Why Are You A Futurist, WFS Editor's Query

When I started working at the World Future Society, one of the first authors I worked with was Lester Brown, founder of the Worldwatch Institute and now president of the Earth Policy Institute. He wrote eloquently and urgently in THE FUTURIST about the need to make more sustainable choices in our lifestyles.

I took what Brown wrote to heart when I decided to move to an apartment building that was within walking distance of the office. I do own a car, but I drive less than 4,000 miles a year. I feel that this choice was a healthy one for myself and is in some small way contributing to a cleaner future environment—at least in my own neighborhood.

We at the World Future Society are looking for other stories about how the study of the future, membership in the Society, or participation at a conference made a difference. In short, why are you here, thinking about the future? Why does the future matter?

Tell us (in about 500 words or fewer) either a personal story or an anecdote out of the history of futuring that inspired you to take a deeper and more active interest in the future—a story to help others see the future with new eyes.

This isn't a contest. We simply believe that stories told by the voices of experience will help show young people and other potential members exactly why thinking about the future is so vital to individuals and to the world right now.

I have worked in Information Technology for over 40 years, starting my career with IBM in 1967. I believe Technology and Change are almost synonymous. Despite the changes I have seen in my 40 years, the rate of change is accelerating and the impact on society will be huge. In the last 5 years alone, the use of the internet, personal devices, and social networking have exploded. What about inthe next 5 years? Is technology going too fast for us to keep up? I see, not to far away, that we will be able to put a chip in our body and have access to any information and to any body AT ALL TIMES, i.e., permanently connected to the world. The implications are awesome. Now, we have to figure out how to control it. They need a few "switches" in that chip: on/off, pause, filter, and on and on. Also, the implications to privacy might be a little scary, but I'm not sure we have privacy today.

I was pointed to your sight by a networking group with the understanding that the above is the kind of issue you look at (plus many others). THAT IS WHY I AM HERE!

Ken Cameron

LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/kencameron
Twitter: www.twitter.com/ITKLCameron

Why am I here? People involved in trying to make this world/ country a better place invariably wonder what their, or their government's, actions will do to change the future. The more information and ideas you are exposed to, the more forward-thinking people you interact with, can only help determine your personal decisions, whether it's voting for the next President, improving the environment, or influencing the direction of a company. All this said, the reason I am here is to review what others think in order to combine this information with my own beliefs to determine a prudent course of action- both personally and in business.

My name is Joshua Gottlieb and I absolutely love your organization and its expressed purpose. Although I have only recently found out about the existence of the World Future Society, I feel encouraged to be able to join such an important group of like-minded individuals. Your website suggested writing to you to express why I went to http://wfs.org in the first place, and so here is my personal explanation.

Ever since I was a small child, the inequity of existence has become more and more obvious to me, as I have continued to learn about life and the universe in which we live. As I reached my college years, it became clear to me that this inequity actually leans heavily on the “wrong” side of things, in my humble opinion. I had an astronomy teacher relate to me a few eye-popping statistics that still resonate with me – that of the 600+ man-made satellites orbiting the Earth, only about 12-20 of them actually look out into space. In addition, even though we are 100% certain that a Near Earth Object (NEO) of sufficient size would wipe out not only humanity but most of the rest of life on Earth as well, we still choose to dedicate less than 0.01% of our GNP as a nation to efforts aimed at identifying such objects and developing solutions to the massive problem.

This sad reality of the way science is funded in the present day crushed my dreams of becoming a theoretical cosmologist. At that time, cosmology was thought of as little more than theoretical physics combined with fortune-telling (we had virtually no data with which to compare against theory). The more I learned about the Health Care industry, the more I realized that the selective funding of only politically useful or provocative topics is pervasive throughout the scientific community. At the time I first explored your site (about 30 minutes ago) it dawned on me that this pattern of who gets the money and who doesn’t, actually extends into the study of the future versus the study of the past.

