nd2011 futurist

Forecasts, Trends, and Ideas about the Future www.wfs.org November-December 2011

Outlook 2012: More than 60 Forecasts for the Decade Ahead, page 29

Moving from Vision to Action in Pursuit of Solutions, page 51

Why Reconnecting with Nature Is Essential, page 41

Investigating the Future Like a Detective, page 47

A Report Card on Global Challenges, page 24

PLuS: WORLD TRENDS & FORECASTSVirtual Games and Real-Life CurrencyUnwasting EnergyThe Return of “Smell-o-Vision”?Editing the Genome

A month after the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami, volunteers from a “lost generation” help communities find and build their lost futures. 6

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Lost and Found in Japan

November-December 2011Volume 45, No. 6

ARTICLES

© 2011 World Future Society. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or part without written permission is prohibited. THE FUTURIST is a registered trademark of the World Future Society. Printed in the U.S.A.

THE FUTURIST (ISSN 0016-3317) is published bimonthly by the World Future Society, 7910 Woodmont Avenue, Suite 450, Bethesda, Maryland 20814, U.S.A. Included with membership in the World Future Society (dues: $79 per year for individuals; $20 for full-time students under age 25). Subscriptions for libraries and other institutions are $89 annually. Periodicals postage paid at Bethesda, Maryland, and additional mailing offices. • POSTMASTER: Send address changes to THE FUTURIST, 7910 Woodmont Avenue, Suite 450, Bethesda, Maryland 20814. • OWNERSHIP: THE FUTURIST is owned exclusively by the World Future Society, a nonpartisan educational and scientific organization incorporated in the District of Columbia and recognized by the U.S. Internal Revenue Service as a nonprofit tax-exempt organization under section 501(c)3 of the Internal Revenue Code. • CHANGE OF ADDRESS: Write or call Membership Department at the Society. 1-800-989-8274.

A magazine of forecasts, trends, and ideas about the future

WorldFuture 2011 report. Page 51

16 LostandFoundinJapanBy Patrick TuckerWhile the world turned its attention to the frightening prospects of a nuclear ca-tastrophe in post-tsunami Japan, another crisis was being dealt with, quietly, hum-bly, and with pragmatic determination.

24 UpdatingtheGlobalScorecard:The2011StateoftheFutureBy Jerome C. GlennThe world could be better off in ten years than it is today, but only if decision makers can work together to meet global challenges, according to The Millennium Project.

29 Outlook2012Environmental threats and energy source opportunities; in vivo organ and tissue printing and buildings that self-adapt to weather fluctuations. These forecasts and more appear in THE FUTURIST’s annual roundup of thought-provoking ideas.

41 ReconnectingtoNatureintheAgeofTechnologyBy Richard LouvA best-selling author argues that our relationship with our natural environ-

ment is in jeopardy, imperiling our future well-being. But the growing trend of social networking may in fact inspire new tools to help us restore nature to our lives.

47 InvestigatingtheFuture:Lessonsfromthe“SceneoftheCrime”By Charles BrassFuturists investigate clues and evi-dence to attempt to answer difficult questions, much like crime-scene in-vestigators. But while CSIs try to de-termine things that have already hap-pened, futurists look to what may yet happen, and what we can do now to influence it.

51 TheSearchforGlobalSolutions:MovingfromVisiontoActionBy Cynthia G. WagnerWhat does it take to get an idea launched or a problem solved? At the World Future Society’s 2011 conference, the answer was inspiration, collaboration, and the energy of forward-thinking people.

BOOKS

60 HowtheRecessionHasChangedtheMiddleClassA book review by Patrick TuckerThe 2008 recession was hard on everyone, but it did not distribute its woes evenly, says Don Peck, author of Pinched: How the Great Recession Narrowed Our Futures and What We Can Do About It.

DEPARTMENTS

Nurtured by nature. Page 41

2 TomorrowinBrief

4 Feedback

6 WorldTrends&Forecasts:Gaming,Engineering,Medicine,Energy,InformationSociety

14 SalutetoOurContributors

57 ConsultantsandServices

67 FutureActive:NationalEcologicalObservatoryNetwork(NEON),InstituteforDefenseAnalyses

68 AsTweeted:Jobsolescence

COVER PHOTOGRAPHS BY PATRICK TUCKER; DESIGN BY LISA MATHIAS

Tomorrow in brief

Metal Theft on the Rise?

As the value of metals in-creases, so does the likelihood of theft. But it isn’t just the local thugs ripping gold chains off our necks that we’ll have to worry about.

Metal theft may become one of the biggest criminal activities of the twenty-first century, warns University of Indianapo-lis criminologist Kevin White-acre. Targets may include con-struction sites, vehicle parts, plumbing and electrical equip-ment, and public infrastructure, where thieves see value not just in the manufactured goods themselves but also in their component metals.

“This has redefined theft to me,” says Whiteacre. “You’re no longer stealing a specific item for its value as an item. You’re stealing it for its constit-uent parts.” Whiteacre has cre-ated a Web site, Metaltheft.net, as a repository of news and research on the phenomenon.

Source: University of Indianapolis, www.uindy.edu.

Virtual Lab Rats

The use of laboratory animals has long helped researchers study complex systems, such as the interplay of genetics and en-vironmental factors in disease formation. But these animals need to be fed and housed.

Now, researchers may use computer models with inte-grated data sets to simulate animal physiology. A project to create a “virtual physiological rat” is under way at the Medi-cal College of Wisconsin in Mil-waukee. The project will allow computational biologist Daniel Beard and his team to predict the interaction of a variety of factors within an entire physi-ological system.

While it won’t eliminate the need for laboratory animals en-tirely, the project aims to make more efficient use of animal research, to improve under-standing of disease, and to ad-vance the goal of creating a virtual physiological human.

Source: National Institute of General Medical Sciences, National Insti-tutes of Health, www.nigms.nih.gov.

Aquariums as Farms

Future homeowners, college campuses, and other nontraditional “farm-ers” may soon be growing their own fish and vegeta-bles while recycling waste.

An experimental food production system is be-ing tested by SUNY eco-logical engineering gradu-ate student Michael Amadori. The system is a variation on aquaponics (combining traditional aquaculture and hydro-ponic farming) that incor-porates the use of post-consumer food waste.

Instead of being composted (or thrown out), the wasted food is fed to the fish. Then, the fish waste is used for growing veg-

etables. The goal is to reduce the amount of food waste and lower the cost of raising fish.

Source: State University of New York College of Environmental Sci-ence and Forestry, www.esf.edu.

The ivy-covered walls adorning university buildings may soon be powering those buildings as well.

Solar Ivy, developed by Sus-tainably Minded Interactive Technology in New York, is made of small photovoltaic panels that can be created in different shapes and colors to suit the architecture.

Pioneering the application of

Solar Ivy is the University of Utah, which used funds raised by students to install the pan-els in late 2011. The goal is to generate enough electricity for the ivy-covered building to off-set the amount of power it buys from the utility company.

Sources: University of Utah, www.utah.edu.

Solar Ivy, www.solarivy.com.Need a lift up from bed to

chair? The task is awkward and difficult for most humans, and sometimes results in care-givers wrenching their backs. Not so for robots.

As the population of older people needing nursing care begins to soar in Japan and other graying societ-ies, robots are being de-veloped to provide more of the necessary physical support. This may be as many as 40 lifts a day for individual patients.

Japan’s latest RIBA II (Robot for Interactive Body Assis-tance), developed by research-ers at RIKEN and Tokai Rub-ber Industries, has improved functionality, more power, and greater sensitivity. Sheets of sensors lining the robot’s arms and chest allow it to de-tect a patient’s

weight accurately, and thus provide gentler and safer lifts.

Source: RIKEN, www.riken.jp.

Solar Ivy for Walls

2 THE FUTURIST November-December 2011

SUNY-ESF

Checking a tank of tilapia, graduate student Michael Amadori hopes to create an aquaponics system that increases fish and vegetable produc-tion and reduces food waste.

RIKEN

Mechanical assembly of RIBA-II, caregiving robot capable of lifting a 176-pound (80 kg) patient from a futon to a wheelchair.

COURTESY OF TOM MELBURN

University of Utah environmental studies major Tom Melburn, who led the initiative for the Solar Ivy installa-tion, holds a solar panel in front of one of the buildings under consideration for the array.

SUSTAINABLY MINDED INTERACTIVE TECHNOLOGIES

Drawing of solar panel arrays simu-lating an ivy-covered wall.

Robotic Caregivers

Editorial Staff

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AbouT This issue

The term futurist conjures up very different feelings depending on who hears it and the context in which it is heard. Ultimately, it’s a noun defined by an activity—futuring—to engage the future in thought, speech, or deed, and hopefully all three.

A willingness to attack the unknown might be described as an act of futurism, and so in this issue we present my personal ac-count of the volunteer efforts in the city of Ishinomaki, as I en-countered them one month after the March 11 earthquake.

The U.S. media coverage of the Tohoku quake focused primar-ily on the situation at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. Very little attention went to the young men and women who signed up to go north into difficult and hard-hit areas like Miyagi Prefecture to help in any way they could.

In the weeks following the quake, young volunteers—mostly in their twenties—showed up by the hundreds at the Tokyo offices of the nongovernmental relief organization Peace Boat and boarded buses to go north. They came to camp in tents, hand out supplies, and clean mud from the houses and streets of the city of Ishino-maki. On April 8, I accompanied about 150 of them to learn about how social networking and next-generation emergency housing can save lives and restore communities the next time mega disaster strikes. See “Lost and Found in Japan,” page 16.

Each year since 1985, FUTURIST editors have selected the most thought-provoking ideas and forecasts appearing in our maga-zine over the course of the year to go into our annual Outlook re-port. Outlook has spotlighted the emergence of such epochal de-velopments as the Internet, virtual reality, the end of the Cold War, and the role of subprime mortgages in the U.S. housing col-lapse. This past year, we’ve featured the outlooks of experts in a wide range of fields—physics, medicine, education, engineering, economics, and much more—each with valuable insights about the future. A roundup of their forecasts is presented as part of this year’s Outlook on page 29.

Best-selling nature writer Richard Louv (page 41) is a visionary who asks a question that many more of us will find ourselves ask-ing in the decades ahead. How do you preserve a connection to nature in an age dominated by technology?

Jerome C. Glenn’s overview of The Millennium Project’s annual State of the Future report provides a macro snapshot of our rapidly evolving tomorrow (page 24). And finally, in “The Search for Global Solutions: Moving from Vision to Action” (page 51), FUTURIST edi-tor Cynthia G. Wagner describes what happens when more than 750 futurists from around the world come together over the course of a weekend to share, develop, and argue over ideas and outlooks.

—Patrick TuckerDeputy Editor

[email protected]

For Futurists, By Futurists

THE FUTURIST November-December 2011 3

Send your comments to [email protected]

Drowning in the Sea of Data

I believe the core premise of “Treading in the Sea of Data” by Richard Yonck (July-August 2011) creates a circular argument.

The physical meta-phors (“sea of data,” “swimming in data,” “keeping our heads above the rising sea of data,” “save us from drowning”) may se-duce the reader into thinking of data as if it’s some kind of natu-rally occurring sub-stance, a fluid of some sort that’s rising inexo-rably all around us, rather than something humans create by choice.

I think we should devote our tal-ents and technology to reducing, not expanding, the supply of data. We’re long past the point where we could ever access, even for an instant, all of the data that’s accumulating in ar-chives around the world. Every new byte of data that gets added makes some other byte inaccessible.

The unvoiced assumption is that we must develop technology that lets us access everything, never mind that we’d never have the time or attention to read it even if we could get to it. If we can’t locate a scanned copy of that unpaid cus-tomer invoice from 1973, will the business fail?

The circular reasoning that I per-ceive in Yonck’s article runs like this: (1) the amount of data in the world will keep rising exponentially; (2) we’ll have to develop better technol-ogy—and better humans—to keep from “drowning” in it; and (3) this ever-advancing technology will en-able us to produce even more data, at an even faster rate. In other words, the faster we run on the treadmill, the faster it goes.

For me, most disturbing is the ca-sual premise that, “in order to stay afloat, we may eventually find it necessary to transform ourselves.” Terms such as “options for human

augmentation,” “genetic and bio-technology enhancements,” and “brain–computer interfaces” signal where the self-appointed architects

of the new technologi-cal age want to take us. I wonder whether they’ll be willing to have microchips em-bedded in their own skulls, or if that is just for the rest of us.

Karl AlbrechtSan Diego, California

Richard Yonck replies: The metaphor of wa-ter is used in the article to help convey our ongoing and de-

veloping difficulties with informa-tion, though of course, they are not literal descriptors.

But while we cannot actually “drown in data,” we can be over-whelmed by it and lose the ability to utilize it effectively. This goes far be-yond the loss of an individual file or invoice. For instance, a wealth of knowledge lies hidden within vast data sets, waiting to be discovered. Just as we needed the power of the computer to reveal the fractal world in Mandelbrot’s mathematics, we’ll need new technologies to fully mine the secrets of the genome, the pro-teome, the brain, and much more. There is so much we still don’t know about our universe, and much of it is so complex that we’ll never be able to grasp it unaided.

The nature of this aid will most certainly be in the form of technol-ogy. Throughout human history, our machines have extended our grasp, our vision, and our thoughts. Though the exact technologies we’ll use in the future are yet to be deter-mined, the long-term trend has been toward greater integration with our minds and bodies. This progression is based not on coercion but on the competitive forces that drive techno-logical innovation. These same com-petitive forces prevent us from re-ducing the growth of data in the world, even if we wanted to do so.

While unilateral restriction is an op-tion, the lost opportunities would be too great to make this a viable long-term solution.

Assessing the Fukushima Meltdown

At the conclusion of “My First Meltdown: Lessons from Fuku-shima” (July-August 2011), Patrick Tucker writes that, if he and his wife had k n o w n t h e Japanese gov-e r n m e n t ’ s worst-case sce-nario, he might not have left the country.

On the day of the tsunami, I heard that the nuclear power p l a n t h a d a p r o b l e m . When people asked my comment on the situation, I told them that I thought it would probably develop into a disaster that rivaled Cher-nobyl.

I was told that I was stupid. Some asked where I got my nuclear engi-neering degree. Others said that the Japanese had the best and newest in nuclear technology and that the country was prepared to handle this situation.

As time went on, and one reactor after another began to blow, I was still being criticized for being nega-tive on the problem.

As a member of the World Future Society, I have followed articles on nuclear power for years. This is what gave me the hunch that the incident would develop into something greater and more dangerous than we were being told by the powers in charge.

Mr. Tucker may think that he jumped the gun by leaving Japan when he did, but in the long run, he

feedbAck


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Mobile games playable on smartphones, tablet PCs, and other Internet- connected devices are projected to surpass $11 billion in annual revenue by 2014, up from $8 bil-lion in 2011, according to a report by Juni-per Research. Twenty-year-old software guru Brian Wong says that the mobile game space will advance faster than many are predicting.

“There are still a few billion people on the planet that have not touched a mobile device or game. Imagine what happens when they come online,” Wong said at WorldFuture 2011, the annual conference of the World Future Society. Wong was on hand to discuss his new company, Kiip,

which gives players real rewards for their mobile video-game achievements. When players win a level or reach a particularly high score, they can access real-world re-wards, everything from coupons for cap-puccinos to discounts on clothes and even cruises.

“We’re trying to leverage the mass amount of people who are engaging [in these games] to tie with marketing and ad-vertising and make the game emotionally relevant,” said Wong.

One potential catalyst for runaway growth in mobile-game revenue is the ad-vent of a mobile-payment system, which would allow people to make purchases di-rectly from their phones while immersed in video-game play.

“Right now we’re exclusively paying through plastic, bank accounts, cash, and that’s about it,” Wong said. “But soon we’ll get the ability to use our phones to make payments.… Once that happens, [users] can pay without feeling like [they’re] pay-ing.”

Wong also sees an enormous rise in the value of the virtual economy (VE), which roughly refers to exchanges of virtual goods, links, and digital labor such as tweeting. An April 2011 report commis-sioned by the World Bank valued the vir-tual economy at $3 billion at the end of 2009. Wong predicts the VE could grow to $300 billion in the next 10 years.

“These [virtual] goods can be repro-duced into infinity with no physical bar-

Gaming | CommErCE

Virtual Games Bring Currency to Real LifeYoung entrepreneur Brian Wong sees mobile games invading real life.

Brian Wong, 20-year-old entre-preneur and Kiip founder, at WorldFuture 2011.

PATRICK TUCKER


World Trends & ForecastsGaming

Engineering

Energy

Medicine

Information Society

World’s Fair as Smell-O-Vision—though perhaps a more accurate term for the concept would be tele-smell.

An ar t i f i c ia l scent - delivery process raises all kinds of questions. For in-stance, would telesmell add another dimension to works being presented or would it be a superficial distraction that runs coun-ter to the creators’ inten-tions? Would it irrevers-ibly alter the entertain-ment landscape in a positive or negative way? Would it become the “next big thing” or a short-lived fad? And can it be done in a way that’s inexpensive and safe?

Up until this point, the answer to that last question has been up in the air, so to speak. Previous systems were bulky, slow, and crude. They ran out of odor informa-tion quickly or were otherwise unable to reproduce the scent consistently, allowed very little control over the amount and in-tensity of the scents released, and left lin-gering scents that intermingled like cheap perfumes in a crowded subway car.

Home entertainment centers are also get-ting flatter and thinner, and watching vid-eos on portable electronic devices is be-coming more commonplace. Therefore, a viable telesmell system would have to be a small, compact, nonmechanical device compatible with a wide range of hardware, from gaming consoles to smartphones, ac-cording to the researchers at UCSD and Samsung. Thousands of scents can poten-tially be generated on command in such a device, and it would be relatively inexpen-sive, they believe.

The change in the viewing experience would be pronounced. “Instantaneously generated fragrances or odors would match the scene shown on a TV or cell phone,” says Sungho Jin, UCSD Jacobs School of Engineering professor of materi-als science. He gives the example of charac-ters onscreen eating a pizza. “The viewer smells pizza coming from a TV or cell phone.”

Jin tells THE FUTURIST, “The image

rier,” he told THE FUTURIST. “The chal-lenge is to use marketing, scarcity, and exclusivity to make the goods meaningful and valuable.” Of Kiip, he said, “We’re building that.”

Wong is particularly sanguine about the potential of new currency systems built around social network platforms. One ex-ample is Facebook credits, a system that al-lows users to buy virtual goods on all the games across Facebook, such as the popu-lar Mafia Wars, Evony, and Farmville.

“The World Bank report leaves out the companies that have the power to consoli-date virtual value, like Facebook,” said Wong. “The dollar and euro are yester-day’s news. What happens with Facebook credits or other credit systems? That’s the fascinating question.” —Patrick Tucker

Sources: Brian Wong (interview at WorldFuture 2011),

http://kiip.me.

Knowledge Map of the Virtual Economy by Vili

Lehdonvirta and Mirko Ernkvist (World Bank publica-

tions, 2011), Information for Development Program,

www.infodev.org.

Engineering | SCi/tECh

The Smell of Future VideoScent transmission could add another layer to digital and streaming broadcasts.

Virtual-reality enthusiasts have long ar-gued that a truly immersive, multisensory entertainment experience needs to fully en-gage the senses: sight, sound, and smell.

Researchers at the University of Califor-nia, San Diego (UCSD), in collaboration with the Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology in Korea, are working to move such experiences a step in that direction by adding smells to movies, television shows, advertisements, video games, and more. They have developed a new incarnation of an idea that arguably dates back to the ear-liest days of the silent film era and was showcased at the 1939-40 New York

Left to right: Sungho Jin, professor of ma-terials science at University of Califor-nia, San Diego, and graduate students Calvin Gardner (me-chanical engineer-ing) and Hyunsu Kim (materials sci-ence), examine their odor-generating system under a microscope.

UC SAN DIEGO JACOBS SCHOOL OF ENGINEERING


price would depend on how many devices are made and sold,” according to Jin. “It may take several years before such a sys-tem becomes commercialized.”

There are other potential applications for this technology, aside from entertainment and advertising. One possible field that might benefit is telemedicine.

“One can imagine vapor-based therapeu-tic drugs in the future (rather than the cur-rent solid or liquid-based drugs), which physicians can remotely release,” Jin says. Patients would breathe in the medicine through their nose, absorbing it into their system.

Jin highlights a possible security applica-tion, as well: alarm systems. “For example, if you want to repel a burglar at home or at a … government lab, you could design the alarm system in such a way that … you could trigger a severe skunk smell that the typical person could not withstand.”

This brings to mind potential security threats. For example, terrorists could create panic in a public space by transmitting a scent that replicates mustard gas or an-other dangerous chemical. However, Jin believes such an incident is unlikely.

“Odors or poison gases cannot be trans-mitted through phone lines or Internet lines,” he says. “But if a terrorist plants an array of different poison gases [using a similar technological method] in a subway station, the selected poison could be re-leased and stopped in a controlled way by remote electronic signals at selected time intervals. [This] would be an advanced version compared to what the terrorist might be able to do today—in other words, just activate a switch and release one type of gas uncontrollably.” While such a sys-tem would be more sophisticated, there are currently easier ways for criminals to cre-ate panic in the streets.

When and if telesmell ever becomes commonplace, media consumption will likely be the most greatly impacted arena—and it is probable that new uses for the technology will continue to be discov-ered, as well. —Aaron M. Cohen

Sources: University of California, San Diego, Jacobs

School of Engineering, www.jacobsschool.ucsd.edu.

Sungho Jin, UCSD Jacobs School of Engineering

professor of materials science (e-mail interview).

on the screen should be synchronized with electrically triggered odor release from the chamber array attached to the TV or cell phone.” He compares this pro-cess to the way in which sound was added to movies at the end of the silent movie era.

In the proposed system, which the re-searchers refer to as the X–Y matrix odor- releasing system, the scents are stored in a container made from a silicone-based poly-mer called polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS), which has been used to time drug release in patients and has the capacity to act as an on/off switch. A rubberlike substance, PDMS is optically clear, nontoxic, nonflam-mable, and found in everything from con-tact lenses to processed foods. It is stable over a wide range of temperatures, and it protects its contents from contamination or from leaking out.

An electrical current heats the liquid odor solution inside the container, creating enough pressure to push open a tiny hole at the top, just long enough to release the built-up gas. It seals back elastically and stores the solution until the next cycle. The polymer container is long-lasting, and when scent solutions start running low, they could be replaced.

The system features 10,000 odors pre-served in aqueous solutions, each in tiny PDMS containers. The liquids are heated electrically via thin metal wires laid out on a 100x100 cell matrix, which greatly re-duces the system’s bulkiness. Currently, the smells can be sensed only up to 30 cen-timeters (about 1 foot) away.

The researchers are also looking at other ways to improve their prototype. “Such a system should not be too expensive. The

A researcher demonstrates the odor-release pro-cess: An aqueous solution in a silicone- based polymer con-tainer is heated via an electrical current. The heated solution builds pressure, which causes a tiny hole at the top of the container to open, releasing the scent before resealing it-self. The released scent is then mea-sured by an odor detector.

UC SAN DIEGO JACOBS SCHOOL OF ENGINEERING


World Trends & Forecasts

RFID tags, and other monitoring tasks.“There is a large amount of electromag-

netic energy all around us, but nobody has been able to tap into it,” says Tentzeris. “We are using an ultra-wideband antenna that lets us exploit a variety of signals in different frequency ranges, giving us greatly increased power-gathering capabil-ity.”

Tentzeris’s team is also taking advantage

Energy | Earth

Unwasted EnergyPhysicists seek ways to harvest “junk” energy in the environment.

From the vibrations filling the air when jets take off to the waves generated by ra-dio and television transmitters, our envi-ronment is full of largely wasted energy. Now, researchers are seeking ways to cap-ture that energy and turn it into useful sources of electricity.

One of the challenges is that communica-tions devices transmit energy at different frequency ranges, so whatever devices are used to harvest this energy needs to hone in on the right band in order to capture the energy. (Currently, scavenging devices can work in ranges from FM radio to radar.) Then the energy needs to be converted from AC to DC, and stored in capacitors and batteries.

At Georgia Tech, a rectifying antenna used to convert ambient microwave energy to DC power was developed by a team led by electrical and computer engineering professor Manos Tentzeris. The gathered power could be used for wireless sensors,

Manos Tentzeris of Georgia Tech holds a rectifying antenna designed to harvest microwave energy and convert it to electricity. The an-tenna was created using 3-D inkjet printing technology.

