Biotechnology’s Promise—and Risks

Chips, Clones, and Living Beyond 100: How Far Will the Biosciences Take Us? by Paul J. H. Schoemaker and Joyce A. Schoemaker. Financial Times Press. 2009. 201 pages. $24.99.

“Between now and 2025, the biosciences will likely become one of the most important topics in our personal lives, at work, and in society,” assert Paul J. H. Schoemaker and Joyce A. Schoemaker, a husband-and-wife team with experience in the industry. Yet, their new book, Chips, Clones, and Living Beyond 100, is not so much about the biosciences as it is about the outside social, economic, and political factors that will likely impact the industry and determine its commercial potential. The real question, as far as the authors are concerned, is not how far the biosciences will take us, but rather what will drive biotechnology forward.

To answer this, the authors analyze long-term trends and build scenarios, giving special consideration to possible wild cards. They also examine biotechnology’s potential impact on related industries such as pharmaceuticals and health care. The end result is practically a textbook example of how to apply futures techniques in a nonfiction book aimed at the average reader, and this may be its most exciting contribution.

After a quick rundown of significant medical breakthrough over the past 200 years, the authors discuss some of the pivotal breakthroughs that effectively created and defined the biosciences (such as synthesizing the human insulin gene and the Human Genome Project). From there, they look to potential future innovations, such as affordable genome-sequencing microchips, individualized prescription drugs, stem-cell treatments, and gene therapy (replacing or shutting off a defective gene).

Next, they examine what must happen fiscally in order to make such innovations a reality. Entrepreneurs and venture capitalists are needed to help fund biotech innovations and commercialize the technology. Yet, up to this point, commercializing the technology has not exactly been a walk in the park. Given overall disappointing financial results thus far, the industry nonetheless survives and continues to grow in large part because of Big Pharma.

“Established pharmaceutical companies have created extensive alliance and ownership arrangements with many biotechnology companies,” the Schoemakers write. Pharmaceutical companies are drawn to the emerging field in part because of their own struggling financial situation. They see it as a response to growing challenges that are threatening their profit margins, now that they can no longer depend on so-called blockbuster drugs. To them, biotech drugs represent an opportunity to move toward a more sustainable long-term business model. Conversely, how successfully biotech manages to cross business boundaries will be one of the major keys to its success and growth, the authors argue.

The industry’s success also depends on how well we meet global health-care challenges, including those in the developed world.

“How can we expand these new technologies to poorer nations when the richest countries in the world, where they are first developed and deployed, have difficulties themselves controlling healthcare costs?” the authors ask. Health care has to be reformed if it is to be sustained, they argue. The rapidly growing need for greater preventive care and chronic disease management, thanks to increased longevity, will only add to the already large tab.

Where biotech is ultimately headed also has to do with those potential game changers known as wild cards. The authors group them into three sectors: society and politics, science and technology, and business and economics. While the events they list are certainly high impact, the big surprise is that not many truly qualify as low probability. For instance, as the Schoemakers point out, there is ample reason to believe that mass public acceptance — or rejection — of the biosciences could occur. (The debate over genetically modified foods in Europe sets a strong precedent for the rejection scenario.) Even the notion of rogue states harboring bioterrorists doesn’t seem too far-fetched.

Building on these forecasts, the authors divide their scenario framework into two main categories: technological success and societal acceptance. (Funding is a third variable, but it’s at least partially dependent on the other two.) They then use scenario-building exercises to answer the nagging questions: (1) What if biotech doesn’t live up to expectations? and (2) What if it does?

The authors identify a number of different tensions between projected technological breakthroughs and sociopolitical and economic forces. These include potential class inequities that could arise and ethical arguments regarding life extension, not to mention other thornier matters.

“We stand at the threshold of an unprecedented era in which humans can change their own genes, and hence redefine what it means to be human,” the Schoemakers assert. “Unfortunately, we presently lack the regulatory oversight and moral compass to wisely navigate the technological terrain.”

Thoroughly researched and highly accessible, Chips, Clones, and Living Beyond 100 is designed with a wide audience in mind. To that end, it’s not weighted down by technical jargon and the work appeals to the reader’s interest and imagination. The book’s geographic orientation is almost exclusively toward the United States, but the authors justify this focus by arguing that biotech innovation depends mainly on the United States, both economically and politically.

If the book has a not-so-hidden agenda, it’s to advocate for the advancement of the biosciences. But if there’s a second, less-intended aftereffect, it may well be the expansion of futuring.

About the Reviewer

Aaron M. Cohen is a staff editor for THE FUTURIST and World Future Review.

Books in Brief

By Rick Docksai

Surprising Facts About the Brain

Brain Sense: The Science of the Senses and How We Process the World Around Us by Faith Hickman Brynie. AMACOM. 2009. 274 pages. $24.

The brain is much more dynamic than scientists used to think, according to science and health writer Faith Hickman Brynie in Brain Sense. She takes readers on a tour of how the brain and the senses interact, sharing discoveries that she says have dramatic implications for brain research and medical practice. Examples:

Monkeys using their own brain waves to control robotic arms.

Patients blinded by strokes regain some of their vision by retraining their eyes with computer-assisted visual exercises.

New physical-therapy regimens that relieve amputees of “phantom-limb” pain (pains in the empty spaces where those parts used to be).

Brynie points to newly discovered ways that the brain constantly reshapes its own structure and replacing circuits — or even memories — that had been lost or damaged. She also describes recent observations about how the brain perceives reality: “Our brains have minds of their own,” she says. In other words, no two people will taste, smell, or feel in the same way.

Brynie’s Brain Sense is a fascinating look at what it means to be human and conscious. It is also an exciting preview of treatments that doctors might one day achieve.

Change Design: Conversations about Architecture as the Ultimate Business Tool by NBBJ and Bruce Mau. Greenway. 2009. 250 pages. $59.95.

A well-designed building encourages creativity and cooperation within, according to architectural firm NBBJ and design company Bruce Mau. Their jointly authored and richly illustrated book Change Design showcases new buildings that offer new ways of working. Change Design presents real-life stories of 14 organizations that enhanced productivity, employee satisfaction, energy efficiency, or all three by changing the layout of their office buildings.

Case studies include the Banner Health hospital complex, designed to accommodate systematic growth over the next 20 years; Boeing, which brought manufacturers and designers — two groups that had always worked separately — together into one facility, thereby resolving problems more quickly and cutting production time in half; and developer City Developments Limited, which custom-builds high-rises with ventilation, shading, and rainwater-sequestration features to maximize sustainability and comfort.

