Works by
Jeremy Rifkin
(Visionary Activist, Writer)
[1943 - ]

Children

• Stuart Little 2: The Joke Book (2002)

Non-fiction

• The European Dream: How Europe's Vision of the Future Is Quietly Eclipsing the American Dream (2004)
  The national bestseller that shows how the American Dream is languishing, surpassed worldwide by a powerful alternative in the lifestyle of the new Europe.

• The Hydrogen Economy: The Creation of the Worldwide Energy Web and the Redistribution of Power on Earth (2002)
  The message of The Hydrogen Economy is resoundingly simple: The earth is depleting its oil reserves and even the most generous estimates show oil reserves peaking in about forty years. The specter of global warming and the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in the oil-rich regions of the earth worsen the problem considerably. The answer, asserts Rifkin, is to embrace a new energy source that is just now gaining public attention: hydrogen.
  
  This abundant element, found everywhere on earth including in air and water, can be transformed, using sustainable methods, into a potentially limitless form of clean-burning fuel. But this potential will founder unless we act now to create the necessary global infrastructure before the factors above overtake us. If we embrace this momentous opportunity, Rifkin says, we will also be able to reinvent the global economy as one in which an inexpensive energy grid provides affordable, efficient fuel for virtually everyone on earth. If we fail, our current economic regime-built exclusively on fossil fuels-will collapse. As the concept of a hydrogen-based future grows in the news, The Hydrogen Economy will lead the way.

• The Age of Access: The New Culture of Hypercapitalism, Where all of Life is a Paid-For Experience (2000)
  Imagine waking up one day to find that virtually every activity you engage in outside your immediate family has become a "paid-for" experience. It's all part of a fundamental change taking place in the nature of business, contends Jeremy Rifkin. After several hundred years as the dominant organizing paradigm of civilization, the traditional market system is beginning to deconstruct. On the horizon looms the Age of Access, an era radically different from any we have known.

• The Biotech Century: Harnessing the Gene and Remaking the World (1999)
  In The Biotech Century, bestselling author Jeremy Rifkin examines the emerging biotech revolution that has captured the world's attention. Biochips, cloning, and genetic mapping and engineering are among the new biotechnologies that are allowing scientists to redirect the evolutionary wisdom of millions of years of life on earth. These technologies offer a cornucopia of potential benefits in fields ranging from agriculture to medicine, but very troubling issues are being disregarded, denied, and overlooked by both the scientific community and the media. In a state-of-the-art account of what is currently possible, what is being developed, what is being imagined, and the potential repercussions, Rifkin provides an opinion that is not generally expressed in the ebullient reports given to the public. He examines how these discoveries will fundamentally transform our economic systems and our civilization. The Biotech Century is a fascinating portrait of the new era in economics, science, and technology upon us and is certain to become a standard reference source on biotechnology.

• The End of Work: The Decline of the Global Labor Force and the Dawn of the Post-Market Era (1994, 2004)
  The most significant domestic issue of the 2004 elections is unemployment. The United States has lost nearly three million jobs in the last ten years, and real employment hovers around 9.1 percent. Only one political analyst foresaw the dark side of the technological revolution and understood its implications for global employment: Jeremy Rifkin.
  
  The End of Work is Jeremy Rifkin's most influential and important book. Now nearly ten years old, it has been updated for a new, post-New Economy era. Statistics and figures have been revised to take new trends into account. Rifkin offers a tough, compelling critique of the flaws in the techniques the government uses to compile employment statistics.
  
  The End of Work is the book our candidates and our country need to understand the employment challenges-and the hopes-facing us in the century ahead.

• Beyond Beef: The Rise and Fall of the Cattle Culture (1992)
  "There are currently 1.28 billion cattle populating the earth. They take up nearly 24 percent of the land mass of the planet and consume enough grain to feed hundreds of millions of people. Their combined weight exceeds that of the human population on earth."
  
  Beginning with this startling and unsettling set of facts, Jeremy Rifkin interweaves anthropology, history, sociology, economics, and ecology in a brilliant and devastating examination and indictment of the cattle culture that has come to shape and warp our world.

• Voting Green: Your Complete Einvironmental Guide to Making Political Choices in the '90s (1992) with Carol Grunewald Rifken
  An indispensable political handbook for evaluating candidates' "green quotient" in the 1992 elections. The book includes a list of the most important legislation that has been introduced in the past few years; details the voting record of each member of Congress; and includes a questionnaire designed to determine candidates' allegiance to the green agenda.

• Biosphere Politics: A New Consciousness for a New Century (1991)

• The Green Lifestyle Handbook: 1001 Ways to Heal the Earth (1990)
  Twenty-three environmental experts have placed the survival of the earth in your hands.
  
