Lost and Found in Japan

By Patrick Tucker

While the world turned its attention to the frightening prospects of a nuclear catastrophe in post-tsunami Japan, another crisis was being dealt with, quietly, humbly, and with pragmatic determination.

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The date is April 8, 2011. I am on a bus to go into the Japanese city of Ishinomaki, a place that consisted of 162,882 souls before the March 11 tsunami struck. On the day of my journey, 2,283 of the city’s citizens are feared dead, 2,643 are missing, and some 18,000 are in shelters. Because Japan is, perhaps, the most technologically advanced nation on earth, the successes and failures of its attempts to cope with the aftermath of this disaster will doubtless be instructive to planners and governments around the world. I am here to learn whatever I can.

I’ve also come to see a miracle.

In the weeks following the Tohoku earthquake, in the midst of the Kan administration’s various failed efforts to contain the situation at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, something remarkable took place. More than 1,500 people showed up at the Tokyo offices of Peace Boat, a small nonprofit that quickly became one of the first organizations to actively solicit volunteers. These volunteers came to go north, through Fukushima prefecture, into the tsunami-affected areas.

The mission turned out to be surprisingly dangerous. Two nights earlier, a 7.0 aftershock hit the area, causing a power disruption at the Miyagi nuclear power plant as well as an overflow of radioactive material. A tsunami warning was issued and then called down. While the situation was contained within a few hours, it served as a vivid reminder that the safety situation in Ishinomaki is still precarious. The buildings that remain standing are severely compromised.

Yet, the volunteer rolls are only growing. The first Peace Boat dispatch consisted of 50 individuals; the next was 100. The group was now preparing to bring up 250 the following week and as many as 500 in the week after that.

“We have lots of university students,” says Satoshi Nakazawa, a relief worker at Peace Boat who has also volunteered to be my interpreter during my brief stay in the north. “Lots” is an understatement. As I look at the crowd, it seems that about 90% of the volunteers who have shown up are people in their 20s or younger, and most are either students or unemployed.

The Mayor of Ishinomaki

TAKASHI "JUNIOR" YAMAMOTO. CREDIT: PATRICK TUCKER

Upon arriving at Peace Boat’s camp, I make arrangements to meet Takashi Yamamoto, project leader for this operation. He was among the first relief workers to put his boots on the ground in downtown Ishinomaki at a time when even the army (referred to in Japan as the Self-Defense Force) was limiting its activities in the area to mostly helicopter flybys. I meet Yamamoto at the makeshift headquarters the group is sharing with the other relief organizations here. In very un-Japanese fashion, he arrives 30 minutes late, reaches out, and gives a big, two-handed shake. “Call me Junior,” he says. He bids us sit on the floor so he can tell us what he’s been doing the past month.

On March 17, after a journey over stricken roads and a difficult night camping in the cold, he and the other members of the Peace Boat advance team woke and walked downtown. The devastation was Carthaginian.

“I couldn’t believe this was Japan,” he says. He likens the scene to the Tokyo firebombings: glass, smoke, ruin, a smell of dead fish, a world on its side with its contents bleeding out.

Junior happened to have a contact on the Ishinomaki Social Welfare Committee (SWC). These committees are the primary authority on what happens in any given city. Without local SWC approval there could be no Peace Boat relief operation in the area. The Ishinomaki SWC was functioning at one-third of capacity at the time, meaning two-thirds of the city council’s guiding leadership were missing and presumed dead.

The committee was reluctant at first to allow volunteers into the city. Who would coordinate them? What if they got hurt? What if they were criminals? Junior consulted with an architect who calculated that 150 volunteers, working eight hours a day, seven days a week, would have all the mud cleared out of Ishinomaki in approximately 4,000 days.

“Take every volunteer you can get,” he told them.

Junior has been in disaster situations before; he was with one of the first relief teams to show up after the Kobe quake in 1995. He was the project leader for Peace Boat’s response in Sri Lanka to the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. But he’s never undertaken anything like this.

The volunteer camp is a tent city outside of Ishinomaki University, which, Junior acknowledges, will not suffice as a durable solution. He wants to build a permanent housing facility for the kids who keep showing up. “You can’t have your people sleeping here in tents in November,” he says. He’s also trying to get money into the hands of the downtown area residents. He wears his new, unofficial role of “mayor of Ishinomaki” well. The life he led before March 11 is becoming a distant memory.

ISHINOMAKI, APRIL 10, 2011. CREDIT: PATRICK TUCKER

The Peace Boat volunteers are divided into 30 teams of five members each, and each team sticks to one mission. For some, this means a full week dealing with people in the areas hardest-hit by the tsunami—people who easily meet the clinical definition of the term traumatized. “When talking to victims, give no information that is not certain. You will start rumors,” the volunteers are told. “This will be very hard work. Be sure to keep your energy level up.”

For the others, it’s seven days of hefting boxes in a warehouse. All the jobs are vital, says Peace Boat, but for the kids who have come here searching for something—some formative experience related to the most significant event in Japan’s history since World War II—the warehouse assignment must be a bit of a disappointment.

The Earthquake Generation

The young Peace Boat volunteers who felt the immediate need to help their fellow Japanese offer an unexpected view of the country’s social reality—and its future.

PEACEBOAT VOLUNTEER MAIKO SUGANO. CREDIT: PATRICK TUCKER

Maiko Sugano, age 27, Googled volunteer opportunities and contacted several organizations. Peace Boat was the only one to write back. “They seem to take everyone. No experience necessary,” says Sugano. She’s unemployed right now, which, in contemporary Japan, carries a certain degree of shame. She’s clearly bright. Her English is flawless. Her 10-year goal is a simple one: She wants to feel more capable. She was worried about the radiation from Fukushima, but not enough to let it stop her. She wants nothing but to hold on to this experience, to absorb it into her. “What happened here will be forgotten so easily. People will stop donating. Next month, who knows, something else might happen. If I see it with my eyes, I will take it seriously at least. I will remember it.”

Sugano and many of the young and underemployed volunteers might be referred to as a “lost generation.” Originally an expression that referred to men and women who came of age during World War I in the United States, the term first came into usage in Japan after the bursting of the real-estate bubble in the 1990s, and the moniker “lost generation” has latched itself to various successive graduating classes ever since.

For 20 years now, the story has been the same: The biggest and most stable companies—the ones still offering a clear path to reliable middle-class income—only recruit fresh out of university and only pick the top students. The young people who aren’t snapped up, who willingly diverge from the white-collar career course or don’t seem to match the corporate ideal because they are socially awkward, different, or just of the wrong gender, often spend decades bouncing from start-up to start-up, from one small company job to the next.

“Those hired as contract workers usually have no hope of full employee status in the Japanese corporate world,” says Michael Dziesinski, a sociology fellow at the University of Tokyo. “The employment issue for Japanese youth is a broken postwar school-to-work system for young adults, and as a result, some less-resilient youth fall through the cracks,” says Dziesinski. The result: Nonstandard employment—referring to part-time, freelance, or just dead-end work—has doubled since the 1980s and today comprises one-third of the Japanese labor force.

After World War II, Japan forged a reputation for social cohesiveness, egalitarianism, and strong middle-class job growth. As Japan’s ties to the United States grew stronger through the 1990s, the Japanese economy has come more and more to resemble that of the United States in its most unenviable aspects. Japan’s income inequality is higher than that of many other wealthy countries, such as Norway, Sweden, and even India. The 2008 recession only exacerbated this trend, as many thousands of temporary and contract workers lost employment, bringing the poverty rate up to 15%. A few years ago, this disparity inspired the coinage of the term kakusa sakai, which might be interpreted to mean “disparate society,” or “society without evenness.” Another new expression to describe economic stratification is kachigumi soshite makegumi: society of winners and losers.

“The attainable Japanese dream began to disappear 30 years ago, in the eighties. We don’t know where the next Japanese dream lies,” says Tokyo University demographics expert Yuji Genda.

PEACE BOAT VOLUNTEER ISSEY TAMAKU. CREDIT: PATRICK TUCKER

Peace Boat volunteer Issey Tamaku, age 20, is a politics student at Keio University. He lost his aunt and uncle to the tsunami. When he learned that his school had canceled classes because of the earthquake, he, too, Googled volunteer opportunities and found Peace Boat. He went to high school in South Korea and credits this for his perfect English. He says that, compared to Korea, Japan “doesn’t get out enough. We’re too content to stay here. We need better English instruction. These kids are learning English but they can’t speak it.” Still, he’s optimistic about the future of Japan. “I have to be,” he says.

Kenji Yasuda, a student from Yokahama, age 22, is wonderfully frank about his motivation. He was captivated by the scenes on his television and now he wants to know how existence here compares to his comfortable life back home. He says he needed to contribute something and so he will be shoveling mud for the week. “People in Tokyo are getting back to ordinary life,” he says. “Already, pachinko parlors are full. They’re losing memory.”

Koike Shinya, age 20, works as a house painter. He doesn’t know what he wants to do in life except, one day, go to Boston. He’s volunteering now because he wanted to play a role in the most significant event to take place in Japan in the last 50 years. “We are a country of very nice people, but some of that is only on the surface. When a crisis like this happens, you can see people for what they really are,” he says.

Another 20-year-old, Takumi Thomas, is a university student in politics and media, with aspirations toward being an announcer. He was motivated by a mixture of curiosity and its separate, murkier, altruistic cousin, “a desire to help.” Like almost every volunteer here, he began searching online for volunteer opportunities immediately after the disaster. Peace Boat was the first to write back and accept the offer.

Tsubabasa Shinoda, age 20, is from Kanagawa Yokohama. He’s a law student and works an unpaid internship in an advertising agency. Like many of the volunteers in the tent city, he says he got on the bus because he was “afraid of being indifferent.” It seems he’s struggling to do the right thing, groping for the proper response to an event far larger than anything he’s experienced in his lifetime, an event to which he feels intimately bound.

Besides Peace Boat, there are several other nongovernmental organizations operating in the area. A group called AP Bank sent up 100 volunteers for the weekend. The Red Cross was running a hospital. But Peace Boat appeared to be winning the contest to send as many volunteers as possible, which enabled them to cover the gaps left open by other, well-funded relief groups. Herein lies the first lesson of the tsunami: Expect a flood of volunteers and respond rapidly to marshal their energy.

The natural human response to a terrible news event like the Tohoku tragedy is complex. Groups like the Red Cross work to convert that reaction into a financial contribution as quickly as possible through televised appeals and banner ads.

Peace Boat put out a solicitation within weeks of the disaster, when the interest level was still high. It campaigned through its own network, through Facebook, mixi, and even the Tokyo blogger community. The message went viral because it connected with what the broader public actually wanted to do in response to the scene playing out on their televisions: shovel, repair, comfort, change the situation in a visible and tangible way—in a word, act. Clicking a banner ad does not have the same effect and never will.

On April 9, no other private organization in the affected area was taking as big a risk, either financially or in terms of safety, as was Peace Boat. Even the Japanese army began the relief process by carefully assessing the situation and writing a manual before distributing food and supplies. Peace Boat did the reverse: It started sending volunteers and then writing their safety manual based on the feedback they received.

Peace Boat was also spending far more than it was taking in. In normal years, it’s an educational tour outfit, ferrying kids around the world for high-priced educational excursions on chartered boats (Peace Boats). After the 1995 Kobe earthquake and the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, the organization raised money and collected supplies, but it has never attempted an operation of this size or scope. Financially, the organization may not survive this, its grandest moment.

This character of impulsive selflessness reflects the attitudes of the young volunteers who have signed up for this excursion. I found it repeated in the survivors.

Resilience by Necessity

YOSHIE HAGA (LEFT) AND MITSUKO HAGA. CREDIT: PATRICK TUCKER

Yoshie Haga, age 66, and her daughter Mitsuko, age 40, ran a beauty parlor on the corner of what was one of the busier streets in downtown Ishinomaki before the quake. They had two houses in a family compound. One was insured. One house was not. They are in a good mood when I meet them and are eager to tell me their earthquake story.

The tsunami warning sounded and they attempted to drive to higher ground. They hit traffic and their car was swept up in the wave. They broke out and swam to a nearby rooftop, then went from building to building, all while Haga the elder carried her small dog in the front of her blouse. Finally they found a roof that seemed out the flood’s way and stayed the night there. In the morning, they hiked through knee-deep water to the local evacuation center.

They’re animated as they recite this tale. The part about the dog seems embellished, but I’m disinclined to press them on this. Of course it’s natural and fitting that they should want to make this story shine a bit after what they went through.

They say that their clients have been asking them when they would reopen their beauty shop. They are hoping to get the electricity back on by the end of the April, and if they can do that, they aren’t going to charge for haircuts for the first couple of weeks.

This willingness to plan ahead for a brighter tomorrow is encouraging, but rare. For many Japanese, the future has become yet another touchy subject. In a poll conducted by Japan’s largest labor organization before the earthquake, 93% of respondents said they were worried about what lay ahead for the nation and for themselves. Even after March 11 pushed the country back into recession, people like Yoshie and Mitsuko Haga defy this fatalism.

I ask them how they’re able to remain so optimistic in spite of everything they’ve lost. “Women are stronger in these situations,” they tell me.

Since the quake, the Hagas have become devoted stewards of the community. They spend their days moving among their neighbors’ houses, checking up on the elderly. One of the roles of the Peace Boat volunteers is to find people stuck or squatting in uninhabitable houses, which on April 10 number 30,000 people, according to reports. But community members like the Hagas are critical to the effort, because they are much better at finding their neighbors than cadres of strange volunteers would be.

CREDIT: PATRICK TUCKER

A few minutes later, I am standing in a shell of a building in downtown Ishinomaki. A single security camera dangles from the ceiling on a loose wire. The south wall of the place is gone, knocked out during the flood by a runaway Toyota station wagon, which now sits outside in the mud.

This is the residence and former convenience store of Sho Nitta, age 74. When the tsunami hit, he and his wife barricaded themselves upstairs and watched helplessly as people tried to break free from their cars. They saw a woman struggling nearby in the current, so they thrust out a pole, caught her, and pulled her inside their house. The Nittas don’t know her first name, but her family name was Takahashi. They haven’t seen her since that night.

They continue to live upstairs in a gutted apartment. Like almost 85% of Japanese people, they have no earthquake insurance and aren’t covered for the damages they’ve suffered. Sho says he wants to rebuild, but I can’t imagine him or his wife pulling the lumber and drywall they will need to fix their home and store. His wife wants to move in with their son in the south. The aftershocks rattle her.

Now, Sho Nitta helps organize neighborhood association meetings every day at 8 a.m. About 50 people show up regularly to receive relief items and to strategize. He, too, wants to get the electricity back in his place, but he needs his neighbor’s permission to run a new line through a shared wall. This neighbor was a music teacher and left at the first opportunity. Now, he’s in Sendai. All that is left of him is his broken piano keyboard covered in mud, which sits outside in a trash heap.