GARY MEEK / GEORGIA TECH

Designed particles placed next to each other alter the way mechanical energy moves through them. Physicist Sur-ajit Sen of the Uni-versity at Buffalo be-lieves this principle will help capture more energy that goes to waste in our environment.

SURAJIT SEN / UNIVERSITY AT BUFFALO


Medicine | SCi/tECh

Fighting AIDS through Genome EditingA new treatment might genetically adapt us to resist HIV.

The human immunodeficiency virus that causes AIDS keeps evolving in the face of new drugs. But a new “genome editing” treatment might enable humans to evolve to resist HIV. The treatment uses enzymes called zinc-finger nucleases (ZFNs) to re-move problematic genes, such as that which makes a person susceptible to HIV.

“It’s about giving patients the tools to suppress the HIV virus, to keep the virus count to a low level where it won’t do them any harm,” says Paula Cannon, a UCLA microbiologist and immunologist who is developing a ZFN therapy.

HIV destroys T cells, the blood cells that combat viruses. According to Cannon, T cells’ weak link is a gene called the CCR5. If a T cell does not have the CCR5, HIV cannot harm it.

Cannon and her colleagues applied ZFN to human bone-marrow cells. Bone mar-row is where all blood cells, including T cells, are manufactured. The ZFNs latched onto the cells’ genomes and re-moved the coding for CCR5.

Then the researchers injected these modi-fied stem cells into baby mice. The stem cells merged into the mice’s bone marrow and started producing blood cells.

When the mice reached adulthood, the researchers infected them with HIV. At first, blood samples from the mice exhib-ited high viral counts. About 12 weeks later, Cannon and her team drew blood again and could no longer detect any vi-ruses. The mice’s marrow cells were mak-ing CCR5-negative T cells that were with-standing the virus.

“I think of this as a therapy that will not necessarily completely remove the HIV from their body, but it gives them an HIV-proof immune system so that HIV won’t cause the harm that it normally does,” says Cannon.

She is now trying her ZFN therapy in the

of new 3-D inkjet printing technology to build sensors, antennas, and energy-scav-enging devices on paper or flexible poly-mers.

Another promising source of “junk” en-ergy is the vibrations produced on roads and airport runways.

At the University at Buffalo, physicist Surajit Sen and his colleagues have taken a mathematical approach to studying energy exchange between particles. They discov-ered that altering the surface area of adja-cent particles can change the way energy moves, thus making it possible to control the energy channeled.

“We could have chips that take energy from road vibrations, runway noise from airports—energy that we are not able to make use of very well—and convert it into pulses, packets of electrical energy, that be-come useful power,” says Sen. “You give me noise, I give you organized bundles.”

—Cynthia G. Wagner

Sources: Georgia Tech, http://gtresearchnews.gatech.edu.

University at Buffalo, www.buffalo.edu.

Surajit Sen

UNIVERSITY AT BUFFALO

“IfIhitoneendofthechainofpar-ticles,theper-turbationwilltravelasanen-ergybundle.…Yougivemenoise,Igiveyouorganizedbundles.”

Surajit Sen, theoretical physicist, University at Buffalo



tentially arm the patient with cells that can suppress the infection without drugs,” says Gregory. “It’s the first step to controlling the virus in the absence of medication.”

Either ZFN method may be more reliable than a hypothetical AIDS vaccine or anti-biotic, according to Carl June, a University of Pennsylvania pathologist who is work-ing with Sangamo researchers. June says that HIV mutates repeatedly, so a drug that aims to kill HIV cells will not work for very long. Changes to the patient’s cells, however, could block even mutated HIV pathogens.

“If you can target a patient’s cellular pro-tein rather than a virus, you’re much better off on a long-term factor. It would take a

Los Angeles clinic City of Hope on patients who are HIV-positive and have lymphoma. She chose them because they typically un-dergo chemotherapy for the lymphoma, and prior to chemo, doctors remove some of their bone marrow cells to protect them from the chemicals. They reinsert the cells once chemotherapy is complete. Cannon will apply ZFN to the cells before reinser-tion.

“Because the AIDS lymphoma patients already have these cells taken out and put back in them, it seems like a good place to start. We’re piggybacking on this proce-dure,” she says.

She would not be the first to try ZFN therapy on people. Sangamo Biosciences, a pharmaceutical company, conducted hu-man trials in 2011 on a ZFN therapy that isolates, treats, and reinserts T cells. Philip Gregory, Sangamo’s chief scientific officer, says that most patients exhibited higher numbers of T cells six weeks post-treatment. The modified T-cells were replicating.

“We actually expand the number of T cells from what we take out of the body,” says Gregory. “They survive, whereas the cells that express CCR5 are continually killed by the HIV infection.”

According to Gregory, the increased T cell concentrations are significant be-cause, while antiretroviral drugs suppress the virus, they cannot restore an immune system. ZFN treatments give patients their immune systems back and might even en-able them to wean off their antiretroviral medications.

“If you can protect these cells from infec-tion, you can halt the infection—and po-

Special enzymes called ZFNs (the coil-like green- and copper-colored shapes) bind to a strand of DNA. Researchers are using ZFNs to latch onto specified base pairs of human DNA in order to remove defective genes and replace them with new, healthy ones. Many diseases and disorders, such as AIDS, might be preventable if physicians can master this technique.

JEFF MILLER / SANGAMO BIOSCIENCES


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medical help, Turner-Lee notes. She wants government to ensure that mobile transac-tions are secure, and she wants govern-ment agencies to make more information about their own operations Web-accessible.

“I think it’s a great opportunity with de-vices to ensure transparency and ensure the ability of citizens to access information in real time,” she says.

In February 2011, Turner-Lee co- authored a report on the future of “e-governance” with Jon Gant, visiting res-ident fellow of the Media and Technology Institute at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies. The report calls out the proliferation of mobile devices as a prime medium for a government to com-municate easily and in real time with any of its citizens, whether they own comput-ers or not.

“With the proliferation of mobile de-vices, especially cell and smartphones, governments can gain easy and immediate access to consumers, especially those that do not own a computer, and widen their distribution of significant data,” the au-thors write.

However, the report also expresses con-cern that not enough low-income and un-dereducated Americans have gained Inter-net access. The authors recommend education campaigns to encourage more disadvantaged adults to obtain Internet ac-cess, such as by showing how using a com-puter can make it easier for a citizen to in-teract with Medicare or to navigate Medicaid.

“The outcomes of open government will be the most relevant when they not only reduce the digital disparities that maintain a degraded quality of life for many Ameri-cans, but also offer a road to opportunity for these vulnerable groups,” the report states. “In the end, cities can begin to see healthier, safer, and more viable communi-ties as a result of deeper engagement from all citizens.”

World Bank analysts also see much poverty-relieving potential in cell-phone usage. Laurent Besancon, senior regulatory specialist in the World Bank’s Information and Communication Technologies Divi-sion, says that India gained its first 3G (Web-accessible) phone services in 2009, and that, in that short time span, the num-

very big change in the virus to overcome it,” says June.

ZFN-based genetic treatments could also work against other genetically inherited diseases, June adds, such as sickle-cell ane-mia and immunodeficiency diseases. Doc-tors now treat those conditions with bone-marrow transplants, but patients have to take medications to stop their bodies from attacking the transplanted tissue. ZFN treatment would involve no meds.

“ZFN would be much lower toxicity, since you’re using the patient’s own cells,” June explains. —Rick Docksai

Sources: Paula Cannon, UCLA, www.ucla.edu.

Philip Gregory, Sangamo Biosciences,

www.sangamo.com.

Carl June, University of Pennsylvania,

www.upenn.edu.

Information Society | govErnanCE

Connecting People to Their GovernmentsMobile phones may become valuable tools for empowering the disadvantaged.

The world’s less-affluent populations cannot all afford personal computers, but mobile phones are much more within their financial reach. That’s why Nicol Turner-Lee, vice president and director of the Me-dia and Technology Institute at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, looks to mobile phones and other hand-held devices for Internet access as a great opportunity for empowering disadvan-taged communities and ultimately enhanc-ing democracy.

“Cell phones present a lower barrier to entry to underrepresented groups like low-income minority or elderly who need that constant contact. It’s an easier modus operandi for these communities,” says Turner-Lee.

Low-income adults and young people are increasingly using mobile devices to conduct banking, find jobs, and access

“It’sagreatopportunitywithdevicestoensuretrans-parencyandensuretheabil-ityofcitizenstoaccessinfor-mationinrealtime.”

Nicol Turner-Lee



ber of 3G connections in India has sur-passed fixed broadband connections.

“When we look at the future and we see the cost of platforms decreasing, we see an enormous take-up with smartphones,” says Besancon, adding that he expects Af-ghanistan to get its first 3G phone services sometime in 2012.

Afghans today are already enhancing their interactions with public services through conventional, non-Web mobile phones, according to Siddhartha Raja, a World Bank information and communica-tions technologies specialist. For example, farmers in remote areas can call in and find market prices in major markets across the country. In the near future, residents of ru-ral areas where doctors are sparse will be able to search through their phone’s on-screen directories to find doctors living in cities. Raja expects this to assist in cutting maternal mortality rates.

“The mobile phone might be the first regular interaction with the state that they would ever have,” says Raja.

Meanwhile, in India’s Kerala state, gov-ernment agencies have been making many transactions, such as license and registra-tion renewals, or checking voters’ identifi-cation and locating the correct polling sta-tion to cast a ballot, available over the phone. Raja anticipates more citizen-to-government transactions taking place via mobile phones as phone services and Inter-net services continue to expand.

“This is really something that is allowing anyone with a mobile phone—whether they are poor or rich—to get access to those services that were previously diffi-cult to reach,” says Raja. “In a country like India, the question is how to expand and improve the connections to government, whereas in Afghanistan, the question is how to get citizens connected to their gov-ernment in the first place.” —Rick Docksai

Sources: Nicol Turner-Lee (interview), Media and

Technology Institute, www.jointcenter.org/institutes/

media-and-technology. See also “Government Trans-

parency: Six Strategies for More Open and Participa-

tory Government” by Jon Gant and Nicol Turner-Lee,

Aspen Institute white paper, www.aspeninstitute.org.

Laurent Besancon (interview), World Bank,

www.worldbank.org.

Siddhartha Raja (interview), www.worldbank.org. ❑


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By Patrick Tucker

Lost and Found in Japan

The remains of a house in the tsunami-affected area of Ishinomaki, Japan, on April 8, 2011.

PHOTOS BY PATRICK TUCKER

While the world turned its attention to the frightening prospects of a nuclear catastrophe in post-tsunami Japan, another crisis was being dealt with, quietly, humbly, and with pragmatic determination.

plant, something remarkable took place. More than 1,500 people showed up at the Tokyo offices of Peace Boat, a small nonprofit that quickly became one of the first orga-nizations to actively solicit volun-teers. These volunteers came to go north, through Fukushima prefec-ture, into the tsunami-affected areas.

The mission turned out to be sur-prisingly dangerous. Two nights ear-lier, a 7.0 aftershock hit the area, causing a power disruption at the Miyagi nuclear power plant as well as an overflow of radioactive mate-rial. A tsunami warning was issued and then called down. While the sit-uation was contained within a few hours, it served as a vivid reminder that the safety situation in Ishino-

The date is April 8, 2011. I am on a bus to go into the Japanese city of Ishinomaki, a place that consisted of 162,882 souls before the March 11 tsunami struck. On the day of my journey, 2,283 of the city’s citizens are feared dead, 2,643 are missing, and some 18,000 are in shelters. Be-cause Japan is, perhaps, the most technologically advanced nation on earth, the successes and failures of its attempts to cope with the after-math of this disaster will doubtless be instructive to planners and gov-ernments around the world. I am here to learn whatever I can.

I’ve also come to see a miracle.In the weeks following the Tohoku

earthquake, in the midst of the Kan administration’s various failed ef-forts to contain the situation at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power

Lost and Found in Japan Defense Force) was limiting its activ-ities in the area to mostly helicopter flybys. I meet Yamamoto at the makeshift headquarters the group is sharing with the other relief organi-zations here. In very un-Japanese fashion, he arrives 30 minutes late, reaches out, and gives a big, two-handed shake. “Call me Junior,” he says. He bids us sit on the floor so he can tell us what he’s been doing the past month.

On March 17, after a journey over stricken roads and a difficult night camping in the cold, he and the other members of the Peace Boat ad-vance team woke and walked down-town. The devastation was Cartha-ginian.

“I couldn’t believe this was Japan,” he says. He likens the scene to the Tokyo firebombings: glass, smoke, ruin, a smell of dead fish, a world on its side with its contents bleeding out.

Junior happened to have a contact on the Ishinomaki Social Welfare Committee (SWC). These commit-tees are the primary authority on what happens in any given city. Without local SWC approval there could be no Peace Boat relief opera-tion in the area. The Ishinomaki SWC was functioning at one-third of capacity at the time, meaning two-thirds of the city council’s guiding leadership were missing and pre-sumed dead.

The committee was reluctant at first to allow volunteers into the city. Who would coordinate them? What if they got hurt? What if they were criminals? Junior consulted with an architect who calculated that 150 volunteers, working eight hours a day, seven days a week, would have all the mud cleared out of Ishino-maki in approximately 4,000 days.

“Take every volunteer you can get,” he told them.

Junior has been in disaster situa-tions before; he was with one of the first relief teams to show up after the Kobe quake in 1995. He was the project leader for Peace Boat’s re-sponse in Sri Lanka to the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. But he’s

maki is still precarious. The build-ings that remain standing are se-verely compromised.

Yet, the volunteer rolls are only growing. The first Peace Boat dis-patch consisted of 50 individuals; the next was 100. The group was now preparing to bring up 250 the follow-ing week and as many as 500 in the week after that.

“We have lots of university stu-dents,” says Satoshi Nakazawa, a re-lief worker at Peace Boat who has also volunteered to be my inter-preter during my brief stay in the north. “Lots” is an understatement.

Takashi Yamamoto, or “Junior,” head of the Peace Boat’s relief operation, discusses the future of Ishinomaki.

As I look at the crowd, it seems that about 90% of the volunteers who have shown up are people in their 20s or younger, and most are either students or unemployed.

The Mayor of Ishinomaki

Upon arriving at Peace Boat’s camp, I make arrangements to meet Takashi Yamamoto, project leader for this operation. He was among the first relief workers to put his boots on the ground in downtown Ishino-maki at a time when even the army (referred to in Japan as the Self-

The wife of Sho Nitta, a tsunami survivor, displays a crocus pulled from her backyard.


gone, knocked out during the flood by a runaway Toyota station wagon, which now sits outside in the mud.

This is the residence and former convenience store of Sho Nitta, age 74. When the tsunami hit, he and his wife barricaded themselves upstairs and watched helplessly as people tried to break free from their cars. They saw a woman struggling nearby in the current, so they thrust out a pole, caught her, and pulled her inside their house. The Nittas don’t know her first name, but her family name was Takahashi. They haven’t seen her since that night.

They continue to live upstairs in a gutted apartment. Like almost 85% of Japanese people, they have no earthquake insurance and aren’t cov-ered for the damages they’ve suf-fered. Sho says he wants to rebuild, but I can’t imagine him or his wife pulling the lumber and drywall they will need to fix their home and store. His wife wants to move in with their son in the south. The aftershocks rattle her.

Now, Sho Nitta helps organize neighborhood association meetings every day at 8 a.m. About 50 people show up regularly to receive relief items and to strategize. He, too, wants to get the electricity back in his place, but he needs his neigh-bor’s permission to run a new line through a shared wall. This neighbor was a music teacher and left at the first opportunity. Now, he’s in Sen-dai. All that is left of him is his bro-ken piano keyboard covered in mud, which sits outside in a trash heap.

(Now former) Prime Minister Naoto Kan is touring the city of Ishinomaki today, his first visit since the earthquake. I ask Sho Nitta what he would ask Japan’s prime minister if given the chance. Nitta says his concern is the long-term future. He doesn’t believe that Ishinomaki will ever recover economically. “The shops will try to rebuild,” he says, “but the customers won’t come.” He has food and water, for now, but what happens in a year or two? Will the government be able to support him if he and his wife choose to stay? How will they rebuild?

Five Peace Boat volunteers spend the day pulling mud out of the Nittas’ backyard. After several hours

the elder carried her small dog in the front of her blouse. Finally they found a roof that seemed out the flood’s way and stayed the night there. In the morning, they hiked through knee-deep water to the local evacuation center.

They’re animated as they recite this tale. The part about the dog seems embellished, but I’m disin-clined to press them on this. Of course it’s natural and fitting that they should want to make this story shine a bit after what they went through.

They say that their clients have been asking them when they would reopen their beauty shop. They are hoping to get the electricity back on by the end of the April, and if they can do that, they aren’t going to charge for haircuts for the first couple of weeks.

This willingness to plan ahead for a brighter tomorrow is encouraging, but rare. For many Japanese, the future has become yet another touchy subject. In a poll conducted by Japan’s largest labor organization before the earthquake, 93% of re-spondents said they were worried about what lay ahead for the nation and for themselves. Even after March 11 pushed the country back into recession, people like Yoshie and Mitsuko Haga defy this fatalism.

I ask them how they’re able to re-main so optimistic in spite of everything they’ve lost. “Women are stronger in these situations,” they tell me.

Since the quake, the Hagas have become devoted stewards of the community. They spend their days moving among their neighbors’ houses, checking up on the elderly. One of the roles of the Peace Boat volunteers is to find people stuck or squatting in uninhabitable houses, which on April 10 number 30,000 people, according to reports. But community members like the Hagas are critical to the effort, because they are much better at finding their neighbors than cadres of strange vol-unteers would be.

A few minutes later, I am standing in a shell of a building in downtown Ishinomaki. A single security camera dangles from the ceiling on a loose wire. The south wall of the place is

never undertaken anything like this.The volunteer camp is a tent city

outside of Ishinomaki University, which, Junior acknowledges, will not suffice as a durable solution. He wants to build a permanent housing facility for the kids who keep show-ing up. “You can’t have your people sleeping here in tents in November,” he says. He’s also trying to get money into the hands of the down-town area residents. He wears his new, unofficial role of “mayor of Ishinomaki” well. The life he led be-fore March 11 is becoming a distant memory.

The Peace Boat volunteers are di-vided into 30 teams of five members each, and each team sticks to one mission. For some, this means a full week dealing with people in the areas hardest-hit by the tsunami—people who easily meet the clinical definition of the term traumatized. “When talking to victims, give no in-formation that is not certain. You will start rumors,” the volunteers are told. “This will be very hard work. Be sure to keep your energy level up.”

For the others, it’s seven days of hefting boxes in a warehouse. All the jobs are vital, says Peace Boat, but for the kids who have come here searching for something—some for-mative experience related to the most significant event in Japan’s his-tory since World War II—the ware-house assignment must be a bit of a disappointment.

Resilience by Necessity

Yoshie Haga, age 66, and her daughter Mitsuko, age 40, ran a beauty parlor on the corner of what was one of the busier streets in downtown Ishinomaki before the quake. They had two houses in a family compound. One was insured. One house was not. They are in a good mood when I meet them and are eager to tell me their earthquake story.

The tsunami warning sounded and they attempted to drive to higher ground. They hit traffic and their car was swept up in the wave. They broke out and swam to a nearby rooftop, then went from building to building, all while Haga


mother and her son, got them into a nearby cab, and rushed them to the elementary school. Tominaga’s son is now sitting against a wall, staring at his feet. He appears to be about 20. He is becoming visibly disturbed by our presence. His breathing is accel-erating, and he is clenching his fists. Tominaga describes him as easily ag-itated. After she dropped him off at Minato on the day of the earthquake, she took the cab back home, turned off the gas, grabbed a few posses-sions, got back in the cab, and headed up the hill to the elementary school. A moment later, she and the driver found themselves stuck in traffic.

In the 30 minutes between the ini-tial quake and the tsunami, tens of thousands of people in low-lying areas struck out to find higher

g r o u n d . T h e traffic jam that resulted from too many people

trying to take too few roads at once was enormous. Tominaga saw the choice in front of her clearly; she could stay in the cab and hope the jam cleared or make an attempt to leave on foot. She chose the latter. The cab driver, a man who arguably saved her life and the life of her son and mother, chose the former. She hasn’t seen or heard from him since.

I want to ask her about what her life has been like and what she ex-pects next, but these sorts of ques-tions aren’t likely to yield anything more candid than “Muzukashii desu”: It is difficult. The people of Minato do not indulge in complaint or expressions of unhappiness in front of me or the other reporter who is with me today. This is for our ben-efit. We are guests here, and there is a right and a wrong way to extend hospitality. And then there is the matter of pride. Sadness, like naked-ness, is not for the eyes of the world. I ask her instead what life she would like to be living 10 years from now.

“Just a normal life,” she says. “Nothing elaborate.”

It is not the scope of Sachie Tomi-naga’s hardship that compels sym-pathy, for the world is populated by the poor and the homeless. Rather, it is the abruptness of her loss. In her

fall upon the local community and the social welfare councils. They will appeal to the government for finan-cial support, but all the important decisions will be made at the local level. This, in part, explains why so many residents chose to stay in dam-aged housing despite the lack of wa-ter, heat, or electricity. When the community is broken up and people are shipped to emergency housing situations miles away, reconstruction is impeded for everyone.

This fact seems obvious. Yet, au-thorities rarely consider community cohesion a priority when determin-ing how to house disaster victims, as evinced by the U.S. government’s re-location of New Orleans residents, first to FEMA trailers and then across the country, in the aftermath of Hurr icane Katrina in 2005.

I journey to Minato Elemen-tary School, one of Ishinomaki’s re-lief centers. Exactly one month be-fore my arrival, the tsunami’s wave—here reaching 16 feet high and thick with flotsam—trampled through the school’s first floor. When I climb the stairs I see that several cars still litter the temple cemetery behind the school, an indi-cation of how high, forceful, and dangerous was the wave that crashed through here.

The refugees housed in the school’s upper stories have been sep-arated into rooms on the basis of neighborhood. They have daily meetings, also at 8 a.m., to distribute food items and discuss the where-abouts of friends and neighbors.

A board displays requests for in-formation about people who have not been found, and application forms for government housing assis-tance sit beneath an open window. These are necessary to score a spot on the waiting list for a government-subsidized hotel room or a tempo-rary house, of which the Ishinomaki authorities have plans to build 150. Some 8,000 families have applied for temporary housing, a number ex-pected to reach 10,000.

Sachie Tominaga is one such appli-cant. She was at a friend’s place when the tsunami warning sounded. She sprinted home, found her

of hard work, they are able to leave the couple with a few square feet to erect scaffolding to repair their back wall. Nitta’s wife says she probably won’t replant what was in the gar-den, but she’s grateful. Extremely grateful. An orange crocus has sprung up beneath the Toyota that came through her wall. She picks the flower and holds it up so all the vol-unteers can see. We all make too much of it.

We have to.

The Reinvention of Community

The Nittas have been lucky, you might say. They haven’t lost anyone and aren’t technically homeless. They also exemplify the challenges Japan will face as the country tries to put this place back together. The na-tion’s population is the second old-est in the world. In the tsunami- affected prefectures of Iwate, Fukushima, and Miyagi, an average of one in four people is over the age of 65.

This fact becomes very apparent at Ishinomaki’s relief centers. Residents are allocated to rooms according to neighborhood, not name. In the ini-tial days after the disaster, American television reporters made a point to mention how “orderly” the refugees were keeping the relief quarters. Many journalists were quick to credit the inherent goodness of the Japanese people, as though the in-habitants of this island nation pos-sess a rare dignity gene absent from the common DNA. While flattering, these explanations also traffic in cul-tural stereotypes of the Japanese as rigid and obsessed with discipline—caricatures that have not always served the Japanese well.

The simple decision to house evac-uees alongside their most immediate neighbors—recreating little villages block by block—likely contributed to the safe and calm atmosphere in the relief centers. Members of a commu-nity are the most likely to know who lives where, who might be suffering from diabetes or Parkinson’s, and how to reach them.

Almost all of the tsunami survi-vors I encountered felt personally responsible for reconstruction. The job of fixing damaged structures will

“Sadness, like nakedness, is not for the eyes of the world.”


continued on page 22

The young Peace Boat volunteers who felt the immediate need to help their fellow Japanese offer an unex-pected view of the country’s social reality—and its future.