I asked myself, how many Futurist programs exist in universities nation-wide versus History programs? How does the funding match up? How many students are compelled to take History classes for which they will never have any useful need? The answers, which are pretty clear to anyone who has recently gone through the college experience in the United States, lean heavily towards History and against Futurists. In fact, I graduated with a degree in Global Studies, and that is probably the best analogue for a Futurist degree I can think of, because it is dedicated to studying the effects of the current trends in globalization and looking ahead to see what will be happening in the near future. The unfortunate part, besides the lack of funding for Future Studies as a serious academic discipline, is the lack of understanding (or purposeful belittling) of the importance of Future Studies. I’m not saying it is the most important field of study, but that we could probably use a lot less random Historical societies that play no active part in shaping the future and a lot more futurist groups like WFS.

Thanks for taking the time to read my little rant. I look forward to joining WFS and interacting with some like-minded individuals.

Joshua Gottlieb
Universal Sports

6.5.08

As a youth in junior high school in Tyler, Texas during the mid-fifties, I read every science fiction book in the city library. There was only one small section of about 50 books. I think everyone would understand the important stimulus this experience had on my interest in the Future, duh!

The question is, why did I seek out science fiction in the first place and why did my interest continue though my life? Of course, there was the current events in my life. I was a "duck and cover" teenager, believing that the world might end before I reached adulthood. But, I suspect my personal perspective was the biggest factor: I didn't like the world the way it was and wanted to "figure out" how I could make better. I was hurting and scared. Survival instinct pure and simple!

It's taken me sixty something years to transform to a more optimistic state of mind, actually a passionate state of mind. Maybe though the wisdom of my varied experiences and learning, I have not only figured out what a better world can be, but more significantly, through the media of the Web, I have discovered "signs" of a large community of like-minded people. For the first time in my life, I can justify Hope and Faith in the future of humanity.

For now, that like-minded community is represented by the World Future Society.

Kenan Doyle Branam
Media Consultant/Presenter

Why am I here? To make the future happen, not just for my children but all children.

One day I was chatting with a new employee in the hallway. The CEO of my company walked by, then stopped abruptly, turned around and alerted the new member that talking to me may soon translate into having something to read – an article or even a book. I took that as a compliment.

I am an avid reader and I’m known among my friends as the “walking index,” always ready to point out an article or a book on whatever topic the conversation may revolve around. The Futurist is one of my main sources for retrieving meaningful content and a springboard for further research. I discovered your publication decades ago and instantly fell in love with it. It’s one of the few publications that I read from beginning to end. I consider it the roadmap for my life-long learning experience. It stretches the limits of my imagination into directions that I can’t possibly think of on my own. The articles are well written and inspiring. They are sparks for creative minds, taking the reader into worlds waiting to be explored. It’s in the juxtaposition of ideas that innovation and learning happens, and The Futurist provides fertile ground for those seeds.

Having grown up multilingual and having a keen interest in foreign languages and cultures, language structures, etymology and semantics, I chose to become a linguist. I then began my professional career as an indexer and quickly discovered that I had a whole new world at my fingertips – content to analyze, structures to build, topics to articulate, semantics to apply, words to work with in new ways. I started to look at words not just from a linguistic point of view but also from an information-management point of view, and new worlds started to unfold under my eyes. With the advent of electronic publishing, more and more opportunities emerged for me in the field of information science, search technologies and retrieval, product design and features, etc. The forward-looking minds that The Futurist features had a tremendous impact on my 26 years of post-graduate education. I learned to take the tasks at hand and venture into other areas (disciplines that were none of my business - or so some said) such as biology, design, education, architecture, technology, gastronomy, interior decorating, etc., to find solutions to unanswered questions. The solutions to problems don’t necessarily lie in the area of one’s expertise. Everything is intertwingled and, yet, there is so much order in everything - if one can only see the patterns. In my professional quest for knowledge, I have discovered how my findings also apply to personal areas of fulfillment and happiness, relationships, corporate management, teamwork, economic and social networks, environmental issues, and on and on.