Accompanying these stories are essays on the nature of design, the future of workplaces, the relationship between building design and personal values, and hope for resolving tensions between executives and designers. The volume also includes descriptions of change-design activities that you can organize in your own workplace.

Change Design is a delightful show-and-tell of architectural improvements and their tangible benefits. Artists, business leaders, and professionals of all kinds may find it informative and inspirational.

Fight for the Bay: Why a Dark Green Environmental Awakening is Needed to Save the Chesapeake Bay by Howard R. Ernst. Rowman & Littlefield. 2009. 144 pages. Paperback. $19.95.

Pollution has reduced more than 400 water ecosystems around the world to “dead zones,” notes U.S. Naval Academy political-science professor Howard Ernst in Fight for the Bay. For conservationists trying to save these ecosystems, the eastern United States’ Chesapeake Bay serves as a cautionary tale.

Since the early 1980s, Ernst explains, a publicly funded Chesapeake Bay Program has coordinated bay-restoration efforts with the governments of neighboring states Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. The program, however, lacks any lawmaking power. It only organizes public education campaigns, distributes grants to citizen cleanup projects, and sets nonbinding guidelines for state officials. This “voluntary” approach — “light-green conservation,” as Ernst calls it —failed miserably. Fauna and animal life across the bay remain in jeopardy, and its fishing industries have collapsed.

There is no substitute for political action and litigation, Ernst concludes. However, he sees the Chesapeake Bay Program’s light-green approach being repeated in estuaries around North America and beyond. He hopes that conservationists will change course and accept confrontation as necessary for reform.

Ernst’s Fight for the Bay is an incisive look at an important ecosystem and what communities everywhere can learn from it. Researchers, environmentalists, and political activists of all kinds may find it an enlightening read.

How to Survive the End of the World As We Know It: Tactics, Techniques, and Technologies for Uncertain Times by James Wesley Rawles. Plume. 2009. 153 pages. Paperback. $17.

Civilization is still standing now, but that does not mean it always will, cautions survival expert James Wesley Rawles in How to Survive the End of the World As We Know It.

We’d better know what to do in the event of a deadly viral pandemic, major asteroid strike, unprecedented hyperinflationary (or deflationary) economic depression, third World War, or any other global disaster, Rawles argues.

He spells out all the hazards that we might face in a post-disaster society: looting, armed violence, food shortages, etc. Then he lays out steps we can take now, such as taking survival-training courses, designing shelters, and stocking them with necessary supplies. He even offers a chapter on disaster-proof financial security: savvy investments to make now, earning income in the midst of a major recession, and bartering in the wake of a true disaster.

If all of these musings sound alarmist, he explains, consider that the world today is increasingly dangerous and fraught with uncertainty — worldwide terrorist movements since the early 1990s and the 2008 meltdown of markets across the globe are proof.

Making the Invisible Visible: Essays by the Fellows of the International Leadership Forum edited by Richard Farson. Western Sciences Behavioral Institute. 2009. 153 pages. $29.

We cannot reliably forecast the future unless we understand the present, says Richard Farson, president of the Western Sciences Behavioral Institute, a nonprofit foundation that explores ways to improve human life. In Making the Invisible Visible, he brings together essays from 29 Institute fellows, who share their perspectives on current challenges. Among the contributing authors are:

Ralph Keyes, freelance writer, describes a trend of increasing groupthink throughout society.

Lawrence Solomon, management consultant, wonders at the human mind’s capacity to simultaneously comprehend reality and distort it.

Michael Crichton, the late physician and author, states his concern that our society is losing its tolerance and respect for opposing ideas.

Jane Poynter, aerospace engineer, debunks the common belief that we must choose between the environment and human welfare.

Carlos Cardozo Campbell, urban planner, notes the toll that mass urbanization takes on human and environmental health.

James Cramer, co-founder of the journal DesignIntelligence and co-chairman of the Design Futures Council, considers the pros and cons of society’s fixation on speediness.

The authors eloquently address deep ideas to general audiences, in thought-provoking essays that are good for reflection, discussion, and community action.

The Smart Growth Manual by Andres Duany and Jeff Speck with Mike Lydon. McGraw-Hill. 2009. 240 pages. $24.95.

Urban growth is inevitable, so let us plan ahead for it to make sure that it takes place in the most orderly ways possible, argue design consultants Andres Duany and Jeff Speck in The Smart Growth Manual.

“No-growth” campaigns rarely if ever succeed, they note, and often serve to undercut needed planning — so when growth does resume, it is even more haphazard and wasteful.

If given the chance, local discussion sessions among city officials and residents can minimize growth’s worst side effects and help keep neighborhood enlargement from degenerating into urban sprawl. If successful, they will design mixed-use neighborhoods that treat all residents with equity. They will also harmonize urban and rural areas, and live in accordance with their regions’ natural resource and water supplies.

The authors outline fundamental principles of smart growth, instructions for formulating a growth blueprint, and making optimum arrangements for convenient mass transit. They also cover affordable housing, vibrant neighborhood life, and conservation of energy, land, and water.

The Smart Growth Manual is an attractive, well-illustrated guidebook for building cities that will offer high quality living in the present and the future.

Upstarts: How GenY Entrepreneurs Are Rocking the World of Business and 8 Ways You Can Profit from Their Success by Donna Fenn. McGraw-Hill. 2009. 258 pages. $29.95.

A new business landscape is in the making, and the 13- to 25-year-old youth demographic is creating it, according to Upstarts by business writer Donna Fenn. A trend is rising of teens and young adults starting their own businesses, offering the world’s best hope for a flourishing post-recession global economy, Fenn argues.

She explains that these Generation Y “upstarts” are the first generation to grow up digital; they know the Internet, mobile devices, and social media and how these applications can facilitate starting and running a business. In addition, they are more frugal and independent than preceding youth cohorts. Most were raised by working parents, and all were faced with the turmoil of the twenty-first-century economy, in which any large corporation or institution can fail. The upstarts have learned to count on themselves.

Older executives who want to know where their industries are headed, younger professionals who are considering launching out on their own, and anyone else who wants to better understand Generation Y will benefit from reading Upstarts.

The Viking in the Wheat Field: A Scientist’s Struggle to Preserve the World’s Harvest by Susan Dworkin. Walker & Company. 2009. 239 pages. $26.

The global food outlook is grim, says magazine writer and author Susan Dworkin in The Viking in the Wheat Field. She points out that, according to the United Nations, there will be 9 billion people on earth by 2050, and they will require a 75% increase in food supply. Meeting such an elevated feeding demand is a major challenge, since farmers have already cultivated most of the planet’s arable land. Worse still, much of the land that is available has lost its fertility due to overuse. What options remain besides destroying more forests?