Maiko Sugano, age 27, Googled volunteer opportunities and con-tacted several organizations. Peace Boat was the only one to write back. “They seem to take everyone. No ex-perience necessary,” says Sugano. She’s unemployed right now, which, in contemporary Japan, carries a cer-tain degree of shame. She’s clearly bright. Her English is flawless. Her 10-year goal is a simple one: She wants to feel more capable. She was worried about the radiation from Fu-kushima, but not enough to let it

stop her. She wants nothing but to hold on to this experience, to absorb it into her. “What happened here will be forgotten so easily. People will stop donating. Next month, who knows, something else might hap-pen. If I see it with my eyes, I will take it seriously at least. I will re-member it.”

Sugano and many of the young and underemployed volunteers might be referred to as a “lost gener-ation.” Originally an expression that referred to men and women who came of age during World War I in the United States, the term first came into usage in Japan after the bursting of the real-estate bubble in the 1990s, and the moniker “lost generation”

has latched itself to various succes-sive graduating classes ever since.

For 20 years now, the story has been the same: The biggest and most stable companies—the ones still of-fering a clear path to reliable middle-class income—only recruit fresh out of university and only pick the top students. The young people who aren’t snapped up, who willingly di-verge from the white-collar career course or don’t seem to match the corporate ideal because they are so-cially awkward, different, or just of the wrong gender, often spend dec-ades bouncing from start-up to start-up, from one small company job to the next.

“Those hired as contract workers

The Earthquake Generation


usually have no hope of full em-ployee status in the Japanese corpo-rate world,” says Michael Dziesinski, a sociology fellow at the University of Tokyo. “The employment issue for Japanese youth is a broken postwar school-to-work system for young adults, and as a result, some less- resilient youth fall through the cracks,” says Dziesinski. The result: Nonstandard employment—refer-ring to part-time, freelance, or just dead-end work—has doubled since the 1980s and today comprises one-third of the Japanese labor force.

After World War II, Japan forged a reputation for social cohesiveness, egalitarianism, and strong middle-class job growth. As Japan’s ties to the United States grew stronger through the 1990s, the Japanese economy has come more and more to resemble that of the United States in its most unenviable aspects. Japan’s income inequality is higher than that of many other wealthy countries, such as Norway, Sweden, and even India. The 2008 recession only exacerbated this trend, as many thousands of temporary and contract workers lost employment, bringing the poverty rate up to 15%. A few years ago, this disparity inspired the coinage of the term kakusa sakai, which might be interpreted to mean “disparate society,” or “society with-out evenness.” Another new expres-sion to describe economic stratifica-tion is kachigumi soshite makegumi: society of winners and losers.

“The attainable Japanese dream began to disappear 30 years ago, in the eighties. We don’t know where the next Japanese dream lies,” says Tokyo University demographics ex-pert Yuji Genda.

Peace Boat volunteer Issey Tamaku, age 20, is a politics student at Keio University. He lost his aunt and un-cle to the tsunami. When he learned that his school had canceled classes because of the earthquake, he, too, Googled volunteer opportunities and found Peace Boat. He went to high school in South Korea and cred-its this for his perfect English. He says that, compared to Korea, Japan “doesn’t get out enough. We’re too content to stay here. We need better English instruction. These kids are learning English but they can’t speak

it.” Still, he’s optimistic about the future of Japan. “I have to be,” he says.

Kenji Yasuda, a student from Yo-kahama, age 22, is wonderfully frank about his motivation. He was capti-vated by the scenes on his television and now he wants to know how ex-istence here compares to his comfort-able life back home. He says he needed to contribute something and so he will be shoveling mud for the week. “People in Tokyo are getting back to ordinary life,” he says. “Al-ready, pachinko parlors are full. They’re losing memory.”

Koike Shinya, age 20, works as a house painter. He doesn’t know what he wants to do in life except, one day, go to Boston. He’s volun-teering now because he wanted to play a role in the most significant event to take place in Japan in the last 50 years. “We are a country of very nice people, but some of that is only on the surface. When a crisis like this happens, you can see people for what they really are,” he says.

Another 20-year-old, Takumi Thomas, is a university student in politics and media, with aspirations toward being an announcer. He was motivated by a mixture of curiosity and its separate, murkier, altruistic cousin, “a desire to help.” Like al-most every volunteer here, he began searching online for volunteer op-portunities immediately after the di-saster. Peace Boat was the first to write back and accept the offer.

Tsubabasa Shinoda, age 20, is from Kanagawa Yokohama. He’s a law student and works an unpaid intern-ship in an advertising agency. Like many of the volunteers in the tent city, he says he got on the bus be-cause he was “afraid of being indif-ferent.” It seems he’s struggling to do the right thing, groping for the proper response to an event far larger than anything he’s experi-enced in his lifetime, an event to which he feels intimately bound.

Besides Peace Boat, there are sev-eral other nongovernmental organi-zations operating in the area. A group called AP Bank sent up 100 volunteers for the weekend. The Red Cross was running a hospital. But Peace Boat appeared to be winning the contest to send as many volun-

teers as possible, which enabled them to cover the gaps left open by other, well-funded relief groups. Herein lies the first lesson of the tsu-nami: Expect a flood of volunteers and respond rapidly to marshal their energy.

The natural human response to a terrible news event like the Tohoku tragedy is complex. Groups like the Red Cross work to convert that reac-tion into a financial contribution as quickly as possible through televised appeals and banner ads.

Peace Boat put out a solicitation within weeks of the disaster, when the interest level was still high. It campaigned through its own net-work, through Facebook, mixi, and even the Tokyo blogger community. The message went viral because it connected with what the broader public actually wanted to do in re-sponse to the scene playing out on their televisions: shovel, repair, com-fort, change the situation in a visible and tangible way—in a word, act. Clicking a banner ad does not have the same effect and never will.

On April 9, no other private orga-nization in the affected area was tak-ing as big a risk, either financially or in terms of safety, as was Peace Boat. Even the Japanese army began the relief process by carefully assessing the situation and writing a manual before distributing food and sup-plies. Peace Boat did the reverse: It started sending volunteers and then writing their safety manual based on the feedback they received.

Peace Boat was also spending far more than it was taking in. In nor-mal years, it’s an educational tour outfit, ferrying kids around the world for high-priced educational excursions on chartered boats (Peace Boats). After the 1995 Kobe earth-quake and the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, the organization raised money and collected supplies, but it has never attempted an operation of this size or scope. Financially, the or-ganization may not survive this, its grandest moment.

This character of impulsive self-lessness reflects the attitudes of the young volunteers who have signed up for this excursion. I found it re-peated in the survivors.

—Patrick Tucker


nami to show that huge wave events create color patterns, detectable at high altitude using special lenses. These patterns can forecast the direc-tion and scope of the tsunami wave. The finding could give emergency workers in tsunami-vulnerable areas an extra hour to prepare.

Perhaps the most important lesson of the March 11 disaster is that we need to change the way we respond to disaster victims immediately fol-lowing destructive events. Too often, the initial response of those in gov-ernment charged with managing the suddenly displaced population is to relocate them many miles away.

The short-term need to take citi-zens out of harm’s way undermines the long-term goal of restoring their lives and communities. The thou-sands of displaced Ishinomaki resi-dents needed to be physically close to their neighborhoods, and to one another, in order to rebuild.

Now meet David Lopez, a Balti-more architect who’s pushing a new approach to emergency housing. His focus: shelter solutions that allow communities to stay together, as close to their original dwellings as possible, after disasters. It’s a mis-sion he pursued in Haiti following the 2010 earthquake.

Lopez teaches a class on emer-gency housing at the Maryland Insti-tute College of Art. Last May, part of the course work for his students was to design a transitional housing re-sponse to an earthquake. The win-ning project transformed various bits of debris from fallen structures into a cluster of houses where the old ones once stood, thus solving simultane-ously (though not entirely) the twin problems of handling the debris and quickly acquiring cheap materials. At a cost of less than $3,100 per house, the winning scheme would cost less than what the Japanese gov-ernment was spending to build emergency housing units offsite.

This small improvement over the current status quo could make a dra-matic difference in the lives of the people of Ishinomaki. Given the choice between abandoning their neighborhood and staying—perhaps uncomfortably—in a broken house with no water or heat, most of the men and women I came across chose

populated nation, it will again bring with it death, destruction, and de-spair. But each of these can be less-ened through the intelligent applica-tion of technologies already in existence and readily deployable.

Think back to the Hagas on the af-ternoon of the earthquake. The tsu-nami warning has just sounded. Like thousands of others in Ishinomaki,

they head out by car only to meet traffic, the inevitable result of too many people seeking to use the same outlet at once. They’re swept up by a wave and barely survive. According to anecdotal accounts, fatalities on March 11 were part icular ly heavy among people stuck in motor ve-hicles.

G o r d o n J o n e s , CEO of Guardian Watch, knows that, while a warning bell

does give enough information to spur action, it doesn’t provide enough data to make a real decision. He’s developed a mobile app that al-lows anyone with a smartphone or video streaming device to get a vi-sual read on a disaster playing out in their area in real time.

The app makes use of the fact that people rely on social networks even—and perhaps especially—dur-ing disasters, when the speed of Twitter makes mainstream news look glacial in comparison. There are already more than 200 million cell phones with either photo or movie capability. It’s a function we use for leisure, shooting video of our pets or our friends’ stupid skateboard tricks. But, in a disaster, combined with the right social network and pointed in the right direction, this enormous global web of cameras takes on con-siderable value. Such an app would have allowed the Hagas to pinpoint the location of the wave behind them and the traffic in front of them before they got into their car.

Combine that small breakthrough with a recent finding from the Uni-versity of Illinois: Researcher Jona-than Makela used the March 11 tsu-

quiet, respectful humility, she is a living testament to the fact that the destitute do not usually earn their misery through lack of discipline and poor exercise of choice.

Tomorrow, classes at Minato Ele-mentary are scheduled to resume. Four of this room’s new residents

have arrived. A group of boys, ages 7 to 10 or so, stand by the door beside their parents. They are shyly staring at a bank of cubby holes.

Tominaga and her neighbors will have to leave this room to make way for incoming students. She’s not sure where she’ll be sent, and she still has to put her things in order. “I have to go,” she says. She bows low and apologizes. We bow low in return and thank her. She leaves to comfort her son, pack away her few posses-sions, and prepare herself for an-other cab ride to a place that is not home.

Beyond Survival

Events like the March 11 earth-quake and tsunami in Japan illus-trate just how little control we have over the future, despite our actions. Contrary to common hubris, you cannot plan for the unthinkable. You can only pay attention, listen, and learn in order to build stronger, react smarter, survive better when the un-foreseeable occurs. The tsunami is al-ready helping researchers, inventors, and designers to do just that.

Whenever the next tsunami hits a

Sachie Tominaga, at the Minato Elementary relief center, the day before the resumption of classes.


continued from page 19

been living in a windowless cargo truck so he can better assist in the clean-up and management of relief items.

With some cajoling, Yamashita ad-mits that the government seemed slow in its response to the disaster, particularly in its handling of food. The Self-Defense Force didn’t begin distributing rice and bread in Ishino-maki until the first week of April, nearly three weeks after the tsunami.

Yamashita is reluctant to offer a more critical assessment of the Kan administration’s response to the event, or the government’s focus on the nuclear power plant. In situa-tions like these, he says, the burden of both relief and repair lies first “with the town leadership, then the prefecture government, then the na-tional government.”

It’s this self-imposed role of guardian that has kept him in Ogatsu, attached to a town that isn’t, cleaning away the remnants of what had been. I ask him what he would like to see this place become in 10 years. This is a softball question that I pitch to a lot of people—an open invitation to be optimistic, to recre-ate Ogatsu from whole cloth. He looks to the tin roof above his head.

“One thing is for certain,” he says. “I will still be here.” ❑

About the AuthorPatrick Tucker is the deputy editor of THE FUTURIST magazine and director of communications for the World Future Society. He spent five months in Japan researching trends and re-

porting for THE FUTURIST (“Solar Power from the Moon,” May-June 2011; “My First Meltdown: Lessons from Fukushima,” July-August 2011; and “Thank You Very Much, Mr. Roboto,” September-October 2011). E-mail [email protected].

month earlier. The remains of once neighboring houses are piled up against its walls.

We have come to serve miso soup, boiled vegetables, and rice to the handful of Ogatsu employees who have elected to stay here and clean debris. Many have been sleeping in improvised houses or beneath the tin roof of the local recycling center, which we use as our kitchen. The place is not much more than a truck hangar that had been transformed into a living room. Mismatched bits of office and home furniture stand around coffee tables. Everything is damp with mildew and rain.

There were 40 town employees who lived in Ogatsu before the earthquake. I am told that two-thirds have vanished and are presumed dead. We prepare soup for 60, not knowing who else is in the area and may show up.

One of the survivors is Hiroshi Yamashita. In the minutes after the earthquake, he went to help evacu-ate the hospital, but then fled to the roof when the waters rose up through the first, then the second, then the third floors. He stayed there for three days, waiting for the ocean to recede. His only company was the sound of the waves lapping against the sides of the building. Night brought with it a darkness he had never before seen and the certain knowledge that many people in the hospital beneath him had perished. Finally, on the third night, the sound of moving water softened and disap-peared. He was able to climb down the next morning, find construction equipment, and set to work cleaning the street.

He lost several friends that day, but his family—two daughters, his wife, and his mother—survived and are staying with relatives. He has

the latter. If there is anything to be learned from the events that played out in Japan after the tsunami, it is that our public response to disaster must accommodate and encourage this vital urge to keep community physically intact.

Guardians of the Now

I become viscerally aware of this need for connectedness on the day I journey with other Peace Boat volun-teers to Ogatsu on the outskirts of Ishinomaki.

Ogatsu was once a town: a collec-tion of homes, offices, and stores laid out on a navigable grid; a place where people rode bicycles to the market, children walked to school while playing handheld video games; where old women swept the dust from their front steps. These are the typical characteristics of a Japanese community, but they do not describe this place. Not anymore.

Ogatsu, as I encounter it, has be-come a white Shinto wedding dress webbed across tree branches. It is a house with its interior—couch, chair, wallpaper—exposed like a diorama. Ogatsu is splinters and metal and cotton and silk chaotically meeting and diverging in a manner that is al-most beautiful but that cannot serve a single human need. The town of Ogatsu is field upon field strewn with bits and pieces of its inhabit-ants’ former lives.

The town of Ogatsu is no more.On March 11, the tsunami here

was at its mightiest, at more than 100 feet high. It descended on this place and chewed through everything in its path. The volunteers with me are encountering Ogatsu for the first time, and they are silent. The van driver, a tough looking fellow with long hair done up in a ponytail, is trying in vain to hide the fact that he is weeping. We pass an upside-down roof stuck on a sandbar, like an over-turned turtle, and a bus parked where city hall once stood.

Among the few structures still standing is the three-story hospital. Every window is broken. It looks like a casualty of economic depres-sion, a factory abandoned 50 years ago, not a first-rate medical facility that was housing patients just a

A bus in the village of Ogatsu now serves as the town hall.


UPDATING THE GLOBAL SCORECARD:THE 2011 STATE OF THE FUTUREBy Jerome C. Glenn


The world could be better off in ten

years than it is today, but only if

decision makers can work together

to meet global challenges, according

to The Millennium Project.

UPDATING THE GLOBAL SCORECARD:THE 2011 STATE OF THE FUTURE

The global population in general is richer, healthier, better edu-cated, more peaceful, and better connected than ever before, yet

half the world is potentially un-stable. Food prices are rising, water tables are falling, corruption and or-ganized crime are increasing, debt and economic in security is growing, climate change is accelerating, and the gap between the rich and poor continues to widen dangerously.

There are potentials for many seri-ous nightmares, but also a range of solutions for each. If current trends in population growth, resource de-pletion, climate change, terrorism, organized crime, and disease con-tinue and converge over the next 50–100 years, it is easy to imagine cata-strophic results and an unstable world. But, if current trends in self-organization via future Internets, transnational cooperation, materials science, alternative energy, cognitive science, interreligious dialogues, synthetic biology, and nanotechnol-ogy continue and converge over the next 50–100 years, it is easy to imag-ine a world that works for all.

The coming biological revolution may change civilization more pro-foundly than did the industrial or in-formation revolutions. The world has not come to grips with the impli-cations of writing genetic code to create new life-forms. Yet, within the next two decades, the concept of be-ing dependent on synthetic life-forms for medicine, food, water, and energy could be quite normal.

After 15 years of The Millennium Project’s global futures research, it is increasingly clear that the world has the resources to address its chal-lenges. What is not clear is whether we will make good decisions fast enough and on a large enough scale to really address these challenges. Hence, we are in a race between im-plementing ever-increasing ways to improve the human condition and the seemingly ever-increasing com-plexity and scale of global problems.

So, how is the world doing in this race? What’s the score so far? In or-der to calculate that, an international Delphi panel selected more than a hundred indicators of progress or re-gress. Indicators were then chosen that had at least 20 years of reliable

ALAIN LACROIX / DREAMSTIME.COM


Livestock’s Long Shadow, the meat in-dustry contributes 18% of human- related greenhouse gases (measured in CO2 equivalent), which is higher than the transportation industry. A large reinsurance company found that 90% of 950 natural disasters in 2010 were weather-related and fit cli-mate change models; these disasters killed 295,000 people and cost ap-proximately $130 billion.

To save the ecosystem, nothing less than cutting CO2 by 80% by 2020, keeping population to no more than 8 billion by 2050, restoring nat-ural ecosystems, and eradicating poverty will be required, argues Earth Policy Institute President Les-ter Brown in his book Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization (Nor-ton, 2009)

Humanity’s material extraction in-creased eightfold during the twenti-eth century. We currently consume 30% more renewable natural re-sources than these systems regener-ate. In just 39 years, humanity may add an additional 2.3 billion people to world population. There were 1 billion humans in 1804, 2 billion in 1927, 6 billion in 1999, and 7 billion today.

Investment in alternative energy is rapidly accelerating to meet the pro-jected 40%–50% increase in demand by 2035. China has become the larg-est investor in “low-carbon energy,” with a 2010 budget of $51 billion. Yet, without major technological breakthroughs and large-scale be-havioral changes, the majority of the world’s energy in 2050 will still come from fossil fuels. Therefore, large-scale carbon capture and reuse has to become a top priority to re-duce climate change.

Meanwhile, automakers around the world are in a race to make lower-cost plug-in hybrid and all-electric cars. Engineering companies are exploring how to take CO2 emis-sions from coal power plants to make carbonates for cement and grow algae for biofuels and fish food. China is exploring telework programs to reduce long commut-ing, energy, costs, and traffic conges-tion.

Falling water tables worldwide and increasing depletion of sustain-ably managed water have led to the

Where We Are Losing

• Carbon-dioxide emissions.• Global surface temperature anom-

alies.• Percentage of people voting in

elections.• Levels of corruption in the 15 larg-

est countries.• Number of people killed or injured

in terrorist attacks.• Number of refugees per 100,000 to-

tal population.

AreAs of UncerTAinTy

It is not clear at the moment where these trends are heading:• Unemployment rate.• Transition to clean energy and re-

newables.• Percentage of global population

living in democratic countries.• Percentage of land area covered by

forest.In comparison with recent years,

the global forecast for the next decade looks better than ever. How-ever, the future may not improve as much in the next 10 years as it has over the past 20 years. In many of the areas where improvements are being made (such as reductions in HIV, malnutrition, and developing country debt), they are not being made fast enough. There are also areas of uncertainty that represent serious problems: unemployment, fossil fuel consumption, political freedom, and forest cover. Some problems could have quite serious impacts, such as corruption, climate change, organized crime, and terror-ism. Nevertheless, this selection of data indicates that the world 10 years from now, on balance, will be better than today.

fAcTors To consider in Assessing The fUTUre

cLiMATe chAnge And eArTh’s re-soUrces: Each decade since 1970 has been warmer than the preceding one, and 2010 tied 2005 as the warm-est year on record. Atmospheric CO2 is at 394.35 parts per million as of May 2011, the highest in at least 2 million years.

According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization’s report

historical data and later, where pos-sible, were matched with variables used in the International Futures model. The resulting 28 variables were integrated into the State of the Future Index with a 10-year projec-tion. A review of the trends of the 28 variables used in The Millennium Project’s State of the Future Index provides a record of humanity’s per-formance in addressing the most im-portant challenges.

The cUrrenT oUTLook for 2020: The MiLLenniUM ProjecT’s scorecArd

Here is a summary of where The Millennium Project’s participants see improvements, where they see back-sliding, and where the trends may be ambiguous.

Where We Are Winning

• The percentage of people with access to clean water.

• The adult literacy rate.• The percentage of people enrolled

in secondary school.• Poverty measured as percentages

of the population in low- and mid-income countries living on $1.25 a day (purchasing power parity).

• Overall global population growth.• GDP per capita.• Physicians and health-care work-

ers per 1,000 people.• Internet users.• Infant mortality rates.• Life expectancy at birth.• Overall percentage of women in

parliamentary governments.• GDP per unit of energy use.• Number of major armed conflicts

with more than 1,000 deaths per year.

• Undernourishment.• HIV prevalence among 15- to

49-year-olds.• Number of countries that have or

are strongly suspected to have plans for nuclear weapons.

• Total debt service in low- and mid-income countries.

• Research and development expen-ditures as a percentage of national budgets.


world economy grew 4.9% in 2010 while the population grew 1.2%, yielding world GDP per capita growth of 3.7%. Nearly half a billion people rose out of extreme poverty ($1.25 a day) between 2005 and 2010, but 900 million (13% of the global population) remain in such dire con-ditions. The number of countries classified as low-income has fallen from 66 to 40, but the gap between rich and poor—both within and among countries—continues to widen. Brazil, Russia, India, and China produced 108 of the 214 new billionaires in 2011, according to Forbes.

China surpassed Japan to become the world’s second-largest economy in 2010. There are more Internet us-ers in China (485 million) than the entire population of the United States (307 million). India is expected to pass China as most populous country in the world by 2030. To-gether, China and India account for nearly 40% of humanity and are in-creasingly becoming the driving force for world economic growth.

heALTh, Medicine, And WeLL- Being: Many populations are aging, due to falling fertility rates and in-creasing longevity. The ability to meet financial requirements for the elderly will diminish as the support ratio (workers-to-retirees) will con-tinue to shrink. Policy makers will need to rethink the concept of retire-ment, and social structures will have to change to avoid intergenerational conflicts.

Another byproduct of longer lives is that there could be as many as 150 million people with age-related de-mentia by 2050. Advances in brain research and applications to improve brain functioning and maintenance could lead to healthy long life (as op-posed to an infirmed long life).

World health is improving, the in-cidence of diseases is falling, and people are living longer, yet many past challenges remain and many future threats are becoming more se-rious. During 2011, there were six potential epidemics. The most dan-gerous is probably the NDM-1 en-zyme that can make a variety of bac-teria resistant to most drugs. On the plus side, new HIV infections de-clined 19% over the past decade; the

other generation, with potential for improvement and innovation as well as continued social unrest and mi-gration.

The social media that helped facili-tate the Arab Spring Awakening is in no small part driving a historic tran-sition from a world comprising many pockets of civilizations barely aware of each other’s existence to a digitally interconnected world.

TechnoLogy And The econoMy: More data went through the Internet in 2010 than in all the previous years combined, and Amazon.com sold more electronic than paper books for the first time that year as well. Hu-manity, the built environment, and ubiquitous computing are forming an augmented continuum of con-sciousness and technology that re-flects the full range of human behav-ior, from individual philanthropy to organized crime. New forms of civi-lization will emerge from this con-vergence of minds, information, and technology worldwide.

Computing power continues to ac-celerate. China currently holds the record for the fastest computer with Tianhe-1. Mira, the 10-metaflop su-percomputer that IBM claims will be operational in 2012, would be four times faster. Just as the autonomic nervous system runs most biological decision making, computer systems are also increasingly making more (and more significant and complex) day-to-day decisions.

Ethical decision making is strug-gling to keep up with the rate of technological change. Despite the ex-traordinary achievements of science and technology, future risks from continued acceleration and global-ization needs to be better forecasted and assessed. At the same time, new technologies also make it easier for more people to do more good at a faster pace than ever before. Ordi-nary citizens initiate groups on the Internet, organizing actions world-wide around specific ethical issues. News media, blogs, mobile phone cameras, ethics commissions, and NGOs are increasingly exposing un-ethical decisions and corrupt prac-tices, creating an embryonic global conscience.