  Authoritative, wide-ranging, and comprehensive, The Green Lifestyle Handbook suggests hundreds of steps that all of us can take in our personal lives to develop a green lifestyle at home, in our diet, at the marketplace, in the office, on the road, in our communities, at our places of worship, and in our leisure pursuits. It offers an alternative way of living and acting that will help create a sustainable future for ourselves and the planet.

• Time Wars: The Primary Conflict in Human History (1987)
  Time Wars is for everyone who wonders why, in a culture that is so intent on saving time, we find so little time left for ourselves and for each other.

• Declaration of a Heretic (1985)

• Algeny: A New Word, A New World (1983)
  Algeny is a challenging and controversial reevaluation of Darwinism, a critique of the coming era of bioengineering, and a critical examination of the way we view our relationship with nature. Jeremy Rifkin, author of the best-selling Entropy, reasons that our decision to develop biotechnology is potentially far more dangerous than our decision to split the atom. Beyond the promise of miracles may lie the reality of extinction.

• Entropy: Into the Greenhouse World (1980, 1989) with Ted Howard
  Prevously titled Entropy: A New World View (1980)
  Entropy will strike a resounding chord for everyone who wonders why "nothing seems to work anymore" and why solving one crisis usually leads to another even larger crisis. It is a hard-hitting, accessible, impeccably credentialed, and absolutely essential primer to the world we live in and, more important, to the world as we will shape it in the decades to come.

• The Emerging Order: God in the Age of Scarcity (1979) with Ted Howard
  America has entered an age of scarcity: The "unlimited wealth" on which the American dream is based is now clearly a delusion, and the coming bad years have plunged the nation into a spiritual void.
  
  In this provocative book, the authors provide a blueprint for American culture that is staggering in its implications. Beyond being yet another indictment of the liberal welfare state, their thesis points to a major cultural reformation in which religion will play a leading role in the rearrangement of our nation's priorities. Today's Christian renewal movements — particularly the Charismatics and evangelicals — could end up challenging the assumption behind the state's economic definition of man, namely, that we are all wholly predictable materialists, driven by a consuming desire to maximize profit and consumption. Such a viewpoint has been used to justify the unrestrained pillage and exploitation of the natural world.

• The North Will Rise Again: Pensions, Politics and Power in the 1980s (1978) with Randy Barber
  This is is an eye-opening look at economic power in America today and the political struggle among the major power blocs — the unions, the corporate/financial community, the northern industrial states, and the sunbelt — to control it. Jeremy Rifkin and Randy Barber provide a completely new approach to solving the growing economic crisis in America and answer the questions millions of Americans, particularly workers in the depressed Northeast, are asking about it. They argue that the economic decline of the industrial North and of organized labor are intertwined, the crux of the problem being the massive migration of capital from North to South and abroad. A substantial part of this capital comes from some $400 billion of employee pension funds: the very money designed to protect the economic security of the workers is being used to destroy it.
  
  The authors have documented an array of astounding facts about the way the American economy operates and have developed a strategy for revitalizing the labor movement as well as the industrial North.

• Own Your Own Job: Economic Democracy for Working Americans (1977)

• Who Should Play God?: The Artificial Creation of Life and What It Means for the Future of the Human Race (1977) with Ted Howard
  In 1953 two young biologists succeeded in cracking the DNA code, unlocking the secrets of the basic genetic structures of all life. Now, only twenty-five years later, scientists possess the awesome power to upset billions of years of natural evolution. With the discovery in 1973 of recombinant DNA-a laboratory technique for splicing together genetic material from unrelated organisms to manufacture new and unprecedented life forms -genetic engineers can create monstrosities beyond imagination. In a few years, they will be able to propagate a super-race of beings as easily as they will be able to create a docile, subhuman breed of servants and slaves. Scientists claim that in ten years they will be able to clone an unlimited number of exact replicas of any living organism from a single cell of its body. Their research may already have produced new renegade bacteria and viruses that could destroy all life on this planet.
  
  Who Should Play God? is the first full-fledged report on recombinant DNA research in America-what it is, how it developed, where it may take us, and who is leading the way. A glimpse at any aspect of the issue readily shows how precariously we are perched on the genetic powder keg: Leading genetic engineers are proposing that only people with superior genotypes be licensed to have babies. Corporations engaged in present recombinant DNA research have the right to own and sell all new life forms that they create in their laboratories. Experimenters are exploring the possibility of increasing brain size to produce a new super-species of human beings. If this unbridled research and experimentation continues, the question of the future of life on this planet becomes painfully simple: Who will be chosen for life in the post-evolutionary world? And who will do the choosing?

• The Great Bicentennial Debate: History as a Political Weapon (1976)
  A record of the debate between Jeremy Rifkin and Jeffrey St. John, held at St. Olaf's College, Minnesota, 1976.

• How to Commit Revolution American Style, Bicentennial Declaration (1973) with John Rossen