(Now former) Prime Minister Naoto Kan is touring the city of Ishinomaki today, his first visit since the earthquake. I ask Sho Nitta what he would ask Japan’s prime minister if given the chance. Nitta says his concern is the long-term future. He doesn’t believe that Ishinomaki will ever recover economically. “The shops will try to rebuild,” he says, “but the customers won’t come.” He has food and water, for now, but what happens in a year or two? Will the government be able to support him if he and his wife choose to stay? How will they rebuild?

CREDIT: PATRICK TUCKER

Five Peace Boat volunteers spend the day pulling mud out of the Nittas’ backyard. After several hours of hard work, they are able to leave the couple with a few square feet to erect scaffolding to repair their back wall. Nitta’s wife says she probably won’t replant what was in the garden, but she’s grateful. Extremely grateful. An orange crocus has sprung up beneath the Toyota that came through her wall. She picks the flower and holds it up so all the volunteers can see. We all make too much of it.

We have to.

The Reinvention of Community

The Nittas have been lucky, you might say. They haven’t lost anyone and aren’t technically homeless. They also exemplify the challenges Japan will face as the country tries to put this place back together. The nation’s population is the second oldest in the world. In the tsunami-affected prefectures of Iwate, Fukushima, and Miyagi, an average of one in four people is over the age of 65.

This fact becomes very apparent at Ishinomaki’s relief centers. Residents are allocated to rooms according to neighborhood, not name. In the initial days after the disaster, American television reporters made a point to mention how “orderly” the refugees were keeping the relief quarters. Many journalists were quick to credit the inherent goodness of the Japanese people, as though the inhabitants of this island nation possess a rare dignity gene absent from the common DNA. While flattering, these explanations also traffic in cultural stereotypes of the Japanese as rigid and obsessed with discipline—caricatures that have not always served the Japanese well.

The simple decision to house evacuees alongside their most immediate neighbors—recreating little villages block by block—likely contributed to the safe and calm atmosphere in the relief centers. Members of a community are the most likely to know who lives where, who might be suffering from diabetes or Parkinson’s, and how to reach them.

Almost all of the tsunami survivors I encountered felt personally responsible for reconstruction. The job of fixing damaged structures will fall upon the local community and the social welfare councils. They will appeal to the government for financial support, but all the important decisions will be made at the local level. This, in part, explains why so many residents chose to stay in damaged housing despite the lack of water, heat, or electricity. When the community is broken up and people are shipped to emergency housing situations miles away, reconstruction is impeded for everyone.

This fact seems obvious. Yet, authorities rarely consider community cohesion a priority when determining how to house disaster victims, as evinced by the U.S. government’s relocation of New Orleans residents, first to FEMA trailers and then across the country, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

I journey to Minato Elementary School, one of Ishinomaki’s relief centers. Exactly one month before my arrival, the tsunami’s wave—here reaching 16 feet high and thick with flotsam—trampled through the school’s first floor. When I climb the stairs I see that several cars still litter the temple cemetery behind the school, an indication of how high, forceful, and dangerous was the wave that crashed through here.

The refugees housed in the school’s upper stories have been separated into rooms on the basis of neighborhood. They have daily meetings, also at 8 a.m., to distribute food items and discuss the whereabouts of friends and neighbors.

A board displays requests for information about people who have not been found, and application forms for government housing assistance sit beneath an open window. These are necessary to score a spot on the waiting list for a government-subsidized hotel room or a temporary house, of which the Ishinomaki authorities have plans to build 150. Some 8,000 families have applied for temporary housing, a number expected to reach 10,000.

SACHIE TOMINAGA. CREDIT: PATRICK TUCKER

Sachie Tominaga is one such applicant. She was at a friend’s place when the tsunami warning sounded. She sprinted home, found her mother and her son, got them into a nearby cab, and rushed them to the elementary school. Tominaga’s son is now sitting against a wall, staring at his feet. He appears to be about 20. He is becoming visibly disturbed by our presence. His breathing is accelerating, and he is clenching his fists. Tominaga describes him as easily agitated. After she dropped him off at Minato on the day of the earthquake, she took the cab back home, turned off the gas, grabbed a few possessions, got back in the cab, and headed up the hill to the elementary school. A moment later, she and the driver found themselves stuck in traffic.

In the 30 minutes between the initial quake and the tsunami, tens of thousands of people in low-lying areas struck out to find higher ground. The traffic jam that resulted from too many people trying to take too few roads at once was enormous. Tominaga saw the choice in front of her clearly; she could stay in the cab and hope the jam cleared or make an attempt to leave on foot. She chose the latter. The cab driver, a man who arguably saved her life and the life of her son and mother, chose the former. She hasn’t seen or heard from him since.

I want to ask her about what her life has been like and what she expects next, but these sorts of questions aren’t likely to yield anything more candid than “Muzukashii desu”: It is difficult. The people of Minato do not indulge in complaint or expressions of unhappiness in front of me or the other reporter who is with me today. This is for our benefit. We are guests here, and there is a right and a wrong way to extend hospitality. And then there is the matter of pride. Sadness, like nakedness, is not for the eyes of the world. I ask her instead what life she would like to be living 10 years from now.

“Just a normal life,” she says. “Nothing elaborate.”

It is not the scope of Sachie Tominaga’s hardship that compels sympathy, for the world is populated by the poor and the homeless. Rather, it is the abruptness of her loss. In her quiet, respectful humility, she is a living testament to the fact that the destitute do not usually earn their misery through lack of discipline and poor exercise of choice.

Tomorrow, classes at Minato Elementary are scheduled to resume. Four of this room’s new residents have arrived. A group of boys, ages 7 to 10 or so, stand by the door beside their parents. They are shyly staring at a bank of cubby holes.

Tominaga and her neighbors will have to leave this room to make way for incoming students. She’s not sure where she’ll be sent, and she still has to put her things in order. “I have to go,” she says. She bows low and apologizes. We bow low in return and thank her. She leaves to comfort her son, pack away her few possessions, and prepare herself for another cab ride to a place that is not home.

Beyond Survival

Events like the March 11 earthquake and tsunami in Japan illustrate just how little control we have over the future, despite our actions. Contrary to common hubris, you cannot plan for the unthinkable. You can only pay attention, listen, and learn in order to build stronger, react smarter, survive better when the unforeseeable occurs. The tsunami is already helping researchers, inventors, and designers to do just that.

Whenever the next tsunami hits a populated nation, it will again bring with it death, destruction, and despair. But each of these can be lessened through the intelligent application of technologies already in existence and readily deployable.

Think back to the Hagas on the afternoon of the earthquake. The tsunami warning has just sounded. Like thousands of others in Ishinomaki, they head out by car only to meet traffic, the inevitable result of too many people seeking to use the same outlet at once. They’re swept up by a wave and barely survive. According to anecdotal accounts, fatalities on March 11 were particularly heavy among people stuck in motor vehicles.

Gordon Jones, CEO of Guardian Watch, knows that, while a warning bell does give enough information to spur action, it doesn’t provide enough data to make a real decision. He’s developed a mobile app that allows anyone with a smartphone or video streaming device to get a visual read on a disaster playing out in their area in real time.

The app makes use of the fact that people rely on social networks even—and perhaps especially—during disasters, when the speed of Twitter makes mainstream news look glacial in comparison. There are already more than 200 million cell phones with either photo or movie capability. It’s a function we use for leisure, shooting video of our pets or our friends’ stupid skateboard tricks. But, in a disaster, combined with the right social network and pointed in the right direction, this enormous global web of cameras takes on considerable value. Such an app would have allowed the Hagas to pinpoint the location of the wave behind them and the traffic in front of them before they got into their car.

Combine that small breakthrough with a recent finding from the University of Illinois: Researcher Jonathan Makela used the March 11 tsunami to show that huge wave events create color patterns, detectable at high altitude using special lenses. These patterns can forecast the direction and scope of the tsunami wave. The finding could give emergency workers in tsunami-vulnerable areas an extra hour to prepare.

Perhaps the most important lesson of the March 11 disaster is that we need to change the way we respond to disaster victims immediately following destructive events. Too often, the initial response of those in government charged with managing the suddenly displaced population is to relocate them many miles away.

The short-term need to take citizens out of harm’s way undermines the long-term goal of restoring their lives and communities. The thousands of displaced Ishinomaki residents needed to be physically close to their neighborhoods, and to one another, in order to rebuild.

Now meet David Lopez, a Baltimore architect who’s pushing a new approach to emergency housing. His focus: shelter solutions that allow communities to stay together, as close to their original dwellings as possible, after disasters. It’s a mission he pursued in Haiti following the 2010 earthquake.

MARYLAND INSTITUTE COLLEGE OF ART STUDENTS DISPLAY A NEXT-GEN EMERGENCY HOUSING DESIGN IN MAY. CREDIT: PATRICK TUCKER

Lopez teaches a class on emergency housing at the Maryland Institute College of Art. Last May, part of the course work for his students was to design a transitional housing response to an earthquake. The winning project transformed various bits of debris from fallen structures into a cluster of houses where the old ones once stood, thus solving simultaneously (though not entirely) the twin problems of handling the debris and quickly acquiring cheap materials. At a cost of less than $3,100 per house, the winning scheme would cost less than what the Japanese government was spending to build emergency housing units offsite.

This small improvement over the current status quo could make a dramatic difference in the lives of the people of Ishinomaki. Given the choice between abandoning their neighborhood and staying—perhaps uncomfortably—in a broken house with no water or heat, most of the men and women I came across chose the latter. If there is anything to be learned from the events that played out in Japan after the tsunami, it is that our public response to disaster must accommodate and encourage this vital urge to keep community physically intact.

Guardians of the Now

I become viscerally aware of this need for connectedness on the day I journey with other Peace Boat volunteers to Ogatsu on the outskirts of Ishinomaki.

Ogatsu was once a town: a collection of homes, offices, and stores laid out on a navigable grid; a place where people rode bicycles to the market, children walked to school while playing handheld video games; where old women swept the dust from their front steps. These are the typical characteristics of a Japanese community, but they do not describe this place. Not anymore.

OGATSU, JAPAN. CREDIT: PATRICK TUCKER

Ogatsu, as I encounter it, has become a white Shinto wedding dress webbed across tree branches. It is a house with its interior—couch, chair, wallpaper—exposed like a diorama. Ogatsu is splinters and metal and cotton and silk chaotically meeting and diverging in a manner that is almost beautiful but that cannot serve a single human need. The town of Ogatsu is field upon field strewn with bits and pieces of its inhabitants’ former lives.

The town of Ogatsu is no more.

On March 11, the tsunami here was at its mightiest, at more than 100 feet high. It descended on this place and chewed through everything in its path. The volunteers with me are encountering Ogatsu for the first time, and they are silent. The van driver, a tough looking fellow with long hair done up in a ponytail, is trying in vain to hide the fact that he is weeping. We pass an upside-down roof stuck on a sandbar, like an overturned turtle, and a bus parked where city hall once stood.

Among the few structures still standing is the three-story hospital. Every window is broken. It looks like a casualty of economic depression, a factory abandoned 50 years ago, not a first-rate medical facility that was housing patients just a month earlier. The remains of once neighboring houses are piled up against its walls.

We have come to serve miso soup, boiled vegetables, and rice to the handful of Ogatsu employees who have elected to stay here and clean debris. Many have been sleeping in improvised houses or beneath the tin roof of the local recycling center, which we use as our kitchen. The place is not much more than a truck hangar that had been transformed into a living room. Mismatched bits of office and home furniture stand around coffee tables. Everything is damp with mildew and rain.

OGATSU SOUP KITCHEN. CREDIT: PATRICK TUCKER

There were 40 town employees who lived in Ogatsu before the earthquake. I am told that two-thirds have vanished and are presumed dead. We prepare soup for 60, not knowing who else is in the area and may show up.

One of the survivors is Hiroshi Yamashita. In the minutes after the earthquake, he went to help evacuate the hospital, but then fled to the roof when the waters rose up through the first, then the second, then the third floors. He stayed there for three days, waiting for the ocean to recede. His only company was the sound of the waves lapping against the sides of the building. Night brought with it a darkness he had never before seen and the certain knowledge that many people in the hospital beneath him had perished. Finally, on the third night, the sound of moving water softened and disappeared. He was able to climb down the next morning, find construction equipment, and set to work cleaning the street.

He lost several friends that day, but his family—two daughters, his wife, and his mother—survived and are staying with relatives. He has been living in a windowless cargo truck so he can better assist in the clean-up and management of relief items.

With some cajoling, Yamashita admits that the government seemed slow in its response to the disaster, particularly in its handling of food. The Self-Defense Force didn’t begin distributing rice and bread in Ishinomaki until the first week of April, nearly three weeks after the tsunami.

Yamashita is reluctant to offer a more critical assessment of the Kan administration’s response to the event, or the government’s focus on the nuclear power plant. In situations like these, he says, the burden of both relief and repair lies first “with the town leadership, then the prefecture government, then the national government.”

It’s this self-imposed role of guardian that has kept him in Ogatsu, attached to a town that isn’t, cleaning away the remnants of what had been. I ask him what he would like to see this place become in 10 years. This is a softball question that I pitch to a lot of people—an open invitation to be optimistic, to recreate Ogatsu from whole cloth. He looks to the tin roof above his head.

“One thing is for certain,” he says. “I will still be here.”❑

About the Author

Patrick Tucker is the deputy editor of THE FUTURIST magazine and director of communications for the World Future Society. He spent five months in Japan researching trends and reporting for THE FUTURIST (“Solar Power from the Moon,” May-June 2011; “My First Meltdown: Lessons from Fukushima,” July-August 2011; and “Thank You Very Much, Mr. Roboto,” September-October 2011). Email ptucker@wfs.org.

Investigating the Future: Lessons from the "Scene of the Crime"

By Charles Brass

Futurists investigate clues and evidence to attempt to answer difficult questions, much like crime-scene investigators. But while CSIs try to determine things that have already happened, futurists look to what may yet happen, and what we can do now to influence it.

As practitioners of a relatively young profession, futurists are frequently asked to explain what they do. Often, the askers have some skepticism. I personally have lost track of the number of times people have asked to see my crystal ball or my time machine when I have shown them my business card.

Many people seem to be unable to get their heads around the idea that it is possible to learn something useful about events or situations that have not yet happened. Yet, when archaeologists report on what they have learned, no one doubts their professionalism, despite the fact that they were not at the time and place they are observing.

This is why, when I am asked to explain what a futurist does, I use the analogy of an archaeologist or, for younger audiences, a crime-scene investigator. Most practicing futurists are at least as interested in the past as they are in the future, but my use of this analogy goes far beyond simply acknowledging that how we arrived at the present has a powerful impact on what will happen in the future.