PoverTy And WeALTh: Poverty is on a downward trend globally. The

concept of “peak water,” similar to peak oil. Since 1990, an additional 1.3 billion people gained access to improved drinking water and 500 million got better sanitation. Yet 884 million people still lack access to clean water today (down from 900 million in 2009) and 2.6 billion people still lack access to safe sanita-tion. Half of all hospital patients in the developing world suffer from water-related diseases.

Food prices are at their highest point in history and are likely to con-tinue increasing over the long term if there are no major innovations in production and changes in con-sumption. New approaches like salt-water agriculture and pure meat produced from stem cells or tissue replications could help alleviate this.

Environmental security is increas-ingly dominating national and inter-national agendas and shifting de-fense and geopolitical paradigms, because policy leaders increasingly understand that conflict and envi-ronmental degradation exacerbate each other. The traditional nation-centered security focus is expanding to a more global one due to geopolit-ical shifts, the effects of climate change, environmental and energy security, and growing global inter-dependencies. The Millennium Proj-ect defines environmental security as the viability of an environment to support life. This concept embraces the goals of preventing or repairing military damage to the environment, preventing or responding to envi-ronmentally caused conflicts, and protecting the environment due to its inherent moral value.

Proceeding along the “business-as-usual” path is a threat to environ-mental security. People and organi-zations who got away with wreaking environmental damage in the past are less likely to escape exposure and punishment in the future.

sociAL chAnge: Nearly 30% of the population in Muslim-majority countries is between 15 and 29 years old. Many who were tired of older hierarchies and high unemployment, felt left behind, and wanted to join the modern world brought change across North Africa and the Middle East in 2011. This demographic pat-tern is expected to continue for an-


porting global policies that are im-plemented at national and local levels.

The global financial crisis and the efforts to resolve it have clearly dem-onstrated the need for global sys-tems of analysis, policy formation, and policy implementation. Nation-state decision making worked well during slower and less interdepen-dent times. However, the future is expected to be far more interdepen-dent than today, with even less lee-way between problem recognition and solution. Hence, it will require improved global governance.

Economic growth and technologi-cal innovation have led to better health and living conditions than ever before for more than half the people in the world, but unless our financial, economic, environmental, and social behaviors are improved along with our industrial technolo-gies, the long-term future is in jeopardy.

Governments should create sys-tems of resilience and collective in-telligence and should use national “State of the Future Indexes” for their budget and policy processes. Potential decision makers should have a keen grasp of foresight meth-ods. They should be hardheaded idealists who can look into the worst and best of humanity to create and implement strategies of success.

The world can be a far better place—but only if individuals, groups, nations, and institutions make the right decisions. We need a multifaceted, compellingly positive view of the future toward which hu-manity can work. ❑

About the AuthorJerome C. Glenn is the executive director of The Millennium Project and the primary author of the organi-zation’s annual State of the Future reports over the past 15 years.

This article draws from the most recent report, which may be or-dered from The Millennium Project at www.millennium-project.org. Readers are also invited to share their own conclusions about these trends, as well as read and comment on the short online summaries of the 15 Global Challenges.

in 2010: Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Yemen, northwestern Pakistan, Nax-alites in India, Mexican cartels, Su-dan, Libya, and one classified as in-ternational extremism.

The United States and Russia con-tinue to reduce their nuclear stock-piles, but China, India, and Pakistan are increasing them. According to the Federation of American Scien-tists, by February 2011 there were 22,000 nuclear warheads in the world, 2,000 of which are ready for use by the United States and Russia. And while the number and area of nuclear-free zones are increasing, the number of unstable states is increas-ing (from 28 to 37 between 2006 and 2011).

Although the world is waking up to the enormity of the threat of trans-national organized crime, the prob-lem continues to grow, and leaders have yet to adopt a global strategy to address this threat. World illicit trade is estimated at $1.6 trillion for 2011 (up $500 billion from 2010), with counterfeiting and intellectual property piracy accounting for $300 billion to $1 trillion, the global drug trade at $404 billion, trade in envi-ronmental goods at $63 billion, hu-man trafficking and prostitution at $220 billion, smuggling at $94 bil-lion, weapons trade at $12 billion, and cybercrime costing billions an-nually in lost revenue. These figures do not include extortion or orga-nized crime’s part of the $1 trillion in bribes that the World Bank estimates are paid annually, or its part of the estimated $1.5–6.5 trillion in laun-dered money. Hence, the total illicit income could be $2–3 trillion—about twice as big as all the military bud-gets in the world.

AddRESSing HUmAniTy’S CHAllEngES

The global challenges facing hu-manity are transnational in nature, demanding transinstitutional solu-tions. No government, international organization, or other form of insti-tution acting alone can solve these problems. The world may have to move from governance by a mosaic of sometimes conflicting national government policies to governance by coordinated and mutually sup-

median cost of antiretroviral medi-cine per person in low-income coun-tries has dropped to $137 per year; and 45% of the estimated 9.7 million people in need of antiretroviral ther-apy received it by the end of 2010. Yet two new HIV infections occur for every person starting treatment.

Infant mortality is on the decline, as more than 30% fewer children un-der age 5 died in 2010 than in 1990. Total mortality from infectious dis-ease fell from 25% in 1998 to less than 16% in 2010. On the other hand, health-care costs are increasing, and the shortage of health workers is growing, making telemedicine and self-diagnosis via biochip sensors and online expert systems increas-ingly necessary.

confLicT And criMe: There is, of course, a darker side to technological development. Advances in synthetic biology, DNA research, and future desktop molecular and pharmaceuti-cal manufacturing could one day give individuals the ability to make and deploy biological weapons of mass destruction. To counter this, we will need more-sophisticated sensors to detect molecular changes in pub-lic spaces, along with advances in human development (ranging from improved education to more wide-spread mental health care) and social engagement to reduce the number of people who might be inclined to use these technologies for mass murder.

Another emerging problem is in-formation warfare and cyberwar. Governments and military contrac-tors are engaged in an intellectual arms race to defend themselves from cyberattacks from other govern-ments and their surrogates. Because society’s vital systems now depend on the Internet, cyberweapons to bring it down can be thought of as weapons of mass destruction. Infor-mation warfare’s manipulation of the media can lead to increasing mis-trust.

Meanwhile, traditional military wars have decreased over the past two decades, cross-cultural dia-logues are flourishing, and intra-state conflicts are increasingly being settled by international interven-tions. As of this writing, there are 10 major armed conflicts with at least 1,000 deaths per year, down from 14

AARON M. COHEN


Recent Forecasts from World Future Society for the Decade Ahead

OUTLOOK 2012INTRODUCTION

The U.S. space shuttle program may have ended in 2011, but space travel, exploration, and commercialization will continue well into the future, thanks to private initiatives. Growing en-vironmental threats such as the emergence of new “dust bowls” to rival those of the 1930s will spawn the drive to make this planet more livable; look for advances in fuel cells to enable us to live deep under the sea, for instance. These are a few of the forecasts found in THE FUTURIST magazine in the past year, offering glimpses of possibilities and suggestions for solutions.

The forecasts collected in the World Future Society’s annual Outlook reports are not in-tended to predict the future, but rather to pro-voke thought on how we may begin to shape our own tomorrows today.

The opinions and ideas expressed are those of their authors or sources cited and do not neces-sarily represent the views of the World Future Society. For more information, please refer to the original articles cited. Back issues of THE FUTURIST may be purchased using the coupon in this report or online at www.wfs.org.

Continue the dialogue! Your feedback is welcome. Please e-mail your comments to [email protected].

—THE EDITORS

INSIDE OUTLOOKBusiness and Economics .............. 2

Computers and Automation ........... 2

Energy ........................................... 3

Environment and Resources ......... 4

Habitats ......................................... 5

Health and Medicine ...................... 5

Information Society ........................ 6

Lifestyles and Values ..................... 7

Science and Technology ................ 8

Work and Careers ......................... 9

World Affairs .................................. 9

©2011 World Future Society • 7910 Woodmont Avenue, Suite 450, Bethesda, MD 20814, U.S.A. • All rights reserved. Printed in U.S.A.

OUTLOOK 2012

2 OUTLOOK 2012

rency. —David R. Warwick, “The Case Against Cash,” July-Aug 2011, p. 47

l Commercial space tourism will grow significantly during the coming decade. The Futron/Zogby firm estimates that, by 2021, there will be 13,000 suborbital passengers annually, resulting in $650 million in revenue. Many companies are currently working to make com-mercial space flight a viable industry, Melchor Antuñano, director of the FAA Civil Aerospace Medical Institute, told attendees of WorldFuture 2010. —Richard Yonck, “Challenges and Opportunities in Space Medicine,” Nov-Dec 2010, p. 50

l The “fast fashion” fad may fade. Two competing values drive trends in fashion: the desire for clothes that are fashion-forward and inexpensive, and the desire for clothes that are higher quality and don’t quickly go out of style. The future may favor “slow fashion” as con-sumers look beyond price tags for merchandise that is well made, long lasting, and free of sweatshop labor. —World Trends & Forecasts, Sep-Oct 2011, p. 12

COMPUTERS AND AUTOMATION

l Computers will manage our money for us. Elec-tronically enhanced market management could ward off a lot of would-be recessions and market crashes. Econo-mists might use increasingly sophisticated computer simulation models to identify fault lines and predict trouble before it starts. Even better, computers could perform automated trading for human investors, and in so doing mitigate market risk and unnecessary trades. —Rutger van Santen, Djan Khoe, and Bram Vermeer, au-thors of 2030, reviewed by Rick Docksai, Mar-Apr 2011, p. 56

l The Internet will automatically search itself so you don’t have to. The information you provide Google when you search for something is teaching the search engine more about you and your interests. One day, Google will become so savvy about you that you won’t have to search at all: Your smartphone will pick

BUSINESS AND ECONOMICSl New metrics will supplement GDP and other economic measures to provide better indicators of quality of life. According to a study by Ethical Markets Media and GlobeScan, many people believe that such economic indicators are limited gauges of a nation’s to-tal economic activity, much less the overall standard of living. Critics advocate for a new metric that accounts for environmental and public-health factors, social wel-fare, infrastructure, and other quality of life factors. The United Nations’ Human Development Index is perhaps the best-known and most widely cited alternative. —World Trends & Forecasts, May-June 2011, pp. 11-12

l The U.S. rich–poor gap is another disaster wait-ing to happen—probably around 2020. If the eco-nomic situation looks bad now, just wait until the end of the decade. Present-day concentration of wealth in the hands of too few Americans, and the related problem of out-of-control consumer debt, will lead to economic stagnation and political upheaval with impacts felt across the world. —Robert B. Reich, author of Aftershock, reviewed by Patrick Tucker, Mar-Apr 2011, p. 52

l China’s economy will stop growing and start shrinking later this century. So forecasts economist Daniel Altman, who notes that China is an economic powerhouse now, but structural weaknesses threaten to cause major problems in the long term. Meanwhile, prosperity will resume in the United States and a few other nations that are now lagging. —Books in Brief [review of Outrageous Fortunes by Daniel Altman], Jan-Feb 2011, p. 48

l Environmental sustainability will receive growing attention from economists. According to Ethical Mar-kets Media’s Green Transition Scoreboard, which tracks global private investments in sustainable businesses, the “green economy” continues to grow each year. The Scoreboard projects that there could soon be a cumula-tive $1 trillion annual investment in green businesses. —World Trends & Forecasts, May-June 2011, p. 12

l The United States could transition to a cashless society. Cash is on the way out in the United States, even if policy makers do not actively work to facilitate this transition. However, leaving everything to chance may result in trillions of wasted dollars. Possible mea-sures that could help “nudge” cash out of circulation include imposing a federal tax surcharge on ATM withdrawals and transforming cash into an electronic cur-

BOB ELBERT / ISU NEWS SERVICE

U.S. DRUG ENFORCEMENT AGENCY

OUTLOOK 2012 3

l Artificially intelligent entities will evolve faster and farther than humans. While natural human evolu-tion has slowed, technological evolution is accelerating. Humans may increasingly adapt themselves with tech-nological enhancements in order to keep up the pace. —Steven M. Shaker, “The Coming Robot Evolution Race,” Sep-Oct 2011, p. 20

l Humans will eventually “lose” the race with robots. Even with every technological enhancement available to them, future human beings will not be able to keep up with the evolutionary pace of robotic human-oids with artificial intelligence. The reason: Robots will be unimpeded by insurmountable biological limitations. The best we can do is to learn from and make friends with our robotic competitors. —Steven M. Shaker, “The Coming Robot Evolution Race,” Sep-Oct 2011, p. 23

ENERGY

l A diverse portfolio of energy technologies will replace our reliance on fossil fuels. Scientists are ex-ploring not just wind and solar energies, but also such eso-teric technolo-gies as artificial photosynthe-sis, traveling wave reactors, and mini black holes. —David J. LePoire, “Exploring New Energy Alternatives,” Sep-Oct 2011, pp. 34-38

l Lunar-based solar power production may be the best way to meet future energy demands. Solar power can be more dependably and inexpensively gath-ered on the Moon than on Earth. This clean energy source is capable of delivering the 20 trillion watts of power a year that the Earth’s 10 billion people will re-quire by mid-century. A lunar solar power system such as the LUNA RING (an alternative energy plan from the Japanese company Shimizu) would be the largest public infrastructure project in human history, but it would pay

up information from your environment, anticipate what you’ll want to know, and deliver it automatically. At least, that is the hope of Google developers. Privacy ad-vocates such as Eli Pariser, author of The Filter Bubble, warn of abuses by companies that could profit from such private information. —Eli Pariser, “The Troubling Future of Internet Search,” World Trends & Forecasts, Sep-Oct 2011, p. 6

l A computer program that can measure callers’ stress levels over the phone could help crisis cen-ters respond more effectively during emergencies. Rapid talking, variations in pitch, and changes in breathing rates are among the vocal cues that enable the program to gauge urgency and alert responders who may already be overwhelmed with calls during a major crisis. The system may also prove beneficial in military situations. —Tomorrow in Brief, July-Aug 2011, p. 2

l Robots may learn human emotions by interacting with people. Researcher Lola Cañamero of the University of Herford-shire, England, says that the more interaction with (and feedback from) a human care-giver that a robot has, the stronger the bond becomes and the more emotional expressions it learns. —Tomorrow in Brief, Nov-Dec 2010, p. 2

l Soccer-trained robots will gain enough intelli-gence and mobility to conduct rescue missions. En-gineers are trying to tune robots’ intelligence and motor skills to the point where a team of humanoid droids could play a whole soccer game as a team effectively enough to beat even the best hu-man contenders. The endeavor isn’t just fun and games. It holds practical applications, too: Robots this nimble will be optimally suited for urban search-and-rescue operations and for working as house-hold helpers. —World Trends & Forecasts, Jan-Feb 2011, p. 9

UNIVERSITY OF HERTFORDSHIRE, FEELIX GROWING, WWW.FEELIX-GROWING.ORG

ALDEBARAN ROBOTICS

RANDY MONTOYA / SANDIA NATIONAL LABORATORIES

SHIMIZU

OUTLOOK 2012

4 OUTLOOK 2012

l The dust bowls of the twenty-first century will dwarf those seen in the twentieth. Two giant dust bowls are currently forming—one in Asia and one in Africa. These clear indicators of soil erosion and deserti-fication are caused, in varying degrees, by overgrazing, overplowing, and deforestation. Desertification cur-rently affects 25% of the planet’s land area, threatening the livelihoods of more than 1 billion people in approxi-mately 100 countries. —Lester R. Brown, “Eroding Futures: Why Healthy Soil Matters to Civilization” and “Dust Bowl Redux,” July-Aug 2011, pp. 23-30

l We will use our water more wisely—or else. Water shortages are a problem now and will get worse in years ahead unless we learn to make more efficient use of ex-isting water supplies. Among other things, we should grow more drought-resistant crops, improve our irriga-tion methods, and expand neighborhood and household use of water-purification and desalination systems. —Rutger van Santen, Djan Khoe, and Bram Vermeer, au-thors of 2030, reviewed by Rick Docksai, Mar-Apr 2011, p. 55

l The United Nations estimates that 2.8 billion people will live in water-stressed environments by 2025. According to the Japanese government, safe water reclamation and recycling will be a $1 trillion market by 2025. They consider it a key export area for the future. —World Trends & Forecasts, July-Aug 2011, p. 12

l Nanotech-driven water purification filters could provide fresh potable water to those in water-stressed areas. Japanese manufacturer Nitto Denko’s desalination filter desalinates and purifies water more effectively than any other water filter in existence, but at the moment, the process is too energy-intensive and cost-prohibitive for most developing countries. It uses a reverse-osmosis nano-membrane system. A less energy-intensive process being developed at Stanford Univer-sity involves a silver nanowire filtration system. —World Trends & Forecasts, July-Aug 2011, pp. 11-12

for itself after only 15 years. —David R. Criswell, “Why We Need the Moon for Solar Power on Earth,” May-June 2011, p. 37; Patrick Tucker, “Solar Power from the Moon,” May-June 2011, p. 34

l Ammonia may be worth its weight in oil. Hydrogen is too light to be a practical fuel source in its own right, but it works great if com-bined with nitrogen to form ammonia. If we build enough renewable-energy gen-eration and distribution infra-structure, ammonia might become the world’s first fuel of choice for household and transportation use. —Carl E. Schoder, “A Convenient Truth About Clean Energy,” Jan-Feb 2011, p. 25

l Dig very deep, and you will find enough geother-mal energy to power the world. Geothermal energy plants today generate fairly limited energy, but that may be because they only channel heat from around 200 me-ters underground. The earth is much hotter further down, according to several Norwegian companies and ExxonMobil, who are all planning drilling installations that will tap 5,500 meters to 10,000 meters or more un-derground. Norwegian-based SINTEF says that just a fraction of the heat energy encased at those depths would suffice to power the entire world. —World Trends & Forecasts, Jan-Feb 2011, p. 8

ENVIRONMENT AND RESOURCES

l Urbanization will increase global warming. As the National Center for Atmospheric Research projects, the influx of rural populations into cities, particularly in de-veloping countries, could further raise greenhouse-gas emissions by another 25% by mid-century, irrespective of how high total population climbs. On the other hand, aging populations leaving the workforce in industrial-ized countries may help to reduce emissions and, hence, slow down climate change. —World Trends & Forecasts, Mar-Apr 2011, p. 12

l Robotic earthworms will gobble up our garbage. Much of what we throw away still has value. Metals, petroleum, and other components could get additional use if we extracted them, and robotic earthworms could do that for us. Human “earthworm drivers” will direct them to mine landfills, extract anything of value, and di-gest the remaining heaps into quality topsoil. —Thomas Frey, “More Jobs for Tomorrow,” Jan-Feb 2011, p. 36

NASA IMAGE COURTESY OF JEFF SCHMALTZ, MODIS RAPID RESPONSE TEAM, NASA-GODDARD SPACE FLIGHT CENTER

© JACK ROBERTSON / NORTHWEST HYDROGEN ALLIANCE

OUTLOOK 2012 5

public spaces themselves. —World Trends & Forecasts, Nov-Dec 2010, p. 9

HEALTH AND MEDICINE

l More than half of all baby boomers will live healthy lives beyond 100. So forecasts antiaging physi-cian Ron Klatz. Research suggests that it may be pos-sible to prevent the shortening of telomeres or possibly rejuvenate them. (A telomere is a region of the chromo-some that protects it from deterioration.) If successful, this technique might increase life spans. —Verne Wheel-wright, “Strategies for Living a Very Long Life,” Nov-Dec 2010, p. 13

l Robotic surgical machines will build new organ tissue right in hospital wards. Sev-eral research centers are de-veloping computerized in-struments that will build living tissue layer by layer and implant it directly into human patients. The pro-cess, called bioprinting, could use the patient’s own cells as a catalyst and thereby not only help alleviate demands for new organ donations, but also negate the resistance of many pa-tients’ bodies to transplanted organs. —Vladimir Mironov, “The Future of Medicine: Are Custom-Printed Organs on the Horizon?” Jan-Feb 2011, p. 21

l More people than ever will need medical treat-ment for hearing loss. Society is noisier than ever, and ears everywhere are at risk of damage, warns author and journalist George Prochnik. In his latest book, The Pursuit of Silence, he notes that the ubiquity of back-ground noise—traffic, portable music players, sound systems blaring music in restaurants and shopping malls—is contributing not only to dam-aged hearing, but also to memory loss, reading skills deficiencies, anxiety, insomnia, in-creased blood pressure, and cardiovascular disorders. Prochnik encourages listeners to adhere to the 60-60 rule: Turn the music down to 60% of the full volume or less, and listen for no more than 60 minutes a day. —World Trends & Forecasts, Nov-Dec 2010, p. 7

HABITATSl Advances in fuel cells will enable deep-sea habi-tation. These fuel cells, which will produce electricity directly, with no toxic fumes, are currently being devel-oped for automobiles. They will eventually allow for the exploration and colonization of the undersea world via extended submarine journeys. This could lead to human colonization of the continental shelves and the shallow oceans as well as the development of extensive deep-sea business sectors. —James H. Irvine and Sandra Schwarzbach, “The Top 20 (Plus 5) Technologies for the World Ahead,” May-June 2011, p. 18

l Livable, economically viable manufacturing sites could be built on the Moon. It is feasible to create them within a decade. These sites, or colonies, could process materials on the Moon to create new products. For ex-ample, satellites could be fabricated and lowered to de-sired Earth orbits. This process would cost much less than building satellites on Earth and then rocketing them back up into space. Such sites could turn a profit within 20–30 years and offer huge long-term economic returns. —Joseph N. Pelton, “Finding Eden on the Moon,” May-June 2011, pp. 40-42

l Future buildings may be more responsive to weather fluctuations. “Protocell cladding” that utilizes bioluminescent bacteria or other materials would be ap-plied on building facades to collect water and sunlight, helping to cool the interiors and produce biofuels. The protocells are made from oil droplets in water, which al-low soluble chemicals to be exchanged between the drops and their surroundings. —Tomorrow in Brief, May-June 2011, p. 2

l Cities will use geographic information systems to collect real-time data from citizens to improve ser-vices. One such program already in use in the United Kingdom is Voice Your View. The program allows pe-destrians to record their opinions about their surround-ings into a database via their mobile phones or strategi-cally situated kiosks. The data is then shared with both city planners and the public via Web sites and at the

© HDW

ENVISIONTEC

© JONATHAN ROSS / DREAMSTIME.COM

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6 OUTLOOK 2012

l Music therapy may play a key part in low-cost interven-tions. Studies show that music may change people’s cel-lular environment, boosting immunity and suppressing the expression of genes that are associated with heart disease and other conditions. —World Trends & Forecasts, Sep-Oct 2011, p. 13

INFORMATION SOCIETY

l The next generation of dating sites will enable people to go on virtual “dates” in cyberspace. Like-wise, breakups will happen more often by electronic communications than by in-person discussions. —Arnold Brown, “Relationships, Community, and Identity in the New Virtual Society,” Mar-Apr 2011, p. 30

l The end of identity as we know it: It will be easier than ever to create a new identity or identities for ourselves. All we will have to do is create new avatars in virtual reality. Those avatars will act on our behalf in real life to conduct such high-level tasks as performing intensive research, posting blog entries and Facebook updates, and managing businesses. The lines between ourselves and our virtual other selves will blur, to the point where most of us will, in essence, have multiple personalities. —Arnold Brown, “Relationships, Community, and Identity in the New Virtual Society,” Mar-Apr 2011, p. 34

l Learning will become more social and game-based, and online social gaming may soon replace textbooks in schools. The idea that students learn

l A future “Internet of bodies” will enable doctors to monitor patients remotely. As sensors and transmit-ters shrink in size and are embedded in our bodies, pub-lic health officials will be able to collect information and predict problems, so frail elderly and disabled individu-als will be able to live more independently. —Tomorrow in Brief, Sep-Oct 2011, p. 2

l It’s a boom market for medical tourism. As health-care costs continue to rise in the developed nations, many of their citizens are seeking cheaper care in de-veloping countries’ hospitals. By 2017, 23 million Americans could be spending a combined total of $79 billion annually for care overseas. Developed nations’ health-care leaders worry, however: The trend could cost them heavily in revenue and make it harder for them to recruit new doctors. —Prema Nakra, “Could Medical Tourism Aid Health-Care Delivery?” Mar-Apr 2011, p. 23

l Emotion sensors in our surroundings may help reduce our stress. Built-in stress-sensing electronics and electromag-nets in things we handle daily, such as pens and steering wheels, would provide a counterforce to fidgety movements and help nervous people to calm down. —Tomorrow in Brief, May-June 2011, p. 2

l Nanotechnology and biomimicry offer hope for restoring sight. Flower-shaped electrodes topped with photodiodes to collect light may one day be implanted in blind patients’ eyes to restore their sight. The “nano-flowers” mimic the geometry of neurons, making them a better medium than traditional com-puter chips for carrying photo-diodes and transmitting the collected light signals to the brain. —World Trends & Forecasts, Sep-Oct 2011, p. 18

l Epilepsy sufferers could obtain relief via a com-puter. People with epilepsy will wear compact monitors that will continuously read their brain waves to spot signs of oncoming seizures. When it detects a seizure, the monitor will interface with the patient’s brain to avert it. —Rutger van Santen, Djan Khoe, and Bram Vermeer, authors of 2030, reviewed by Rick Docksai, Mar-Apr 2011, p. 55

