Barbara Ward

Barbara Ward (Baroness Jackson of Lodsworth) (1914-1981)

British economist and author, futurist and global planner. Chief interests included sustainable environments, ending poverty, global economies and the development of Third World nations. Pioneer of sustainable planning. Was a Catholic and after being cured of cancer in the 1940s she said it was due to the involvements of Padre Pio. Influenced by RBF. [wikipedia] [google]

town.edu/dept/speccoll/cl211.htm">The Barbara Ward Papers at Georgetown include various correspondences, including more than 700 letters written to her mother. [quotes]

Books and writings

• Spaceship Earth (1966)

  Mix of sustainability and Catholicism.

  In the world at large, the millions will be born. The settlements will grow — in squalor and violence, or in work and hope. The whole world — linked by its communications, its airlines, its hijackers and its terrorists — has really only one choice: to become a place worth living in or face ‘the way to dusty death.’ And where else do people live save in their settlements? So where else is the salvation to begin?

• Only One Earth: The Care and Maintenance of a Small Planet

  Co-authored with Rene Dubos. Global sustainability and economics.

• Nationalism & Ideology (W. W. Norton 1966)

• The Rich Nations and the Poor Nations (W. W. Norton 1984)

• The Angry Seventies: The Second Development Decade: A Call to the Church (Pontifical Commission: Justice and Peace 1970)

• Five Ideas that Change the World (W. W. Norton 1959)

• Are today’s basic problems religious?, Moral order in an uncertain world
  (University Press 1953). The Mott Foundation Lectures.

• It can be done: An approach to the problem of world poverty (G. Chapman 1965)

• Britain’s interest in Atlantic Union (Friends of Atlantic Union 1954)

• Democracy, east & west (Bureau of Current Affairs 1947) (Background handbook)

Articles and references

“The Third World Urban Forum: ‘Spaceship Earth’ spiralling irreversibly into the urban era.“ (2006)

“Following the vision of Barbara Ward” [photo]

For further reading