WFS - About This Issue of the Futurist

A magazine of forecasts, trends, and ideas about the future.
May-June 2007, Vol. 41, No. 3

About This Issue
by Cindy Wagner Managing Editor

Solutions for a World in Crisis

Probably the most frightening problem facing people in the Western developed world today is the growing threat of terrorism. Global trends analyst and defense adviser Marvin J. Cetron solicited input from futurists on potential terrorist scenarios and concludes that terrorist events will become more common and bloodier in the years ahead, largely initiated by Islamic extremists and backed by an expanding al-Qaeda. The war on terror will drag on for decades, he believes, and changing this future course represents the biggest challenge that the United States (and the West in general) will face.

Reorganizing and recharging global institutions is one approach to dealing with terrorism, says political scientist Anil Hira. One reason that so many such institutions have failed in the development projects intended to change lives for the better around the world is that they are not democratic, are not accountable, and have no means of raising revenues consistently. Hira outlines a proposal for creating a new global welfare institution that would help resolve the issues contributing to terrorism and other future-threatening problems.

Solutions for a world in crisis need not be grandiose, but they do need imagination: a pump that works like walking on stilts; a water-purification device that works like sipping through a drinking straw; a laptop computer so simple and cheap that every child in the world could have one. In the Visions essay, we see some of the simple but elegant design solutions "for the other 90%," honored in an exhibit of the Smithsonian Institution's Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum.

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