Both crime-scene investigators and futurists are interested in learning more about a time and place remote from themselves, and both use increasingly sophisticated sets of tools and techniques to help them expand their knowledge. Before they begin to use any of these tools, however, they follow a series of protocols that are designed to ensure that they do their job rigorously and that others can validate and replicate their work. This article looks at some of the rules that crime-scene investigators (CSIs) follow. These rules have direct parallels in helping to shape not only good crime-scene analysis, but good futures practice, as well.

Determining the Investigation’s Boundaries

The first thing that CSIs do is to define the physical space in which they are interested and then cordon this area off. This is no trivial exercise. The CSIs expect to invest considerable time and energy in examining the interior of that quarantined space, recognizing all the while that drawing too wide a boundary may yield only marginally more knowledge. Similarly, drawing too narrow a boundary will increase the likelihood that important information will be overlooked. In any case, no boundary can possibly capture everything or everybody of interest.

Futurists, too, have to delineate boundaries around the themes in which they and their clients are interested. As good systems thinkers, futurists are acutely aware of the extent to which everything is interconnected, and they are always concerned that important information may lie outside the immediate area of their focus.

They also know (and if they don’t, their clients always remind them) that they don’t have an infinite amount of time within which to explore the future. Futures work is designed to enhance the quality of decisions made in the present, and clients most often want to make decisions quickly. For instance, those responsible for public-school systems must anticipate numbers of incoming kindergarteners some years in advance, but this is difficult in the absence of detailed information about such things as decisions to open or close local factories, or planned changes in zoning regulations.

The CSI has an advantage over the futurist in that the boundary of an official crime scene is marked with very visible tape that everybody understands and most people respect. Even if futurists are meticulous and explicit about defining the boundaries of a particular assignment, the nature of their work and the people they work with mean these boundaries regularly get challenged or ignored. Nonetheless, most futurists find it very helpful in their consulting work to take time early in the process to discuss, and hopefully agree on, the boundaries within which any particular assignment will take place.

Of course, good CSIs know that a new discovery might at any time cause an expansion of the taped-off area. Similarly, futures work is made easier if the futurist and the client can explicitly acknowledge that some proposed new action is taking the assignment beyond the previously agreed boundaries. In the school system example, chronic flooding in the region may also impact families’ relocation decisions, so the futurist’s boundaries might need to expand to include environmental factors.

There is more to the tape around a crime scene, however, than just simply defining where the CSI will focus attention. The tape reminds others that the space inside is a special place and needs to be treated carefully.

This is another way in which the CSI has an advantage over the futurist. CSIs can pretty well ensure that no one will enter their area of interest unless they have been invited, and even then they will follow the CSI’s rules of conduct. In effect, the CSIs attempt to freeze the crime scene until they complete their investigation.

Futurists’ areas of interest can rarely be as conveniently frozen while the analysis takes place. Nonetheless, if people who do continue to move around inside the demarked area are aware that, for the moment, this is a special space, they are more likely to think more carefully about the actions they take. Perhaps the members of the school board might need to be reminded to factor their yet-to-be completed future scanning into their current budget cycle.

For futurists, marking out the territory of interest in a particular investigation includes identifying the people who habitually occupy that territory. Letting all these people know that an investigation is taking place can often reduce the accidental damage done by those who aren’t aware of the significance of the space.

Of course, not everyone’s motives are pure and wholesome. Both CSIs and futurists need to be aware that some people will deliberately try to mislead or taint the crime scene or the future space.

Analyzing Evidence Objectively

Having drawn a boundary around their area of interest, CSIs then get down to work. They know that their primary role is to carefully notice and document as much as possible. In addition to their five human senses, they bring their experience and a variety of technological tools to help them in this work.

They are acutely aware that their mere presence on the scene changes things, and that their human prejudices and biases color what they notice and how they report on what they notice. They are aware, too, that some of their work is unpleasant, and that it is a natural human reaction to try and cover up some of this unpleasantness.

Futurists, too, are most often outsiders that other people bring in to a situation to help make sense of it. Like any other human beings, too, futurists are prone to bring biases and prejudices to everything they do. Just as the fingerprints of all CSIs and police officers are recorded so they can be eliminated from the investigation, so futurists need to be careful to eliminate as much of their influence on the scene as they can.

Futurists also should know that, whatever specialist expertise they claim to bring, many others on the scene will nonetheless seek to bring their perspectives to the situation. In particular, futurists need to be aware of the natural human tendency to avoid unpleasantness. The best futurists are skilled at presenting the results of their work in such a way that all relevant aspects are given their appropriate weight.

Placing a tape around a crime scene gives the impression that the moment of the crime has been frozen for analysis by the CSI. The skilled investigator, whether CSI or futurist, knows that everything changes, even during an investigation, so the more they know about how things change, the more useful they will be.

In this regard, the training that futurists receive might give them an advantage over the CSIs. Learning to appreciate all the dimensions within which change takes place is an integral part of futurist training, and good futurists are aware that only dead things change in regularly predictable ways.

The CSIs are almost always examining purely physical, geographic space. Futurists, on the other hand, explore landscapes that are shaped and populated by human beings for whom change is an unpredictable inevitability.

CSIs’ specialist expertise is most often accepted by all those involved. They can often rely on the legal system both to support their efforts and to compel the participation of all those in whom they are interested.

Alas, futurists have no such legal mandate. Where the CSI can usually assume that those who commission their work are genuinely interested in their professional analysis—such as identifying a cause of death or indicating a probable perpetrator—futurists often confront unwilling participants or even clients unwilling to listen to what has been learned.

CSIs are provided with an ever-expanding toolkit, much of which is the result of developments in science and technology. In particular, they have access to many tools that enhance or extend human senses and give precise quantitative data.

Futurists, too, have access to an expanding toolkit. Like the CSIs’, much of the futurists’ equipment is designed to supplement individual human senses, often by aggregating information across larger populations. Some of the futurist toolkit is also designed to tap into underutilized areas of the human experience, such as myth, metaphor, and worldview. Often, the futurists seek to sharpen human senses by focusing them in a variety of ways. Modern technology enhances the futurist toolkit by allowing the collection, analysis, and interpretation of quantities of data that would otherwise stretch human capability.

Whatever tools are used, both the CSIs and the futurists need to be aware of the limitations of human ability to understand and interpret the information before them. And they also need to be aware that some people have malicious intent and can either inadvertently or consciously taint the data.

Studying the Past and Studying the Future

CSIs and futurists are both part of our modern world because human beings are relentlessly interested in the world around them. Since none of us can be everywhere at all times, we are collectively prepared to invest in developing the skills of that special subset of people who can help us make sense of a world we did not, or could not, experience: the past and the future.

Good CSIs know that the past is not a space that anyone can completely understand. No matter how many resources we bring to bear on studying it, our comprehension of the past—even of very recent events—will always be imperfect. What CSIs expect to do is to work diligently to reduce this imperfection as much as they can.

Futurists can relate to this: The future is also inherently uncertain. They strive to reduce the uncertainties as much as possible by applying systemic and systematic approaches to understanding the future.

There is a final, crucial difference between CSIs and futurists, however. CSIs primarily exist to help others understand what has happened. Futurists are interested in what may happen and are even more interested in what we would like to happen. Futures work is about both understanding the future and creating it.

In The Clock of the Long Now, futurist Stewart Brand wrote: “Our experience of time is asymmetric. We can see the past, but not influence it. We can influence the future, but not see it.” He may have been wrong on both counts. Many people behave as though they could influence the past, and we all strive to see the future. What both CSIs and futurists remind us is that doing all these things will be improved if it is done systematically and rigorously.

About the Author

Charles Brass is chair of Australia’s premier futures organization, the Futures Foundation, which incorporates the professional association for futurists in Australia. E-mail cab@fowf.com.au; Web site www.futuresfoundation.org.au.

Updating the Global Scorecard: The 2011 State of the Future

By Jerome C. Glenn

The world could be better off in ten years than it is today, but only if decision makers can work together to meet global challenges, according to The Millennium Project.

The global population in general is richer, healthier, better educated, more peaceful, and better connected than ever before, yet half the world is potentially unstable. Food prices are rising, water tables are falling, corruption and organized crime are increasing, debt and economic insecurity is growing, climate change is accelerating, and the gap between the rich and poor continues to widen dangerously.

There are potentials for many serious nightmares, but also a range of solutions for each. If current trends in population growth, resource depletion, climate change, terrorism, organized crime, and disease continue and converge over the next 50–100 years, it is easy to imagine catastrophic results and an unstable world. But, if current trends in self-organization via future Internets, transnational cooperation, materials science, alternative energy, cognitive science, interreligious dialogues, synthetic biology, and nanotechnology continue and converge over the next 50–100 years, it is easy to imagine a world that works for all.

The coming biological revolution may change civilization more profoundly than did the industrial or information revolutions. The world has not come to grips with the implications of writing genetic code to create new life-forms. Yet, within the next two decades, the concept of being dependent on synthetic life-forms for medicine, food, water, and energy could be quite normal.

After 15 years of The Millennium Project’s global futures research, it is increasingly clear that the world has the resources to address its challenges. What is not clear is whether we will make good decisions fast enough and on a large enough scale to really address these challenges. Hence, we are in a race between implementing ever-increasing ways to improve the human condition and the seemingly ever-increasing complexity and scale of global problems.

So, how is the world doing in this race? What’s the score so far? In order to calculate that, an international Delphi panel selected more than a hundred indicators of progress or regress. Indicators were then chosen that had at least 20 years of reliable historical data and later, where possible, were matched with variables used in the International Futures model. The resulting 28 variables were integrated into the State of the Future Index with a 10-year projection. A review of the trends of the 28 variables used in The Millennium Project’s State of the Future Index provides a record of humanity’s performance in addressing the most important challenges.

The Current Outlook for 2020: The Millennium Project’s Scorecard

Here is a summary of where The Millennium Project’s participants see improvements, where they see backsliding, and where the trends may be ambiguous.

Where We Are Winning

• The percentage of people with access to clean water.
• The adult literacy rate.
• The percentage of people enrolled in secondary school.
• Poverty measured as percentages of the population in low- and mid-income countries living on $1.25 a day (purchasing power parity).
• Overall global population growth.
• GDP per capita.
• Physicians and health-care workers per 1,000 people.
• Internet users.
• Infant mortality rates.
• Life expectancy at birth.
• Overall percentage of women in parliamentary governments.
• GDP per unit of energy use.
• Number of major armed conflicts with more than 1,000 deaths per year.
• Undernourishment.
• HIV prevalence among 15- to 49-year-olds.
• Number of countries that have or are strongly suspected to have plans for nuclear weapons.
• Total debt service in low- and mid-income countries.
• Research and development expenditures as a percentage of national budgets.

Where We Are Losing

• Carbon-dioxide emissions.
• Global surface temperature anomalies.
• Percentage of people voting in elections.
• Levels of corruption in the 15 largest countries.
• Number of people killed or injured in terrorist attacks.
• Number of refugees per 100,000 total population.

Areas of Uncertainty

It is not clear at the moment where these trends are heading:

• Unemployment rate.
• Transition to clean energy and renewables.
• Percentage of global population living in democratic countries.
• Percentage of land area covered by forest.

In comparison with recent years, the global forecast for the next decade looks better than ever. However, the future may not improve as much in the next 10 years as it has over the past 20 years. In many of the areas where improvements are being made (such as reductions in HIV, malnutrition, and developing country debt), they are not being made fast enough. There are also areas of uncertainty that represent serious problems: unemployment, fossil fuel consumption, political freedom, and forest cover. Some problems could have quite serious impacts, such as corruption, climate change, organized crime, and terrorism. Nevertheless, this selection of data indicates that the world 10 years from now, on balance, will be better than today.

Factors to Consider in Assessing the Future

Climate Change and Earth’s Resources: Each decade since 1970 has been warmer than the preceding one, and 2010 tied 2005 as the warmest year on record. Atmospheric CO2 is at 394.35 parts per million as of May 2011, the highest in at least 2 million years.

According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization’s report Livestock’s Long Shadow, the meat industry contributes 18% of human-related greenhouse gases (measured in CO2 equivalent), which is higher than the transportation industry. A large reinsurance company found that 90% of 950 natural disasters in 2010 were weather-related and fit climate change models; these disasters killed 295,000 people and cost approximately $130 billion.

To save the ecosystem, nothing less than cutting CO₂ by 80% by 2020, keeping population to no more than 8 billion by 2050, restoring natural ecosystems, and eradicating poverty will be required, argues Earth Policy Institute President Lester Brown in his book Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization (Norton, 2009)

Humanity’s material extraction increased eightfold during the twentieth century. We currently consume 30% more renewable natural resources than these systems regenerate. In just 39 years, humanity may add an additional 2.3 billion people to world population. There were 1 billion humans in 1804, 2 billion in 1927, 6 billion in 1999, and 7 billion today.

Investment in alternative energy is rapidly accelerating to meet the projected 40%–50% increase in demand by 2035. China has become the largest investor in “low-carbon energy,” with a 2010 budget of $51 billion. Yet, without major technological breakthroughs and large-scale behavioral changes, the majority of the world’s energy in 2050 will still come from fossil fuels. Therefore, large-scale carbon capture and reuse has to become a top priority to reduce climate change.

Meanwhile, automakers around the world are in a race to make lower-cost plug-in hybrid and all-electric cars. Engineering companies are exploring how to take CO₂ emissions from coal power plants to make carbonates for cement and grow algae for biofuels and fish food. China is exploring telework programs to reduce long commuting, energy, costs, and traffic congestion.

Falling water tables worldwide and increasing depletion of sustainably managed water have led to the concept of “peak water,” similar to peak oil. Since 1990, an additional 1.3 billion people gained access to improved drinking water and 500 million got better sanitation. Yet 884 million people still lack access to clean water today (down from 900 million in 2009) and 2.6 billion people still lack access to safe sanitation. Half of all hospital patients in the developing world suffer from water-related diseases.

Food prices are at their highest point in history and are likely to continue increasing over the long term if there are no major innovations in production and changes in consumption. New approaches like saltwater agriculture and pure meat produced from stem cells or tissue replications could help alleviate this.

Environmental security is increasingly dominating national and international agendas and shifting defense and geopolitical paradigms, because policy leaders increasingly understand that conflict and environmental degradation exacerbate each other. The traditional nation-centered security focus is expanding to a more global one due to geopolitical shifts, the effects of climate change, environmental and energy security, and growing global interdependencies. The Millennium Project defines environmental security as the viability of an environment to support life. This concept embraces the goals of preventing or repairing military damage to the environment, preventing or responding to environmentally caused conflicts, and protecting the environment due to its inherent moral value.

Proceeding along the “business-as-usual” path is a threat to environmental security. People and organizations who got away with wreaking environmental damage in the past are less likely to escape exposure and punishment in the future.

Social Change: Nearly 30% of the population in Muslim-majority countries is between 15 and 29 years old. Many who were tired of older hierarchies and high unemployment, felt left behind, and wanted to join the modern world brought change across North Africa and the Middle East in 2011. This demographic pattern is expected to continue for another generation, with potential for improvement and innovation as well as continued social unrest and migration.

