More Visions
Editor's Note: This article is part of a regular section in Solutions in which the author is challenged to envision a future society in which all the right changes have been made.
"What if the crisis of 2008 represents something much more fundamental than a deep recession? What if it’s telling us that the whole growth model we created over the...
Suppose we could move gloriously and quietly along in our own comfortable car compartment some 20 feet high between the trees, yet with no engine running, no fossil fuel use, no greenhouse gas emissions, and no need to watch the road (Figure 1). Or, we could zip along in channels dug just below ground level and topped with translucent covers. No...
In 1987 when the United Nations’ Brundtland Report, Our Common Future, appeared to worldwide fanfare, its slogan of “sustainable development” reassured environmentalists, who focused on the term “sustainable,” while pleasing business interests, who understood “development” to mean continued material growth. It seemed we could have it all. But many...
Editor's Note: This article is part of a regular section in Solutions in which the author is challenged to envision a future society in which all the right changes have been made.
From New Zealand’s position now in the year 2050, in a state of strong sustainability, it is clear that its citizens were quite unready in 2009 to embrace the concept...
The year is 2100 and I am attending the annual meeting of the Global Council of Peoples in the newly regenerated Amazon basin. Inspired by Costa Rica, the first nation in the world to dismantle its military and redirect public investments toward human development and conserving natural resources, the indigenous peoples of Latin America were early...
A flurry of articles in recent years shows that loss of knowledge about the past may have contributed to an acceptance of other losses, such as declines in biodiversity. I first identified this form of collective amnesia in a 1995 article describing how fisheries biologists assess changes in biomass abundance. Every generation begins its conscious...
A new very advanced virtual reality system just released reminds me of a holodeck on Star Trek. The “reality” it simulates is generated by a cross between a real-time systems simulation model of the biophysical environment, an agent-based personality simulator (a super-Sims), and an advanced “future search” consensus-building system. Participants...
Where does real change begin? Let’s say, for a moment, that it begins in the Appalachian coalfields, a place that, in 2010, has already lost nearly everything. I set my story here for two reasons, and neither have anything to do with despair. First, I find it easier to give a vision focus, and easier still if the focus is a landscape I have come...
It’s the year 2100, the atmospheric CO2 level is subsiding back toward 350 parts per million (ppm), and the best is yet to come. Beset with a host of global problems just a century ago, our generation rose to the challenge. Here is our story.
It was 2010. We were young people wobbling on the edge of a new decade, and we felt almost crippled by...
Let’s imagine for a moment that we’re at 2100, and the atmospheric CO2 level is slowly subsiding back toward 350, and the worst is over. Let’s try to figure out how we got there—reverse-engineer a century of halting but ultimately decisive progress.
The first decision, clearly, was the most important. In 2011, after 22 years of hemming and hawing...