●Our formal education often fails us miserably. It often takes the joy out of learning. A linear theoretical approach is a miserable approach towards preparing us for the world. I would encourage everyone to plan to be a life-long learner. Learn to listen and look behind the obvious. You are being shaped by what you find. Be a futurist!

●Some things have to be taken literally, and others are there to be tampered with. Make sure you know the difference.

●Dare to be different. Listen to the experts, scrutinize ideas, and then do your thing but prove and validate, prove and validate along the way. There are bullies everywhere.

●Think out of the box? Does it have to be a box? Now you’re in the innovation zone. Miracles can happen there.

●Understand architecture of both tangible and intangible things. Foundations are the stronghold of systems. Build on them.

●Understand the laws of the universe. Work with them. There is power in systems.

●Understand life. Ecology. Coevolution. Communication. The message and the solution are everywhere. Let them inspire you. Biodiversity refers to more than the obvious.

●Invest wisely. There is no monopoly on knowledge. Knowledge is power. It is portable.

●Know the difference between form and function, fluff and substance, real progress and sheer activity, price and value, honesty and deception and keep adding to this list.

●Don’t let technology blind you. It’s only as good as the one writing the code. Tame it, it’s just an enabler in our quest to make this world a better place.

●Be a dreamer. Understand that imagination is a rare commodity. Be a surrealist, but be practical at the same time. There’s truth in a paradox. Life is full of contradictions. And that is a good thing.

●Results matter. Everything has a context. Not all metrics are created equal. Know what to count and what counts.

●Understand reality. You are not inventing the world, just reinventing it. Rearranging, reconnecting, reshuffling. Know where your effort matters.

●There is great power in proverbs. Expand them into stories. Reduce stories to proverbs. Pass them on. It’s the wisdom of generations.

●Learn. Produce. Enhance. Shed prejudice. Embrace. Then teach. Learn and teach. Teach and learn. Give back to the family, the company, the community, the world. They give back to you. Be a citizen of the world.

●There’s no destination just a complex path. Arm yourself for the trip. Obstacles are new opportunities. They give you strength to grow. Success does not come in gift boxes.

●Appreciate your friends. Adore your critics and your enemies. They make your growth possible. They make life what it is.

●Nothing in life is useless. It can always serve as a bad example. And that applies to people too.

●There is no ego in greatness. Be generous. Give and give and then give some more. Be tolerant. Be compassionate. Love unconditionally.

●Know that your work never ends. There will be little appreciation. Stand up for the right things, it is your duty.

●Find your niche. Find something greater than yourself. Be passionate. It is a natural “high.” Nothing great can be accomplished without passion. It is not an easy road but a passionate life is a fulfilling life. With passion you never have to “work” in your life and, yet, you have to start from scratch and keep on scratching.

I've been an environmentalist since the 70s, always recycling, reducing waste, etc.

Now I drive a diesel car that is powered by waste-vegetable oil. I don't want to support fossil fuel/oil companies which do so much harm to the environment by drilling and so much destruction to peace politically.

But the most important thing anyone who cares about the future can do for the earth is become a vegan.

The leading cause of greenhouse gasses is factory farming, not carbon emission from autos, etc. You cannot be an environmentalist without being a vegetarian. Nothing does more to destroy the environment than factory farming which is the leading cause of water pollution, greenhouse gasses, and world deforestation.

Who doesn't want to make the world a better place? Most people, believe it or not. You can tell by the number of people who fail the (1) Utilitarian Test: Which decision would do the most good for the most people? (2) Self-defeating Test: What would happen if everyone did what you did? and (3) Golden rule Test: Would we want others to treat us the way we are treating them? It doesn't have anything to do with religion though religion is responsible for the world's ails. (Religion is about power.)