The social media that helped facilitate the Arab Spring Awakening is in no small part driving a historic transition from a world comprising many pockets of civilizations barely aware of each other’s existence to a digitally interconnected world.

Technology and the Economy: More data went through the Internet in 2010 than in all the previous years combined, and Amazon.com sold more electronic than paper books for the first time that year as well. Humanity, the built environment, and ubiquitous computing are forming an augmented continuum of consciousness and technology that reflects the full range of human behavior, from individual philanthropy to organized crime. New forms of civilization will emerge from this convergence of minds, information, and technology worldwide.

Computing power continues to accelerate. China currently holds the record for the fastest computer with Tianhe-1. Mira, the 10-metaflop supercomputer that IBM claims will be operational in 2012, would be four times faster. Just as the autonomic nervous system runs most biological decision making, computer systems are also increasingly making more (and more significant and complex) day-to-day decisions.

Ethical decision making is struggling to keep up with the rate of technological change. Despite the extraordinary achievements of science and technology, future risks from continued acceleration and globalization needs to be better forecasted and assessed. At the same time, new technologies also make it easier for more people to do more good at a faster pace than ever before. Ordinary citizens initiate groups on the Internet, organizing actions worldwide around specific ethical issues. News media, blogs, mobile phone cameras, ethics commissions, and NGOs are increasingly exposing unethical decisions and corrupt practices, creating an embryonic global conscience.

Poverty and Wealth: Poverty is on a downward trend globally. The world economy grew 4.9% in 2010 while the population grew 1.2%, yielding world GDP per capita growth of 3.7%. Nearly half a billion people rose out of extreme poverty ($1.25 a day) between 2005 and 2010, but 900 million (13% of the global population) remain in such dire conditions. The number of countries classified as low-income has fallen from 66 to 40, but the gap between rich and poor—both within and among countries—continues to widen. Brazil, Russia, India, and China produced 108 of the 214 new billionaires in 2011, according to Forbes.

China surpassed Japan to become the world’s second-largest economy in 2010. There are more Internet users in China (485 million) than the entire population of the United States (307 million). India is expected to pass China as most populous country in the world by 2030. Together, China and India account for nearly 40% of humanity and are increasingly becoming the driving force for world economic growth.

Health, Medicine, and Well-Being: Many populations are aging, due to falling fertility rates and increasing longevity. The ability to meet financial requirements for the elderly will diminish as the support ratio (workers-to-retirees) will continue to shrink. Policy makers will need to rethink the concept of retirement, and social structures will have to change to avoid intergenerational conflicts.

Another byproduct of longer lives is that there could be as many as 150 million people with age-related dementia by 2050. Advances in brain research and applications to improve brain functioning and maintenance could lead to healthy long life (as opposed to an infirmed long life).

World health is improving, the incidence of diseases is falling, and people are living longer, yet many past challenges remain and many future threats are becoming more serious. During 2011, there were six potential epidemics. The most dangerous is probably the NDM-1 enzyme that can make a variety of bacteria resistant to most drugs. On the plus side, new HIV infections declined 19% over the past decade; the median cost of antiretroviral medicine per person in low-income countries has dropped to $137 per year; and 45% of the estimated 9.7 million people in need of antiretroviral therapy received it by the end of 2010. Yet two new HIV infections occur for every person starting treatment.

Infant mortality is on the decline, as more than 30% fewer children under age 5 died in 2010 than in 1990. Total mortality from infectious disease fell from 25% in 1998 to less than 16% in 2010. On the other hand, health-care costs are increasing, and the shortage of health workers is growing, making telemedicine and self-diagnosis via biochip sensors and online expert systems increasingly necessary.

Conflict and Crime: There is, of course, a darker side to technological development. Advances in synthetic biology, DNA research, and future desktop molecular and pharmaceutical manufacturing could one day give individuals the ability to make and deploy biological weapons of mass destruction. To counter this, we will need more-sophisticated sensors to detect molecular changes in public spaces, along with advances in human development (ranging from improved education to more widespread mental health care) and social engagement to reduce the number of people who might be inclined to use these technologies for mass murder.

Another emerging problem is information warfare and cyberwar. Governments and military contractors are engaged in an intellectual arms race to defend themselves from cyberattacks from other governments and their surrogates. Because society’s vital systems now depend on the Internet, cyberweapons to bring it down can be thought of as weapons of mass destruction. Information warfare’s manipulation of the media can lead to increasing mistrust.

Meanwhile, traditional military wars have decreased over the past two decades, cross-cultural dialogues are flourishing, and intra-state conflicts are increasingly being settled by international interventions. As of this writing, there are 10 major armed conflicts with at least 1,000 deaths per year, down from 14 in 2010: Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Yemen, northwestern Pakistan, Naxalites in India, Mexican cartels, Sudan, Libya, and one classified as international extremism.

The United States and Russia continue to reduce their nuclear stockpiles, but China, India, and Pakistan are increasing them. According to the Federation of American Scientists, by February 2011 there were 22,000 nuclear warheads in the world, 2,000 of which are ready for use by the United States and Russia. And while the number and area of nuclear-free zones are increasing, the number of unstable states is increasing (from 28 to 37 between 2006 and 2011).

Although the world is waking up to the enormity of the threat of transnational organized crime, the problem continues to grow, and leaders have yet to adopt a global strategy to address this threat. World illicit trade is estimated at $1.6 trillion for 2011 (up $500 billion from 2010), with counterfeiting and intellectual property piracy accounting for $300 billion to $1 trillion, the global drug trade at $404 billion, trade in environmental goods at $63 billion, human trafficking and prostitution at $220 billion, smuggling at $94 billion, weapons trade at $12 billion, and cybercrime costing billions annually in lost revenue. These figures do not include extortion or organized crime’s part of the $1 trillion in bribes that the World Bank estimates are paid annually, or its part of the estimated $1.5–6.5 trillion in laundered money. Hence, the total illicit income could be $2–3 trillion—about twice as big as all the military budgets in the world.

Addressing Humanity’s Challenges

The global challenges facing humanity are transnational in nature, demanding transinstitutional solutions. No government, international organization, or other form of institution acting alone can solve these problems. The world may have to move from governance by a mosaic of sometimes conflicting national government policies to governance by coordinated and mutually supporting global policies that are implemented at national and local levels.

The global financial crisis and the efforts to resolve it have clearly demonstrated the need for global systems of analysis, policy formation, and policy implementation. Nation-state decision making worked well during slower and less interdependent times. However, the future is expected to be far more interdependent than today, with even less leeway between problem recognition and solution. Hence, it will require improved global governance.

Economic growth and technological innovation have led to better health and living conditions than ever before for more than half the people in the world, but unless our financial, economic, environmental, and social behaviors are improved along with our industrial technologies, the long-term future is in jeopardy.

Governments should create systems of resilience and collective intelligence and should use national “State of the Future Indexes” for their budget and policy processes. Potential decision makers should have a keen grasp of foresight methods. They should be hardheaded idealists who can look into the worst and best of humanity to create and implement strategies of success.

The world can be a far better place—but only if individuals, groups, nations, and institutions make the right decisions. We need a multifaceted, compellingly positive view of the future toward which humanity can work.

About the Author

Jerome C. Glenn is the executive director of The Millennium Project and the primary author of the organization’s annual State of the Future reports over the past 15 years.

This article draws from the most recent report, which may be ordered from The Millennium Project at www.millennium-project.org. Readers are also invited to share their own conclusions about these trends, as well as read and comment on the short online summaries of the 15 Global Challenges.

Reconnecting to Nature in the Age of Technology

By Richard Louv

A best-selling author argues that our relationship with our natural environment is in jeopardy, imperiling our future well-being. But the growing trend of social networking may in fact inspire new tools to help us restore nature to our lives.

From The Nature Principle, © 2011 by Richard Louv. Reprinted by permission of Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill. All rights reserved.

Every day, our relationship with nature, or the lack of it, influences our lives. This has always been true. But in the twenty-first century, our survival—or thrival—will require a transformative framework for that relationship, a reunion of humans with the rest of nature. In 2005, in Last Child in the Woods, I introduced the term nature-deficit disorder, not as a medical diagnosis, but as a way to describe the growing gap between children and nature. After the book’s publication, I heard many adults speak with heartfelt emotion, even anger, about this separation, but also about their own sense of loss.

In my most recent book, The Nature Principle, I describe a future shaped by an amalgam of converging theories and trends as well as a reconciliation with old truths. This amalgam, the Nature Principle, holds that a reconnection to the natural world is fundamental to human health, well-being, spirit, and survival.

Primarily a statement of philosophy, the Nature Principle is supported by a growing body of theoretical, anecdotal, and empirical research that describes the restorative power of nature—its impact on our senses and intelligence; on the physical, psychological, and spiritual health; and on the bonds of family, friendship, and the multispecies community. Illuminated by ideas and stories from good people I have met, the book asks: What would our lives be like if our days and nights were as immersed in nature as they are in technology? How can each of us help create that life-enhancing world, not only in a hypothetical future, but right now, for our families and for ourselves?

Our sense of urgency grows. In 2008, for the first time in history, more than half the world’s population lived in towns and cities. The traditional ways that humans have experienced nature are vanishing, along with biodiversity.

At the same time, our culture’s faith in technological immersion seems to have no limits, and we drift ever deeper into a sea of circuitry. We consume breathtaking media accounts of the creation of synthetic life, combining bacteria with human DNA; of microscopic machines designed to enter our bodies to fight biological invaders or to move deadly clouds across the battlefields of war; of computer-augmented reality; of futuristic houses in which we are surrounded by simulated reality transmitted from every wall. Inventors and futurists like Ray Kurzweil describe a coming “transhuman” or “posthuman” era in which people are optimally enhanced by technology. NASA’s Steven Dick describes a “postbiological universe” where “the majority of intelligent life has evolved beyond flesh and blood intelligence.”

I am not arguing against these concepts or their proponents—at least not the ones who are devoted to the ethical use of technology to expand human capacities. But I do suggest that we’re getting ahead of ourselves. We have yet to fully realize, or even adequately study, the enhancement of human capacities through the power of nature. In a report praising higher-tech classrooms, one educator quotes Abraham Lincoln: “The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulties, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew.” That we should; but in the twenty-first century, ironically, an outsized faith in technology—a turning away from nature—may well be the outdated dogma of our time.

In contrast, the Nature Principle suggests that, in an age of rapid environmental, economic, and social transformation, the future will belong to the nature-smart—those individuals, families, businesses, and political leaders who develop a deeper understanding of nature, and who balance the virtual with the real.

In fact, because of the environmental challenges we face today, we may be—we had better be—entering the most creative period in human history. This is a time defined by a goal to extend the past century of environmentalism, and to go beyond sustainability to the renaturing of everyday life.

The Connection between Nature and Health

In 2007, naturalist Robby Astrove and I were driving through West Palm Beach, Florida, on our way to an event promoting the preservation of the Everglades. He told me: “As a kid, I was always glued to the car window, taking notice. I still do this and must sit in a window seat when flying. Looking back, it’s no wonder I’m a naturalist, having trained my senses to detail, images, sounds, and feelings.”

In fifth grade, a school field trip to the Everglades led to his career choice. After college, he surveyed hundreds of miles of the Everglades, to learn about the great river of grass, the threats to it, and its recovery. In 1979, when he was 15, Astrove was diagnosed with HIV and hepatitis C, which he contracted from three life-saving blood transfusions for a staph infection that had spread from a blister on his thumb. Following the blood test that revealed HIV, he was called into the doctor’s office. He found his parents in tears. “The doc sat me down and shared the news. My first words were, ‘What are we going to do now?’”

During the ensuing years, he found himself drawn, more and more, to the river of grass. “It’s hard to explain, but acknowledging the cycles, patterns, and interconnectedness of the world has provided healing to me,” he said. “Sometimes, I awake in the middle of the night and find myself putting on boots, grabbing a raincoat and collection containers. I don’t question actions like that. I’m excited to hike in the dark not knowing what I’ll find. It might not be until I hear the call of a barred owl that I realize why I came. Or seeing a familiar tree that I’ve studied a million times during the day that reveals something new at night. I go because I trust my instincts, have patience, and allow for things to happen. Well, there’s luck, too. But the same trust and instinct is required to manage a disease. When I haven’t gotten enough nature time, my body tells me. I listen.”

Astrove, who is studying international public health at Emory University, finds HIV biologically fascinating. “It’s able to reproduce rapidly and can mutate, always creating the demand for new medicines. In a weird way, HIV is elegant, beautiful. I understand what this monster is capable of, so I establish limits. Not staying out too late, eating healthy, not ever smoking.” Avoiding these behaviors as a teenager was difficult for him, but respect for the virus trumped peer pressure. “Nature is always making adaptations, so why can’t I do the same? I listen. When I hear ‘rest,’ I rest. When I see macroinvertebrates in a stream indicating clean water, that reminds me to pay attention to indicators for my own health. Stumbling upon a rare plant reminds me of the uniqueness of my situation. No two people are the same in their response to a virus.”

In his role as an educator, Astrove teaches his students that wetlands serve as “nature’s liver.” He relates to systems personally. “The wetlands purify water and trap pollutants.” He explains that the rain forests and other natural places are the source of many of our medicines, that spending time in that world reduces stress. “We feel good from the endorphin release it stimulates, and it inspires us. Inspiration is another giver of health. I go to the woods knowing I will receive healing. And the benefits come in the form of physical, psychological, and spiritual gains. It’s a natural high sometimes when I get the feeling of light, energy, and awe.” He looked out the truck window at the passing landscape as he drove. “Now that I’ve been taking meds for some time, sensitive blood tests can’t find the virus; I test ‘undetectable.’”

Does research give weight to Astrove’s experience? Possibly. A study of 260 people in 24 sites across Japan found that, among people who gazed on forest scenery for twenty minutes, the average concentration of salivary cortisol, a stress hormone, was 13.4% lower than that of people in urban settings.

“Humans lived in nature for 5 million years. We were made to fit a natural environment…. When we are exposed to nature, our bodies go back to how they should be,” explained Yoshifumi Miyazaki, who conducted the study. Miyazaki is director of the Center for Environment Health and Field Sciences at Chiba University; he is Japan’s leading scholar on “forest medicine,” an accepted health-care concept in Japan, where it is sometimes called “forest bathing.”

In other research, Li Qing, a senior assistant professor of forest medicine at Nippon Medical School in Tokyo, found green exercise—physical movement in a natural setting—can increase the activity of natural killer (NK) cells. This effect can be maintained for as long as 30 days.

“When NK activity increases, immune strength is enhanced, which boosts resistance against stress,” according to Li, who attributes the increase in NK activity partly to inhaling air conditioning phytoncides, antimicrobial essential wood oils given off by plants. Studies of this sort deserve closer scrutiny. For example, in the study of natural killer cells, there was no control group, so it is hard to say if the change was due to time off work, exercise, nature contact, or some combination of influences.