One hope rests on making more-efficient use of existing crop land. Dworkin describes the lifetime work of Bent Skovmand, the late Norwegian horticultualist who spent his career developing biotechnology procedures for cross-breeding wheat plants to enhance their disease resistance, accelerate their growth, and exponentially increase their grain output. Dworkin’s account relates Skovmand’s many experiments in seed banks and their successful outcomes in Mexico, Turkey, and other locales.

In light of the much-publicized rises in food costs and shortages of water for farming, the story that Dworkin tells in The Viking in the Wheat Field is very compelling and very timely.

Why We Cooperate by Michael Tomasello et al. MIT Press. 2009. 204 pages. $14.95.

In the next decade, research into human infants’ thought patterns might help answer ancient questions about human nature, speculate anthropologist Michael Tomasello and co-authors in Why We Cooperate.

Tomasello reviews studies that compared human children with apes and found the humans to be uniquely cooperative: Only human children convey information to one another, exhibit teamwork, share their belongings, or object when others are not being “fair.”

But where did humans’ unique cooperativeness emerge, wonders psychologist Carol Dweck. She argues that it is not entirely from nature; children’s altruistic behaviors are heavily influenced by other people.

Philosopher Brian Skyrms encourages researchers to study the cooperation that exists across the animal kingdom: Bacteria, mole rats, meerkats, and many insects are very cooperative with each other.

Psychologist Elizabeth Spelke posits that humans’ cooperation started after they developed language. She notes that at around age two, humans begin to display unique abilities that are possible only with language: analyzing information, understanding math, discerning other people’s intentions, communicating ideas through gestures, and helping others to achieve goals.

Why We Cooperate is an impressive convergence of philosophy and hard science that nonspecialists will find very approachable and engaging.

Digital Bandage Monitors Vital Signs

Wireless technology for early detection.

A wireless digital “bandage” that would continuously monitor patients’ vital signs and transmit the data in real time to health-care professionals is currently being tested in the United Kingdom.

The Sensium disposable adhesive bandage is non-intrusive and affixes easily and painlessly to a patient’s chest. Doctors and nurses would be notified instantly of any changes in a patient’s body temperature, heart rate, and respiration on any digital device, from desktop computers to cell phones. This would enable them to respond faster to any changes or complications. The patient’s medical records would also be automatically updated with the data.

The bandage, developed by Toumaz Technology, is part of a growing medical trend toward integrating wireless technology in patient care.

Compared to large, fixed monitoring machines, the Sensium digital plaster boasts several distinct advantages. It could enable patients to leave their beds and move about with greater independence, shorten hospital stays, and improve the quality of outpatient care.

Just like a regular Band-Aid or gauze wrap, the digital bandage would need to be replaced with a fresh one every couple of days.

Chris Toumazou, CEO and co-founder of Toumaz Technology and the director of the Institute of Biomedical Engineering at Imperial College in London, says, “We’re hoping that the plaster will improve the health and well-being of a vast range of patients — from patients on a general hospital ward to people with chronic diseases like diabetes and cardiovascular disease who want to have their health monitored without having to keep visiting the hospital.” — Aaron M. Cohen

Source: Toumaz Technology, www.toumaz.com.

Is Industrial Civilization Doomed?

The Ecotechnic Future: Envisioning a Post-Peak World by John Michael Greer. New Society Publishers. 2009. 153 pages. Paperback. $18.95.

It is the middle of the twenty-first century, and the only countries that can still afford to use fossil fuels are those that are producing them. Half those countries’ populations — and 90% of the populations of the non-fossil-fuel-producing countries — labor at subsistence agriculture. Most of the rest eke out livings in factories converting salvaged materials with hand tools. Public health has collapsed, literacy rates are in steady freefall, and poverty and hunger are everywhere. Dozens of nations are mired in civil war, and populations are migrating in hordes, some to flee rising sea levels and encroaching droughts.

This is the future that ecologist John Michael Greer anticipates in The Ecotechnic Future. He argues that our industrial civilization is headed for its final fall. It doomed itself by exhausting its natural resources and mistakenly assuming that technology freed human communities from their natural environments’ constraints.

The population boom of the last few centuries, Greer explains, was made possible by massive advances in living standards, economic growth, surpluses of food, and vastly improved public health. All of this, however, was sustained by fossil fuels. Once fossil-fuel reserves peak —as they are expected to do between 2020 and 2030 — production, growth, and the amenities of modern life will gradually halt. Contemporary industrial society will downgrade into a “scarcity society” that manages on minimal energy, after which it will become a “salvage society” that scrapes survival from the refuse of the defunct urban buildings, information networks, and industrial centers. Populations everywhere will shrink. Civic unrest will simmer, and epic migrations will sweep continents. Power will shift from multinational corporations to national governments, which in turn will lose power to local communities. Cultures will disintegrate, the Internet will collapse, and cultural exchanges across nations and continents will be few.

Greer sees hope, however: The industrial age’s end might lead to the rise, centuries from now, of a new “ecotechnic” society that supports complex technology and sustainable relations with the rest of the biosphere.

No one knows for sure what this ecotechnic society will look like, he explains. Through diversity and experimentation with many piecemeal solutions — not grandiose, radical agendas — we will gradually construct it. It will help if we embrace sustainability and wise lifestyle changes now, not later; then the decline will be less drastic, and the ecotechnic world’s arrival much sooner.

Every aspect of our daily lives must manage on much less energy, Greer says. We will need to implement massive changes in eating habits, land use, food distribution, and waste management. Homes will have to transition to compactness, energy efficiency, and production of their own electricity and food. Economies will have to rely more on human labor and domestic production. In all, we will need to recognize our role as one species among many, subject to the same natural laws and ecological patterns.

This book is as realistic a portrayal of the end of civilization as one is likely to find. It is a worthwhile read for all who think about the far future.

About the Reviewer

Rick Docksai is a staff editor for THE FUTURIST and World Future Review.

Pop Music as an Economic Indicator

Changing tastes may reflect market mood.

That long hemlines accompany a bad economy is an old saying in the fashion industry. Today, most experts regard hemline theory as fanciful, but a number of social theorists agree that trends in fashion, movies, or music do reflect public sentiment, which can influence stock market direction. Theoretically at least, new fads could point to shifting economic conditions. But finding the exact correlation between changing music tastes and economic performance is anything but easy.

William Higham, author of The Next Big Thing: Spotting and Forecasting Consumer Trends for Profit (Kogan Page, 2009), argues that the down economy and grumpy public sentiment forecasts an angry music wave in the coming year. However, economics is not the sole cause, says Higham. The next music fad will take more than one form, he believes.

