Facts : 1 Living in a high opportunity, high risk society Giddens has vigorously pursued the theme of globalization in recent years
Facts : 2 He sees the growing interdependence of world society as driven not only by the increasing integration of the world economy, but above all by massive advances in communications
Facts : 3 As he has noted, when he delivered the BBC Reith Lectures, just before the turn of the century, the Internet was in its infancy
Facts : 4 Now it has expanded in a wholly unprecedented way - linking people and organizations across the world on an everyday level, but also intruding deeply into everyday life
Facts : 5 An increasingly interconnected and wired-up world offers many advantages and benefits
Facts : 6 Both on the level of opportunity and risk we are in terrain human beings have never explored before
Facts : 7 No other civilization before the advent of modern industrialism was able to intervene into nature to even a fraction of the extent to which we do on an everyday basis
Facts : 8 Climate change, Giddens says, constitutes a fundamental threat to the future of industrial civilisation as it spreads across the globe
Facts : 9 Given that is the case, he asks, why are countries around the world doing so little to counter its advance? Many reasons are involved, but the prime one is the historical novelty of humanly induced climate change itself
Facts : 10 No previous civilisation intervened into nature on a level remotely similar to that which we do on an everyday level today
Facts : 11 We have no previous experience of dealing with such an issue and especially one of such global scope, or of the dangers it poses
Facts : 12 Those dangers hence appear as abstract, and located at some indefinite point in the future
Facts : 13 We are likely put off responding adequately to climate change until major catastrophes unequivocally connected to it occur; but by then by definition it will be too late
Facts : 14 In his latest work, Giddens has returned to the subject of the European Union, discussed in 2007 in his book Europe in the Global Age and in a diversity of articles
Facts : 15 In Turbulent and Mighty Continent: What Future for Europe? he discusses the likely future of the EU in the wake of the world financial crisis
Facts : 16 Giddens writes as a committed pro-European, but accepts that fundamental reforms must be made if the EU is to avoid stagnation or worse
Facts : 17 The coming of the euro introduced economic federalism among the