Nonetheless, for Astrove, wilderness has helped create a context for healing. It may have strengthened his immune system and offered protective properties that he, and the rest of us, do not yet fully understand.

The Third Ring

Remember those cardboard kaleidoscopes we had when we were kids—how, when you twisted the cylinders, the pieces of colored plastic would snap into a vivid pattern? Sometimes the future comes into focus just like that. For me, one such moment occurred at a conference held in New Hampshire in 2007. On that day, more than a thousand people from across the state traveled to chart the course of the statewide effort to connect families with nature.

As hours of productive meetings came to an end, a father stood up, complimented the attendees’ creativity, and then cut to the chase. “We’ve been talking a lot about programs today,” he said. “Yes, we need to support the programs that connect people to nature, and yes, we need more programs. But the truth is,” he added, “we’ve always had programs to get people outside and kids still aren’t going outside in their own neighborhoods.” Neither, for that matter, are that many adults. He described his own experience. “A creek runs through my neighborhood, and I would love it if my girls could go down and play along that creek,” he said. “But here’s the deal. My neighbors’ yards back up to the creek, and I have yet to go to my neighbors and ask them to give permission to my kids to play along the creek. So here’s my question. What will it take for me to go to my neighbors and ask them for that permission?”

The New Hampshire dad was raising a fundamental question for people of all ages.

What will it take?

The goal is deep, self-replicating cultural change, a leap forward in what a society considers normal and expected. But how do we get there from here? Let me offer my Three Ring theory. The First Ring comprises traditionally funded, direct-service programs (nonprofits, community organizing groups, conservation organizations, schools, park services, nature centers, and so on) that do the heavy institutional lifting of connecting people to nature.

The Second Ring is made up of individual docents and other volunteers, the traditional glue that holds together so much of society. These two Rings are vital, but each has limitations. A direct-service program can only extend as far as its funding will allow. Volunteers are constrained by the resources available for recruitment, training, management, and fund-raising. Many good programs are competing for the same dollars from the same funding sources, a process with its own price. Particularly during difficult economic times, the leaders of direct-service programs often come to view other groups doing similar work as competitors. Good ideas become proprietary; vision is reduced. This response is understandable.

The best programs and volunteer organizations transcend these limitations, but doing so is always a struggle.

Now for the Third Ring: a potentially vast orbit of networked associations, individuals, and families. This Ring is based on peer-to-peer contagion, people helping people create change in their own lives and in their own communities, without waiting for funding. This may sound like traditional volunteerism, but it’s more than that. In the Third Ring, individuals, families, associations, and communities use the sophisticated tools of social networking, both personal and technological, to connect to nature and one another.

Family nature clubs offer one on-the-ground example. Using blog pages, social networking sites, and the old-fashioned instrument called the telephone (or smartphone), families are reaching out to other families to create virtual clubs that arrange multifamily hikes and other nature activities. An array of free organizing and activity tools is now available on the Internet for these clubs. They’re not waiting for funding or permission; they’re doing it themselves, doing it now.

The California-based organization Hooked on Nature networks people who form “nature circles” to explore their own bioregions. In the San Francisco Bay Area, Exploring a Sense of Place organizes groups of adults who meet on weekends to go on hikes with botanists, biologists, geologists, and other experts on their regions’ natural world. Similarly, the Sierra Club has networked hikers for years.

New Third Ring networks could connect people who are rewilding their homes, yards, gardens, and neighborhoods; neighbors creating their own small, do-it-yourself “button” parks; businesspeople and professionals, including developers, hoping to apply biophilic principles. These networks, unlimited in their ability to grow, could transform future policies of more traditional professional societies. For example, today’s influential Green Building Certification Institute’s LEED certification for buildings is almost exclusively focused on energy efficiency and low-environmental-impact design. It’s overdue for an update that would go beyond energy conservation to include the benefits of more natural environments to human health and well-being. For the proponents of that change, going the conventional route to achieve such a policy change could take years. But an expanding network of individual professionals could accelerate that change—and as you read this, that may have happened already.

Similarly, networks of health care and wellness professionals already committed to the nature prescription could change elements of their professions without waiting for top-down pronouncements. Through peer-to-peer networks, they could change minds, hearts, and eventually official protocol, and they could, through this process, build a funding base for direct-service programs.

When I mentioned this Third Ring notion to the director of the Maricopa County (Arizona) Parks and Recreation Department, the largest urban park district in the United States, he grew excited—not only about family nature clubs but about the broader context of the Third Ring.

“I have programs right now in my park system for families, but they’re under-enrolled. This could be a way to change that,” he said. Moreover, he faces new budget challenges. By encouraging families to create self-sustaining, self-organizing nature networks, he would be expanding the number of people who use his parks. Just as important, the growth of a Third Ring could translate into future political support for park funding.

Similarly, as large land-trust organizations and governments help neighborhoods create their own nearby-nature trusts, overhead would be small, but their reach would grow. So would the public’s understanding of the importance of the land-trust concept. College students, those who hope to pursue careers connecting people to nature, could be similarly networked.

The Third Ring could be especially effective in changing the closed system of public education. At this writing, efforts are afoot to gather “natural teachers” into a national network. These educators, in primary and secondary schools, colleges and universities, are not necessarily environmental education teachers. They’re the teachers who intuitively or experientially understand the role that nature experience can play in education. They’re the art teachers, English teachers, science teachers, and many others who insist on taking their students outside to learn—to write poetry or paint or learn science under the trees. I meet these teachers all over the country. Every school had one or two. And they feel alone.

What if thousands of these natural teachers were networked and, through this network, gained power and identity? Once connected, these educators could push for change within their own schools, colleges, and communities. Connected and honored, natural teachers could inspire other teachers; they could become a galvanizing force within their own schools. In the process, they would contribute to their own psychological, physical, and spiritual health.

Third Ring networks can reach well beyond the immediate members. In Austin, Texas, a grade-school principal told me that he would love to include more nature experience in his school. “But you can’t imagine the pressure I’m under now with the testing,” he said. “We can’t do everything.” When I described the family nature club phenomenon, the principal was enthusiastic. I asked if he could provide toolkits—packed with educational material, guides to local parks, and so forth—and encouragement to children and parents to start their own nature clubs. “I could do that,” he said, and he meant it. He immediately began to think of how the educational elements of these clubs might augment his curriculum.

Earlier that day, in a meeting of leaders from central Texas, a PTA president spoke movingly. “Listen, I’m really tired of going into a roomful of parents and telling them not to give their kids candy, because of obesity,” she said. “Recently, I’ve started talking to them about getting their children, and themselves, outside in nature more often. You can’t believe the different feeling in the room. In the room where I’m preaching about candy, the mood is rather unpleasant, but when I’m in a room with parents and we’re talking about getting outside, then the mood is happy, even serene. Parents immediately relax when we talk about that.” During our meeting, she began to make plans for her PTA to start encouraging family nature clubs.

Social networking, online and in person, has transformed the political world. Online tools are used to raise funds, to organize face-to-face house parties, and to turn out voters. A nature-focused Third Ring using those same tools, and ones not yet imagined, could create a growing constituency for needed policy changes and business practices. It could, in fact, help create a renatured culture.

What if family nature clubs really caught on, like book clubs did in recent years? What if there were 10,000 family nature clubs in the United States, created by families for families, in the next few years? What if the same process in other spheres of influence moved nature to the center of human experience? In such a culture, that father in New Hampshire would be more likely to knock on his neighbor’s door. Or, better yet, one of his neighbors will show up at his door, asking his family to join a new network of neighbors devoted to enjoying nature in their own neighborhood. Their first expedition: to explore the creek that runs through it.

Your Right to Nature

To be clear, I don’t believe that permanent cultural change will take root without major institutional and legislative commitments to protect, restore, and create natural habitat on a global basis.

Generous future historians may someday write that our generation finally met the environmental challenges of our time—not only climate change, but also the change of climate in the human heart, our society’s nature-deficit disorder—and that, because of these challenges, we purposefully entered one of the most creative periods in human history; that we did more than survive or sustain, that we laid the foundation for a new civilization; and that nature came to our workplaces, our neighborhoods, our homes, and our families.

Such a transformation, both cultural and political, will come only with a new consideration of human rights. Recently I began asking friends this question: Do we have a right to a walk in the woods? Several people responded with puzzled ambivalence. Look at what our species is doing to the planet, they said. Based on that evidence alone, isn’t the relationship between human beings and nature inherently oppositional? That point of view is understandable, given the destructiveness of human beings to nature. But consider the echo from folks who reside at another point on the political/cultural spectrum, where nature is seen as an object under human dominion or as a distraction on the way to Paradise. In practice, these two views of nature are radically different. Yet there is also a striking similarity: nature remains the “other”; humans are in it, but not of it.

My mention of the basic concept of rights made some of the people I talked to uncomfortable. One friend said: “In a world in which millions of children are brutalized every day, can we spare time to forward a child’s right to experience nature?” Good question. Others pointed out that we live in an era of litigation inflation and rights deflation; too many people believe that they have a “right” to a parking spot, a “right” to cable TV, even a “right” to live in a neighborhood that bans children. As a consequence, the idea of rights is deflated. Do we really need to add more rights to our catalogs of entitlements?

The answer to these questions is Yes, if we can agree that the right at issue is fundamental to our humanity.

About the Author

Richard Louv is a journalist and the author of eight books about the connections among family, nature, and community. His previous work includes Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder (Algonquin Books, 2005).

This article was excerpted from his most recent book, The Nature Principle: Human Restoration and the End of Nature-Deficit Disorder (2011, Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill).

Outlook 2012

INTRODUCTION

The U.S. space shuttle program may have ended in 2011, but space travel, exploration, and commercialization will continue well into the future, thanks to private initiatives. Growing environmental threats such as the emergence of new “dust bowls” to rival those of the 1930s will spawn the drive to make this planet more livable; look for advances in fuel cells to enable us to live deep under the sea, for instance. These are a few of the forecasts found in THE FUTURIST magazine in the past year, offering glimpses of possibilities and suggestions for solutions.

The forecasts collected in the World Future Society’s annual Outlook reports are not intended to predict the future, but rather to provoke thought on how we may begin to shape our own tomorrows today.

The opinions and ideas expressed are those of their authors or sources cited and do not necessarily represent the views of the World Future Society. For more information, please refer to the original articles cited. Back issues of THE FUTURIST may be purchased at www.wfs.org/backissues.

Continue the dialogue! Your feedback is welcome.

—THE EDITORS

BUSINESS AND ECONOMICS

New metrics will supplement GDP and other economic measures to provide better indicators of quality of life. According to a study by Ethical Markets Media and GlobeScan, many people believe that such economic indicators are limited gauges of a nation’s total economic activity, much less the overall standard of living. Critics advocate for a new metric that accounts for environmental and public-health factors, social welfare, infrastructure, and other quality of life factors. The United Nations’ Human Development Index is perhaps the best-known and most widely cited alternative. —World Trends & Forecasts, May-June 2011, pp. 11-12

The U.S. rich–poor gap is another disaster waiting to happen—probably around 2020. If the economic situation looks bad now, just wait until the end of the decade. Present-day concentration of wealth in the hands of too few Americans, and the related problem of out-of-control consumer debt, will lead to economic stagnation and political upheaval with impacts felt across the world. —Robert B. Reich, author of Aftershock, reviewed by Patrick Tucker, Mar-Apr 2011, p. 52

China’s economy will stop growing and start shrinking later this century. So forecasts economist Daniel Altman, who notes that China is an economic powerhouse now, but structural weaknesses threaten to cause major problems in the long term. Meanwhile, prosperity will resume in the United States and a few other nations that are now lagging. —Books in Brief [review of Outrageous Fortunes by Daniel Altman], Jan-Feb 2011, p. 48

Environmental sustainability will receive growing attention from economists. According to Ethical Markets Media’s Green Transition Scoreboard, which tracks global private investments in sustainable businesses, the “green economy” continues to grow each year. The Scoreboard projects that there could soon be a cumulative $1 trillion annual investment in green businesses. —World Trends & Forecasts, May-June 2011, p. 12

The United States could transition to a cashless society. Cash is on the way out in the United States, even if policy makers do not actively work to facilitate this transition. However, leaving everything to chance may result in trillions of wasted dollars. Possible measures that could help “nudge” cash out of circulation include imposing a federal tax surcharge on ATM withdrawals and transforming cash into an electronic currency. —David R. Warwick, “The Case Against Cash,” July-Aug 2011, p. 47

Commercial space tourism will grow significantly during the coming decade. The Futron/Zogby firm estimates that, by 2021, there will be 13,000 suborbital passengers annually, resulting in $650 million in revenue. Many companies are currently working to make commercial space flight a viable industry, Melchor Antuñano, director of the FAA Civil Aerospace Medical Institute, told attendees of WorldFuture 2010. —Richard Yonck, “Challenges and Opportunities in Space Medicine,” Nov-Dec 2010, p. 50

The “fast fashion” fad may fade. Two competing values drive trends in fashion: the desire for clothes that are fashion-forward and inexpensive, and the desire for clothes that are higher quality and don’t quickly go out of style. The future may favor “slow fashion” as consumers look beyond price tags for merchandise that is well made, long lasting, and free of sweatshop labor. —World Trends & Forecasts, Sep-Oct 2011, p. 12

COMPUTERS AND AUTOMATION

Computers will manage our money for us. Electronically enhanced market management could ward off a lot of would-be recessions and market crashes. Economists might use increasingly sophisticated computer simulation models to identify fault lines and predict trouble before it starts. Even better, computers could perform automated trading for human investors, and in so doing mitigate market risk and unnecessary trades. —Rutger van Santen, Djan Khoe, and Bram Vermeer, authors of 2030, reviewed by Rick Docksai, Mar-Apr 2011, p. 56

The Internet will automatically search itself so you don’t have to. The information you provide Google when you search for something is teaching the search engine more about you and your interests. One day, Google will become so savvy about you that you won’t have to search at all: Your smartphone will pick up information from your environment, anticipate what you’ll want to know, and deliver it automatically. At least, that is the hope of Google developers. Privacy advocates such as Eli Pariser, author of The Filter Bubble, warn of abuses by companies that could profit from such private information. —Eli Pariser, “The Troubling Future of Internet Search,” World Trends & Forecasts, Sep-Oct 2011, p. 6

A computer program that can measure callers’ stress levels over the phone could help crisis centers respond more effectively during emergencies. Rapid talking, variations in pitch, and changes in breathing rates are among the vocal cues that enable the program to gauge urgency and alert responders who may already be overwhelmed with calls during a major crisis. The system may also prove beneficial in military situations. —Tomorrow in Brief, July-Aug 2011, p. 2

