The decision by the British Home Secretary Jacqui Smith to reclassify cannabis as a Category B drug, despite the opposing views of her expert advisers, has reminded me of the chaotic state of Britain’s drugs policy. It is an area where policy has remained completely immune to evidence - as one ‘killer chart’ demonstrates.
One of the observations of last year’s State of the Future report (which I blogged about here) was that organised crime was one of the the three biggest threats to global security and prosperity. Misha Glenny’s new book McMafia (’a journey through the global criminal underworld’ 
comes to a similar conclusion - arguing that [...]
One of the things you learn working as a journalist is that most news is predictable - a point satirised by Michael Frayn in his outstanding novel The Tin Men in the 1960s. But sometimes headlines do still surprise you. One such was the news that British car exports had reached record levels last year.
The most interesting new word I’ve heard so far this year is ‘solastalgia‘, buried in some notes that Matt Jones made at a recent lecture by Geoff Manaugh of BLDGBLOG. It was coined five years ago by an Australian, Glenn Albrecht, and seeks to capture notions of place-related distress. Albrecht was quoted in an Australian [...]
One of the things you notice when you work with stakeholders on futures projects is that some professional cultures seem to find it harder to engage with than others. Economists in particular seem to find futures anathema. I’ve just stumbled on a plausible explanation as to why.
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 [...]
There was an article in Technology Guardian last week about an Irish innovator who was developing a prototype of a wave power generator in the Galway Bay. It captured well the obsessive nature of much innovation. But from a futures perspective the most interesting part of the article was a passing comment by a [...]
Let’s face it, futurists mostly love robots. The word (from the Czech robota, meaning servitude or drudgery, coined in the 1920s), the history of the idea (back to the Greeks, through Leonardo, to Frankenstein), the associations. So maybe it’s not surprising that one of the most intriguing stories I’ve read recently - and meant [...]
I was at a seminar this week looking at the impact of population changes on the future of the countryside (Chatham House rules, if not Rule, so that’s probably all I can say on the event itself) where it became clear that some of those involved in the discussion hadn’t really had the opportunity [...]
For those of you interested in the literature of utopias, and dystopias, there’s an interesting article in a recent issue of The New Atlantis (’a journal of technology and society’ looking back at Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, and how it was received on publication and afterwards.