“Consumers’ current mood, which blends confused, afraid, angry, and determined, is due to a mix of financial hardship, anger at being let down by politicians and big business, continuing fear of world events, the speed of technological/social change, and a reassessment of work/life priorities,” Higham told THE FUTURIST.

Jon P. Avlon, author of Independent Nation (Three Rivers Press, 2005), agrees that the public mood is bad and getting worse, and mainstream media will only exacerbate the grumpiness. The angry rhetoric rocking the airwaves and cable channels across the United States, the protestor clashes outside the Copenhagen Summit on Climate Change, and the Tea Party rallies that have lately sprung up in Washington, D.C., are a “reflection of a larger trend, the fragmentation of modern media, which has had an ironic effect on the way we get our information,” he wrote to THE FUTURIST. “The best ratings are achieved by [TV and radio] hosts who cultivate narrow but intense niche audiences. This has helped pump up the hate and hyper-partisanship we see today.”

Higham argues that previous eras of socioeconomic flux had two distinct and separate effects on pop culture. Mainstream music (which appeals more to baby boomers) became more quiet, subdued, and quaint, whereas “alternative” music, marketed primarily to younger people, became louder and more primal.

“Socioeconomic problems drove rock in the 1960s, heavy rock and punk in the 1970s, gangsta rap in the late 1980s, and grunge in the 1990s. So the new consumer mood will, I believe, drive a rise in both more aggressively patriotic mainstream roots music (the soundtrack to Tea Party anger) and more angry, dissonant Alternative music (the soundtrack to environmental protest),” he said.

Visible changes in fashion, television, movies, and particularly pop music can not only reflect a nation’s economic circumstances, but predict them as well, according to scholars with the Socionomics Institute.

In the October 2009 issue of The Socionomist, authors Matt Lampert and Euan Wilson claim that the commercial success of particular types of popular culture items — the music, movies, and TV shows that big-name clothiers and studios market to the public — can indicate stock market changes. When the public’s “social mood” and popular culture are both good, then upbeat or even vapid entertainment fare becomes the rage and the economy is likely in or about to enter a bullish cycle. Teen or tween pop acts such as the Jonas Brothers, Miley Cyrus, and High School Musical epitomized the bull market for stocks following the 2002 recession, say Lampert and Wilson. Supporting their theory, they point to the commercial success of 1980s bubblegum pop musicians such as Michael Jackson and Cyndi Lauper during a period of economic growth.

When both popular culture and social mood are down, movies, television, and music will trend toward the dark, gritty, dissatisfied, and potentially innovative; in a word, bearish. Lampert and Wilson attribute the rise of Seattle grunge aesthetic during the early 1990s to the recession that began in 1987, and the rise of punk rock in the mid-1970s to falling affluence and economic stagnation of that decade, particularly the 1970 to 1973 period.

A diminished stock market, high unemployment, and unprecedented government intervention that characterized the 2008 and 2009 economic environment portends terribly for social mood going forward. Recent poll numbers indicate as much. Some 55% of Americans think the country is on the wrong track, and 66% say that they aren’t confident that their children’s lives will be better than their own (as opposed to 27% who are confident), according to a Wall Street Journal/NBC poll from December. Yet, popular music in the United States remained “planted in bull territory” during this time. The disconnect suggests a pop culture lag. Forecast: Expect further stock market losses and a downbeat music wave.

“The continued reign of light popular music is an indicator that stocks are high, not low,” write Lampert and Wilson. “Coincident socioeconomic indicators convey compatible messages, and we can use one to validate the other.... At minimum, when social mood turns negative, lyrical themes will become dark and melody will diminish. Many performers who play discordant, experimental styles will find an audience. A genre even more aggressive than punk will ultimately emerge.”

Whether music is becoming angrier, lighter, more primal, or more quaint is no easy determination in an environment where cultural trends can be measured using an ever-wider array of metrics. And music fads will remain an imprecise (at best) indicator of stock market performance into the foreseeable future, according to other sociologists.

“I think there might be a correlation,” says Higham, “but it would be a brave man to bet [his] portfolio on a number one hit album.” — Patrick Tucker

Sources: The Socionomist (October 2009), www.socionomics.net.

The Next Big Thing: Spotting and Forecasting Consumer Trends for Profit by William Highham. Kogan Page, 2009. 261 pages. $29.95.

Reviving the Aral Sea

Aralsk, Kazakhstan, is surrounded by barren desert, but the city could become a thriving port if the Aral Sea makes its anticipated comeback.

“A billboard outside Aralsk proclaims ‘Good News — the Sea is Coming Back.’ There is a lot of optimism among the people,” reports Joop Stoutjesdik, task team leader of the World Bank’s Syr Darya and Northern Aral Sea Project.

The Aral Sea, situated in Central Asia between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, was the world’s fourth-largest inland body of water in 1960, according to the European Space Agency. But the Aral lost more than 70% of its water due to drainage for irrigating parched farmland.

By 1990, the Aral had shriveled into a remnant northern sea within Kazakhstan and a southern one on the Kazakh-Uzbek border. Each sea was more than 20 meters lower than the original.

The drainage lay bare more than 40,000 square kilometers of its sea bed, whose exposed salts and sands fueled sandstorms that caused fatal illnesses and erratic weather.

The remaining water became so unnaturally saline that most of the fish and fauna died. Drinking-water supplies became scarce, and tens of thousands of fishing, agriculture, and service-sector jobs vanished.

Better times may be ahead, however. Between 2005 and 2007, Kazakhstan and the World Bank funded extensive restoration projects for the northern sea: a 13-kilometer Kok-Aral dike to block flow of its water into the southern sea; hydraulic facilities along the Aral tributary Syr Darya river to increase its capacity and channel more water into the sea basin; and a dam and canal from the Syr Darya to restore fishing lakes, which would serve as hatcheries for new fish populations.

The northern sea has since risen four meters and increased its surface area by 13%. Its salinity has been reduced by more than two-thirds. New water-supply systems bring better-quality drinking water to seaside villages. Seven species of fish have returned, according to the World Bank. The sea’s recovery is also improving the climate.

“During the last years there were rains in April, May, and June, while before, the last rains would fall in March,” Stoutjesdik adds. “There is more grass for livestock. Dust storms are fewer. Swans, ducks, and geese are returning.”

The southern sea is still shrinking, however. The European Space Agency expects it to dry out completely by 2020.

Amanda Wooden, Bucknell University environmental science professor, says that the best-case scenario is that the southern sea stabilizes around its present levels.