UNIVERSITY OF OREGON

COURTESY OF LISA LYNNE

LINDEN LAB

MIGUEL BRUNS ALONSO

OUTLOOK 2012 7

l Accelerating change may accelerate resistance to change. The uncertainties and discomfort that accom-pany rapid changes (such as in new technologies and social structures) often provoke individuals to retreat into rigid belief systems and even aggressive, dysfunc-tional behavior. People may become more apathetic about the future at a time when they need to be more aware and engaged, warn the authors of The Techno-Human Condition. —Braden R. Allenby and Daniel Sarewitz, “The Accelerating Techno-Human Future,” Sep-Oct 2011, p. 32

l New data on the neuroscience of human attrac-tion and bonding will change the way people partner and fall in love. The feeling of romantic love is associ-ated with the brain’s dopamine system for wanting. One company has begun to bottle a perfume that contains oxytocin, the natural brain chemical that, when sniffed, triggers feelings of trust and attachment. —Helen Fisher, “The New Monogamy, Forward to the Past,” Nov-Dec 2010, p. 28

l Human relationships won’t die, but they will change shape. As more people conduct more social in-teraction in virtual space, their relations to each other in physical space will change profoundly. “Nuclear” fami-lies will morph into other arrangements. Communities could see more construction of single-person housing units due to more homeowners having virtual partners instead of live, in-person partners. Virtual marriages might become normal, and the spouses will claim real benefits and legal ties. —Arnold Brown, “Relationships, Community, and Identity in the New Virtual Society,” Mar-Apr 2011, p. 31

l Look for a rise in “lessmeatarianism” as the pub-lic grows increasingly aware of the beef industry’s impacts on the climate. Less meat and dairy in our diets could reduce agricultural greenhouse-gas emis-sions by as much as 80% by 2055, according to the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. —World Trends & Forecasts, Nov-Dec 2010, p. 9

l The future is full of bicycles. As the world keeps urbanizing, people’s health will increasingly suffer from environmental pollution and from sedentary lifestyles

more when they are engaged—as they are when playing games—is helping educators embrace new technologies in the classroom. In addition to encouraging collabora-tions, games also allow students to learn from their mis-takes through trial and error. —World Trends & Forecasts, Sep-Oct 2011, p. 16

l Future libraries will be valued more for services than for book collections. Libraries will become more participatory, and librarians will serve as information fa-cilitators. As learning and knowledge creation become more collaborative and dynamic, library spaces will be used more for community services and less as a place to store books. Readers will share recommendations and feedback, enhancing the knowledge contained in texts. —Books in Brief [review of The Atlas of New Librarian-ship by R. David Lankes], Sep-Oct 2011, p. 52

l Transitioning to a mostly cashless society could reduce crime. Specifically, it would go a long way toward eliminating illegal underground economies and reducing criminal activity. Based on 2009 FBI statistics, eliminating cash robberies would save the United States around $144 billion per year. In addition, identity theft and wire fraud would likely decline, since fraudulently wired funds are most often redeemed in cash in order to break audit trails. —David R. Warwick, “The Case Against Cash,” July-Aug 2011, pp. 46-47

LIFESTYLES AND VALUES

l We will increasingly treat free time as a general social asset. This free time, or “cognitive surplus” of creativity, insight, and knowledge, could be harnessed for large, communally created projects, thanks to the spread of information technology. We’ve gone from a world with two models of media—public broadcasts by professionals and private conversations between pairs of people—to a world where public and private media blend together and where voluntary public participation has moved from nonexistent to fundamental. —Clay Shirky, “Tapping the Cognitive Surplus,” Nov-Dec 2010, p. 21

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PEGGY GREB / USDA—AGRICULTURAL RESEARCH SERVICE

OUTLOOK 2012

8 OUTLOOK 2012

to access information from almost any location at speeds approaching those of wired networks. Simultaneously, embedded networked processors and smart dust—sen-sor networks made up of billions, even trillions, of nodes—will be everywhere, providing real-time data streams about everything, all the time. —Richard Yonck, “Treading in the Sea of Data,” July-Aug 2011, p. 33

l We’ll ward away mosquitoes safely by adopting the smell of their predators. A multidisciplinary team of researchers at the Univer-sity of Haifa in Israel have identified key compounds released by mosquitoes’ predators. Synthesizing these natural chemicals and releasing them in breeding areas could offer an inexpensive, nontoxic alternative to pesticides. —Tomorrow in Brief, Nov-Dec 2010, p. 2

l We will design more devices to gradually degrade back into the parts stream. In his book Shaping Things, Bruce Sterling proposed that, with the right regulatory framework and technology, it might be possible to start readdressing design decisions so that products like cell phones can decompose back into components that can be reused in next-generation devices. —Cory Doctorow, quoted in “Cory Doctorow Meets the Public,” Nov-Dec 2010, p. 22

l Large digital touch-screen displays will take microscopy to the next level. Forty-six-inch or larger multitouch screens will make the act of looking at a sample through a microscope similar to the experience of using Google Maps. —Tomorrow in Brief, July-August 2011, p. 2

l A space elevator could lift people (and materials) from Earth’s surface into orbit. Such an elevator

that do not allow for enough physical activity. Mean-while, resource depletion will accelerate. Local transpor-tation systems that encourage biking and walking could be a powerful antidote to these harmful trends, how-ever. There are encouraging signs of more bike use al-ready, including the creation of bike trails, rising popu-larity of bike tours, and more doctors encouraging elderly patients to bike more often. —Kenneth Harris, “Bike to the Future,” Mar-Apr 2011, pp. 25-28

l Gaming will help improve our ability to make de-cisions. Researchers observe that overconfidence can lead to poor decision making. Now, a Web-based game called World of Uncertainty gauges how confident people are when making decisions, so they can become better aware of their own biases, according to David Newman of Queen’s University Belfast, one of the game creators. —World Trends & Forecasts, July-Aug 2011, pp. 10-11

l Future human societies may be divided between augmented and nonaugmented breeds. Those who can afford technological enhancements, including changes to their DNA, may become so significantly al-tered that they will no longer be able to breed with non-enhanced humans. —Steven M. Shaker, “The Coming Ro-bot Evolution Race,” Sep-Oct 2011, p. 22

SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

l Machine vision will become available in the next 5 to 15 years and grow more sophisticated over time. Its range will ultimately exceed that of the human eye. This technology will greatly enhance robotic sys-tems’ capabilities. —James H. Irvine and Sandra Schwarzbach, “The Top 20 (Plus 5) Technologies for the World Ahead,” May-June 2011, pp. 17-18

l By 2020, the world’s digital output may reach 35 zettabytes (more than a trillion billion bytes). That’s enough DVDs to reach halfway to Mars. In the near future, high-speed wireless technologies will enable us

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OUTLOOK 2012 9

WORLD AFFAIRSl Networks will increasingly become the key to positive political change. The ability to elect a law-maker or lobby for a cause is built around our capacity to network with one another online, according to science-fiction author Cory Doctorow. This is why the issue of Internet access, and how it is controlled or re-stricted, is the most important free speech issue of our time. —Cory Doctorow, quoted in “Cory Doctorow Meets the Public,” Nov-Dec 2010, p. 24

l Climate change threatens to displace as many as 70 million Bangladeshis. Much of Bangladesh is at or near sea level, so if the Intergovernmental Panel on Cli-mate Change’s forecast of a seven-meter sea-level rise this century comes true, possibly 17% of the country could be submerged. That would render 60 million to 70 million Bangladeshis homeless and destroy the liveli-hoods of countless more. Bangladesh is investing heav-ily in flood and storm preparations now, but India’s di-version of major river ways between the two countries could still spell major trouble. —World Trends & Fore-casts, Jan-Feb 2011, p. 9

l The Arctic regions will be hotspots for industrial and demographic growth. Iceland, Canada, Russia, and other far-north locales could see more population growth and commercial activity than even Brazil or China. A number of factors are behind this: Surging populations of job seekers in the developing world; fall-ing populations in the northern countries; growing global demand for oil and other resources; and melting of Arctic permafrost, which would likely hasten human immigration into, and commerce throughout, the re-gion. —Laurence C. Smith, author of The World in 2050, reviewed by Rick Docksai, Jan-Feb 2011, p. 47

l Watch out, St. Louis! The most-endangered place in America is not on the Gulf Coast or California. St. Louis, Missouri, faces a wide variety of potential disasters, ac-cording to Forecasting International’s Owen Davies. As the town resides on the New Madrid fault and the Mississippi River, both earthquakes and floods loom large in St. Louis’s future. Other threats include massive environmental pollution and the highest crime rate in the United States. —Futurists and Their Ideas, Sep-Oct 2011, p. 44

l Look for surprising strategic alliances across the globe. Germany and Russia will forge stronger eco-nomic ties, while Turkey and the Arab states eye Iran more closely as a competitor. Europe’s internal eco-nomic struggles will contribute to the continent’s fading as a global power, while Brazil will exert formidable economic and military influence in Africa. —Books in Brief [review of The Next Decade by George Friedman], Sep-Oct 2011, p. 54

would prove especially useful if a lunar or space colony is built. Once in orbit, gravitational pull is 560 times less. People could exit the elevator and fly to the Moon, Mars, or other destinations via very-low-thrust, high- efficiency propulsion systems. —Joseph N. Pelton, “Find-ing Eden on the Moon,” May-June 2011, pp. 40-42

l No water? No power? No problem. Cheap electric-ity and clean water may soon be possible for remote vil-lages, military operations, and other places without ac-cess to these vital resources. A device using a new aluminum alloy developed by Purdue University re-searchers can split salty or polluted water into hydrogen and oxygen. The hydrogen feeds a portable fuel cell to supply electricity, and the steam byproduct is recap-tured as pure water. —Tomorrow in Brief, Sep-Oct 2011, p. 2

WORK AND CAREERS

l Journalism may soon be taken over by nonjournalists. Professionals from just about any field—law, neurology, astrophysics, investing, etc.—could be valued news writers if they complete some cross-training in journalism. As traditional news report-ing jobs disappear, these cross-training professionals will fill in the gaps and produce news and commentary on their respective fields of work. Readers will flock to them because the writers not only know how to write, but also know their subjects inside and out. —Cynthia G. Wagner, “Emerging Careers and How to Create Them,” Jan-Feb 2011, p. 32

l People could become professional data collec-tors. Terabyters—people who produce a terabyte or more of digital data a day—would be paid generous sums to don high-tech data-collection gear and explore neighborhoods, shopping districts, and city centers. Their sensors would record and process all visual and sensory data about their surroundings, for which com-panies like Google and Microsoft may pay lucrative sums to develop data streams for marketing purposes. —Thomas Frey, “The Coming of the Terabyters: Lifelogging for a Living,” Jan-Feb 2011, p. 35

l With more work done by freelancers, organiza-tions will need full-time professionals to supervise them. Employers large and small will trim overhead to the bare minimum by keeping small cores of staff for only the most essential operations. Meanwhile, most of the nonessential work will be outsourced to freelance help. As projects come up, organizations will contact professional “talent aggregators,” who keep databases of registered work seekers whom they can call up when-ever needed. —Jim Ware, “Careers for a More Personal Corporation,” Jan-Feb 2011, p. 37

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From The Nature Principle, © 2011 by Richard Louv. Reprinted by permission of Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill. All rights reserved.

Reconnecting to Nature in the Age of

TechnologyBy Richard Louv

A best-selling author argues that our relationship with our natural

environment is in jeopardy, imperiling our future well-being. But the growing trend of social networking may in fact

inspire new tools to help us restore nature to our lives.

PHOTODISC


we must think anew and act anew.” That we should; but in the twenty-first century, ironically, an outsized faith in technology—a turning away from nature—may well be the out-dated dogma of our time.

In contrast, the Nature Principle suggests that, in an age of rapid envi-ronmental, economic, and social transformation, the future will belong to the nature-smart—those individu-als, families, businesses, and political leaders who develop a deeper under-standing of nature, and who balance the virtual with the real.

In fact, because of the environmen-tal challenges we face today, we may be—we had better be—entering the most creative period in human his-tory. This is a time defined by a goal to extend the past century of envi-ronmentalism, and to go beyond sustainability to the renaturing of everyday life.

The Connection between Nature and Health

In 2007, naturalist Robby Astrove and I were driving through West

Our sense of urgency grows. In 2008, for the first time in history, more than half the world’s popula-tion lived in towns and cities. The traditional ways that humans have experienced nature are vanishing, along with biodiversity.

At the same time, our culture’s faith in technological immersion seems to have no limits, and we drift ever deeper into a sea of circuitry. We consume breathtaking media ac-counts of the creation of synthetic life, combining bacteria with human DNA; of microscopic machines de-signed to enter our bodies to fight biological invaders or to move deadly clouds across the battlefields of war; of computer-augmented real-ity; of futuristic houses in which we are surrounded by simulated reality transmitted from every wall. Inven-tors and futurists like Ray Kurzweil describe a coming “transhuman” or “posthuman” era in which people are optimally enhanced by technol-ogy. NASA’s Steven Dick describes a “postbiological universe” where “the majority of intelligent life has evolved beyond flesh and blood in-telligence.”

I am not arguing against these concepts or their proponents—at least not the ones who are devoted to the ethical use of technology to ex-pand human capacities. But I do suggest that we’re getting ahead of ourselves. We have yet to fully real-ize, or even adequately study, the en-hancement of human capacities through the power of nature. In a re-port praising higher-tech classrooms, one educator quotes Abraham Lin-coln: “The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy pres-ent. The occasion is piled high with difficulties, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so

E very day, our relationship with nature, or the lack of it, influ-ences our lives. This has always

been true. But in the twenty-first century, our survival—or thrival—will require a transformative frame-work for that relationship, a reunion of humans with the rest of nature. In 2005, in Last Child in the Woods, I in-troduced the term nature-deficit disor-der, not as a medical diagnosis, but as a way to describe the growing gap between children and nature. After the book’s publication, I heard many adults speak with heartfelt emotion, even anger, about this separation, but also about their own sense of loss.

In my most recent book, The Na-ture Principle, I describe a future shaped by an amalgam of converg-ing theories and trends as well as a reconciliation with old truths. This amalgam, the Nature Principle, holds that a reconnection to the nat-ural world is fundamental to human health, well-being, spirit, and sur-vival.

Primarily a statement of philoso-phy, the Nature Principle is sup-ported by a growing body of theoret-ical , anecdotal , and empirical research that describes the restor-ative power of nature—its impact on our senses and intelligence; on the physical, psychological, and spiri-tual health; and on the bonds of fam-ily, friendship, and the multispecies community. Illuminated by ideas and stories from good people I have met, the book asks: What would our lives be like if our days and nights were as immersed in nature as they are in technology? How can each of us help create that life-enhancing world, not only in a hypothetical future, but right now, for our fami-lies and for ourselves?

Richard Louv

AARON M. COHEN


cepted health-care concept in Japan, where it is sometimes called “forest bathing.”

In other research, Li Qing, a senior assistant professor of forest medicine at Nippon Medical School in Tokyo, found green exercise—physical movement in a natural setting—can increase the activity of natural killer (NK) cells. This effect can be main-tained for as long as 30 days.

“When NK activity increases, im-mune strength is enhanced, which boosts resistance against stress,” ac-cording to Li, who attributes the in-crease in NK activity partly to inhal-ing air conditioning phytoncides, antimicrobial essential wood oils given off by plants. Studies of this sort deserve closer scrutiny. For ex-ample, in the study of natural killer cells, there was no control group, so it is hard to say if the change was due to time off work, exercise, na-ture contact, or some combination of influences.

Nonetheless, for Astrove, wilder-ness has helped create a context for healing. It may have strengthened his immune system and offered protec-tive properties that he, and the rest of us, do not yet fully understand.

The Third Ring

Remember those cardboard kalei-doscopes we had when we were kids—how, when you twisted the cylinders, the pieces of colored plas-tic would snap into a vivid pattern? Sometimes the future comes into fo-cus just like that. For me, one such moment occurred at a conference held in New Hampshire in 2007. On that day, more than a thousand people from across the state traveled to chart the course of the statewide effort to connect families with nature.

As hours of productive meetings came to an end, a father stood up, complimented the attendees’ creativ-ity, and then cut to the chase. “We’ve been talking a lot about programs to-day,” he said. “Yes, we need to sup-port the programs that connect people to nature, and yes, we need more programs. But the truth is,” he added, “we’ve always had programs to get people outside and kids still aren’t going outside in their own neighborhoods.” Neither, for that

monster is capable of, so I establish limits. Not staying out too late, eat-ing healthy, not ever smoking.” Avoiding these behaviors as a teen-ager was difficult for him, but re-spect for the virus trumped peer pressure. “Nature is always making adaptations, so why can’t I do the same? I listen. When I hear ‘rest,’ I rest. When I see macroinvertebrates in a stream indicating clean water, that reminds me to pay attention to indicators for my own health. Stum-bling upon a rare plant reminds me of the uniqueness of my situation. No two people are the same in their response to a virus.”

In his role as an educator, Astrove teaches his students that wetlands serve as “nature’s liver.” He relates to systems personally. “The wetlands purify water and trap pollutants.” He explains that the rain forests and other natural places are the source of many of our medicines, that spend-ing time in that world reduces stress. “We feel good from the endorphin release it stimulates, and it inspires us. Inspiration is another giver of health. I go to the woods knowing I will receive healing. And the benefits come in the form of physical, psy-chological, and spiritual gains. It’s a natural high sometimes when I get the feeling of light, energy, and awe.” He looked out the truck win-dow at the passing landscape as he drove. “Now that I’ve been taking meds for some time, sensitive blood tests can’t find the virus; I test ‘unde-tectable.’”

Does research give weight to Astrove’s experience? Possibly. A study of 260 people in 24 sites across Japan found that, among people who gazed on forest scenery for twenty minutes, the average concen-tration of salivary cortisol, a stress hormone, was 13.4% lower than that of people in urban settings.

“Humans lived in nature for 5 mil-lion years. We were made to fit a nat-ural environment…. When we are exposed to nature, our bodies go back to how they should be,” ex-plained Yoshifumi Miyazaki, who conducted the study. Miyazaki is di-rector of the Center for Environment Health and Field Sciences at Chiba University; he is Japan’s leading scholar on “forest medicine,” an ac-

Palm Beach, Florida, on our way to an event promoting the preservation of the Everglades. He told me: “As a kid, I was always glued to the car window, taking notice. I still do this and must sit in a window seat when flying. Looking back, it’s no wonder I’m a naturalist, having trained my senses to detail, images, sounds, and feelings.”

In fifth grade, a school field trip to the Everglades led to his career choice. After college, he surveyed hundreds of miles of the Everglades, to learn about the great river of grass, the threats to it, and its recov-ery. In 1979, when he was 15, Astrove was diagnosed with HIV and hepatitis C, which he contracted from three life-saving blood transfu-sions for a staph infection that had spread from a blister on his thumb. Following the blood test that re-vealed HIV, he was called into the doctor’s office. He found his parents in tears. “The doc sat me down and shared the news. My first words were, ‘What are we going to do now?’”

During the ensuing years, he found himself drawn, more and more, to the river of grass. “It’s hard to explain, but acknowledging the cycles, patterns, and interconnected-ness of the world has provided heal-ing to me,” he said. “Sometimes, I awake in the middle of the night and find myself putting on boots, grab-bing a raincoat and collection con-tainers. I don’t question actions like that. I’m excited to hike in the dark not knowing what I’ll find. It might not be until I hear the call of a barred owl that I realize why I came. Or see-ing a familiar tree that I’ve studied a million times during the day that re-veals something new at night. I go because I trust my instincts, have pa-tience, and allow for things to hap-pen. Well, there’s luck, too. But the same trust and instinct is required to manage a disease. When I haven’t gotten enough nature time, my body tells me. I listen.”

Astrove, who is studying interna-tional public health at Emory Uni-versity, finds HIV biologically fasci-nating. “It’s able to reproduce rapidly and can mutate, always cre-ating the demand for new medi-cines. In a weird way, HIV is elegant, beautiful. I understand what this


natural environments to human health and well-being. For the pro-ponents of that change, going the conventional route to achieve such a policy change could take years. But an expanding network of individual professionals could accelerate that change—and as you read this, that may have happened already.

Similarly, networks of health care and wellness professionals already committed to the nature prescription could change elements of their pro-fessions without waiting for top-down pronouncements. Through peer-to-peer networks, they could change minds, hearts, and eventu-ally official protocol, and they could, through this process, build a funding base for direct-service programs.

When I mentioned this Third Ring notion to the director of the Mari-copa County (Arizona) Parks and Recreation Department, the largest urban park district in the United States, he grew excited—not only about family nature clubs but about the broader context of the Third Ring.

“I have programs right now in my park system for families, but they’re under-enrolled. This could be a way to change that,” he said. Moreover, he faces new budget challenges. By encouraging families to create self-sustaining, self-organizing nature networks, he would be expanding the number of people who use his parks. Just as important, the growth of a Third Ring could translate into future political support for park funding.

Similarly, as large land-trust orga-nizations and governments help neighborhoods create their own nearby-nature trusts, overhead would be small, but their reach would grow. So would the public’s understanding of the importance of the land-trust concept. College stu-dents, those who hope to pursue ca-reers connecting people to nature, could be similarly networked.

The Third Ring could be especially effective in changing the closed sys-tem of public education. At this writ-ing, efforts are afoot to gather “natu-ral teachers” into a national network. These educators, in primary and sec-ondary schools, colleges and univer-sities, are not necessarily environ-

This Ring is based on peer-to-peer contagion, people helping people create change in their own lives and in their own communities, without waiting for funding. This may sound like traditional volunteerism, but it’s more than that. In the Third Ring, in-dividuals, families, associations, and communities use the sophisticated tools of social networking, both per-sonal and technological, to connect to nature and one another.

Family nature clubs offer one on-the-ground example. Using blog pages, social networking sites, and the old-fashioned instrument called the telephone (or smartphone), fami-lies are reaching out to other families

to create virtual clubs that arrange multi-family hikes and other nature activities. An array of free organiz-ing and activity tools is now available on

the Internet for these clubs. They’re not waiting for funding or permis-sion; they’re doing it themselves, do-ing it now.

The California-based organization Hooked on Nature networks people who form “nature circles” to explore their own bioregions. In the San Francisco Bay Area, Exploring a Sense of Place organizes groups of adults who meet on weekends to go on hikes with botanists, biologists, geologists, and other experts on their regions’ natural world. Similarly, the Sierra Club has networked hikers for years.

New Third Ring networks could connect people who are rewilding their homes, yards, gardens, and neighborhoods; neighbors creating their own small, do-it-yourself “but-ton” parks; businesspeople and pro-fessionals, including developers, hoping to apply biophilic principles. These networks, unlimited in their ability to grow, could transform future policies of more traditional professional societies. For example, today’s influential Green Building Certification Institute’s LEED certifi-cation for buildings is almost exclu-sively focused on energy efficiency and low-environmental-impact de-sign. It’s overdue for an update that would go beyond energy conserva-tion to include the benefits of more

matter, are that many adults. He de-scribed his own experience. “A creek runs through my neighborhood, and I would love it if my girls could go down and play along that creek,” he said. “But here’s the deal. My neigh-bors’ yards back up to the creek, and I have yet to go to my neighbors and ask them to give permission to my kids to play along the creek. So here’s my question. What will it take for me to go to my neighbors and ask them for that permission?”

The New Hampshire dad was rais-ing a fundamental question for people of all ages.

What will it take?The goal is deep, self-replicating

cultural change, a leap forward in what a society considers nor-mal and expected. But how do we get there from here? Let me of-fer my Three Ring the-ory. The First Ring comprises tradi-tionally funded, direct-service programs (nonprofits, community organizing groups, conservation or-ganizations, schools, park services, nature centers, and so on) that do the heavy institutional lifting of connect-ing people to nature.