I like to envision a future where everyone is kind and compassionate, not disrespectful where life of all kinds including humans comes cheap because there are so many of us, the way we are now. I envision a politician somewhere tactfully creating a fair and sensible plan to address overpopulation, instead of keeping his head buried in the sand. Because let's face it, [too many] humans are at the root of all of our problems. No one wants to be told they're unworthy of procreating, so any plan would have to across the board & not single any one group out.

I have many visions of the future, but none are positive. That's why I like Futurists—there's a growing number of people who "get it." Hopefully one day people with decision-making capabilities will listen to Futurists, before it's too late. But I won't hold my breath.

One is tempted to answer such a question with one of the convoluted arguments from the long debate. Unfortunately, there is not enough space to have that much fun with it.

I am a social scientist by nature and by training. I have made a life of observing and attempting to understand human nature, and from this life I have drawn several conclusions. For one thing, there is nothing quite so dated as an era's vision of the future. The future almost never turns out as we imagine it--at this point, we should all be living like the Jetsons. A society's vision of the future says much more about the character of the people than it does about the future. A society that does not bother imagining the future, has already found the answers for itself, and does not consider change as progress.

When we look to the future, it is because we value progress. Progress is a fairly recent concept, dating from the Renaissance. The concept of progress has its antithesis; it is possible to make things worse in the future rather than better. Of course, better and worse are relative. Is the modern industrial rat race really progress over the sort of life one finds among isolated tribal groups in the Amazon Valley? The answer depends upon your values.

For another thing, I have built somewhat of a reputation as being able to predict future circumstances and events with some accuracy. There is nothing mystical about this. For example when I wish to predict government policies and outcomes, I simply pick the stupidest possible course of action I can imagine for the policy decision, and the worst outcome I can imagine that is still realistic. I have other heuristics that work equally as well.

Finally, for all my cynicism and pessimism (a pessimist is never disappointed because if you are wrong it is because things are better than you thought), I have trouble suppressing my hope. I look to the future for resolution of the issues, solutions to the problems, the ending of hunger and disease, and world peace. I cannot retain hope when I think about the past. The past is the sum total of human folly; the future is the sum total of human possibility.

Richard A. Barker
Planning and Control Specialist
Engineering Services & Products Company

Getting hooked on future studies in the late 1960s, when the famous Daedalus issue with results from the Commission on the Year 2000 appeared, I shared the optimism that existed then regarding the accuracy of such studies. The first oil crisis put an end to that optimism, but there were other signals of trouble, too.

Let me take a seemingly trivial example. I’ve been a runner, now jogger, since the mid 1950’s, and I used to be alone on my jogging path. From the late 70’s, though, a lone jogger no more: in Hyde Park in London, in New York’s Central Park, even in Paris’ Bois de Boulogne there was this stampede. Trivial, but not so trivial if you’re in the shoe business, when a bit into the 1980’s, three quarters of the American shoe market was for running shoes.

Not so trivial, either, this signal about a change in values and attitudes. That was for me an eye-opener. Not only do we have trouble forecasting economic and political change like the oil crisis, we took values and attitudes as so unchangeable that we did not even pay any attention to them. So one basic quandary would be: what are (with a famous phrase) “the unknown unknowns”? How may these be spotted? By definition, they may not – but then the challenge would be to identify them before they reach center stage. Such an ambition might be generalized to a striving for bringing early attention to weak signals, weak signals that are growing to become strong. (Or like with the positive side of self-defeating future studies: knowing about something potentially disastrous or at least negative may help us avoid it.)

The other theme to explore would be to undertake to map the now known previously unknown, thus trying to establish concepts and descriptors for, in this instance, “values, attitudes, and life-styles” (to refer to one such attempt, that of Arnold Mitchell of SRI International; there are others as well). How are values created or perhaps rather imbued? How may they change and to what extent are they constant, unchangeable? What are their effects on our evolving future? How do they relate to something profoundly affecting values, culture?

