Hawkins, Henley Business School

“An interesting initiative, with a clear “theory of change” as to how to break through the current deadlock.” Jonathon Porritt, Forum for the Future

“A novel locally based organising tool to potentially reverse deteriorating social and environmental conditions.” Colin Hines, Convenor UK Green New Deal Group

“This book is a potentially ground-breaking mechanism to lay open the hearts of a people in order to steer those that would govern them by a North Star or moral compass ruled simply by the notion that action is the start of an exorcism that will create belief in the possible. Read it and believe.” Sir Tim Smit, The Eden Project

The Citizens’ Mandate

“I have known John Seymour, the author of ‘Saving Our World: Plan B’ for over 20 years and discussed this book with him over its 3-year gestation period. Our discussions taught me a lot about our economics and politics and particularly about how dysfunctional those systems have become.

Where this book differs from others is that it not only identifies the problems that we face, and they are dire, but it also offers a potential solution. We hear politicians’ promises on climate change, levelling up etc but see scant action by them. A lack of political will?

John outlines a solution that starts from us and gives us a way that we can be heard, which is democratic and can lead to the change that we want to see. The book links to a website where you can cast your personal Mandate for Change and add it to our collective voice for change.

Fortuitously, the book has arrived at a time when it might be most needed. With new opportunities and a new government, we hope that the essential changes needed to save our world will come about.” Michael Leigh

Published by Citizens Mandate Ltd, Saving Our World : Plan B is available from all good bookshops and from Amazon in paperback (ISBN No: 978-1399977241) priced £11.99 and Kindle format (£5.99) on Amazon here.

About the author:

John is a leading expert in change consultancy. Over four decades John has worked with thousands of individuals and hundreds of organisations including many of the best known in education, health and business. He specialises in individual change, systems change, organisational change and culture change.

John is also an author. His bestselling book went into 15 languages and sold over one million copies. Stafford Beer, creator of management cybernetics, was his mentor in systems thinking when John specialised in the Viable Systems Model and its application to organisational change.

John currently works on the Citizens’ Mandate for Change project with website and book as his contribution to addressing the overwhelming global problems we face.

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