The Second Ring is made up of in-dividual docents and other volun-teers, the traditional glue that holds together so much of society. These two Rings are vital, but each has lim-itations. A direct-service program can only extend as far as its funding will allow. Volunteers are con-strained by the resources available for recruitment, training, manage-ment, and fund-raising. Many good programs are competing for the same dollars from the same funding sources, a process with its own price. Particularly during difficult eco-nomic times, the leaders of direct-service programs often come to view other groups doing similar work as competitors. Good ideas become proprietary; vision is reduced. This response is understandable.

The best programs and volunteer organizations transcend these limita-tions, but doing so is always a struggle.

Now for the Third Ring: a poten-tially vast orbit of networked associ-ations, individuals, and families.

“The goal is deep, self-replicating cultural

change.”


Such a transformation, both cul-tural and political, will come only with a new consideration of human rights. Recently I began asking friends this question: Do we have a right to a walk in the woods? Several people responded with puzzled am-bivalence. Look at what our species is doing to the planet, they said. Based on that evidence alone, isn’t the relationship between human be-ings and nature inherently opposi-tional? That point of view is under-standable, given the destructiveness of human beings to nature. But con-sider the echo from folks who reside at another point on the political/cul-tural spectrum, where nature is seen as an object under human dominion or as a distraction on the way to Paradise. In practice, these two views of nature are radically different. Yet there is also a striking similarity: na-ture remains the “other”; humans are in it, but not of it.

My mention of the basic concept of rights made some of the people I talked to uncomfortable. One friend said: “In a world in which millions of children are brutalized every day, can we spare time to forward a child’s right to experience nature?” Good question. Others pointed out that we live in an era of litigation in-flation and rights deflation; too many people believe that they have a “right” to a parking spot, a “right” to cable TV, even a “right” to live in a neighborhood that bans children. As a consequence, the idea of rights is de-flated. Do we really need to add more rights to our catalogs of entitlements?

The answer to these questions is Yes, if we can agree that the right at issue is fundamental to our human-ity. ❑

About the AuthorRichard Louv is a journalist and the author of eight books about the connections among family, nature, and community. His previous work includes Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Chil-dren from Nature-Deficit Dis-

order (Algonquin Books, 2005).This article was excerpted from his most

recent book, The Nature Principle: Human Restoration and the End of Nature-Deficit Disorder (2011, Algonquin Books of Chapel

Hill).

with parents and we’re talking about getting outside, then the mood is happy, even serene. Parents immedi-ately relax when we talk about that.” During our meeting, she began to make plans for her PTA to start en-couraging family nature clubs.

Social networking, online and in person, has transformed the political world. Online tools are used to raise funds, to organize face-to-face house parties, and to turn out voters. A na-ture-focused Third Ring using those same tools, and ones not yet imag-ined, could create a growing constit-uency for needed policy changes and business practices. It could, in fact, help create a renatured culture.

What if family nature clubs really caught on, like book clubs did in re-cent years? What if there were 10,000 family nature clubs in the United States, created by families for fami-lies, in the next few years? What if the same process in other spheres of influence moved nature to the center of human experience? In such a cul-ture, that father in New Hampshire would be more likely to knock on his neighbor’s door. Or, better yet, one of his neighbors will show up at his door, asking his family to join a new network of neighbors devoted to en-joying nature in their own neighbor-hood. Their first expedition: to ex-plore the creek that runs through it.

Your Right to Nature

To be clear, I don’t believe that permanent cultural change will take root without major institutional and legislative commitments to protect, restore, and create natural habitat on a global basis.

Generous future historians may someday write that our generation finally met the environmental chal-lenges of our time—not only climate change, but also the change of cli-mate in the human heart, our society’s nature-deficit disorder—and that, because of these chal-lenges, we purposefully entered one of the most creative periods in hu-man history; that we did more than survive or sustain, that we laid the foundation for a new civilization; and that nature came to our work-places, our neighborhoods, our homes, and our families.

mental education teachers. They’re the teachers who intuitively or expe-rientially understand the role that nature experience can play in educa-tion. They’re the art teachers, En-glish teachers, science teachers, and many others who insist on taking their students outside to learn—to write poetry or paint or learn science under the trees. I meet these teachers all over the country. Every school had one or two. And they feel alone.

What if thousands of these natural teachers were networked and, through this network, gained power and identity? Once connected, these educators could push for change within their own schools, colleges, and communities. Connected and honored, natural teachers could in-spire other teachers; they could be-come a galvanizing force within their own schools. In the process, they would contribute to their own psychological, physical, and spiri-tual health.

Third Ring networks can reach well beyond the immediate mem-bers. In Austin, Texas, a grade-school principal told me that he would love to include more nature experience in his school. “But you can’t imagine the pressure I’m under now with the testing,” he said. “We can’t do everything.” When I described the family nature club phenomenon, the principal was enthusiastic. I asked if he could provide toolkits—packed with educational material, guides to local parks, and so forth—and en-couragement to children and parents to start their own nature clubs. “I could do that,” he said, and he meant it. He immediately began to think of how the educational ele-ments of these clubs might augment his curriculum.

Earlier that day, in a meeting of leaders from central Texas, a PTA president spoke movingly. “Listen, I’m really tired of going into a room-ful of parents and telling them not to give their kids candy, because of obesity,” she said. “Recently, I’ve started talking to them about getting their children, and themselves, out-side in nature more often. You can’t believe the different feeling in the room. In the room where I’m preach-ing about candy, the mood is rather unpleasant, but when I’m in a room

AARON M. COHEN


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Futurists investigate clues and evidence to attempt to answer

difficult questions, much like crime-scene investigators. But while

CSIs try to determine things that have already happened, futurists

look to what may yet happen, and what we can do now to

influence it.

By Charles Brass

InvestIgatIng the Future: Lessons from the “scene of the Crime”


Just as a crime-scene analyst scans for fingerprints, futurists use their tools to gather knowledge about times and places where they have not been.

© PETER KIM / DREAMSTIME

may lie outside the immediate area of their focus.

They also know (and if they don’t, their clients always remind them) that they don’t have an infinite amount of time within which to ex-plore the future. Futures work is de-signed to enhance the quality of de-cisions made in the present, and clients most often want to make de-cisions quickly. For instance, those responsible for public-school sys-tems must anticipate numbers of in-coming kindergarteners some years in advance, but this is difficult in the absence of detailed information about such things as decisions to open or close local factories, or planned changes in zoning regula-tions.

The CSI has an advantage over the futurist in that the boundary of an official crime scene is marked with very visible tape that everybody un-derstands and most people respect. Even if futurists are meticulous and explicit about defining the boundar-ies of a particular assignment, the nature of their work and the people they work with mean these boundar-ies regularly get challenged or ig-nored. Nonetheless, most futurists find it very helpful in their consult-ing work to take time early in the process to discuss, and hopefully agree on, the boundaries within which any particular assignment will take place.

Of course, good CSIs know that a new discovery might at any time cause an expansion of the taped-off area. Similarly, futures work is made easier if the futurist and the client can explicitly acknowledge that some proposed new action is taking the assignment beyond the previ-ously agreed boundaries. In the school system example, chronic flooding in the region may also im-pact families’ relocation decisions, so the futurist’s boundaries might need to expand to include environmental factors.

There is more to the tape around a crime scene, however, than just sim-ply defining where the CSI will fo-cus attention. The tape reminds oth-ers that the space inside is a special place and needs to be treated care-fully.

This is another way in which the

they follow a series of protocols that are designed to ensure that they do their job rigorously and that others can validate and replicate their work. This article looks at some of the rules that crime-scene investiga-tors (CSIs) follow. These rules have direct parallels in helping to shape not only good crime-scene analysis, but good futures practice, as well.

Determining the investigation’s BounDaries

The first thing that CSIs do is to define the physical space in which they are interested and then cordon this area off. This is no trivial exer-cise. The CSIs expect to invest con-siderable time and energy in exam-ining the interior of that quarantined space, recognizing all the while that drawing too wide a boundary may yield only marginally more knowl-edge. Similarly, drawing too narrow a boundary will increase the likeli-hood that important information will be overlooked. In any case, no boundary can possibly capture everything or everybody of interest.

Futurists, too, have to delineate boundaries around the themes in which they and their clients are in-terested. As good systems thinkers, futurists are acutely aware of the ex-tent to which everything is intercon-nected, and they are always con-cerned that important information

As practitioners of a relatively young profession, futurists are fre-quently asked to explain what they do. Often, the askers have some skepticism. I personally have lost track of the number of times people have asked to see my crystal ball or my time machine when I have shown them my business card.

Many people seem to be unable to get their heads around the idea that it is possible to learn something use-ful about events or situations that have not yet happened. Yet, when archaeologists report on what they have learned, no one doubts their professionalism, despite the fact that they were not at the time and place they are observing.

This is why, when I am asked to explain what a futurist does, I use the analogy of an archaeologist or, for younger audiences, a crime-scene investigator. Most practicing futur-ists are at least as interested in the past as they are in the future, but my use of this analogy goes far beyond simply acknowledging that how we arrived at the present has a powerful impact on what will happen in the future.

Both crime-scene investigators and futurists are interested in learning more about a time and place remote from themselves, and both use in-creasingly sophisticated sets of tools and techniques to help them expand their knowledge. Before they begin to use any of these tools, however,

Crime-scene investigators and futurists both need to establish boundary lines delineating the areas that they deem of interest to the case at hand.

© PHILCOLD / DREAMSTIME


that all relevant aspects are given their appropriate weight.

Placing a tape around a crime scene gives the impression that the moment of the crime has been frozen for analysis by the CSI. The skilled investigator, whether CSI or futurist, knows that everything changes, even during an investigation, so the more they know about how things change, the more useful they will be.

In this regard, the training that fu-turists receive might give them an advantage over the CSIs. Learning to appreciate all the dimensions within which change takes place is an inte-gral part of futurist training, and good futurists are aware that only dead things change in regularly pre-dictable ways.

The CSIs are almost always exam-ining purely physical, geographic

Futurists, too, are most often out-siders that other people bring in to a situation to help make sense of it. Like any other human beings, too, futurists are prone to bring biases and prejudices to everything they do. Just as the fingerprints of all CSIs and police officers are recorded so they can be eliminated from the in-vestigation, so futurists need to be careful to eliminate as much of their influence on the scene as they can.

Futurists also should know that, whatever specialist expertise they claim to bring, many others on the scene will nonetheless seek to bring their perspectives to the situation. In particular, futurists need to be aware of the natural human tendency to avoid unpleasantness. The best fu-turists are skilled at presenting the results of their work in such a way

CSI has an advantage over the futurist. CSIs can pretty well ensure that no one will enter their area of interest unless they have been in-vited, and even then they will follow the CSI’s rules of conduct. In effect, the CSIs attempt to freeze the crime scene until they complete their in-vestigation.

Futurists’ areas of interest can rarely be as conveniently frozen while the analysis takes place. None-theless, if people who do continue to move around inside the demarked area are aware that, for the moment, this is a special space, they are more likely to think more carefully about the actions they take. Perhaps the members of the school board might need to be reminded to factor their yet-to-be completed future scanning into their current budget cycle.

For futurists, marking out the ter-ritory of interest in a particular in-vestigation includes identifying the people who habitually occupy that territory. Letting all these people know that an investigation is taking place can often reduce the accidental damage done by those who aren’t aware of the significance of the space.

Of course, not everyone’s motives are pure and wholesome. Both CSIs and futurists need to be aware that some people will deliberately try to mislead or taint the crime scene or the future space.

analyzing eviDence oBjectively

Having drawn a boundary around their area of interest, CSIs then get down to work. They know that their primary role is to carefully notice and document as much as possible. In addition to their five human senses, they bring their experience and a variety of technological tools to help them in this work.

They are acutely aware that their mere presence on the scene changes things, and that their human preju-dices and biases color what they no-tice and how they report on what they notice. They are aware, too, that some of their work is unpleasant, and that it is a natural human reac-tion to try and cover up some of this unpleasantness.

Crime-scene Futurists: six rules from CsI

1. Explicitly describe the boundary marking the edges of the space in which you are interested. There often will be physical, temporal, and/or organizational dimen-sions of this boundary, and all need to be identified.

2. Ensure that all the people who normally inhabit this space, or are likely to enter the space during the project, are aware of the project and its aims.

3. Document the current contents of the space in as much detail as time and resources permit.

4. Investigate the provenance of the space with as much diligence as you can.

5. Notice how, and why, the space changes during theproject. Look for both the internal and external forces that might explain these changes.

6. Use appropriate tools from your futurist toolkit to begin to tease out the future for the space.

Charles Brass


Futurists can relate to this: The future is also inherently uncertain. They strive to reduce the uncertain-ties as much as possible by applying systemic and systematic approaches to understanding the future.

There is a final, crucial difference between CSIs and futurists, how-ever. CSIs primarily exist to help others understand what has hap-pened. Futurists are interested in what may happen and are even more interested in what we would like to happen. Futures work is about both understanding the future and creating it.

In The Clock of the Long Now, futurist Stewart Brand wrote: “Our experience of time is asymmetric. We can see the past, but not influence it. We can influence the future, but not see it.” He may have been wrong on both counts. Many people behave as though they could influence the past, and we all strive to see the future. What both CSIs and futurists remind us is that doing all these things will be improved if it is done systematically and rigorously. ❑

About the AuthorCharles Brass is chair of Australia’s premier futures organization, the Futures Foundation, which incorpo-rates the professional asso-ciation for futurists in Austra-lia. E-mail [email protected];

Web site www.futuresfoundation.org.au.

ing them in a variety of ways. Mod-ern technology enhances the futurist toolkit by allowing the collection, analysis, and interpretation of quan-tities of data that would otherwise stretch human capability.

Whatever tools are used, both the CSIs and the futurists need to be aware of the limitations of human ability to understand and interpret the information before them. And they also need to be aware that some people have malicious intent and can either inadvertently or con-sciously taint the data.

stuDying the Past anD stuDying the Future

CSIs and futurists are both part of our modern world because human beings are relentlessly interested in the world around them. Since none of us can be everywhere at all times, we are collectively prepared to in-vest in developing the skills of that special subset of people who can help us make sense of a world we did not, or could not, experience: the past and the future.

Good CSIs know that the past is not a space that anyone can com-pletely understand. No matter how many resources we bring to bear on studying it, our comprehension of the past—even of very recent events—will always be imperfect. What CSIs expect to do is to work diligently to reduce this imperfection as much as they can.

space. Futurists, on the other hand, explore landscapes that are shaped and populated by human beings for whom change is an unpredictable in-evitability.

CSIs’ specialist expertise is most often accepted by all those involved. They can often rely on the legal sys-tem both to support their efforts and to compel the participation of all those in whom they are interested.

Alas, futurists have no such legal mandate. Where the CSI can usually assume that those who commission their work are genuinely interested in their professional analysis—such as identifying a cause of death or in-dicating a probable perpetrator—fu-turists often confront unwilling par-ticipants or even clients unwilling to listen to what has been learned.

CSIs are provided with an ever-ex-panding toolkit, much of which is the result of developments in science and technology. In particular, they have access to many tools that en-hance or extend human senses and give precise quantitative data.

Futurists, too, have access to an expanding toolkit. Like the CSIs’, much of the futurists’ equipment is designed to supplement individual human senses, often by aggregating information across larger popula-tions. Some of the futurist toolkit is also designed to tap into under-utilized areas of the human experi-ence, such as myth, metaphor, and worldview. Often, the futurists seek to sharpen human senses by focus-

HOUSE OF FUTURES, WWW.HOUSEOFFUTURES.DK

A seminar for futurists involved in the “In 100 Years Starting Now” project, organized by the Copenhagen-based House of Futures. The project seeks to deploy futurists’ tools, such as scenarios, to identify challenges and opportunities for sustainable global development.


The Search for Global Solutions: Moving from Vision to ActionWhat does it take to get an idea launched or a problem solved? At the World Future Society’s 2011 conference, the answer was inspiration, collaboration, and the energy of forward-thinking people.

By Cynthia G. Wagner

Photos by Aaron M. Cohen

How does an idea transform into a goal, and how does a plan inspire people to implement it? What does it take to give a move-ment its momentum? These were the underlying questions of the 750 futurists who met in Vancouver this past July to consider how to take that great leap of faith required for “Moving from Vision to Action.”

The future absolutely requires courage, said leadership expert Lance Secretan, author of The Spark, the Flame, and the Torch (The Secretan Center, 2010). Just as skiing down a steep slope for the first time requires faith in one’s abilities, effecting change and in-spiring others to do so requires courage, whose rewards are ful-fillment and accomplishment.

“It’s a myth that we can’t make change quickly,” said Secretan, “but it takes courage to let go of what’s holding us back.”

Is there danger in rushing down the unfamiliar slope of change? Of course there is. Studying the future helps us see where we’re heading. As business consultant Owen Greaves pointed out, many of our cool new technologies, like smart-phones, brought risks we didn’t necessarily anticipate, such as geolocation tracking chips that could potentially reveal our whereabouts to others.

Because their impacts may be enormous, the assessment of emerging technologies is one of the key tasks of futurists—and a new mission of the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO). Picking up where the former Office of Technology As-sessment left off, GAO has now created a permanent Center for

Kyoto Sangyo University professor of comparative cultural studies Kazuo Mizuta takes a systems view of cultures and individuals’ places in them. He talked about what he terms “cultural personality” and the ways that memes are transmitted inside and outside of cultures.

Chemical engineer Matthew Kern made a 12-minute video, “A Summer at Singularity University,” and uploaded it to the Internet to help give people a brief introduction to his recent ten-week experience at Singularity University.


guage of physics, to describe to po-tential investors the problems that their work may help solve. Barnett said one way to do this is to create “future environments,” or simula-tions of the environments that the clients will be working in, showing how the innovations will be able to fill future gaps. Such a simulation is a “great place to dream,” and these future environments are intended to “make complicated information and ideas more visual and easier to un-derstand,” he said.

Changes and ImpactsAs Baines pointed out in his ses-

sion on the future of language, de-mographic and technological shifts are impacting each other in some-times unsettling ways, as when a 7-year-old can’t seem to put down her multifunctional cell phone. Baines warned that the move away from the complexity of communica-tion found in books could impair critical thought among younger gen-erations.

On the other hand, young people are growing up in an ever-changing social and technological environ-ment, and they are using new tech-

stead of, for example, a printed re-port? Literacy expert Lawrence Baines of the University of Okla-homa–Norman explained that there is “evolutionary pressure to con-dense information and communica-tion.” Images, he noted, are briefer than text, which is too complex for the small devices that people are in-creasingly using as their principal mode of communication.

Baines also observed that televi-sion viewing is increasing, along with consumption of media on cell phones. Thanks to multitasking, young people can pack 10 hours of media consumption into just seven and a half hours a day. This con-sumption is also interactive and so-cial, whereas reading a book requires solitude—an activity that may seem antisocial to today’s youth.

Another approach to communicat-ing technological developments to a new audience is exemplified in the work of Booz│Allen│Hamilton. “My job is to find stuff, and tell every one about it,” said senior asso-ciate William P. Barnett Jr. But, he admitted, not everybody wants to know about it.

The challenge is to help innova-tors, who may only speak in the lan-

Science, Technology, and Engineer-ing (CSTE), reported chief scientist Timothy M. Persons.

The center has just completed a technology assessment of climate en-gineering, which includes such pro-posed projects as brightening clouds at sea, pumping liquid CO2 into rocks or aerosols into the strato-sphere, and afforestation of deserts. Persons pointed out that the center’s assessments include conversations with the public to get the potential responses of those affected by such technologies. “You don’t want to leave this to the experts alone, be-cause you would lose public trust,” he said.

Communicating the FutureAn important aspect of CSTE’s

work is to improve communication with the public, including the con-gressional leaders who, though not scientists themselves, must make de-cisions about these scientific and technological developments. Thus, the design of interactive animations became an important aspect of the technology assessment and commu-nication process, Persons reported.

Why interactive animations in-

Lance Secretan, author of The Spark, the Flame, and the Torch and inspiring leadership consultant.

Timothy M. Persons, co-director of the U.S. Government Account-ability Office’s Center for Science, Technol-ogy, and Engineering.


“We will never in our lifetimes completely map the human brain,” said Edie Weiner at the start of her much buzzed-about session with Arnold Brown. (Weiner and Brown are president and chairman, respectively, of Weiner, Edrich, Brown, Inc.)

Weiner elaborated: This has less to do with sci-ence’s inability to understand the brain’s complex physiology and more to do with the difference be-tween the brain and the concept of a mind or soul—in other words, the distinction between the physical, neurological, and chemical interplay and “what escapes that” (providing you believe that there is something immutable underlying those processes). However, research will enable us to understand the human brain a great deal more and thus gain greater insight into the human con-dition. For example, researchers are learning a lot about how the process of memory works and find-ing ways to reshape and enhance it.

Brain research and brain mapping will likely lead to improvements in the education system and the creation of new learning environments, Weiner told the audience. She believes that virtual reality and interactive gaming will become more com-monplace in the years to come. In addition, over-crowded classrooms will be replaced by one-on-one mentorships conducted mostly online. “We will need guides, not teachers,” she said.

Weiner and Brown also discussed the “human–machine interface.” Brown questioned “whether the human brain is capable of dealing with a world that is becoming more complex by the day.” Intelligence augmentation (technologically en-hancing the human mind) will become increas-ingly necessary if humans are to keep up with arti-ficial intelligence. The looming question is: How can we augment or create intelligence if we can’t fully understand it? —Aaron M. Cohen

Brain Mapping, Intelligence Augmentation, And Virtual Reality

Nicole D. Tricoukes demonstrates the Motorola Headset Computer, a hands-free computer and communications device developed by Motorola and Kopin Corporation. The crowd-pleasing innovation was voted the “best in show” at Futurists:BetaLaunch, a competitive expo of inventions and innovations selected by the World Future Society and its partner 1X57.


nologies and tools to rebuild the world as they go. The panel on Cul-tural Shifts among Global Youths gave a mind-boggling overview of these changes:

The “aging” and “younging” of global populations are altering the workplace, careers, and even the tra-ditional life path from school to work to retirement, said Erica Orange, vice president of Weiner, Edrich, Brown, Inc.

For young people, multitasking with multimedia has fundamentally changed their brains and the way they process information. They bore easily, and this boredom will increas-ingly make shorter-term jobs, con-tract work, and temping more en-trenched, Orange said.

For older workers, the need to ac-quire new skills to remain competi-tive may inspire them to try new ca-reers from scratch; internships will no longer be just for the young, ac-cording to Orange.

Globally, rapid economic develop-ment means that the concept of the “Third World” is becoming obsolete, according to Jared Weiner, a vice president of Weiner, Edrich, Brown, Inc., and a member of the World Future Society’s board of directors.

“We argue that BRIC [Brazil, Rus-sia, India, China] is outdated. Think about Turkey and Singapore,” he ad-vised. The challenge for all econo-mies—and companies—is finding where the ta lented youth of tomorrow are and where they will want to go.

Global youth’s changing relation-ship with the virtual world is also driving trends toward using real names online, putting attention on reputations, and regulating more on-line activities, said Lisa Donchak, an enterprise sales associate for Google Enterprise. “We’re toward the end of the Wild West age of anonymity,” she observed. “Maybe the opportu-nity to be anonymous was a growth stage. More sites [such as Google+] are asking for your real name.”

Along with this authenticity comes “the right to be forgotten,” to erase your data footprint, Donchak noted. The European Union has been leading the way, with a “do not track” policy on cookies (data files placed on your computer by the Web sites you visit).

How Action Builds on ResilienceDwight D. Eisenhower once said,

“In preparing for battle I have al-ways found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.” Donald Byrne, president and CEO of Metrix411, drew on Eisenhower ’s wisdom to help illustrate a funda-mental principle of futuring: the need to take action.

This point is crucially important in emergency situations, such as when deadly tornadoes struck many parts of the United States earlier this year. Byrne credited the resiliency of the community of Greensburg, Kansas, for its reaction to the 2007 tornado that destroyed the city. “In most communities, there is no organiza-tion for what really needs to be done; everybody wants to send wa-ter or ready-to-eat food,” he said. But the Lions Club did one thing that was immediately needed: It paid for funerals.

The community’s resiliency, its ability to respond, is one reason people stayed in Greensburg to re-build rather than move on, Byrne ar-gued. This power of community re-siliency was seen again in Japan after the earthquake and tsunami of March 11, 2011.