“This is a significant loss for the region and the world,” she says.

She notes that this is troubling for the human communities around the sea basin.

“A decline in health conditions and the agricultural sector could have ramifications for Uzbekistan’s stability,” she says. “The broader region will be impacted by climatic changes.”

The southern sea’s western side, at least, could be salvaged if engineers dammed it. Reforming the region’s irrigation systems would also help, but Wooden does not see either approach happening.

“These steps have not been taken and do not seem likely to be followed soon enough,” says Wooden. But even a partial recovery is better than none, she concludes. — Rick Docksai

Sources: Joop Stoutjesdijk, World Bank, www.worldbank.org.

Amanda Wooden, Bucknell University, www.bucknell.edu.

European Space Agency, www.esa.int.

Smart People, Dumb Decisions

By Michael J Mauboussin

Chances are you're unaware of the limits to your abilities, unappreciative of the challenges that lie ahead, and uninformed of all that can go wrong. Don't worry - you're not alone.

If you ask people to offer adjectives that they associate with good decision makers, words like "intelligent" and "smart" are generally at the top of the list. Yet, history contains plenty of examples of smart people who made poor decisions as the result of cognitive mistakes. These mistakes can have horrific consequences, from the space shuttle Columbia disaster to the scores of bank failures across the United States since the start of the 2007 recession. But faulty decision making is also avoidable. Every day, research is offering new insights into the decision- making process. A science of choice is emerging, and the good news is that everyone, from students to stockbrokers, can learn how to make better decisions.

Smart people make poor decisions because the mental software that we humans inherited from our ancestors isn't designed to cope with the complexity of modern day problems and systems. In short, smart people, like everyone else, face two major obstacles to making good decisions. The first obstacle is the brain, which evolved over millions of years to make decisions unlike what we face in modern life. The second obstacle is the growing complexity of the world in which we live.

Overconfidence: The Biggest Factor in Poor Decisions

Our natural decision-making process makes us vulnerable to certain mental mistakes. One example is what psychologists call the "inside view," which explains that we consider problems by focusing on a specific task, use information that is close at hand, and make predictions based on that narrow and unique set of inputs. This approach is common for all forms of planning and almost always paints too optimistic a picture.

Overconfidence, in one form or another, is central to the inside view, and can lead to three illusions that can derail decisions: the illusion of superiority, the illusion of optimism, and the illusion of control.

To introduce the first illusion, take a moment to answer (honestly!) the following questions either Yes or No:

* I am an above-average driver.
* I have an above-average ability to judge humor.
* My professional performance places me in the top half of my organization.

If you are like most people, you said "yes" to all three questions. This shows the illusion of superiority, which suggests that people have an unrealistically positive view of themselves. Of course, not everyone can be above average. In a classic 1976 survey, the College Board asked high school test takers to rate themselves on a host of criteria. Eighty-five percent considered themselves above the median in getting along with others, 70% above the median in ability to lead others, and 60% above the median in sports. One survey showed that more than 80% of people believed that they were more skillful than half of all drivers.

Remarkably, the least-capable people often have the largest gaps between what they think they can do and what they actually achieve. In one study, researchers asked subjects to rate their perceived ability and likely success on a grammar test. The bottom-quartile performers dramatically overstated their ability, thinking that they would be in the nextto- highest quartile. Furthermore, even when individuals do acknowledge that they are below average, they tend to dismiss their shortcoming as inconsequential.

The second is the illusion of optimism. Most people see their future as brighter than that of others. For example, researchers asked college students to estimate their chances of having various good and bad experiences during their lives. The students judged themselves far more likely to have good experiences than their peers and far less likely to have bad experiences.

Finally, there is the illusion of control. People behave as if chance events are subject to their influence. In one study, researchers asked two groups of office workers to participate in a lottery, with a $1 cost and a $50 prize. One group was allowed to choose their lottery cards, while the other group had no choice. Luck determined the probability of winning, of course, but that's not how the workers behaved.

Before the drawing, one of the researchers asked the participants at what price they would be willing to sell their cards. The mean offer for the group that was allowed to choose cards was close to $9, while the offer from the group that had not chosen was less than $2. People who believe that they have some control have the perception that their odds of success are better than they actually are. People who don't have a sense of control don't experience the same bias.

I must concede that my occupation - active money management - may be one of the best examples of the illusion of control in the professional world. Researchers have shown that, in aggregate, money managers who actively build portfolios deliver returns that are lower than the market indices over time, a finding that every investment firm acknowledges. The reason is pretty straightforward: Markets are highly competitive, and money managers charge fees that diminish returns. The same is true for individuals. Even though doing a lot of research into what to buy and sell may give you confidence, over time the costs you incur make it likely that your portfolio returns will fail to keep up with someone who parked money in a garden-variety index fund and forgot about it.

Markets also have a good dose of randomness, assuring that all investors see good and poor results from time to time. Despite this evidence, active money managers behave as if they can defy the odds and deliver market-beating returns. These investment firms rely on the inside view to justify their strategies and fees.

A vast range of professionals commonly lean on the inside view to make important decisions, with predictably poor results. This is not to say that these decision makers are negligent, naïve, or malicious. Encouraged by illusions, most believe they are making the right decision and have faith that the outcomes will be satisfactory.

On Time and within Budget - Maybe Next Time

Just as our faulty brains are naturally inclined toward overly optimistic perception of our abilities, we also have a funny, and faulty, view of time. You will be familiar with this example if you have ever been part of a project, whether it involved renovating a house, introducing a new product, or meeting a work deadline. People find it hard to estimate how long a job will take and how much it will cost. And when they are wrong, they usually underestimate the time and expense. Psychologists call this the planning fallacy. Here, again, the inside view takes over as the majority of people imagine how they will complete the task. Only about onequarter of the population incorporates the base-rate data either from their own experience, or from that of others, while laying out planning timetables.

Years ago, Daniel Kahneman, a psychologist who won the Nobel Prize in Economics, assembled a group to write a curriculum to teach judgment and decision making to high-school students. Kahneman's group included a mix of experienced and inexperienced teachers as well as the dean of the School of Education. After about a year, they had written a couple of chapters for the textbook and had developed some sample lessons.

During one of their Friday afternoon sessions, the educators discussed how to elicit information from groups and how to think about the future. They knew that the best way to do this was for each person to express his or her view independently and to combine the views into a consensus. Kahneman decided to make the exercise tangible by asking each member to estimate the date the group would deliver a draft of the textbook to the Ministry of Education.

