World enough: rethinking the future

The combination of America's most eminent anthropologist and a premier photographer is uniquely suited to the task of distilling a clear cut view of the world from the blur of messages man receives about other societies. In World Enough, Margaret Mead and Ken Heyman enable us to view the contemporary world, in all its complexity, diversity, and rich contra diction, by condensing it to manage able size and "sharpening the focus of our eyes and thought."
The subtle interplay of Dr. Mead's anthropological insight and Ken Heyman's one hundred and eighty searching photographs illuminates the individual and collective dilemmas faced by four billion human beings. World Enough is arranged in four parts, in each of which a distinct level of technological and social development on this planet is examined: (1) the modern, urbanized world; (2) the traditional world, lacking technology-often beautiful, yet humiliatingly deprived; (3) the deteriorated world, endproduct of misdirected growth and development; (4) the world of countryside, desert, island, and forest, where half of the human race retains its ancient strengths and relationships to nature. Within these four sections, Dr. Mead argues persuasively that much of the unprecedented human suffering of the present is due to the misguided effort of both developed and developing nations since 1945 to solve all major problems by extending to the poor countries the high technology and political centralization of the rich.