Thanks to a cadre of young volun-teers flocking to Peace Boat, a relief

Thomas Frey, executive director and senior futurist of the DaVinci Institute.

Clem Bezold, founder and chairman of the Institute for Alternative Futures (IAF), was a 2011 recipient of the WFS Lifetime Achievement Award. He acknowl-edged author Alvin Toffler and scholar Jim Dator as among the “advocates and diplomats for our field,” which in his work with IAF has evolved toward aspi-rational futures.


organization, help quickly came to the communities ravaged by the tsu-nami. “Kids were distributing food before even the army or Red Cross could get there,” reported Patrick Tucker, deputy editor of THE FUTURIST.

Tucker spent five months in Japan and was in Kyoto when the earth-quake hit; as did most other foreign-ers, he left the country in the follow-ing week, but returned when he learned of Peace Boat’s relief work. “If you can keep the community to-gether, you can rebuild faster,” he said, noting that neighbors are es-sential for keeping track of each oth-er’s whereabouts. [See Tucker’s full report, “Lost and Found in Japan,” on page 16 of this issue.]

“Actions” in ActionOne of the best aspects of World

Future Society conferences is the op-portunity for futurists to share their work, providing case studies of ef-fective actions as well as models for applying futuring principles.

Two of the world’s leading futurist training grounds again sent teams of students to the conference to present their work. Describing the Singular-

The Living City Challenge: Buildings That Make a Positive Impact

Green building techniques must continue to improve, evolving beyond meeting LEED certification standards, said Cascadia Green Building Council CEO Jason McLennan. (Currently, LEED Platinum represents the highest standard of environmental certification.) After all, even LEED Platinum-certified buildings have a negative impact on the environment, however greatly reduced. Buildings simply built to code represent the baseline—they are “the worst allowable by law,” he asserted, before ask-ing, “What does ‘good’ look like? How do we move to a place that’s truly regenerative and restorative?”

McLennan, also a board member for the International Living Building Institute, then described the institute’s Living Building Challenge. In gen-eral, to meet the challenge, the project should not damage the natural en-vironment—in fact, it should have a positive impact on the environment. For example, “living buildings” should generate a surplus of clean energy. He emphasized that energy efficiency does not mean sacrificing comfort, and he reported that there are three living building projects currently un-der construction in Vancouver.

McLennan then described a novel sewage-treatment plant that has met the challenge. It is actually intended as a mixed-use facility: Yoga classes are held there, where teachers “encourage people to breathe deeper.”

The “living building” represents the next phase of sustainable build-ings, said McLennan’s co- presenter, architect Cindy Frewen-Wuellner. Their hope is that this transformation will happen in the next 30 to 40 years. Both seemed optimistic that the era of suburban sprawl is coming to an end.

—Aaron M. Cohen

Dale Dougherty, found-ing editor and publisher of Make magazine and organizer of Maker Faire, innovative festi-vals that showcase DIY approaches in arts, crafts, science, and engineering.

Edie Weiner, president of the futurist consulting group Weiner, Edrich, Brown, Inc., received a Lifetime Achievement Award from WFS presi-dent Timothy Mack during the closing plenary session at WorldFuture 2011. She credited WEB chairman Arnold Brown for “taking a chance on me when I was 22,” and encouraged others to take young futurists under their wings.


tries would enter teams to compete for medals, as in the Olympics. The pursuit of these grand challenges would result in enormous benefits to humanity, Frey said. [Editor’s note: More on the DaVinci Institute’s grand challenges will appear in the January-February 2012 issue of THE FUTURIST.]

DIY advocate Dale Dougherty, edi-tor of Make magazine and organizer of the Maker Faire events, led a lively session showcasing the spirit of hands-on innovation. Maker Faires and the “Maker” movement began a dozen years ago as a way to inspire those who feel compelled to manipulate things with their own hands, who want to understand how things work—and make things work themselves.

But unlike the image of the lone “tinkerer” working in the solitude of his or her own basement, the Maker movement is about “social tinkering. … It’s physical, connecting to the digital,” Dougherty explained. “It’s about personal expression, creating, and interacting.”

Because makers tap their childlike curiosity to play with technologies,

recombining them to create new in-novations, the Maker movement could provide a model for educa-tion. “Give children the gift of time and space to play,” Dougherty ad-vised. “Immersion in an activity is valuable. Why isn’t school like this? … My goal is that students would become producers of a personalized education that they invent for them-selves rather than a standardized ed-ucation that they consume—to con-sider themselves as producers, not consumers.”

When people are having fun, they are engaged, Dougherty concluded. And this engagement may be the very key to moving from vision to action. ❑

About the AuthorCynthia G. Wagner is editor of THE FUTURIST and of the 2011 conference vol-ume, Moving from Vision to Action, which is available from www.wfs.org/wfsbooks. E-mail [email protected].

For links to download the WorldFuture 2011 conference program (PDF) or to order audio recordings or the conference volume, please visit www.wfs.org/content/worldfuture-2011.

ity University experience were teaching fellow José Luis Cordeiro and alumni Sasha Grujicic, Matthew Kern, Vjai Anma, and Alison Lewis, who described such projects ranging from sustainable clean water to auto-mobile sharing.

Representing work done at the University of Houston, and intro-duced by Studies of the Future grad-uate program chair Peter Bishop, were Sara Robinson, who analyzed the Future of the Progressive Move-ment in the United States; Heather Schlegel, on the Future of Trans-actions and Alternate Currencies; and Emily Empel, on the Future of the Sex Industry.

One especially inspiring approach to stimulating action is “the power of the prize,” said Thomas Frey, ex-ecutive director of the DaVinci Insti-tute. Most prizes award past accom-plishments, but increasingly prizes are offered as a way to stimulate in-novative solutions.

“What if we could solve the world’s biggest problems through prize challenges?” Frey announced the DaVinci Institute’s Eight Grand Challenges program, in which coun-

Health Maintenance for Extended Life Spans

Metabolism causes damage on an ongoing ba-sis, and this damage eventually causes pathol-ogy, Aubrey de Grey told attendees. It is “a side effect of being alive in the first place.”

But gerontologists aim to intervene in this complex process, focusing on lifelong mainte-nance. De Grey argued that repairing damage early enough to prevent the pathology that causes aging could help humans achieve a big extension of healthy life spans.

Arctic Wild CardsWe believe we are now seeing the least extent

of sea ice in history, according to Lawson Brigham, and this phenomenon could yield wild cards. For example, with greater opportunity for oil and gas development, Greenland may declare independence from Denmark.

Another wild card could be critical safety is-sues as tourism increases in tiny villages that have no infrastructure to service cruise ships.

Lawson W. Brigham,distinguished professor of geography and Arctic policy at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

Aubrey de Grey, biomedical gerontologist and chief science officer of SENS Foundation, a nonprofit charity dedicated to combating the aging process.


S P E C I A L A D V E R T I S I N G S E C T I O N

CONSULTANTS AND SERVICESA listing of consulting futurists. For infor mation about being listed in the directory, published in every issue of THE FUTURIST and available on the

Web at www.wfs.org, call Jeff Cornish toll free at 1-800-989-8274 or 301-656-8274, or fax 301-951-0394.

Coombs Consulting Ltd./Creating Living Workplaces401-1265 West 11th Ave., Vancouver, B.C. V6H 1K6

Phone: 604-733-9014

E-mail: [email protected]

Web: www.thelivingworkplace.com

Contact: Ms. Ann Coombs, Thought Leader

Areas of practice include sessions for renewal in work, personal leadership and emerging trends based on the best seller The Living Workplace. Markets served: corporate/social/nonprofit/foundations/associations.

Creating the Future, Inc. with Edward D. Barlow, Jr.2907 Division St., Suite 109, St. Joseph, MI 49085

Phone: 269-982-1830 Fax: 269-982-1541


Web: www.creatingthefuture.com

Contact: Ed Barlow (staff: Sandy, Tammy, and Tresea)

Relating influences of a changing world to indus-tries, organizations, professions, communities. Presentations, strategic planning facilitation.

de Bono For Business248 W. Loraine St., #103, Glendale, CA 91202

Phone: 818-507-6055


Web: www.deBonoForBusiness.com

Contact: Lynda Curtin, the Opportunity Thinker

Lift your thinking. Learn breakthrough futurist tools—lateral thinking, six thinking hats. Work-shops. Keynotes. Facilitation.

FutureManagement Group AGWallufer Strasse 3a, Eltville, Germany D-65343

Phone: 49-6123-7 55 53

Fax: 49-6123-7 55 54

Web: www.FutureManagementGroup.com


Contacts: Pero Micic, Claudia Schramm

Use the “Eltville Model” of FutureManagement to see more of the future than your competitors!

Karl Albrecht InternationalSan Diego, CA U.S.A.

Phone: 858-576-1500


Web: KarlAlbrecht.com

Contact: Dr. Karl Albrecht

Conference Keynote: “Possibilities: Getting the Future You Deserve — Survival Secrets of the World’s Oldest Companies.”

Alternative Futures Associates100 N. Pitt St., Suite 307, Alexandria, VA 22314-3134

Phone: 703-684-5880 Fax: 703-684-0640


Web: www.altfutures-afa.com

Contact: Clement Bezold, Jonathan Peck, Eric Meade

Vision and scenario development, strategic planning, trend analysis, workshop design and facilitation, presentations, keynotes, consulting.

Atlas Safety & Security Design, Inc.770 Palm Bay Ln., Suite 4-I, Miami, FL 33138

Phone: 305-756-5027 Fax: 305-754-1658


Web: www.cpted-security.com

Contact: Dr. Randall Atlas, AIA, CPP

Pioneers in crime prevention through environ-mental design. Design of jails, prevention of premises liability lawsuits.

Aviv Consulting15363 NE 201st St. Woodinville, WA 98072

Phone: 425-415-6155 Fax: 425-415-0664


Web: www.avivconsulting.com

Contact: Aviv Shahar

Helping leaders and teams develop their vision and design the future. Innovation, strategy, coaching, consulting, retreats.

Center for Strategic Futurist Thinking46 B/4 Jerusalem St., Kfar Saba, Israel 44369

Phone: 972-54-558-7940 Fax: 972-9-766965

Web: www.futurist-thinking.co.il


Contact: Tsvi Bisk

Strategic futurism: “Getting from Here to There” (Keynote speaker) Jewish, Mid-East and Mediterranean Futures (consulting).

Christensen Associates, Inc.8168 Manitoba St., No. 2, Playa Del Ray, CA 90293-8291

Phone: 310-578-0405 Fax: 310-578-0455


Web: www.camcinc.com

Contact: Chris Christensen, CMC

Avoid devastating surprises! Exploit ANY future! Stimulating and entertaining keynotes, workshops, assessments, and consulting.

Joseph F. Coates, Consulting Futurist, Inc.5420 Connecticut Ave. NW, #619 Washington, DC 20015-2832

Phone 202-363-7440 Fax 202-363-4139

Email: [email protected]

Web: www.josephcoates.com

The future is my business: futures research, consultation, trend analysis, scenario develop-ment, visioning, scientific, technological and social forecasting, training, briefings, work-shops, presentations and keynotes. Coates has been one of the most frequently cited au-thors in Future Survey and one of the most popular speakers at the World Future Society annual meetings. He is the author or co-author of six books, most recently A Bill of Rights for 21st Century America, and of 2025: Scenarios of US and Global Society Reshaped by Sci-ence and Technology. He has had assign-ments from half of the Fortune 100 firms, and has had published 290 articles on the future since 1990. He is also responsible for 200 pro-prietary reports to business, government and association clients. Coates will enlighten you on the future of any subject. Prepare for an unforgettable encounter.

Common Sense Medicine812 W. 8th St., Suite 2A, Plainview, TX 79072

Phone: 806-291-0700 Fax: 806-293-8229


Web: www.commonsensemedicine.org

Contact: Lon Jones DO, Jerry Bozeman M.Ed., LPC

Adaptations today are the future. The authors of The Boids and the Bees tell how to guide adaptations in our living systems: healthcare, education, economy, even us.


More consultants and services, next page

consulTAnTs And services

Institute for Global Futures2084 Union St., San Francisco, CA 94123

Phone: 415-563-0720 Fax: 415-563-0219


Web: www.GlobalFuturist.com

Contact: Dr. James Canton

Futures based keynotes, consulting and research for any vertical industry by leading futurist James Canton.

Institute for Participatory Management and PlanningP.O. Box 1937, Monterey, CA 93942-1937

Phone: 831-373-4292 Fax: 831-373-0760


Web: www.ipmp-bleiker.com

Contacts: Annemarie Bleiker, Hans Bleiker, Jennifer Bleiker

We offer a Leadership Boot-Camp for guiding com-plex problem-solving and decision-making efforts.

KAIROS Future ABP.O. Box 804, S-10136 Stockholm, Sweden

Phone: (46 8) 545 225 00 Fax: (46 8) 545 225 01


Web: www.kairosfuture.se

Contacts: Mats Lindgren, Anna Kiefer

Values, work, technology, marketing. Methods: scenarios, studies, lectures, seminars, consult-ing. Public and private sectors.

Leading Futurists LLC4420 49th St., NW, Washington, DC 20016

Phone: 202-271-0444


Web: www.leadingfuturists.biz

Contacts: John B. Mahaffie, Jennifer Jarratt

Futures consulting, workshops, scenarios, research, keynote talks to help organizations discover new opportunities and challenges. Members, Association of Professional Futurists.

MG Rush Performance Learning1301 W. 22nd St., Suite 603, Oak Brook, IL 60523

Phone: 630-954-5880 Fax: 630-954-5889


Contacts: Terrence Metz, 630-954-5882; Kevin Booth, 630-954-5884

Facilitation of, and facilitator training for: sce-nario planning, strategy development, group decision-making, workshop design, ideation, option development and analysis, and training of facilitative leadership.

The Greenway Group25 Technology Pkwy. South, Suite 101, Nor-cross, GA 30092

Phone: 678-879-0929 Fax: 678-879-0930


Web: www.greenway.us

Contact: James Cramer, chairman

Strategic change, trends, forecasts, research. Architecture and design technology. Journals: Design Intelligence. Publications: The Almanac of Architecture & Design, How Firms Succeed, Design + Enterprise, Leadership by Design, Communication by Design, Value Redesigned.

H.G. Hudson and Associates34 Warren Dr., Newport News, VA 23608

Phone: 757-874-5414


Contact: Henry G. Hudson, president and CEO

Management consulting help in advanced ad-ministrative services, operations, systems, methods, procedures, policies, strategy, and management.

Innovation Focus Inc.111 E. Chestnut St., Lancaster PA 17602-2703

Phone: 717-394-2500

Web: www.innovationfocus.com

Contacts: Christopher W. Miller, Ph.D.; Anne Orban, M.Ed.

Innovation Focus is an internationally recog-nized consulting firm that brings innovation to all stages of product life cycle management and provides proven processes for deep cus-tomer understanding and meaningful innova-tion. Clients include: Kraft Foods, Kimberly Clark, WD-40, Bristol-Myers Squibb.

Institute for Alternative Futures100 N. Pitt St., Suite 307, Alexandria, VA 22314-3134

Phone: 703-684-5880 Fax: 703-684-0640


Web: www.altfutures.com

Contacts: Clement Bezold, Jonathan Peck, William Rowley, MD

Uses research reports, workshops, scenarios, and visioning to help organizations understand future possibilities and create their “preferred future.”

Future Problem Solving Program International, Inc.2015 Grant Pl., Melbourne, FL 32901

Phone: 321-768-0078 Fax: 321-768-0097


Web: www.fpspi.org

Contact: Marianne Solomon, Executive Director

FPSPI is an established educational program that provides a 6-step problem solving process to assist students as they think about the future.

The Futures Corporation1109 Main St., Ste. 299A, Boise, ID 83702

Phone: 208-345-5995 Fax: 208-345-6083


Web: www.futurescorp.com

Contact: Dr. John Luthy

Strategic thinking/planning; evolving leadership; organization redesign/development; trend analysis; scenario planning; business growth strategies.

The Futures Lab2130 Goodrich Ave., Austin, TX 78704

Phone: 512-468-4505


Web: www.futures-lab.com

Contact: Derek Woodgate

International futures-based consultancy spe-cializing in consumer, business futures. Lead-ers in the future potential business.

Futurist Speaker Thomas FreyDaVinci Institute, 511 E South Boulder Road, Louisville, CO 80027

Phone: 303-666-4133


Web: www.futuristspeaker.com

Contact: Debra Frey

Thomas Frey is Google’s top-rated futurist speaker and IBM’s most award-winning engi-neer. Author of Communicating with the Future—the book that changes everything.Speaking topics: future of business, work, edu-cation, transportation, government, and more.

Link to futurist consultants and services

online at www.wfs.org/consultantsConnect!


The TechCast ProjectDepartment of Information Systems & Technol-ogy Management, George Washington Univer-sity, Washington, D.C. 20052

Phone: 202-994-5975


Web: www.techcast.org

Contact: William E. Halal, professor, George Washington University; president, Techcast LLC

TechCast is an online research project that pools the knowledge of 100 experts worldwide to forecast breakthroughs in all fields of science and technology. Results are updated in real time and distributed to corporations, govern-ments, and other subscribers to aid in their stra-tegic planning. The project has been featured in The Washington Post, Newsweek, The Futurist, and various journals. The National Academies consider TechCast among the best systems available, and Google ranks it No. 2 or 3 out of 45 million hits. TechCast also gives presenta-tions, conducts customized studies, and per-forms most types of consulting related to tech-nology and strategic change.

van der Werff Global, Ltd.4958 Crystal Circle, Hoover, AL 35226

Phone: 888-448-3779 Fax: 888-432-9263


Web: www.globalfuture.com

Contact: Dr. Terry J. van der Werff, CMC

Confidential advisor to corporate leaders worldwide on global trends, executive leader-ship, and strategic change.

Weiner, Edrich, Brown, Inc.200 E. 33rd St., Suite 9I, New York, NY 10016

Phone: 212-889-7007 Fax: 212-679-0628


Web: www.weineredrichbrown.com

Contact: Arnold Brown, Edie Weiner

For over two decades, the pioneers in detect-ing emerging trends and linking them to action.

Xland sprl111 Av Grandchamp, Brussels, Belgium 1150

Phone: 32-475-827-190 Fax: 32-2-762-46-08

Web: www.xland.be


Contact: D. Michel Judkiewicz

Trend analysis, scenarios, forecasting opportunities/threats based on strong and weak signals for resilient strategies.

scious evolution, martial arts, meditation methods, mindbody strategies, transformational learning.

David Pearce Snyder, Consulting FuturistThe Snyder Family Enterprise, 8628 Garfield St., Bethesda, MD 20817-6704

Phone: 301-530-5807 Fax: 301-530-1028


Web: www.the-futurist.com

Contact: Sue Snyder

High-impact motivating presentations. Strategic assessments, socio-technologic fore-casts/scenarios. Keynote addresses, strategic briefings, workshops, surveys.

Strategic Futures®Strategic Futures Consulting Group, Inc.

113 South Washington St., Alexandria, VA 22314

Phone: 703-836-8383 Fax: 703-836-9192


Web: www.strategicfutures.com

Contact: Ron Gunn or Jennifer Thompson

Strategic planning, succession planning includ-ing mentoring, executive coaching, organiza-tional change facilitation, and matrix manage-ment assistance.

SynOvation Solutions455 Hazelwood Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94127

Phone: 415-298-3008


Web: www.synovationsolutions.com

Contacts: Bruce L. Tow, David A. Gilliam

Future-is-now resources to help you achieve key and mission-critical breakthroughs or cre-atively evolve your business to meet future challenges.

Synthesys Strategic Consulting Ltd.Belsize Park, London NW3 UK

Phone: 44-207-449-2903 Fax: 44-870-136-5560

E-mail: www.hardintibbs.com

Web: www.synthstrat.com

Contact: Hardin Tibbs, CEO

Synthesys specializes in using futures research to develop innovative strategies. Based in London UK, with international experience in both the public and private sectors, across many different industries. Projects include horizon scanning, strategic sense- making, scenarios, vision build-ing, assumption testing, and strategy formulation, either as expert input or by co-production directly with leadership teams.

Minkin Affiliates135 Riviera Dr., #305, Los Gatos, CA 95032

Phone: 408-402-3020


Web: minkinaffiliates.com

Contact: Barry Minkin

Keynote speaker, bestselling author, global manage ment consultant, three decades linking emerging trends to consumer and market strategy.

Next Consulting104 Timber Ridge Rd., State College, PA 16801

Phone: 814-237-2575 Fax: 814-863-4257


Web: nextconsulting.us

Contact: Geoffrey Godbey, Ph.D.

Repositioning leisure/tourism organizations for the near future. Speeches, ideation, imagi-neering. Client list on request.

Jim Pinto AssociatesP.O. Box 131673, Carlsbad, CA 92013

Phone: 858-353-5467


Web: www.JimPinto.com

Contact: Jim Pinto

Speaker and consultant: technology futures, industrial automation, global business trends, Internet business relationships.

Pinyon Partners LLC140 Little Falls St., Suite 210, Falls Church, VA 22046

Phone: 703-651-0359


Web: www.pinyonpartners.com

Contacts: Peter B.G. Shoemaker; Dan Garretson, Ph.D.

Quantitative and qualitative. Art and Science. However you want to characterize it, our distinc-tive combination of the hard-nosed and the deeply intuitive is perfectly suited for those navi-gating over the horizon. Expansive explorations of what’s next; engaging engagements with change; consultations, workshops, research, and talks aimed at creating future-oriented clar-ity, purpose, insight, and confidence. Member, Association of Professional Futurists.

Qi Systems35 Seacoast Terr., Apt. 6P, Brooklyn, NY 11235

Phone: 718-769-9655


Web: www.qisystems.org

Contact: Ronn Parker, Ph.D.

Spectrum Counseling: conflict resolution, con-


book review

How the Recession Has Changed the Middle ClassBy Patrick Tucker

The 2008 recession was

hard on everyone, but it

did not distribute its woes

evenly.

In Pinched, journalist Don Peck paints a portrait of the middle class as jilted lover, nursing feelings of de-spair and betrayal. After doing everything right, the question this poor sop finds himself asking, over and over, like a funerary wail, is not “Why aren’t I good enough,” but the far more terrifying “Why aren’t I good enough anymore?” There is no easy rejoinder. The American Dream has simply moved on and taken a new name. Our hero is left with only the awareness that his best days have passed him by.

The 2008 recession permanently altered the lives of millions of Amer-icans, neighborhoods, and even en-tire regions of the United States. Peck shows that many middle-class, middle-skill jobs that existed prior to 2008 will never return, opportunities that had seemed perennial just a few years ago have permanently van-ished. Labor experts such as John Challenger, writing in this magazine, have encouraged job seekers in low-growth areas to strike out for more-fertile ground. In fact, much of the advice given to the nation’s unem-ployed and underemployed has amounted to: Be adaptable, seek training, and move. These admonish-ments, while sound, are also callous. People forced by market conditions to make dramatic life adjustments are rarely thankful for the opportu-nity to do so.

In many respects, this current state of woe represents a culmination of trends that have been building for some time. Throughout the last 10

years, however, policy makers and financiers were able to post-phone their full im-pact. The rapid appre-ciation in the housing market between 2002 and 2008 created an il-lusory sense of pros-perity in the absence of real salary growth, which has budged little from the 1970s. Since the largest asset owned by most Amer-icans is their primary r e s i d e n c e , m a n y people experienced an enormous, and artifi-cial, expansion in net worth over the last decade. The losses re-sulting from the housing collapse will linger for a long time, affecting consumption and investment habits for years.

“Many Americans, even those who didn’t lose their jobs, lost a dec-ade’s sense of progress. Long de-ferred, a decade’s disappointment has been concentrated in the past three years,” notes Peck.

Stagnant wages and vanishing jobs, compounded by the intractable housing crisis, have metastasized into to a very literal paralysis. Nearly one in four Americans owes more on his or her house than that house is worth. Peck points out that, in Arizona and Florida, the number is one in two, and in Nevada, two in three. Many individuals who are un-derwater on their home loans simply can’t move to a better economic en-vironment, even if they wanted to. They’re caught between the prover-bial rock and hard place, the moun-tainous amount of debt they owe and the cold truth of their home’s ac-tual value.

All of this has fundamentally changed the demographic makeup of America’s white-picket-fence sub-urbs, which now house more poor people than do the nation’s urban centers. It’s an ironic reversal. In the 1950s, suburban developments were

sold as a means to es-cape c i ty squa lo r , which was under-s tood as a th in ly vei led al lusion to non-Caucasian neigh-bors. Half a century later, actual squalor in these neighborhoods pits frustrated home-o w n e r s a g a i n s t equal ly desperate renters.