Robots may learn human emotions by interacting with people. Researcher Lola Cañamero of the University of Herfordshire, England, says that the more interaction with (and feedback from) a human caregiver that a robot has, the stronger the bond becomes and the more emotional expressions it learns. —Tomorrow in Brief, Nov-Dec 2010, p. 2

Soccer-trained robots will gain enough intelligence and mobility to conduct rescue missions. Engineers are trying to tune robots’ intelligence and motor skills to the point where a team of humanoid droids could play a whole soccer game as a team effectively enough to beat even the best human contenders. The endeavor isn’t just fun and games. It holds practical applications, too: Robots this nimble will be optimally suited for urban search-and-rescue operations and for working as household helpers. —World Trends & Forecasts, Jan-Feb 2011, p. 9

Artificially intelligent entities will evolve faster and farther than humans. While natural human evolution has slowed, technological evolution is accelerating. Humans may increasingly adapt themselves with technological enhancements in order to keep up the pace. —Steven M. Shaker, “The Coming Robot Evolution Race,” Sep-Oct 2011, p. 20

Humans will eventually “lose” the race with robots. Even with every technological enhancement available to them, future human beings will not be able to keep up with the evolutionary pace of robotic humanoids with artificial intelligence. The reason: Robots will be unimpeded by insurmountable biological limitations. The best we can do is to learn from and make friends with our robotic competitors. —Steven M. Shaker, “The Coming Robot Evolution Race,” Sep-Oct 2011, p. 23

ENERGY

A diverse portfolio of energy technologies will replace our reliance on fossil fuels. Scientists are exploring not just wind and solar energies, but also such esoteric technologies as artificial photosynthesis, traveling wave reactors, and mini black holes. —David J. LePoire, “Exploring New Energy Alternatives,” Sep-Oct 2011, pp. 34-38

Lunar-based solar power production may be the best way to meet future energy demands. Solar power can be more dependably and inexpensively gathered on the Moon than on Earth. This clean energy source is capable of delivering the 20 trillion watts of power a year that the Earth’s 10 billion people will require by mid-century. A lunar solar power system such as the LUNA RING (an alternative energy plan from the Japanese company Shimizu) would be the largest public infrastructure project in human history, but it would pay for itself after only 15 years. —David R. Criswell, “Why We Need the Moon for Solar Power on Earth,” May-June 2011, p. 37; Patrick Tucker, “Solar Power from the Moon,” May-June 2011, p. 34

Ammonia may be worth its weight in oil. Hydrogen is too light to be a practical fuel source in its own right, but it works great if combined with nitrogen to form ammonia. If we build enough renewable-energy generation and distribution infrastructure, ammonia might become the world’s first fuel of choice for household and transportation use. —Carl E. Schoder, “A Convenient Truth About Clean Energy,” Jan-Feb 2011, p. 25

Dig very deep, and you will find enough geothermal energy to power the world. Geothermal energy plants today generate fairly limited energy, but that may be because they only channel heat from around 200 meters underground. The earth is much hotter further down, according to several Norwegian companies and ExxonMobil, who are all planning drilling installations that will tap 5,500 meters to 10,000 meters or more underground. Norwegian-based SINTEF says that just a fraction of the heat energy encased at those depths would suffice to power the entire world. —World Trends & Forecasts, Jan-Feb 2011, p. 8

ENVIRONMENT AND RESOURCES

Urbanization will increase global warming. As the National Center for Atmospheric Research projects, the influx of rural populations into cities, particularly in developing countries, could further raise greenhouse-gas emissions by another 25% by mid-century, irrespective of how high total population climbs. On the other hand, aging populations leaving the workforce in industrialized countries may help to reduce emissions and, hence, slow down climate change. —World Trends & Forecasts, Mar-Apr 2011, p. 12

Robotic earthworms will gobble up our garbage. Much of what we throw away still has value. Metals, petroleum, and other components could get additional use if we extracted them, and robotic earthworms could do that for us. Human “earthworm drivers” will direct them to mine landfills, extract anything of value, and digest the remaining heaps into quality topsoil. —Thomas Frey, “More Jobs for Tomorrow,” Jan-Feb 2011, p. 36

The dust bowls of the twenty-first century will dwarf those seen in the twentieth. Two giant dust bowls are currently forming—one in Asia and one in Africa. These clear indicators of soil erosion and desertification are caused, in varying degrees, by overgrazing, overplowing, and deforestation. Desertification currently affects 25% of the planet’s land area, threatening the livelihoods of more than 1 billion people in approximately 100 countries. —Lester R. Brown, “Eroding Futures: Why Healthy Soil Matters to Civilization” and “Dust Bowl Redux,” July-Aug 2011, pp. 23-30

We will use our water more wisely—or else. Water shortages are a problem now and will get worse in years ahead unless we learn to make more efficient use of existing water supplies. Among other things, we should grow more drought-resistant crops, improve our irrigation methods, and expand neighborhood and household use of water-purification and desalination systems. —Rutger van Santen, Djan Khoe, and Bram Vermeer, authors of 2030, reviewed by Rick Docksai, Mar-Apr 2011, p. 55

The United Nations estimates that 2.8 billion people will live in water-stressed environments by 2025. According to the Japanese government, safe water reclamation and recycling will be a $1 trillion market by 2025. They consider it a key export area for the future. —World Trends & Forecasts, July-Aug 2011, p. 12

Nanotech-driven water purification filters could provide fresh potable water to those in water-stressed areas. Japanese manufacturer Nitto Denko’s desalination filter desalinates and purifies water more effectively than any other water filter in existence, but at the moment, the process is too energy-intensive and cost-prohibitive for most developing countries. It uses a reverse-osmosis nano-membrane system. A less energy-intensive process being developed at Stanford University involves a silver nanowire filtration system. —World Trends & Forecasts, July-Aug 2011, pp. 11-12

HABITATS

Advances in fuel cells will enable deep-sea habitation. These fuel cells, which will produce electricity directly, with no toxic fumes, are currently being developed for automobiles. They will eventually allow for the exploration and colonization of the undersea world via extended submarine journeys. This could lead to human colonization of the continental shelves and the shallow oceans as well as the development of extensive deep-sea business sectors. —James H. Irvine and Sandra Schwarzbach, “The Top 20 (Plus 5) Technologies for the World Ahead,” May-June 2011, p. 18

Livable, economically viable manufacturing sites could be built on the Moon. It is feasible to create them within a decade. These sites, or colonies, could process materials on the Moon to create new products. For example, satellites could be fabricated and lowered to desired Earth orbits. This process would cost much less than building satellites on Earth and then rocketing them back up into space. Such sites could turn a profit within 20–30 years and offer huge long-term economic returns. —Joseph N. Pelton, “Finding Eden on the Moon,” May-June 2011, pp. 40-42

Future buildings may be more responsive to weather fluctuations. “Protocell cladding” that utilizes bioluminescent bacteria or other materials would be applied on building facades to collect water and sunlight, helping to cool the interiors and produce biofuels. The protocells are made from oil droplets in water, which allow soluble chemicals to be exchanged between the drops and their surroundings. —Tomorrow in Brief, May-June 2011, p. 2

Cities will use geographic information systems to collect real-time data from citizens to improve services. One such program already in use in the United Kingdom is Voice Your View. The program allows pedestrians to record their opinions about their surroundings into a database via their mobile phones or strategically situated kiosks. The data is then shared with both city planners and the public via Web sites and at the public spaces themselves. —World Trends & Forecasts, Nov-Dec 2010, p. 9

HEALTH AND MEDICINE

More than half of all baby boomers will live healthy lives beyond 100. So forecasts antiaging physician Ron Klatz. Research suggests that it may be possible to prevent the shortening of telomeres or possibly rejuvenate them. (A telomere is a region of the chromosome that protects it from deterioration.) If successful, this technique might increase life spans. —Verne Wheelwright, “Strategies for Living a Very Long Life,” Nov-Dec 2010, p. 13

Robotic surgical machines will build new organ tissue right in hospital wards. Several research centers are developing computerized instruments that will build living tissue layer by layer and implant it directly into human patients. The process, called bioprinting, could use the patient’s own cells as a catalyst and thereby not only help alleviate demands for new organ donations, but also negate the resistance of many patients’ bodies to transplanted organs. —Vladimir Mironov, “The Future of Medicine: Are Custom-Printed Organs on the Horizon?” Jan-Feb 2011, p. 21

More people than ever will need medical treatment for hearing loss. Society is noisier than ever, and ears everywhere are at risk of damage, warns author and journalist George Prochnik. In his latest book, The Pursuit of Silence, he notes that the ubiquity of background noise—traffic, portable music players, sound systems blaring music in restaurants and shopping malls—is contributing not only to damaged hearing, but also to memory loss, reading skills deficiencies, anxiety, insomnia, increased blood pressure, and cardiovascular disorders. Prochnik encourages listeners to adhere to the 60-60 rule: Turn the music down to 60% of the full volume or less, and listen for no more than 60 minutes a day. —World Trends & Forecasts, Nov-Dec 2010, p. 7

A future “Internet of bodies” will enable doctors to monitor patients remotely. As sensors and transmitters shrink in size and are embedded in our bodies, public health officials will be able to collect information and predict problems, so frail elderly and disabled individuals will be able to live more independently. —Tomorrow in Brief, Sep-Oct 2011, p. 2

It’s a boom market for medical tourism. As health-care costs continue to rise in the developed nations, many of their citizens are seeking cheaper care in developing countries’ hospitals. By 2017, 23 million Americans could be spending a combined total of $79 billion annually for care overseas. Developed nations’ health-care leaders worry, however: The trend could cost them heavily in revenue and make it harder for them to recruit new doctors. —Prema Nakra, “Could Medical Tourism Aid Health-Care Delivery?” Mar-Apr 2011, p. 23

Emotion sensors in our surroundings may help reduce our stress. Built-in stress-sensing electronics and electromagnets in things we handle daily, such as pens and steering wheels, would provide a counterforce to fidgety movements and help nervous people to calm down. —Tomorrow in Brief, May-June 2011, p. 2

Nanotechnology and biomimicry offer hope for restoring sight. Flower-shaped electrodes topped with photodiodes to collect light may one day be implanted in blind patients’ eyes to restore their sight. The “nanoflowers” mimic the geometry of neurons, making them a better medium than traditional computer chips for carrying photodiodes and transmitting the collected light signals to the brain. —World Trends & Forecasts, Sep-Oct 2011, p. 18

Epilepsy sufferers could obtain relief via a computer. People with epilepsy will wear compact monitors that will continuously read their brain waves to spot signs of oncoming seizures. When it detects a seizure, the monitor will interface with the patient’s brain to avert it. —Rutger van Santen, Djan Khoe, and Bram Vermeer, authors of 2030, reviewed by Rick Docksai, Mar-Apr 2011, p. 55

Music therapy may play a key part in low-cost interventions. Studies show that music may change people’s cellular environment, boosting immunity and suppressing the expression of genes that are associated with heart disease and other conditions. —World Trends & Forecasts, Sep-Oct 2011, p. 13

INFORMATION SOCIETY

The next generation of dating sites will enable people to go on virtual “dates” in cyberspace. Likewise, breakups will happen more often by electronic communications than by in-person discussions. —Arnold Brown, “Relationships, Community, and Identity in the New Virtual Society,” Mar-Apr 2011, p. 30

The end of identity as we know it: It will be easier than ever to create a new identity or identities for ourselves. All we will have to do is create new avatars in virtual reality. Those avatars will act on our behalf in real life to conduct such high-level tasks as performing intensive research, posting blog entries and Facebook updates, and managing businesses. The lines between ourselves and our virtual other selves will blur, to the point where most of us will, in essence, have multiple personalities. —Arnold Brown, “Relationships, Community, and Identity in the New Virtual Society,” Mar-Apr 2011, p. 34

Learning will become more social and game-based, and online social gaming may soon replace textbooks in schools. The idea that students learn more when they are engaged—as they are when playing games—is helping educators embrace new technologies in the classroom. In addition to encouraging collaborations, games also allow students to learn from their mistakes through trial and error. —World Trends & Forecasts, Sep-Oct 2011, p. 16

Future libraries will be valued more for services than for book collections. Libraries will become more participatory, and librarians will serve as information facilitators. As learning and knowledge creation become more collaborative and dynamic, library spaces will be used more for community services and less as a place to store books. Readers will share recommendations and feedback, enhancing the knowledge contained in texts. —Books in Brief [review of The Atlas of New Librarianship by R. David Lankes], Sep-Oct 2011, p. 52

Transitioning to a mostly cashless society could reduce crime. Specifically, it would go a long way toward eliminating illegal underground economies and reducing criminal activity. Based on 2009 FBI statistics, eliminating cash robberies would save the United States around $144 billion per year. In addition, identity theft and wire fraud would likely decline, since fraudulently wired funds are most often redeemed in cash in order to break audit trails. —David R. Warwick, “The Case Against Cash,” July-Aug 2011, pp. 46-47

LIFESTYLES AND VALUES

We will increasingly treat free time as a general social asset. This free time, or “cognitive surplus” of creativity, insight, and knowledge, could be harnessed for large, communally created projects, thanks to the spread of information technology. We’ve gone from a world with two models of media—public broadcasts by professionals and private conversations between pairs of people—to a world where public and private media blend together and where voluntary public participation has moved from nonexistent to fundamental. —Clay Shirky, “Tapping the Cognitive Surplus,” Nov-Dec 2010, p. 21

Accelerating change may accelerate resistance to change. The uncertainties and discomfort that accompany rapid changes (such as in new technologies and social structures) often provoke individuals to retreat into rigid belief systems and even aggressive, dysfunctional behavior. People may become more apathetic about the future at a time when they need to be more aware and engaged, warn the authors of The Techno-Human Condition. —Braden R. Allenby and Daniel Sarewitz, “The Accelerating Techno-Human Future,” Sep-Oct 2011, p. 32

New data on the neuroscience of human attraction and bonding will change the way people partner and fall in love. The feeling of romantic love is associated with the brain’s dopamine system for wanting. One company has begun to bottle a perfume that contains oxytocin, the natural brain chemical that, when sniffed, triggers feelings of trust and attachment. —Helen Fisher, “The New Monogamy, Forward to the Past,” Nov-Dec 2010, p. 28

Human relationships won’t die, but they will change shape. As more people conduct more social interaction in virtual space, their relations to each other in physical space will change profoundly. “Nuclear” families will morph into other arrangements. Communities could see more construction of single-person housing units due to more homeowners having virtual partners instead of live, in-person partners. Virtual marriages might become normal, and the spouses will claim real benefits and legal ties. —Arnold Brown, “Relationships, Community, and Identity in the New Virtual Society,” Mar-Apr 2011, p. 31

Look for a rise in “lessmeatarianism” as the public grows increasingly aware of the beef industry’s impacts on the climate. Less meat and dairy in our diets could reduce agricultural greenhouse-gas emissions by as much as 80% by 2055, according to the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. —World Trends & Forecasts, Nov-Dec 2010, p. 9

