In this age of instant communication and biotechnology, and on this ever-smaller planet, what kinds of problems have we created for ourselves? And, once we identify these problems, how do we tackle them in a world where the accustomed nation-state methods may be reaching their natural limits?

In High Noon, J.F. Rischard challenges us to solve the problems of the twenty-first century with a new approach to global problem-solving. Defining and then offering a brief overview of the twenty most important and urgent global problems, Rischard finds that they all have two things in common: They're getting worse, not better, and the standard strategies for dealing with them, such as international treaties and on-and-off gatherings of governments, are woefully inadequate to the task. The real problem, in other words, is that in our increasingly crowded, fast-moving, interconnected world, we don't have an effective way of addressing the problems that such a world creates. Our difficulties belong to the present and the future, but our means of solving them belong to the past.

Rischard proposes new vehicles for global problem-solving that would be acknowledged by governments but that would function as extra-governmental bodies devoted to particular problems. Their powers would not be legal but normative: They would produce globally recognized standards and would then monitor and single out the nations and organizations that were not cooperating.

No previous book has presented such a unified appraisal of this century's global problems or offered such a consistent and well-defined approach to solving them. With its clear-eyed urgency and refreshing specificity, High Noon is an agenda-setting book that everyone who cares about the future must read.