“ T h i s i s n ’ t t h e neighborhood that I moved into ,” one frayed suburbanite complained to Peck. “It’s never going to recover to what it was.”

Contrast this pre-dicament with the plight, or more accurately flight, of the nation’s mon-eyed elite. While the American poor are stuck in place, the country’s rich are increasingly transient, pursuing the opportunities of an intercon-nected world and less concerned than ever with the future of the re-public. A growing number of Ameri-ca’s rich are entrepreneurs, as op-posed to inheritors of wealth. Their business aspirations are global in scope; they hire labor in Thailand to market products to consumers in China, or vice versa. Not surpris-ingly, the American elite have more in common with their fellow entre-preneurs from Asia or Europe than they do with their compatriots back home.

But, Peck cautions, don’t assume that today’s wealthy are leading lives of leisure. They’re more likely to be attached to a BlackBerry than a polo mallet. Because they work so hard, many are resistant to the no-tion that fortune may have played the determining role in their success. They may well be more philan-thropic than their predecessors like the Rockefellers or Carnegies, but they’re also more aware of the depths of human need in places like Ghana, Bangladesh, and Papua New Guinea (locations where the Gates

Pinched: How the Great Recession Narrowed Our Futures and What We Can Do About It by Don Peck. Crown. 2011. 224 pages. $22.


who have followed that magazine’s coverage of the recession over the past two years and seen his cover feature story will find some aspects of this book familiar. But Pinched provides much original insight and should be considered a natural heir to Reisman, Glazer, and Denny’s The Lonely Crowd, and Thorstein Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class. Pinched is an excellent chronicle of the Great Recession’s hidden and long-term ef-fects on the American psyche. In its wide scope and clear focus, it may go on to be the seminal book on this period in the country’s history.

About the ReviewerPatrick Tucker is the deputy editor of THE FUTURIST magazine and director of com-munications of the World Future Society.

misses the argument that increasing the tax burden on the rich would hurt the current recovery. Trickle-down economics is patently unvi-able in an environment where the wealthy are few and do a greater portion of their investing and con-suming abroad.

Lawmakers may have overreached in their regulatory response to the 2008 market collapse, says Peck, so lessening regulations might help spur business. He also advocates a reconsideration of the nation’s cur-rent entitlement commitments, which, while popular among baby boomers, are unsustainable. Above all, only real government investment in research and development will put the country back on the road to prosperity, he argues.

Peck currently serves as a features editor for The Atlantic, and people

Foundation has significant invest-ments). The struggles of the shrink-ing American middle class continue to look paltry in comparison to the circumstances of the majority of the world’s inhabitants.

“If the transformation of the world economy lifts four people in China and India out of poverty and into the middle class, and meanwhile means one American drops out of the mid-dle class, that’s not such a bad trade,” Peck quotes one CEO as say-ing.

Is the American middle class sal-vageable? Peck offers up a set of bal-anced recommendations toward that end. First, he argues for a return to the tax rates of a few decades ago, where the wealthy contributed much closer to 50% of their income to the government coffers, as opposed to the 35% they pay today. Peck dis-


ListentoWorldFuture2011!The World Future Society’s 2011 conference is over, but if you missed a session or just want to keep a permanent record of the event, you may order your own audio!

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Futurists combine the creativity for imagining a better future with the entrepreneurial

drive to build it. While the future may be the ultimate “do-it-yourself” project, you don’t

have to create it alone!

Join a thousand future-building men and women at the World Future Society’s 2012

conference, to be held in Toronto, July 27-29, at the Sheraton Centre Toronto hotel.

Why Attend WorldFuture 2012?• Interdisciplinary thinking: WorldFuture conferences are the only global gathering of

futurists from across all disciplines. Conference attendees include world-renowned re-

searchers, up and coming thought leaders, foresight consultants, government and secu-

rity experts, and innovative trend-setters/problem-solvers in ecology, commerce, health,

and technology.

• New in 2012: “Speed Futuring,” a fast-paced networking event designed to give

you immediate connections with a personal team of other forward-thinking people you

can collaborate with beyond the conference weekend.

• World-class learning opportunities: Sessions will include a mix of formats, ranging

WorldFuture 2012Dream. Design. Develop. Deliver.The annual conference of the World Future Society, to be held in Toronto, July 27-29, at the Sheraton Centre Toronto hotel.

from rapid-delivery expert seminars to “deeper dive” workshops, where you can take a

more examined look at how futuring can shape real-world outcomes.

• Connectivity: Wi-fi and Internet access will break down the “classroom” walls and

the barriers between “teachers” and “learners.”

Futurists:BetaLaunch—back after an amazing inaugural year!“It was great to see what the current ‘future’ has in store!”

WorldFuture 2011 marked the premier launch event for futurist entrepreneurs:

Futurists:BetaLaunch!

From more than 60 cutting-edge technologies and social innovations evaluated by our

panel of judges, 15 finalists were given the unique opportunity to launch their innova-

tions in front of the WorldFuture’s global audience in Vancouver.

Futurists:BetaLaunch will be even bigger in 2012! We’ll be offering the innovators

more opportunities to introduce themselves and their ideas to all attendees.

If you have an idea you want to launch, make sure to apply at wfsbetalaunch.com.

PHOTOS: AARON M. COHEN

During the conference, the chosen inventors will have a chance to meet and mingle

with attendees—and potential investors—to discuss the innovations, provide feedback,

evaluate, and learn.

Don’t miss Futurists:BetaLaunch, exclusively at WorldFuture 2012!

About TorontoAn ideal host for global futurists, Toronto is a world-class center for the arts and sci-

ences, commerce and innovation, and ecological and cosmopolitan influences.

The medical and biotech industry in Toronto generates more than $4 billion in reve-

nues and the aerospace industry produces as additional $6 billion annually. With more

than 25,000 designers, Toronto is Canada’s leading design center.

There are more than 125 museums and public archives in the Greater Toronto area,

and the city boasts 50 ballet and dance companies, six opera companies, and two sym-

phony orchestras.

Toronto’s public transportation system (TTC) is second only to New York City as North

America’s most extensive transportation system.

More than 18% of Toronto is dedicated to parkland, featuring 3 million publicly

owned trees and 141 miles of rivers.

About the Conference HotelThe Sheraton Centre Toronto is a Four Diamond Hotel in the heart of Toronto’s finan-

cial and entertainment districts. The hotel is connected to PATH, a 16-mile underground

network of shops, services, theater, and world-class dining.

Call to Participate!The success of the program for WorldFuture 2012 will rely on the rich history of futur-

ists sharing with each other. If you’d like to participate in the conference as a speaker,

panel leader, or if you’d like to expand on your ideas by submitting a conference essay,

visit www.wfs.org to learn more. The deadline for session proposals is October 15, 2011

and the deadline for essays is February 20, 2012.

Regi

ster

at w

ww

.wfs

.org

.

PHOTOS: DOUG BROWN / TORONTO CONVENTION & VISITORS ASSOCIATION

world fuTure socieTy ProgrAms

The World Future Society is a nonprofit educational and scientific organization chartered in the District of Columbia, U.S.A., and is recognized by the U.S. Internal Revenue Service as a tax-exempt organization. The Society has about 25,000 members and subscribers in 80 nations.

PUBLICATIONS

• The Futurist: A magazine published bimonthly, covering trends, forecasts, and ideas about the future.

• Futurist Update: An e-mail newsletter available monthly to all members, covering a range of future-oriented news and useful links.

• World Future Review: A Journal of Strategic Foresight: A journal for futures practitioners and scholars, with articles on forecasting techniques and applications, profiles of futurists and organizations, and abstracts of current futures-relevant literature.

ACTIVITIES AND RESOURCES

• Conferences: The Society holds at least one major conference per year, to which all Society members are in-vited. Most conferences cover a wide range of topics related to the future. Most conferences are in the United States, but the Society has also held meetings in Canada and Austria.

• Groups: Futurist groups are active in a number of U.S. cities, such as Chicago, Washington, and Atlanta, and in more than two dozen countries.

• Books: New books of special interest to members may be purchased through the Society’s partnership with Amazon.com.

MEMBERSHIP PROGRAMS

• Regular Membership: Includes THE FUTURIST magazine; discounts on conferences and books published by the Society; and such other benefits as may be approved for members. Discounted memberships are also available for full-time students under age 25.

• Professional Membership: Programs and publications are available to meet the special needs of practitio-ners, researchers, scholars, and others who are professionally involved in forecasting, planning, or other future-oriented activities, including education and policy making. Professional members receive all the benefits of regular membership, plus a subscription to the journal World Future Review, as well as invitations to Profes-sional Members’ Forums, and other benefits.

• Institutional Membership: The World Future Society’s Institutional Membership program offers special ser-vices for business firms, educational institutions, government agencies, associations, and other groups. Mem-bers receive all of the benefits of Professional Membership, plus copies of all books, monographs, conference proceedings, special reports, and other publications produced by the Society during the year of the member-ship; special discounts on bulk purchases of Society publications; assistance in locating sources of information, consultants, and speakers for conferences and meetings, getting information tailored specifically to the organi-zation’s needs; and inclusion in the Society’s list of institutional members published on the Society’s Web site and annually in THE FUTURIST.

For more information and an application, contact Membership Secretary, World Future Society, 7910 Woodmont Avenue, Suite 450, Bethesda, Maryland 20814

www.wfs.org.


credit—thus lowering or eliminating one’s electric bill. The homeowner benefits because electricity is a by-product of the process and is basi-cally “free.” In addition, as the article aptly points out, CO2 emis-sions could be cut by 30%.

Thanks for raising awareness among your readers of this new and emerging technology.

Mike CockingMarathon Engine Systems

East Troy, Wisconsin

Better Ways to Survive Economic “Aftershocks”

Regarding Patrick Tucker’s book review of Aftershock by Robert Reich (“Surviving the Great Recession’s Aftershocks,” March-April 2011): Having operated a small business in Germany almost all of my life, I have firsthand experience that Reich’s ideas do not work.

For instance, I was required to pay a “severance tax” to every worker I let go, never mind the reason. I dis-missed an alcoholic who threatened to beat up co-workers and a woman on supposed sick leave who spent her nights in bars. They both re-ceived their severance pay.

When business was slow, and I could not afford to retain all employ-ees, I was required to keep those who “needed the money” most, as opposed to the hardest workers (and, of course, pay up to a year’s worth of wages in severance pay to anyone I let go).

I do not envy anybody who is richer than I am. In most cases, they worked harder. I hate the charitable “tax return.” I may not enjoy paying taxes to a wasteful government, but I don’t want any money back for working.

“Rebalancing” wealth is com-pletely unnecessary. Just get rid of all the regulations that keep people from going into business, and we will see more wealth spread around, without government interference.

Peter H. VollmannVero Beach, Florida

A former colleague of mine had everything frozen by the IRS because some anonymous bureaucrat sus-pected something. (It turned out to be false, and the tip was by someone who had a vendetta against him.) Having no cash, he had tears in his eyes when I gave him $5 for food so he could eat for the weekend. This is somebody who is used to living on a six-figure income. He learned the hard way why it’s both wise and necessary here to have a cache of cash, just in case.

In this country, “confidential” means that our data can be accessed, edited, changed, replicated, and dis-

tributed by other par-ties with impunity and immunity, and we have no control over these act ivit ies or even a right to know what’s being spread around.

I pay cash nearly al-ways because digital privacy in the U.S. is nothing but an empty cliché. Identity theft? There ’s not much chance of it when I consistently pay cash.

Joe Bosch(via e-mail)

Small-Scale Cogeneration: A Promising Technology

In the May-June 2011 issue, there was a short article about our small-scale cogeneration (CHP) appliance, known as ecopower (“Recycled Heat,” Tomorrow in Brief). It was noted that “combined heat and power systems capture energy from space or water heaters and convert it to electricity.” As a point of clarifica-tion, small-scale cogeneration pro-duces its own heat (captured from an internal combustion engine) and uses it to heat water that then heats the building.

During heat generation and cap-ture, electricity is also generated and used on site or sent to the utility for

probably made the best choice for himself and his family.

Japan should not downplay what has happened and continues to hap-pen, and take every precaution pos-sible to protect its citizens from dan-ger. Many people and much of the environment has been damaged by this accident, and this needs to be addressed fully.

You can’t be too careful with this kind of disaster.

Gary DornierPaulina, Louisiana

Why I Pay Cash

R e g a r d i n g “ T h e Case Against Cash” by David R. Warwick (July-August 2011): As a former medical and post-claims under-writer, I’ve held credit reports in my hands that list sexual prefer-ences and much more. I know of nothing le-gally that precludes third-party viewers from not only hitting the “print” but-ton, but also editing and/or redis-tributing that data to “other parties and/or proper persons” (whomever these might be).

Data is no more private in the United States than the information in a newspaper on a park bench. Furthermore, we have no more con-trol over what is done either with or to our names, addresses, the con-tents of our bank or credit card ac-counts, etc., than we have over what kids might do with coins found on the sidewalk or in the play yard.

Worse yet, those dealing, collect-ing, and disseminating information about us have immunity (authority without responsibility), so if some-one is damaged by what they dis-tribute about us, and/or their iden-tity is stolen due to carelessness and negligence, it is the individual’s problem.

feedbAck


continued from page 4

fuTure AcTive

Edited by Aaron M. Cohen

Observing the Next 30 Years of Climate Change

C o n s t r u c t i o n i s scheduled to begin in late 2011 on the first long-term continental-scale ecological moni-toring system in the United States. The Na-tional Ecological Ob-servatory Network (NEON), consisting of 62 sites across the country, aims to help researchers better un-derstand and forecast climate change’s ef-fects and patterns over the next 30 years.

In addition to monitoring environ-mental change, NEON will also gauge land use and the effects of in-vasive species on different regions. This will be done via gathering and analyzing data on the soil, water, and atmosphere. Many of the towers and platforms used to gather data will be mobile and transportable, and satellites will help collect infor-mation. The National Science Foun-dation (NSF) is funding the project, which is estimated to cost $434 mil-lion.

“NEON’s early observations will provide the continental baseline we need to understand and forecast the likely environmental changes we could see over the coming decades,” says NEON chief science officer Dave Schimel. This long-term cli-mate-research project is intended to help current—and future—research-ers spot emerging ecological trends. Such research could enable more successful planning and response, as well as better-informed policy making.

While the NSF emphasizes that NEON’s networked infrastructure will employ existing state-of-the-art technologies, no new technology is being developed specifically for the project.

NEON is scheduled to begin oper-ating as soon as 2012 and to be fully functioning by 2017. Its data will be

made available online, in something approximating real time, to anyone interested.

Sources: National Science Foundation,

www.nsf.gov.

NEON Inc., www.neoninc.org.

Commercializing Research From the Public Sector

Researchers in the public sector who develop innovative technology are often not as effective when it

comes to commercializing it. Yet, this step is important, and transferring technological innovation from the public to the private sector can pro-vide additional benefit to a society by boosting its economy.

A study conducted by the Institute for Defense Analyses Science and Technology Policy Institute and sponsored by the U.S. Department of Commerce examines the obstacles holding back commercialization and searches for more effective strategies to move innovative products and processes from the government lab to the marketplace. The report, titled “Technology Transfer and Commer-cialization Landscape of the Federal Laboratories,” relies primarily on in-terviews conducted with individuals involved in technology transfer at federal research labs and agencies.

The interviews revealed nine “mu-tually influential factors” that “affect the speed and dissemination of tech-nologies from the laboratories,” ac-cording to the report. These include government regulations that can de-lay the process or otherwise “make it difficult for federal laboratories and industry to interact,” too much fed-eral or congressional oversight that “can have the unintended conse-quence of encouraging a risk-averse culture towards technology trans-fer,” and lab directors who do not strongly prioritize the commercial-ization process.

There may also be a lack of knowl-edge and skills to carry out that step of the process. Without proper incen-tives in place, it is unlikely that lab directors and others in similar posi-tions will be motivated to develop such abilities. Recommendations for improving incentives include creat-ing awards for excellence in that area and increasing royalty amounts.

The report further points out that ef-forts are often not as organized or co-ordinated as they need to be. Clearly defined missions, goals, and strategies for commercialization are necessary in order to improve the process.

Source: National Institute of Standards and

Technology, www.nist.gov. ❑

The new National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) will monitor regions across the United States for a 30-year period. NEON will gather data (on and above the ground) on environmental change, land use, and the effects of invasive species.

NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION

Metal-stamping project developed by Na-tional Institute of Standards and Technology researchers is intended to benefit the pro-cess of dying sheet-metal parts. A new report from the Institute for Defense Analyses urges improvements in the com-mercialization process for the technology developed in U.S. government labs.

BARRY GARDNER / NIST


By Cynthia G. Wagner

We recently sent out a call on Twitter for “WordBuzz” suggestions and received a number of interesting neolo-gisms. We selected jobsolescence, one of several idea- forward terms submitted by foresight analyst Richard Yonck (@ryonck) of Seattle, Washington.

Joining us in the conversation was Caroline Halton (@GloHalton), a communications strategist and trainer based in Johannesburg, South Africa.

@ryonck: @WorldFutureSoc “Job-solescence”: The state of being for functions, positions or fields that have disappeared. #wordbuzz

@GloHalton: any detail on specif-ically which functions, positions and fields have actually succumbed to ‘Jobsolescence’?

@ryonck: I’d say any job mas-sively undermined by new tech, e.g., elevator operator. May be a few left but not many

@WorldFutureSoc: Much tech-driven “jobsolescence” involves work we don’t want to do, but not everyone is creative enough to find better

@ryonck: True, but there are many jobs people don’t want to do, but have to. Times of transition can cause hardship

@GloHalton: And ‘jobsolescence’ as regards astronauts in the post shuttle era? Taking jobs as tour op-erators with Virgin?

@ryonck: On the contrary, if pri-vate space industry grows, astrojobs may be preparing for lift-off. ;-)

@WorldFutureSoc: I’d love to see more suggestions: Jobs for astro-nauts in post-shutt le era (cc @NASA, @neiltyson) #jobsolescence

@GloHalton: Houston shedding flight controllers, pad technicians, shuttle parts workers so ‘jobless’ as-tronauts in good company.

@WorldFutureSoc: Ideas needed! 101 uses for a used - er, unemployed - astronaut. #jobsolescence

We would like to credit Yonck for coining the term, but upon further research (i.e., Googling), we discov-ered a prior claim on jobsolescence.

Proving that it’s as much fun to do research as it is to just make things up, we watched a video episode about “Jobsolescence” by Double Espresso, independent film-

makers and word-players who credit producer Norma Vega for the concept.

In this short comedy video, two guys, Emilio and Vin-cenzo, assert that poverty translates into stupidity. They cite the (fictitious) book Masters and Slaves of the New World Economy by Guillermo Pinkerton, which outlines a hidden order and the phe-nomenon of jobsolescence—the “obsoletion of employ-ment.”

The guys discuss the suc-cess of that Facebook kid (i .e . , Mark Zuckerberg), whose success story offers lessons for surviving jobso-lescence in this crisis of “the Repression.” He became rich by creating a service for oth-ers, and you can do that, too, “by creating a job that has long eluded you, so you too can become a punk genius billionaire.” ❑

Source: Espressode 6, “Jobsoles-

cence,” by Double Espresso. Written

by Michael Arturo, produced by

Norma Vega, starring Manuel

Bermúdez and Michael Arturo. View

online at www.clicker.com/web/double-

espresso-web-series/.

Follow the World Future Society

on Twitter at http://twitter.com/

WorldFutureSoc. Also see THE

FUTURIST magazine’s official

Twitter page, @TheYear2030.

As TweeTed

JOBSOLESCENCE BY DOUBLE ESPRESSO (VIA YOUTUBE)

Actors Manuel Bermúdez (left, as “Vincenzo”) and Michael Arturo (as “Emilio”) offer one solu-tion for jobsolescence: creating a service for others, as “that Facebook kid” did.

WordBuzz: JobsolescenceAs the U.S. space shuttle program ended, Twitterers pondered the future for a special

class of professionals.


Moving from Vision to ActionPractical analysis of our multifaceted global problems and

pragmatic strategies for addressing them highlight this

volume of essays prepared for WorldFuture 2011. Topics

explored range from the “New Enlightenment” to tactics for

leveraging collective intelligence.

Moving from Vision to Action, edited by FUTURIST

magazine editor Cynthia G. Wagner, was distributed free to

all 2011 conference attendees and to Institutional Members

of the Society. Now, the volume is available to the public, with a

discount for World Future Society members.

Part 1: Perspectives and Prospects brings today’s major trend

drivers into historical perspective and offers ways to think about the

human future in the context of accelerating change—some of which we

cannot control, but much of which we can.

Part 2: Futures and Futuring focuses on improving the basic

equipment at our disposal not just for forecasting the future, but also

for building a human ecosystem in which our visions may be realized.

Part 3: Education, Information, Tools, and Resources ad-

dresses four key sectors in which our ingenuity for envisioning solu-

tions (and acting upon them) could hold the greatest opportunities for

improving the world’s future: technology, information, education, and

energy.

Part 4: New Directions and Leadership concludes with

techniques both for generating better visions of the future and for

becoming better leaders—perhaps the most critical tool of all for

moving from vision to action.

Moving from Vision to Action

edited by Cynthia G. Wagner.

WFS. 2011. 433 pages. Paperback.

ISBN 13: 978-0-930242-68-8.

$29.95 ($24.95 for Society members).

Order from www.wfs.org/wfsbooks

or call Society headquarters, 301-656-8274

Contributors

Stephen Aguilar-Millan

Michael Blinick

Irving H. Buchen

Choi Hangsub

José Luis Cordeiro

Inga-Lena Darkow

Don C. Davis

Wim J. de Ridder

Gary Dehrer

Tony Diggle

David A. Gilliam

Jerome C. Glenn

Tobias Gnatzy

Theodore J. Gordon

Sirkka Heinonen

Alireza Hejazi

Anvar Idiatullin

James H. Irvine

Sofi Kurki

David J. LePoire

Thomas Lombardo

Joseph N. Pelton

John Renesch

Sandra Schwarzbach

Bruce L. Tow

Heiko von der Gracht

Verne Wheelwright

Richard Yonck

Now Available!

Why study the future?The world changes so quickly that it‘s hard to

keep up. New inventions and innovations alter the way we live. People‘s values, attitudes, and beliefs are changing. And the pace of change keeps ac-celerating, making it difficult to prepare for tomorrow.

By studying the future, people can better antici-pate what lies ahead. More importantly, they can actively decide how they will live in the future by making choices today and realizing the conse-quences of their decisions.

The future doesn‘t just happen: People create it through their action—or inaction— today.

What can we know about the future?No one knows exactly what will happen in the

future. But by considering what might happen, people can more rationally decide on the sort of future that would be most desirable and then work to achieve it.

Opportunity as well as danger lies ahead, so people need to make farsighted decisions. The process of change is inevitable; it‘s up to everyone to make sure that change is constructive.

What is the World Future Society?The World Future Society is an association of

people interested in how social and technological developments are shaping the future. The Society was founded in 1966 by a group of private citi-zens, and is chartered as a nonprofit educational and scientific organization.

What does the Society do?The Society strives to serve as a neutral clearing-

house for ideas about the future. Ideas about the future include forecasts, recommendations, sce-narios, alternatives, and more. These ideas help people to anticipate what may happen in the next five, 10, or more years ahead. When people can visualize a better future, then they can begin to create it.

What does membership offer?■ THE FUTURIST, a magazine of fore-

casts, trends, and ideas about the future. Every member receives a sub-scription to this exciting bimonthly magazine. Experts in various fields share their insights and forecasts in ar-ticles directed at a general audience.

■ Special rates for all annual conferences. These conferences provide mem-bers with the opportunity for face-to-face meetings with distinguished scholars, leaders, and experts from around the world.

■ Access to your local chapter. Over 100 cities in the United States and abroad have chapters for grassroots support of futures studies. They provide a way for members to get involved in their local communities through workshops, discussion groups, and speakers.

Free e-mail newsletter! Visit www.wfs.org.

How do I join the Society?Visit www.wfs.org or contact:

World Future Society

Membership Department

7910 Woodmont Avenue, Suite 450

Bethesda, Maryland 20814, USA

Telephone: 301-656-8274

About the World Future SocietyAbout the World Future Society

nd2011 futurist

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