The future is full of bicycles. As the world keeps urbanizing, people’s health will increasingly suffer from environmental pollution and from sedentary lifestyles that do not allow for enough physical activity. Meanwhile, resource depletion will accelerate. Local transportation systems that encourage biking and walking could be a powerful antidote to these harmful trends, however. There are encouraging signs of more bike use already, including the creation of bike trails, rising popularity of bike tours, and more doctors encouraging elderly patients to bike more often. —Kenneth Harris, “Bike to the Future,” Mar-Apr 2011, pp. 25-28

Gaming will help improve our ability to make decisions. Researchers observe that overconfidence can lead to poor decision making. Now, a Web-based game called World of Uncertainty gauges how confident people are when making decisions, so they can become better aware of their own biases, according to David Newman of Queen’s University Belfast, one of the game creators. —World Trends & Forecasts, July-Aug 2011, pp. 10-11

Future human societies may be divided between augmented and nonaugmented breeds. Those who can afford technological enhancements, including changes to their DNA, may become so significantly altered that they will no longer be able to breed with nonenhanced humans. —Steven M. Shaker, “The Coming Robot Evolution Race,” Sep-Oct 2011, p. 22

SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

Machine vision will become available in the next 5 to 15 years and grow more sophisticated over time. Its range will ultimately exceed that of the human eye. This technology will greatly enhance robotic systems’ capabilities. —James H. Irvine and Sandra Schwarzbach, “The Top 20 (Plus 5) Technologies for the World Ahead,” May-June 2011, pp. 17-18

By 2020, the world’s digital output may reach 35 zettabytes (more than a trillion billion bytes). That’s enough DVDs to reach halfway to Mars. In the near future, high-speed wireless technologies will enable us to access information from almost any location at speeds approaching those of wired networks. Simultaneously, embedded networked processors and smart dust—sensor networks made up of billions, even trillions, of nodes—will be everywhere, providing real-time data streams about everything, all the time. —Richard Yonck, “Treading in the Sea of Data,” July-Aug 2011, p. 33

We’ll ward away mosquitoes safely by adopting the smell of their predators. A multidisciplinary team of researchers at the University of Haifa in Israel have identified key compounds released by mosquitoes’ predators. Synthesizing these natural chemicals and releasing them in breeding areas could offer an inexpensive, nontoxic alternative to pesticides. —Tomorrow in Brief, Nov-Dec 2010, p. 2

We will design more devices to gradually degrade back into the parts stream. In his book Shaping Things, Bruce Sterling proposed that, with the right regulatory framework and technology, it might be possible to start readdressing design decisions so that products like cell phones can decompose back into components that can be reused in next-generation devices. —Cory Doctorow, quoted in “Cory Doctorow Meets the Public,” Nov-Dec 2010, p. 22

Large digital touch-screen displays will take microscopy to the next level. Forty-six-inch or larger multitouch screens will make the act of looking at a sample through a microscope similar to the experience of using Google Maps. —Tomorrow in Brief, July-August 2011, p. 2

A space elevator could lift people (and materials) from Earth’s surface into orbit. Such an elevator would prove especially useful if a lunar or space colony is built. Once in orbit, gravitational pull is 560 times less. People could exit the elevator and fly to the Moon, Mars, or other destinations via very-low-thrust, high-efficiency propulsion systems. —Joseph N. Pelton, “Finding Eden on the Moon,” May-June 2011, pp. 40-42

No water? No power? No problem. Cheap electricity and clean water may soon be possible for remote villages, military operations, and other places without access to these vital resources. A device using a new aluminum alloy developed by Purdue University researchers can split salty or polluted water into hydrogen and oxygen. The hydrogen feeds a portable fuel cell to supply electricity, and the steam byproduct is recaptured as pure water. —Tomorrow in Brief, Sep-Oct 2011, p. 2

WORK AND CAREERS

Journalism may soon be taken over by nonjournalists. Professionals from just about any field—law, neurology, astrophysics, investing, etc.—could be valued news writers if they complete some cross-training in journalism. As traditional news reporting jobs disappear, these cross-training professionals will fill in the gaps and produce news and commentary on their respective fields of work. Readers will flock to them because the writers not only know how to write, but also know their subjects inside and out. —Cynthia G. Wagner, “Emerging Careers and How to Create Them,” Jan-Feb 2011, p. 32

People could become professional data collectors. Terabyters—people who produce a terabyte or more of digital data a day—would be paid generous sums to don high-tech data-collection gear and explore neighborhoods, shopping districts, and city centers. Their sensors would record and process all visual and sensory data about their surroundings, for which companies like Google and Microsoft may pay lucrative sums to develop data streams for marketing purposes. —Thomas Frey, “The Coming of the Terabyters: Lifelogging for a Living,” Jan-Feb 2011, p. 35

With more work done by freelancers, organizations will need full-time professionals to supervise them. Employers large and small will trim overhead to the bare minimum by keeping small cores of staff for only the most essential operations. Meanwhile, most of the nonessential work will be outsourced to freelance help. As projects come up, organizations will contact professional “talent aggregators,” who keep databases of registered work seekers whom they can call up whenever needed. —Jim Ware, “Careers for a More Personal Corporation,” Jan-Feb 2011, p. 37

WORLD AFFAIRS

Networks will increasingly become the key to positive political change. The ability to elect a lawmaker or lobby for a cause is built around our capacity to network with one another online, according to science-fiction author Cory Doctorow. This is why the issue of Internet access, and how it is controlled or restricted, is the most important free speech issue of our time. —Cory Doctorow, quoted in “Cory Doctorow Meets the Public,” Nov-Dec 2010, p. 24

Climate change threatens to displace as many as 70 million Bangladeshis. Much of Bangladesh is at or near sea level, so if the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s forecast of a seven-meter sea-level rise this century comes true, possibly 17% of the country could be submerged. That would render 60 million to 70 million Bangladeshis homeless and destroy the livelihoods of countless more. Bangladesh is investing heavily in flood and storm preparations now, but India’s diversion of major river ways between the two countries could still spell major trouble. —World Trends & Forecasts, Jan-Feb 2011, p. 9

The Arctic regions will be hotspots for industrial and demographic growth. Iceland, Canada, Russia, and other far-north locales could see more population growth and commercial activity than even Brazil or China. A number of factors are behind this: Surging populations of job seekers in the developing world; falling populations in the northern countries; growing global demand for oil and other resources; and melting of Arctic permafrost, which would likely hasten human immigration into, and commerce throughout, the region. —Laurence C. Smith, author of The World in 2050, reviewed by Rick Docksai, Jan-Feb 2011, p. 47

Watch out, St. Louis! The most-endangered place in America is not on the Gulf Coast or California. St. Louis, Missouri, faces a wide variety of potential disasters, according to Forecasting International’s Owen Davies. As the town resides on the New Madrid fault and the Mississippi River, both earthquakes and floods loom large in St. Louis’s future. Other threats include massive environmental pollution and the highest crime rate in the United States. —Futurists and Their Ideas, Sep-Oct 2011, p. 44

Look for surprising strategic alliances across the globe. Germany and Russia will forge stronger economic ties, while Turkey and the Arab states eye Iran more closely as a competitor. Europe’s internal economic struggles will contribute to the continent’s fading as a global power, while Brazil will exert formidable economic and military influence in Africa. —Books in Brief [review of The Next Decade by George Friedman], Sep-Oct 2011, p. 54

The Search for Global Solutions: Moving from Vision to Action

By Cynthia G. Wagner

Photos by Aaron M. Cohen

What does it take to get an idea launched or a problem solved? At the World Future Society’s 2011 conference, the answer was inspiration, collaboration, and the energy of forward-thinking people.

Health Maintenance for Extended Life Spans

Metabolism causes damage on an ongoing basis, and this damage eventually causes pathology, Aubrey de Grey told attendees. It is “a side effect of being alive in the first place.”

But gerontologists aim to intervene in this complex process, focusing on lifelong maintenance. De Grey argued that repairing damage early enough to prevent the pathology that causes aging could help humans achieve a big extension of healthy life spans.

How does an idea transform into a goal, and how does a plan inspire people to implement it? What does it take to give a movement its momentum? These were the underlying questions of the 750 futurists who met in Vancouver this past July to consider how to take that great leap of faith required for “Moving from Vision to Action.”

The future absolutely requires courage, said leadership expert Lance Secretan, author of The Spark, the Flame, and the Torch (The Secretan Center, 2010). Just as skiing down a steep slope for the first time requires faith in one’s abilities, effecting change and inspiring others to do so requires courage, whose rewards are fulfillment and accomplishment.

“It’s a myth that we can’t make change quickly,” said Secretan, “but it takes courage to let go of what’s holding us back.”

Is there danger in rushing down the unfamiliar slope of change? Of course there is. Studying the future helps us see where we’re heading. As business consultant Owen Greaves pointed out, many of our cool new technologies, like smartphones, brought risks we didn’t necessarily anticipate, such as geolocation tracking chips that could potentially reveal our whereabouts to others.

Because their impacts may be enormous, the assessment of emerging technologies is one of the key tasks of futurists—and a new mission of the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO). Picking up where the former Office of Technology Assessment left off, GAO has now created a permanent Center for Science, Technology, and Engineering (CSTE), reported chief scientist Timothy M. Persons.

The center has just completed a technology assessment of climate engineering, which includes such proposed projects as brightening clouds at sea, pumping liquid CO2 into rocks or aerosols into the stratosphere, and afforestation of deserts. Persons pointed out that the center’s assessments include conversations with the public to get the potential responses of those affected by such technologies. “You don’t want to leave this to the experts alone, because you would lose public trust,” he said.

Communicating the Future

An important aspect of CSTE’s work is to improve communication with the public, including the congressional leaders who, though not scientists themselves, must make decisions about these scientific and technological developments. Thus, the design of interactive animations became an important aspect of the technology assessment and communication process, Persons reported.

Why interactive animations instead of, for example, a printed report? Literacy expert Lawrence Baines of the University of Oklahoma–Norman explained that there is “evolutionary pressure to condense information and communication.” Images, he noted, are briefer than text, which is too complex for the small devices that people are increasingly using as their principal mode of communication.

Baines also observed that television viewing is increasing, along with consumption of media on cell phones. Thanks to multitasking, young people can pack 10 hours of media consumption into just seven and a half hours a day. This consumption is also interactive and social, whereas reading a book requires solitude—an activity that may seem antisocial to today’s youth.

Another approach to communicating technological developments to a new audience is exemplified in the work of Booz│Allen│Hamilton. “My job is to find stuff, and tell everyone about it,” said senior associate William P. Barnett Jr. But, he admitted, not everybody wants to know about it.

The challenge is to help innovators, who may only speak in the language of physics, to describe to potential investors the problems that their work may help solve. Barnett said one way to do this is to create “future environments,” or simulations of the environments that the clients will be working in, showing how the innovations will be able to fill future gaps. Such a simulation is a “great place to dream,” and these future environments are intended to “make complicated information and ideas more visual and easier to understand,” he said.

Changes and Impacts

As Baines pointed out in his session on the future of language, demographic and technological shifts are impacting each other in sometimes unsettling ways, as when a 7-year-old can’t seem to put down her multifunctional cell phone. Baines warned that the move away from the complexity of communication found in books could impair critical thought among younger generations.

On the other hand, young people are growing up in an ever-changing social and technological environment, and they are using new technologies and tools to rebuild the world as they go. The panel on Cultural Shifts among Global Youths gave a mind-boggling overview of these changes:

The “aging” and “younging” of global populations are altering the workplace, careers, and even the traditional life path from school to work to retirement, said Erica Orange, vice president of Weiner, Edrich, Brown, Inc.

For young people, multitasking with multimedia has fundamentally changed their brains and the way they process information. They bore easily, and this boredom will increasingly make shorter-term jobs, contract work, and temping more entrenched, Orange said.

For older workers, the need to acquire new skills to remain competitive may inspire them to try new careers from scratch; internships will no longer be just for the young, according to Orange.

Globally, rapid economic development means that the concept of the “Third World” is becoming obsolete, according to Jared Weiner, a vice president of Weiner, Edrich, Brown, Inc., and a member of the World Future Society’s board of directors.

“We argue that BRIC [Brazil, Russia, India, China] is outdated. Think about Turkey and Singapore,” he advised. The challenge for all economies—and companies—is finding where the talented youth of tomorrow are and where they will want to go.

Global youth’s changing relationship with the virtual world is also driving trends toward using real names online, putting attention on reputations, and regulating more online activities, said Lisa Donchak, an enterprise sales associate for Google Enterprise. “We’re toward the end of the Wild West age of anonymity,” she observed. “Maybe the opportunity to be anonymous was a growth stage. More sites [such as Google+] are asking for your real name.”

Along with this authenticity comes “the right to be forgotten,” to erase your data footprint, Donchak noted. The European Union has been leading the way, with a “do not track” policy on cookies (data files placed on your computer by the Web sites you visit).

How Action Builds on Resilience

Dwight D. Eisenhower once said, “In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.” Donald Byrne, president and CEO of Metrix411, drew on Eisenhower’s wisdom to help illustrate a fundamental principle of futuring: the need to take action.

This point is crucially important in emergency situations, such as when deadly tornadoes struck many parts of the United States earlier this year. Byrne credited the resiliency of the community of Greensburg, Kansas, for its reaction to the 2007 tornado that destroyed the city. “In most communities, there is no organization for what really needs to be done; everybody wants to send water or ready-to-eat food,” he said. But the Lions Club did one thing that was immediately needed: It paid for funerals.

The community’s resiliency, its ability to respond, is one reason people stayed in Greensburg to rebuild rather than move on, Byrne argued. This power of community resiliency was seen again in Japan after the earthquake and tsunami of March 11, 2011.

Thanks to a cadre of young volunteers flocking to Peace Boat, a relief organization, help quickly came to the communities ravaged by the tsunami. “Kids were distributing food before even the army or Red Cross could get there,” reported Patrick Tucker, deputy editor of THE FUTURIST.

Tucker spent five months in Japan and was in Kyoto when the earthquake hit; as did most other foreigners, he left the country in the following week, but returned when he learned of Peace Boat’s relief work. “If you can keep the community together, you can rebuild faster,” he said, noting that neighbors are essential for keeping track of each other’s whereabouts. [See Tucker’s full report, “Lost and Found in Japan,” in this issue.]

“Actions” in Action

One of the best aspects of World Future Society conferences is the opportunity for futurists to share their work, providing case studies of effective actions as well as models for applying futuring principles.

Two of the world’s leading futurist training grounds again sent teams of students to the conference to present their work. Describing the Singularity University experience were teaching fellow José Luis Cordeiro and alumni Sasha Grujicic, Matthew Kern, Vjai Anma, and Alison Lewis, who described such projects ranging from sustainable clean water to automobile sharing.