Bengt-Arne Vedin, professor emeritus, Sweden

I am here hoping to find people who would be interested in designing the Earth's future collectively.

As it is now, the future of the Earth is being decided, but only to an extent, by few, with those left out influencing the future very negatively.

More on the concept of designing the future with the participation of everyone at www.modelearth.org.

Jan Hearthstone

The dirt, the grass, the smell of growth … as a young teen working the family farm I had ample time to explore each blade of grass I chewed, each bale of hay we stacked and each tree or bend of the creek where we lived. For me, the acres around the house were an immense universe of life that would continue forever; it was exactly this realization one day that the same rock upon which I sat would persist long after the memory of anything I would do, say or write that prompted me to begin my thoughts of the future.

As I evolve through college, profession, marriage and fatherhood, the essence of that solid stone points me to a broader future. It is because of my memories of that natural space that I look to the future and think, despite the humming of daily life, technology and business, what can I do to ensure those blades of grass continue to sprout, the dirt continues to enrich and all growth – of food, humanity, knowledge, spirit and life – happens for longer than I. While the hectic pell-mell of life occurs, for me, it is these small memories that continue to drive me to think of the future.

In that thinking, I look across the swath of life, much as I looked across the swaths of a mown hayfield, and see patterns – some driven by machinery, some driven by wind, some by my own sweat and labor. It is this looking at the world around, the noticing of patterns, the recognition of the forces by which patterns form and the thinking of how such patterns will adjust all of our futures that inherently drive me as a futurist. Thinking through tomorrow’s scenarios, planning for the uncertainty and weathering the unexpected storm or calm is a natural and intense attraction for a child of the farm.

Thus, as a social researcher, I see the world of people and the patterns we create as my future universe. Much as I spent what seemed a lifetime (if only a few years) on that small family farm, I now spend a lifetime looking at new blades of grass, at new fertile soils and at new growth of all people to see what the future brings. Much as acorns sprout the largest oaks, I see social pattern as sprouts to the diversity of the future. It is for this reason, this life of seeking to understand and learn, I engage as a futurist.
Thank you for the opportunity to post, this was an enjoyable lunchtime self-discovery.

Richard Maltsbarger
VP Research
Lowes

Thank you for posing the question about what one individual has done to think about the future of our planet. It’s an important question.

Most of us think, “What can one person do to make even the slightest dent in the health and well-being of our planet?” But from my perspective, all the seemingly small things each one of us does adds up in a big way, just like compounded interest does when there’s money in your bank account. Initially our small contribution seems like a mere drop in the proverbial bucket, but as time passes and each of us does one other small thing and again one other small thing, it’s like a snowball rolling downhill, it picks up energy as it goes. Since science has shown us we are all connected at the basic level, it’s entirely possible for one small thought or one small action to act like a lightening rod attracting more and more energy to it and eventually it begins to affect the bigger whole.

As for me, I’ve done many small things in my lifetime, but the one that comes to immediately to mind is that I chose to only have one child. Even 30 years ago I understood the fact that most of the problems and challenges we face today on the planet are due to the fact that there are simply too many people. It’s people who use the resources, create pollution and generally disregard and disrespect our home planet. This planet only has so much space and so many resources. Most of us seem to believe these things are endless and keeping what we have clean and productive tends to fall by the wayside when there’s a lot of money involved. As one of the earth’s major inhabitants, and the one who can and does cause the most harm, I think it’s up to each of us to take a good hard look at how many children we bring into the world. We need to ask the hard questions like, “What kind of place will we leave our children?” Will we leave it a better or worse place than when we arrived? If we can’t answer those questions in the positive, then each of us needs to seriously consider limiting the number of children we chose to have, or better yet, chose not to have any. I chose to bring my actions into congruence with my principles. And this is the same basic choice each of us must make, to live by our principles. It’s the only way we will survive.

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