Kahneman found that the estimates clustered around two years and that everyone, including the dean, was between 18 and 30 months. It then occurred to Kahneman that the dean had been involved in similar projects. When asked, the dean said he knew of a number of similar groups, including ones that had worked on the biology and mathematics curriculum. So Kahneman asked him the obvious question: "How long did it take them to finish?"

The dean blushed, then answered that 40% of the groups who had started similar programs had never finished, and that none of the groups completed it in less than seven years. Seeing only one way to reconcile the dean's optimistic answer about this group with his knowledge of the shortcomings of the other groups, Kahneman asked how good this group was compared with the others. After a pause, the dean responded, "Below average, but not by much."

While people are notoriously poor at guessing when they'll complete their own projects, they're pretty good at guessing when other people will finish. In fact, the planning fallacy embodies a broader principle. When people are forced to look at similar situations and see the frequency of success, they tend to predict more accurately. If you want to know how something is going to turn out for you, look at how it turned out for others in the same situation.

Daniel Gilbert, a psychologist at Harvard University, has pondered why people don't rely on the outside view more often: "Given the impressive power of this simple technique, we should expect people to go out of their way to use it. But they don't." The reason is that most people think of themselves as different, and better, than those around them.

Even people who should know better forget to consult the outside view. Now that you are aware of how the inside-outside view influences the way people make decisions, you'll see it everywhere. In the business world, it will show up as unwarranted optimism for how long it takes to develop a new product, the chance that a merger deal succeeds, and the likelihood a portfolio of stocks will do better than the market. In your personal life, you'll see it in the parents who believe their seven-year-old is destined for a college sports scholarship, debates about what impact video games have on kids, and the time and cost it will take to remodel a kitchen.

How to Incorporate the Outside View into Your Decisions

Unlike the inside view, the outside view asks if there are similar situations that can provide a statistical basis for making a decision. Rather than seeing a problem as unique, the outside view wants to know if others have faced comparable problems and, if so, what happened. The outside view is an unnatural way to think precisely because it forces people to set aside all of the cherished information they have gathered. Regardless, it can create a very valuable reality check for decision makers.

Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, a psychologist who had a long collaboration with Kahneman, published a multistep process to help you use the outside view. I have distilled their five steps into four and have added some thoughts. Here are the four steps:

1. Select a reference class. Find a group of situations, or a reference class, that is broad enough to be statistically significant but narrow enough to be useful in analyzing the decision that you face. The task is generally as much an art as it is a science, and it is certainly trickier for problems that few people have faced before. But for decisions that are common - even if they are not common for you - identifying a reference class is straightforward.

2. Assess the distribution of outcomes. Once you have a reference class, take a close look at the rate of success and failure. Study the distribution, including the average outcome, the most common outcome, and check for extreme successes or failures.

In his book Full House, Stephen Jay Gould, who was a paleontologist at Harvard University, showed the importance of knowing the distribution of outcomes after his doctor diagnosed him with mesothelioma. His doctor explained that half of the people diagnosed with the rare cancer lived only eight months (more technically, the median mortality was eight months), a seeming death sentence. But Gould soon realized that, while half the patients died within eight months, the other half went on to live much longer. Because of his relatively young age at diagnosis, there was a good chance that he would be one of the fortunate ones.

Gould wrote, "I had asked the right question and found the answers. I had obtained, in all probability, the most precious of all possible gifts in the circumstances - substantial time." He lived another 20 years.

3. Make a prediction. With the data from your reference class in hand, including an awareness of the distribution of outcomes, you are in a position to make a forecast. The idea is to estimate your chances of success and failure. For all of the reasons that I've discussed, the chances are good that your prediction will be too optimistic.

Sometimes when you find the right reference class, you see the success rate is not very high. So to improve your chance of success, you have to do something different from what everyone else did. One example is the play calling of National Football League coaches in critical game situations like fourth downs, kickoffs, and two-point-conversion attempts. Conventional ways to decide about these situations are handed down from one generation of coaches to the next, but this stale decision-making process means scoring fewer points and winning fewer games.

Chuck Bower, an astrophysicist at Indiana University, and Frank Frigo, a former world backgammon champion, created a computer program called Zeus to assess the play-calling decisions of pro football coaches. Zeus uses the same modeling techniques that have succeeded in backgammon and chess programs, and the creators loaded it with statistics and the behavioral traits of coaches. Bower and Frigo found that only four teams in the 32-team league made crucial decisions that agreed with Zeus over one-half of the time, and that nine teams made decisions that concurred less than one-quarter of the time. Zeus estimates that these poor decisions can cost a team more than one victory per year, a large toll in a 16-game season.

Most coaches stick to the conventional wisdom because that is what they have learned and they are averse to the perceived negative consequences of breaking from past practice. But Zeus shows that the outside view can lead to more wins for the coach willing to break with tradition. This is an opportunity for coaches who are willing to think twice.

4. Assess the reliability of your prediction and fine-tune it. How good we are at making decisions depends a great deal on what we are trying to predict. Weather forecasters, for instance, do a pretty good job of predicting what the temperature will be tomorrow. Book publishers, on the other hand, are poor at picking winners, with the exception of those books from a handful of bestselling authors. The worse the record of successful prediction is, the more you should adjust your prediction toward the mean (or other relevant statistical measure). When cause and effect is clear, you can have more confidence in your forecast.

Black Swans and Bad Predictions

We've discussed how the brain naturally clings to certain illusions, such as overconfidence, control, and misplaced assumptions about how difficult challenges will be. When our unreliable brains meet up with complex systems, the chances for poor decision making increase exponentially.

The term "black swan" reflects philosopher Karl Popper's criticism of induction. Popper noted that seeing lots of white swans doesn't prove that all swans are white, but seeing one black swan proves they aren't. Popper's point is that, to understand a phenomenon, we're better off focusing on falsification than on verification.

Repeated good outcomes provide us with confirming evidence that our strategy is good and everything is fine. This illusion lulls us into an unwarranted sense of confidence and sets us up for a surprise (usually negative).

A brief understanding of phase transitions, an aspect of the behavior of complex systems, is useful here. Phase transitions are where small incremental changes in causes lead to large-scale effects. Physicist Philip Ball calls it the "grand ah-whoom." Put a tray of water into your freezer and the temperature drops to the threshold of freezing. The water remains a liquid until - ah-whoom - it becomes ice. Just a small incremental change in temperature leads to a change from liquid to solid.

The grand ah-whoom occurs in many complex systems where collective behavior emerges from the interaction of its constituent parts. You can find lots of these systems both in the physical world and the social world. Examples include everything from the behavior of stock exchanges to the popularity of hit songs.

