Blog
One more day.
Well it’s the last day, and I am sorry to see it come to the close. Today is what is called the Professional Members Forum, titled: Global Futures Projects: Innovations and Outcomes. Thankfully there were no more hard choices to make as the programme was set....
Monday: the last day of the formal proceedings, except …
Today there were so many presentations I wanted to attend (9.00-10-30) and they were apparently all fabulous. We all met up for coffee and the room was abuzz. People in particular to Google include: Medard Gabel (Big Picture Consulting); Jerome Glen and Theodore J...
Into the heavy stuff
Today I attended a presentation by Dennis M. Bushnell, Chief Scientist from NASA, who was fascinating, but I was out of my depth. He is clearly a brilliant man who has an extremely good grasp of technology. Much of his thinking will feed into ‘7x7’ in August and the...
The Conference Begins…
Tonight the conference began properly with the Opening Plenary. The key speakers were Edie Weiner, co-author of FutureThink: How to Think Clearly in a Time of Change, and Bill Drayon, a founder of Ashoka and former assistant administrator for the U.S. Environmental...
The First Pre-Conference Course
Today I attended one of the pre-conference courses. On speaking with Susan Echard (one of the key organisers) about the purpose of Project 2058, Susan recommended I attend Dr Peter Bishop’s presentation. Peter is the current Chair of the Studies of the Future Graduate...
The Brookings Institution and The Urban Institute
Today was fascinating. I visited both the Brookings Institute and the Urban Institute - both with their head offices in Washington DC - both I have admired from afar for a number of years. I have tentative follow-up meetings with each early next week. My first...
7X7
On Tuesday evening, members of the SF team attended the first of the 2008 season of the 7×7 ideas forum. Each night offers 7 speakers with 7 ideas, and 7 minutes each. These evenings, (of which there are five in total) are working under the theme of ‘The Big Think:...
Book Review: The Way We Will Be 50 Years From Today
Edited By Mike Wallace Thomas Nelson, $42.95 What is our vision for the future and how do we achieve it? This is the simple premise that inspired Mike Wallace to interview sixty of the most inspired thinkers and pose the provocative question, what is the shape of the...
Launch of our New-Look Website
On Thursday night, as part of World Environment Day (5 June 2008), the team launched our new-look website. Over the last five years we have been excited to see the number of new innovative organisations working towards sustainable development. This has meant we can...
Book Review: The One Thing You Need To Know: About Great Managing, Great Leading, and Sustained Individual Success
By Marcus Buckingham Free Press, RRP $29.99 Marcus Buckingham, in “The One Thing You Need to Know”, describes what common elements he sees throughout examples of outstanding achievement in managing, leadership and career success. His ideas need not be confined to the...
Book Review: Five Minds for the Future
By Howard Gardner Harvard Business School Press, RRP $61.99 Five Minds is structured in five different parts, each representing a different “mind” that will “command a premium” in the years ahead. Each of these different minds will enable people to cope with the...
Our First Workshop
Over two days the team at Sustainable Future got together to explore the future. It was so fascinating, we ended up staying up to 2.00am thrashing out the key drivers for the next 50 years. After a slow start the next morning, we spent the remainder of the...
Looking Backwards to Map the Future
Part of Project 2058 is about learning from the past, in order to progress the future. An opportunity to learn from New Zealand's first national environmental campaign was too good to miss - therefore the team strolled down to have a look (and were very...
Book Review: The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World
By Alan Greenspan Penguin Books, $65. The combination of an increasingly globalised world economy and a change in the way we do business is rapidly changing the way the world works. In the long term, the sheer velocity of such change could lead us to just about...
Book Review: Carbon Neutral by 2020: How New Zealanders Can Tackle Climate Change
Edited by Nikki Harre & Quentin D. Atkinson Craig Potton Publishing, $35. Climate change has become one of the central issues of our time, yet it is an issue weighed down by messages of doom and gloom and a pervasive sense of helplessness about how we should...
Book Review: Crimes Against Nature: Standing Up to Bush and the Kyoto Killers Who are Cashing In on Our World
By Robert F. Kennedy Penguin Books, pb $28 In this powerful indictment of George W. Bush's White House, environmental attorney Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., presents an impassioned, excoriating account of how Bush and big business are plundering the environment while taking...
Book Review: Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet
By Mark Lynas Fourth Estate, $35 Six degrees refers to the possibility that average global temperatures will rise by up to six degrees within the next hundred years. Utilizing highly up-to-date scientific research and political forecasting Lynas paints a reliable...
Book Review: Reinventing Paradise: How NZ is Starting to Earn a Bigger, Sustainable Living in the World Economy
By Rod Oram Penguin Books, trade paperback, $35.00 This collection of columns by the highly influential and award winning business journalist, Rod Oram, is essential reading for those interested in NZ place in the global market. Pulling together his writing over the...
Book Review: The Upside of Down: Catastrophe Creativity & the Renewal of Civilization
By Thomas Homer-Dixon Text Publishing, trade paperback $40. This is not just a catalogue of crisis points and doom prophecy, “The Upside of Down" sets out a theory of the growth, crisis, and renewal of societies. Today's converging energy, environmental, and...
Celebrating Project 2058’s first reports
Welcome. The team at Sustainable Future are going to keep a diary of progress - and this is our first posting. The photo shows the team in August 2007, raising our glasses to eight months of hard work. We published version two of our methodology and two...
Book Review: New Zealand Unleashed: The Country, Its Future & the People Who Will Get It There
Steven Carden with Campbell Murray Random House NZ, paperback $40. In this book Steven Carden doesn't outline what New Zealand should do, rather he argues how New Zealand should be ; how we, as a country and culture, can thrive on the uncertainty of the future, rather...
Book Review: World Changing – A User’s Guide to the 21st Century
Edited by Alex Steffen Abrams Publishing, Hardback, $70.00 An incredibly interactive book designed to allow, indeed empower, individuals to effect change. Based on the idea that it’s not enough to wait around for policy and top down decision making to dictate issues...
Book Review: The Carbon Buster’s Home Energy Handbook
By Godo Stoyke New Society Publishers, paperback. $29.00 Most people are unaware that environmental problems such as climate change can be easily mitigated, at a profit, on a personal level, through the intelligent application of appropriate technology. The Carbon...
Book Review: Ecovillages: New Frontiers for Sustainability
By Jonathan Dawson Green Books, $28.00 In recent years, ecovillages - local communities which aim to minimise their ecological impact but maximise human wellbeing and happiness - have proliferated worldwide. They incorporate a wealth of radical ideas and approaches...
Book Review: Black Earth White Bones
Else Vintage, $28 pb It’s the summer of Pacific settings for NZ novels. Lloyd Jones’ Mister Pip, the runaway bestseller seen in most hands across NZ all January, is set in Bougainville. Like this month’s review title, it makes lucid and informed comment on the...
Book Review: Confronting Climate Change
by Ralph Chapman, Jonathan Boston and Margot Schwass Victoria University Press, pb $40.00 For those who are tired of a climate change debate communicated through vague hand-waving gestures and pretty pictures, VUP’s Confronting Climate Change addresses the crucial...
Book Review: The Long Emergency
James Howard Kunstler Atlantic, pb $30 Global warming has become increasingly prominent in our social consciousness in the past year and, as always, this brings an excess of literature to choose from. With this book, Kunstler cuts through the chaff by adopting a...
Book Review: A Short History of Progress
By Ronald Wright Da Capo Press, pb $35 One of the central questions Wright seeks to answer in this concise and gripping work is, "Why, if civilizations so often destroy themselves, has the overall experiment of civilization done so well?" He tries to answer it, with...