We are proud to announce the release of a new title from Maize Books, Fostering Reasonableness: Supportive Environments for Bringing Out Our Best, edited by Rachel Kaplan and Avik Basu.
We humans are difficult animals. We are the source of environmental degradation, the culprits of resource decline. We are reluctant to trust and easily angered. However, we are also the source of inspiration, compassion, and creative solutions. What brings out the reasonable side of our capacity? The Reasonable Person Model (RPM) offers a simple framework for considering essential ingredients in how people, at their best, deal with one another and the resources on which we all rely. RPM is a hopeful and engaging framework that helps us understand and address a wide diversity of issues. The 20 chapters of Fostering Reasonableness provide the conceptual foundations of the framework and applications examining contexts as diverse as a region, organization, the classroom, finding common ground in resource planning, education in the prison environment, greening in the inner city. This book was put together to encourage a way of seeing, a way of understanding and examining circumstances that might lead to more wholesome, adaptive, and effective means of addressing the big and little issues that depend on humanity’s reasonableness.
“Fostering Reasonableness explains how we can encourage more sensible behavior in society. It offers a wealth of knowledge relevant to creating environments that support our fundamental desires to understand, explore, master, and take meaningful action.”
–Adam Grant, Wharton professor of management and psychology, and New York Times bestselling author of Give and Take
This book is freely available to read online. Print copies of the book may be purchased from Amazon.
Rachel Kaplan is the Samuel T. Dana Professor of Environment and Behavior, School of Natural Resources and Environment, University of Michigan.
Avik Basu is a Lecturer and Research Area Specialist in the School of Natural Resources and Environment, University of Michigan.