The presence of phase transitions invites a few common decision-making mistakes. The first is the problem of induction, or how you should logically go from specific observations to general conclusions. Although philosophers from Sextus Empiricus to David Hume have for centuries warned against extrapolating from what we see, refraining from doing so is very difficult. To state the obvious, induction fails - sometimes spectacularly so - in systems with phase transitions.

To illustrate the problem, former derivatives trader and best-selling author of The Black Swan (Random House, 2007) Nassim Taleb retells Bertrand Russell's story of a turkey that is fed 1,000 days in a row. (Russell actually spoke of a chicken. Taleb changed it to a turkey for the American audience.) The feedings reinforce the turkey's sense of security and well-being, until one day before Thanksgiving an unexpected event occurs. All of the turkey's experience and feedback is positive until fortune takes a turn for the worse.

The equivalent of the turkey's plight - a period of prosperity (being fed) followed by sharp losses (one's head) - has occurred repeatedly in business. For example, Merrill Lynch (which was acquired by Bank of America) suffered losses over a two-year period in 2007-2008 that were in excess of one-third of the profits the company had earned cumulatively in its 36 years as a public company. Dealing with a system governed by a power law is like the farmer feeding us while he holds the axe behind his back. If you stick around long enough, the axe will fall.

Getting out of a situation before the phase transition - whether it's cashing out of a game of poker before the inevitable bad hand or exiting a particular stock position before the bursting of an equity bubble - is one of the key motivators for people to seek, and often pay for, information about the future. Humans have a large appetite for forecasts and predictions across a broad spectrum of domains, but they must recognize that the accuracy of forecasts in systems with phase transitions is dismal, even by so-called experts.

Duncan Watts, a research scientist at Yahoo who has done seminal work on network theory, says, "We think there is something we can call quality ... and the results we see in the world reflect this quality." But, he adds, "I am comfortable with the idea that the outcomes we get are often largely arbitrary." The best course is to recognize the nature of the distribution and to prepare for all contingencies. But how do you do that? If you've been fed by the farmer for the last 90 days, how do you anticipate the tipping point?

People must deal with systems that are marked by abrupt, unforeseeable change and rare but extreme outcomes. We are all particularly mistake-prone with these systems because we intuitively want to treat the system as being simpler than it is and to extrapolate the past into the future. Flag these systems when you see them and slow down your decision- making procedures.

Thanks to Nassim Taleb's prodding, many people now associate extreme events with black swans. But Taleb makes a careful, if overlooked, distinction: If we understand what the broader distribution looks like - what the best, worst, and most-likely scenarios are - even the extreme outcomes are correctly labeled as gray swans, not black swans. He calls them "modelable extreme events." In fact, scientists have done a lot of work classifying the distributions of various systems, including the stock market, terrorist acts, and power-grid failures. So if you have the background and tools to understand these systems, you can get a general view of how the system behaves even if you have no reliable way to predict any specific event. The key is to properly prepare for whatever the system metes out, extreme or not. For the most part, people are scorched not by black swans - the unknown unknowns - but rather by their failure to prepare for gray swans.

Know What You Can't Predict

In most day-to-day decisions, cause and effect are pretty clear. If you do X, then Y will happen. But in decisions that involve systems with many interacting parts, causal links are frequently unclear. For example, what will happen with climate change? Where will terrorists strike next? When will a new technology emerge? Remember what Warren Buffett said: "Virtually all surprises are unpleasant." So considering the worst-case scenarios is vital and generally overlooked in prosperous times.

Also resist the temptation to treat a complex system as if it's simpler than it is. One of the greatest challenges in finance is to create models that are useful to practitioners but that also capture the market's large moves. Models consistently fail to capture the richness of outcomes inherent in a complex system like the stock market.

There's a funny paradox with decision making. Almost everyone realizes how important it is, yet very few people practice in order to improve. Why don't we drill young students on decision making? Why are so few professional executives, doctors, lawyers, and government officials versed in these big ideas?

There are common and identifiable mistakes that you can understand, see in your daily affairs, and manage effectively. In those cases, the correct approach to deciding well often conflicts with what your mind does naturally. But now that you know when to think twice, better decisions will follow. So prepare your mind, recognize the context, apply the right technique - and practice.
- Michael J. Mauboussin

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The Brain, Stress, and Faulty Extrapolation

One common mistake in decision making is a tendency to inappropriately extrapolate from past results. Scott Huettel, a psychologist and neuroscientist at Duke University, and his colleagues confirmed this finding when they placed subjects in a brain-reading functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine and showed them random patterns of circles and squares. After one symbol, people did not know what to expect next. But after two in a row, they automatically expected a third, even though they knew the series was random. Two may not be a trend, but our brains sure think so.

This mistake is tough because our minds have a deep-seated desire to make out patterns, and our prediction process is very rapid (the researchers call it "automatic and obligatory"). This pattern-recognition ability evolved through the millennia and was profoundly useful for most of human existence.

"In a natural environment, almost all patterns are predictive," says Huettel. "For example, when you hear a crash behind you, it's not something artificial; it means that a branch is falling, and you need to get out of the way. So, we evolved to look for those patterns. But these causal relationships don't necessarily hold in the technological world that can produce irregularities, and in which we look for patterns where none exist."

Extrapolation puts a finer point on a number of other mistakes, as well. We can restate the problem of induction as inappropriately projecting into the future based on a limited number of observations. Failure to reflect reversion to the mean is the result of extrapolating earlier performance into the future without giving proper weight to the role of chance. And models that are based on past results indicate, falsely, that the future will be characteristically similar to history. In each case, our minds - or the models our minds construct - anticipate without giving suitable consideration to other possibilities.

Robert Sapolsky, a neurobiologist at Stanford University and an expert on stress, notes that an important feature of the stress response is that it turns off longer-term oriented bodily systems. You shouldn't worry about your digestion, growth, disease prevention, or reproduction if you are about to be a lion's lunch.

Because stress increases focus on the here and now, stressed people have a hard time thinking about the long term. The manager about to lose her job tomorrow has little interest in making a decision that will make her better off in three years. Psychological stress creates a sense of immediacy that inhibits consideration of options with distant payoffs. The stress response - so effective for dealing with hereand- now risks - co-opts the decision-making apparatus and compels poor decisions.
The functional map is overlaid on a high-resolution anatomical image.

- Michael J. Mauboussin

The Brain versus The Web

By Patrick Tucker

Wired for Thought by Jeffrey M. Stibel. Harvard University Press. 2009. 202 pages. $29.95.

