The question is not whether we are going to trash the planet. The question is whether we are going to trash ourselves as a species. That’s the only conclusion that can be drawn from last week’s publication by the United Nations Environment Program of GEO-4 (available online here, news article summary here). What’s interesting [...]
I spent some of the weekend in Newcastle (or more precisely Gateshead) at the DOTT ‘07 exhibition which marked the close of this ambitious two year project. Three essential lessons for me, which won’t be surprising to those who know the work of John Thackara, who directed the project:
Sustainability is about flows, not stuff
Those flows [...]
The futurist Richard Watson kindly added a comment to my recent blog about the World Futures’ Society ‘top trends’ pointing me towards his ‘extinction timeline’. It’s designed to provoke rather than predict (well, there are no future facts), and deserves a little more prominence.
I’ve been meaning to blog for a couple of weeks on David Bowen’s intriguing article in the FT about General Motor’s uncharacteristic response to strong criticism by New York Times’ columnist Thomas Friedman. Instead of calling their lawyers, they went online. Bowen’s article draws some lessons from the story.
If this is true, it’s alarming. The German energy consultancy Energy Watch Group [EWG] says in its latest six-monthly oil report (report and executive summary can be opened in pdf from here) that global oil production peaked in 2006 - and has since declined quite sharply.
EWG’s conclusions are based on production data rather than information [...]
I have a chapter in Scenarios for Success, edited by Kees van der Heijden and Bill Sharpe, and just published by Wiley. The book came from a meeting of the Oxford Futures Forum aabout eighteen months ago, and includes, I think, quite a lot of innovative material on scenarios techniques and methods. (The editors [...]
The World Future Society has released its top ten trends for ‘2008 and beyond’, from its journal The Futurist. It’s a slightly odd list, and - as with all such lists - in a slightly odd order. I’ve grouped them below to try to make some of the obvious connections, and added my own commentary.
If [...]
It would be nice to be able to say something positive about this. But in the space of less than a week, there have been three separate reports which in their own ways have each emphasised how sharp - and how stuck - the differences are between between poor and richer in the UK.
What happens if the pervasive chemicals in the everyday products we buy and use are the reason that we generally feel below par so much of the time? It could cause a backlash by consumers who increasingly regard their well-being as important to them. The thought comes both because of the wave of stories about [...]
Remiss of me not to mention that 6th October - last Saturday - was the day when the planet went into ecological debt this year; or in other words that we’re now using up resources which the earth isn’t able to replace. The new economics foundation (nef) marked the date with a report (free, but [...]
