Description

This book should be read by anyone involved in birth work, and in future oriented scientific disciplines, anyone working on sustainable development goals, resilience, and planetary boundaries. It is an essential read for explorers of the future and people necessitating transdisciplinary science to explore solutions for our planetary crises … His writing is clear and organized, the chapters can be very short, his argumentation is persuasive and can seem disconnected at times until the connection is found; we enter the brain of a great systems thinker … Michel Odent’s scientifically evidenced linkages between seemingly disconnected events grows our understanding of interconnectedness; a key quality for the survival of humanity.

At a global scale, love hormones are now redundant in the critical period surrounding birth … reasons for questions?

Between 1970 and 1990, in many parts of the world, the rates of caesareans escalated from roughly 5% to roughly 25%. During this short phase of history, the father’s participation became routine. Is there a link between these facts?

Health care systems are on the way to collapsing. Should we go on focusing on the preventive and curative treatments of particular diseases or should we give a greater importance to the way our basic adaptive systems, involved in what we commonly call health, reach a high degree of maturity?

These examples are sufficient to illustrate the “neo-Socratic attitude” of the author. Our contemporaries are constantly dealing with unprecedented situations. Question marks, therefore, can symbolise the current phase of our history. Throughout this book, radically new situations are analysed, before appropriate questions are phrased.

At a time when people commonly debate on the long-term effects of human activities without considering the probable transformations of Homo, one cannot avoid a preliminary question: How to reach an audience made up of female and male open-minded people who are turned towards the future but have not yet realised that the important period surrounding birth has been radically transformed during the past decades?

In the age of cultural blindness related to overspecialization, The Future of Homo is also a training tool to think across boundaries.

Related Link(s)The Future of Homo ? New book looks at the thinking around childbirth