In his new book, Wired for Thought, entrepreneur Jeffrey M. Stibel takes the shop-worn notion that the brain functions like a computer and reorders it into a more useful new idea. The computer is not a brain, Stibel asserts, but the Internet could be.

The differences between the brain and a computer are numerous and inescapable. Among the key distinctions: Our millennia-old three-pound thinking machines perform massive parallel processing. Even the best computers do this terribly in comparison. Electronic logic gates are faster than chemical synapses, but also much simpler. The brain evolved in response to natural circumstances as a tool for survival, but computers (and the vast majority of the programs that operate on them) are designed by people, not by the experience of life, and therefore will never truly be analogous to brains despite the best efforts of many of the world’s top AI researchers.

According to Stibel, computers are much better understood as elements within a larger intelligent system. They act less like brains and more like neurotransmitters. Web sites function as the neuronal synapses in this analogy. Like every synapse, sites hold information and then present that information when accessed. More importantly, Web sites deal in the stuff of the real world. From Wikipedia to the latest trend on Twitter, they serve not simply as files of coded instructions but as repositories of information about life on earth.

Every Web page faces the evolutionary imperative to be both unique and relevant; a Web site that is neither will pass to the digital dustbin, unviewed and unmaintained. Similarly, when the brain is forced to categorize some new sensory impression, it forms a synapse link, a memory. Memories are subject to the same competitive forces that their host organisms must contend with. Those sites that are of little consequence, or that don’t prove particularly useful to the survival of the larger organism, fade with time.

Both the brain and the Internet employ memes or “units of culture” in the parlance of Richard Dawkins, originator of the term. The human neocortex is made of six layers; the topmost of these occupies itself with executing decisions after the lower orders have processed and refined the data to make that decision. Similarly, the makeup of the Web is hierarchical. Internet trends always start small, on individual computers, but quickly pick up momentum. The most-trafficked sites and applications like YouTube and Facebook are popular precisely because they make that process as fast as possible and involve the largest number of people.

Much like the brain, the Internet experienced a period of rapid expansion. But the brain actually grew too large for our Neanderthal predecessors and fell back in size, ultimately settling on 100 billion neurons and roughly 100 trillion interneuron connections. The Web will do the same thing, says Stibel: It will fall back in size and achieve a new equilibrium. This forecast puts Stibel in direct conflict with Internet optimists who contend that the Web can only grow continuously and even exponentially. Surely the Internet shows no sign of curbing its growth anytime soon.

Stibel’s theory is rather comforting, even flattering in the way it reduces the future of the Internet to the evolutionary history of the human thinking organ. According to this view, in the coming decades, the Internet will adapt to the world much as the brain did. It will seek to identify patterns in order to better predict what may happen next. Signs of this future are already evident. In September, Netflix awarded $1 million to a software team who figured out a way for the company to better “predict” what movies its customers might most want to watch. The Web is getting smarter about the real world all the time, accumulating information about the way the world sounds, smells, and tastes through real-time sensing technology. Many trend watchers, such as Tim O’Reilly, consider sensor technology to be the next great trend to move the Internet forward (Web 3.0, if you will). We will merge our brains with the Web, not simply through implants, but through our behavior. This will quickly change the way we experience the Web — and the way the Web experiences us.

No longer will you “surf” the Web, traveling to different sites seeking out information. The Web will search itself and customize itself for you as you encounter it. Stibel points to a company called Kosmix.com that dynamically builds entirely new Web pages based on a particular search. “The Web will one day be able to generate a Web page specific to your request, just as the brain fires off new symphonies of excitation when it encounters a novel subject,” he writes.

Missing from this engaging and persuasive book is any doubt or hesitation that a future smarter, more brainlike Internet is a good thing. A cautious pause may be in order. The basics of biology suggest that intelligent creatures prioritize their own survival above the well-being of others. We evolved our smarts to better survive in a competitive, difficult environment. If the Internet is a brain, the question becomes, what does it think of us?

About the Reviewer

Patrick Tucker is the senior editor of THE FUTURIST and director of communications for the World Future Society.

Vertical Farming

An Idea Whose Time Has Come Back

By Cynthia G. Wagner
Like all our precious resources, good ideas should be reclaimed and recycled. Urban agriculture is one such good idea now made new again.

The April 1985 issue of THE FUTURIST featured an inspiring new book by New Alchemy Institute founders John and Nancy Jack Todd, Bioshelters, Ocean Arks, City Farming: Ecology as the Basis of Design (Sierra Club Books, 1984). The visionary seeds they planted then are now coming into season.

Among the Todds’ more intriguing proposals were multi-tiered city farms occupying once-abandoned warehouses: Mushrooms in the basement; chickens, eggs, trout, and catfish on the first floor; hydroponic veggies on the second floor; third-floor lettuce; and rooftop wind turbines and solar-energy panels.

Even more intriguing were the Todds’ micro-agriculture visions, such as park fountains used for irrigation, fish raised in bus-stop aquariums, and sidewalks converted to aquaculture ponds.

Now, these visions are being reclaimed, recycled, and renewed in towers that are half workspaces and half gardens, eco-laboratories and pyramid farms, and “living” skyscrapers with decks dedicated to food, fuel, or families. These and other inventive agro-architectural solutions take the ideas of city and indoor farming into a new, increasingly urbanized future.

The Vertical Farm Project, launched in 2001 by Columbia University environmental health science professor Dickson Despommier, collects ideas that promise to reduce agriculture’s ecological footprint — not only by bringing food growers and consumers closer together, but also by extending “farmland” into a third dimension: skyward.

The advantages of raising food crops and animals indoors and in closer proximity to consumers include year-round production, more-efficient use and reuse of water and other resources, and protection from threats ranging from epidemics to terrorists.

The recent resurgence of urban agriculture in popular futurist and science literature (including articles in Scientific American, Time, Popular Science, and the New York Times) illustrates that good ideas may need to be cycled and recycled before their time truly comes.

Like the Todds’ New Alchemy Institute, the Vertical Farm Project envisions the transformation of urban architecture along ecological principles. A 30-story skyscraper on one city block could potentially feed 50,000 Manhattanites, using technologies available now, according to Despommier. And with technologies available in the future, intensive-farming techniques could enable us to settle on the Moon, Mars, or beyond.

About the Author

Cynthia G. Wagner is managing editor of THE FUTURIST. E-mail cwagner@wfs.org.

For more information, visit The Vertical Farm Project, www.verticalfarm.com.

John and Nancy Jack Todd co-founded (1981) Ocean Arks International, www.oceanarks.org; since 1999, John has been a research professor and distinguished lecturer at the University of Vermont’s Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources.