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One of the best of the currrent crop of books about the growing threat of runaway climate change due to global warming. Posted in the Best Books section.

Tim Flannery is one of Australia’s leading environmental scientists and a recent Australian of the Year. His 2008 Quarterly Essay is another welcome contribution to a vital debate. Having read it carefully, however, I felt that the framework he was using needed to be expanded to include the human and social factors that he touches on rather too lightly. The essence of my response is that for ’sustainability’ to have any real meaning we need to look beyond the ‘hard’ sciences and fully include the ‘human and social interiors’. Why? Because it is here, rather than in the external physical world, that the issues confronting civilisation have their origins and also their possible solutions. It is posted in the general futures section.

This article provides a response to the five papers that were published in Foresight vol 10 no 4, 2008. It appeared in vol 10 no 5, 2008. It is posted in the general futures section.

This paper in the General Futures section was first produced for the Brisbane Ideas Festival in 2006. It considers what I call the ‘civilisational challenge’ – the array of world concerns facing humanity. It then looks at three avenues of response: understanding, taking responsibility and taking action. Two appendices summarise 20 ‘world problems’ and possible solutions. A brief list of further reading is included.

This paper, written over a three year period, probes the 20th Century myth that America is THE land of the future. Much of the content is derived from what Americans themselves have written about the prospects for this influential nation. It attempts to avoid the shrill ‘anti-Americanism’ that is so common these days by taking a hard look at the model of development that it has promoted and that has been taken up around the world. It concludes that the myth cannot be sustained but that there are many paths out of the civilisational ‘dead end’ that current trends appear to foreshadow. The paper was published in Foresight Vol 10, No 4, 2008, along with five other short essays in response. This paper can be downloaded from the ‘General Futures’ page see link to the right.

Four of the series of ten monographs from the Australian Foresight Institute’s (AFI) research program carried out during 2001 to 2005 have been placed in the Foresight Monographs section. The first provides an overview of the whole program and its main conclusions. The second looks at the transformative cycle (or T-cycle for short), a tool or method for considering ‘breakdowns and renewals of meaning’. The third considers the development and uses of critical futures studies and one of its associated methods (CLA) in part through the bios of those involved. The final item is a succinct and very useful overview of futures in (not ‘of’) education. It is required reading for anyone considering introducing a futures perspective, futures tools and methods, into educational settings at any level.

Together these four publications provide access to several aspects of innovation and renewal in futures thinking and applied foresight. To locate the other monographs please go to: http://www.swinburne.edu.au/business/research_reports.html

if you’re interested in how to implement strategic foresight there’s no better source than this book edited by Andy Hines and Peter Bishop and published by Social Technologies in 2006. It draws on the work and experience of foresight practitioners around the world and distills this knowledge into six practical steps: framing, scanning, forecasting, visioning, planning and acting. The preface can be found here, along with a link to more info about the book.

Having been to two other similarly-titled ‘Future Summits’ I was interested in how Kevin Rudd’s much-heralded event held in Canberra in April 2008 would operate and what responses it would evoke. In this piece I take a critical look at what was missing in this and similar cases.

I’ve placed a small sample of my bird pictures in the Best Birds Gallery at right. I will slowly add to this section over time.

I’ve just uploaded three new papers that can be found in the general futures section at right.