Representing work done at the University of Houston, and introduced by Studies of the Future graduate program chair Peter Bishop, were Sara Robinson, who analyzed the Future of the Progressive Movement in the United States; Heather Schlegel, on the Future of Transactions and Alternate Currencies; and Emily Empel, on the Future of the Sex Industry.

One especially inspiring approach to stimulating action is “the power of the prize,” said Thomas Frey, executive director of the DaVinci Institute. Most prizes award past accomplishments, but increasingly prizes are offered as a way to stimulate innovative solutions.

“What if we could solve the world’s biggest problems through prize challenges?” Frey announced the DaVinci Institute’s Eight Grand Challenges program, in which countries would enter teams to compete for medals, as in the Olympics. The pursuit of these grand challenges would result in enormous benefits to humanity, Frey said. [Editor’s note: More on the DaVinci Institute’s grand challenges will appear in the January-February 2012 issue of THE FUTURIST.]

DIY advocate Dale Dougherty, editor of Make magazine and organizer of the Maker Faire events, led a lively session showcasing the spirit of hands-on innovation. Maker Faires and the “Maker” movement began a dozen years ago as a way to inspire those who feel compelled to manipulate things with their own hands, who want to understand how things work—and make things work themselves.

But unlike the image of the lone “tinkerer” working in the solitude of his or her own basement, the Maker movement is about “social tinkering. … It’s physical, connecting to the digital,” Dougherty explained. “It’s about personal expression, creating, and interacting.”

Because makers tap their childlike curiosity to play with technologies, recombining them to create new innovations, the Maker movement could provide a model for education. “Give children the gift of time and space to play,” Dougherty advised. “Immersion in an activity is valuable. Why isn’t school like this? … My goal is that students would become producers of a personalized education that they invent for themselves rather than a standardized education that they consume—to consider themselves as producers, not consumers.”

When people are having fun, they are engaged, Dougherty concluded. And this engagement may be the very key to moving from vision to action.

About the Author

Cynthia G. Wagner is editor of THE FUTURIST and of the 2011 conference volume, Moving from Vision to Action, which is available from www.wfs.org/wfsbooks. Email cwagner@wfs.org.

For links to download the WorldFuture 2011 conference program (PDF) or to order audio recordings or the conference volume, please visit www.wfs.org/content/worldfuture-2011.

How the Recession Has Changed the Middle Class

By Patrick Tucker

The 2008 recession was hard on everyone, but it did not distribute its woes evenly.

Pinched: How the Great Recession Narrowed Our Futures and What We Can Do About It by Don Peck. Crown. 2011. 224 pages. $22.

In Pinched, journalist Don Peck paints a portrait of the middle class as jilted lover, nursing feelings of despair and betrayal. After doing everything right, the question this poor sop finds himself asking, over and over, like a funerary wail, is not “Why aren’t I good enough,” but the far more terrifying “Why aren’t I good enough anymore?” There is no easy rejoinder. The American Dream has simply moved on and taken a new name. Our hero is left with only the awareness that his best days have passed him by.

The 2008 recession permanently altered the lives of millions of Americans, neighborhoods, and even entire regions of the United States. Peck shows that many middle-class, middle-skill jobs that existed prior to 2008 will never return, opportunities that had seemed perennial just a few years ago have permanently vanished. Labor experts such as John Challenger, writing in this magazine, have encouraged job seekers in low-growth areas to strike out for more-fertile ground. In fact, much of the advice given to the nation’s unemployed and underemployed has amounted to: Be adaptable, seek training, and move. These admonishments, while sound, are also callous. People forced by market conditions to make dramatic life adjustments are rarely thankful for the opportunity to do so.

In many respects, this current state of woe represents a culmination of trends that have been building for some time. Throughout the last 10 years, however, policy makers and financiers were able to postpone their full impact. The rapid appreciation in the housing market between 2002 and 2008 created an illusory sense of prosperity in the absence of real salary growth, which has budged little from the 1970s. Since the largest asset owned by most Americans is their primary residence, many people experienced an enormous, and artificial, expansion in net worth over the last decade. The losses resulting from the housing collapse will linger for a long time, affecting consumption and investment habits for years.

“Many Americans, even those who didn’t lose their jobs, lost a decade’s sense of progress. Long deferred, a decade’s disappointment has been concentrated in the past three years,” notes Peck.

Stagnant wages and vanishing jobs, compounded by the intractable housing crisis, have metastasized into to a very literal paralysis. Nearly one in four Americans owes more on his or her house than that house is worth. Peck points out that, in Arizona and Florida, the number is one in two, and in Nevada, two in three. Many individuals who are underwater on their home loans simply can’t move to a better economic environment, even if they wanted to. They’re caught between the proverbial rock and hard place, the mountainous amount of debt they owe and the cold truth of their home’s actual value.

All of this has fundamentally changed the demographic makeup of America’s white-picket-fence suburbs, which now house more poor people than do the nation’s urban centers. It’s an ironic reversal. In the 1950s, suburban developments were sold as a means to escape city squalor, which was understood as a thinly veiled allusion to non-Caucasian neighbors. Half a century later, actual squalor in these neighborhoods pits frustrated homeowners against equally desperate renters.

“This isn’t the neighborhood that I moved into,” one frayed suburbanite complained to Peck. “It’s never going to recover to what it was.”

Contrast this predicament with the plight, or more accurately flight, of the nation’s moneyed elite. While the American poor are stuck in place, the country’s rich are increasingly transient, pursuing the opportunities of an interconnected world and less concerned than ever with the future of the republic. A growing number of America’s rich are entrepreneurs, as opposed to inheritors of wealth. Their business aspirations are global in scope; they hire labor in Thailand to market products to consumers in China, or vice versa. Not surprisingly, the American elite have more in common with their fellow entrepreneurs from Asia or Europe than they do with their compatriots back home.

But, Peck cautions, don’t assume that today’s wealthy are leading lives of leisure. They’re more likely to be attached to a BlackBerry than a polo mallet. Because they work so hard, many are resistant to the notion that fortune may have played the determining role in their success. They may well be more philanthropic than their predecessors like the Rockefellers or Carnegies, but they’re also more aware of the depths of human need in places like Ghana, Bangladesh, and Papua New Guinea (locations where the Gates Foundation has significant investments). The struggles of the shrinking American middle class continue to look paltry in comparison to the circumstances of the majority of the world’s inhabitants.

“If the transformation of the world economy lifts four people in China and India out of poverty and into the middle class, and meanwhile means one American drops out of the middle class, that’s not such a bad trade,” Peck quotes one CEO as saying.

Is the American middle class salvageable? Peck offers up a set of balanced recommendations toward that end. First, he argues for a return to the tax rates of a few decades ago, where the wealthy contributed much closer to 50% of their income to the government coffers, as opposed to the 35% they pay today. Peck dismisses the argument that increasing the tax burden on the rich would hurt the current recovery. Trickle-down economics is patently unviable in an environment where the wealthy are few and do a greater portion of their investing and consuming abroad.

Lawmakers may have overreached in their regulatory response to the 2008 market collapse, says Peck, so lessening regulations might help spur business. He also advocates a reconsideration of the nation’s current entitlement commitments, which, while popular among baby boomers, are unsustainable. Above all, only real government investment in research and development will put the country back on the road to prosperity, he argues.

Peck currently serves as a features editor for The Atlantic, and people who have followed that magazine’s coverage of the recession over the past two years and seen his cover feature story will find some aspects of this book familiar. But Pinched provides much original insight and should be considered a natural heir to Reisman, Glazer, and Denny’s The Lonely Crowd, and Thorstein Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class. Pinched is an excellent chronicle of the Great Recession’s hidden and long-term effects on the American psyche. In its wide scope and clear focus, it may go on to be the seminal book on this period in the country’s history.

About the Reviewer

Patrick Tucker is the deputy editor of THE FUTURIST magazine and director of communications of the World Future Society.

Tomorrow in Brief

Metal Theft on the Rise?

As the value of metals increases, so does the likelihood of theft. But it isn’t just the local thugs ripping gold chains off our necks that we’ll have to worry about.

Metal theft may become one of the biggest criminal activities of the twenty-first century, warns University of Indianapolis criminologist Kevin Whiteacre. Targets may include construction sites, vehicle parts, plumbing and electrical equipment, and public infrastructure, where thieves see value not just in the manufactured goods themselves but also in their component metals.

“This has redefined theft to me,” says Whiteacre. “You’re no longer stealing a specific item for its value as an item. You’re stealing it for its constituent parts.” Whiteacre has created a Web site, Metaltheft.net, as a repository of news and research on the phenomenon.

Source: University of Indianapolis, www.uindy.edu.

Virtual Lab Rats

The use of laboratory animals has long helped researchers study complex systems, such as the interplay of genetics and environmental factors in disease formation. But these animals need to be fed and housed.

Now, researchers may use computer models with integrated data sets to simulate animal physiology. A project to create a “virtual physiological rat” is under way at the Medical College of Wisconsin in Milwaukee. The project will allow computational biologist Daniel Beard and his team to predict the interaction of a variety of factors within an entire physiological system.

While it won’t eliminate the need for laboratory animals entirely, the project aims to make more efficient use of animal research, to improve understanding of disease, and to advance the goal of creating a virtual physiological human.

Source: National Institute of General Medical Sciences, National Institutes of Health, www.nigms.nih.gov.

Solar Ivy for Walls

The ivy-covered walls adorning university buildings may soon be powering those buildings as well.

Solar Ivy, developed by Sustainably Minded Interactive Technology in New York, is made of small photovoltaic panels that can be created in different shapes and colors to suit the architecture.

Pioneering the application of Solar Ivy is the University of Utah, which used funds raised by students to install the panels in late 2011. The goal is to generate enough electricity for the ivy-covered building to offset the amount of power it buys from the utility company.

Sources: University of Utah, www.utah.edu.

Solar Ivy, www.solarivy.com.

Robotic Caregivers

Need a lift up from bed to chair? The task is awkward and difficult for most humans, and sometimes results in caregivers wrenching their backs. Not so for robots.

As the population of older people needing nursing care begins to soar in Japan and other graying societies, robots are being developed to provide more of the necessary physical support. This may be as many as 40 lifts a day for individual patients.

Japan’s latest RIBA II (Robot for Interactive Body Assistance), developed by researchers at RIKEN and Tokai Rubber Industries, has improved functionality, more power, and greater sensitivity. Sheets of sensors lining the robot’s arms and chest allow it to detect a patient’s weight accurately, and thus provide gentler and safer lifts.

Source: RIKEN, www.riken.jp.

Aquariums as Farms

Future homeowners, college campuses, and other nontraditional “farmers” may soon be growing their own fish and vegetables while recycling waste.

An experimental food production system is being tested by SUNY ecological engineering graduate student Michael Amadori. The system is a variation on aquaponics (combining traditional aquaculture and hydroponic farming) that incorporates the use of post-consumer food waste.

Instead of being composted (or thrown out), the wasted food is fed to the fish. Then, the fish waste is used for growing vegetables. The goal is to reduce the amount of food waste and lower the cost of raising fish.

Source: State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry, www.esf.edu.

Future Active

As Tweeted: WordBuzz: Jobsolescence

By Cynthia G. Wagner

As the U.S. space shuttle program ended, Twitterers pondered the future for a special class of professionals.

We recently sent out a call on Twitter for “WordBuzz” suggestions and received a number of interesting neologisms. We selected jobsolescence, one of several idea-forward terms submitted by foresight analyst Richard Yonck (@ryonck) of Seattle, Washington.

Joining us in the conversation was Caroline Halton (@GloHalton), a communications strategist and trainer based in Johannesburg, South Africa.

@ryonck: @WorldFutureSoc “Jobsolescence”: The state of being for functions, positions or fields that have disappeared. #wordbuzz

@GloHalton: any detail on specifically which functions, positions and fields have actually succumbed to ‘Jobsolescence’?

@ryonck: I’d say any job massively undermined by new tech, e.g., elevator operator. May be a few left but not many

@WorldFutureSoc: Much tech-driven “jobsolescence” involves work we don’t want to do, but not everyone is creative enough to find better

@ryonck: True, but there are many jobs people don’t want to do, but have to. Times of transition can cause hardship

@GloHalton: And ‘jobsolescence’ as regards astronauts in the post shuttle era? Taking jobs as tour operators with Virgin?

@ryonck: On the contrary, if private space industry grows, astrojobs may be preparing for lift-off. ;-)

@WorldFutureSoc: I’d love to see more suggestions: Jobs for astronauts in post-shuttle era (cc @NASA, @neiltyson) #jobsolescence

@GloHalton: Houston shedding flight controllers, pad technicians, shuttle parts workers so ‘jobless’ astronauts in good company.

@WorldFutureSoc: Ideas needed! 101 uses for a used - er, unemployed - astronaut. #jobsolescence

We would like to credit Yonck for coining the term, but upon further research (i.e., Googling), we discovered a prior claim on jobsolescence.

Proving that it’s as much fun to do research as it is to just make things up, we watched a video episode about “Jobsolescence” by Double Espresso, independent filmmakers and word-players who credit producer Norma Vega for the concept.

In this short comedy video, two guys, Emilio and Vincenzo, assert that poverty translates into stupidity. They cite the (fictitious) book Masters and Slaves of the New World Economy by Guillermo Pinkerton, which outlines a hidden order and the phenomenon of jobsolescence—the “obsoletion of employment.”

The guys discuss the success of that Facebook kid (i.e., Mark Zuckerberg), whose success story offers lessons for surviving jobsolescence in this crisis of “the Repression.” He became rich by creating a service for others, and you can do that, too, “by creating a job that has long eluded you, so you too can become a punk genius billionaire.”

Source: Espressode 6, “Jobsolescence,” by Double Espresso. Written by Michael Arturo, produced by Norma Vega, starring Manuel Bermúdez and Michael Arturo. View online at www.clicker.com/web/double-espresso-web-series/.

Follow the World Future Society on Twitter at http://twitter.com/WorldFutureSoc. Also see THE FUTURIST magazine’s official Twitter page, @TheYear2030.

Virtual Games Bring Currency to Real Life

Young entrepreneur Brian Wong sees mobile games invading real life.

Mobile games playable on smartphones, tablet PCs, and other Internet-connected devices are projected to surpass $11 billion in annual revenue by 2014, up from $8 billion in 2011, according to a report by Juniper Research. Twenty-year-old software guru Brian Wong says that the mobile game space will advance faster than many are predicting.

“There are still a few billion people on the planet that have not touched a mobile device or game. Imagine what happens when they come online,” Wong said at WorldFuture 2011, the annual conference of the World Future Society. Wong was on hand to discuss his new company, Kiip, which gives players real rewards for their mobile video-game achievements. When players win a level or reach a particularly high score, they can access real-world rewards, everything from coupons for cappuccinos to discounts on clothes and even cruises.

“We’re trying to leverage the mass amount of people who are engaging [in these games] to tie with marketing and advertising and make the game emotionally relevant,” said Wong.

One potential catalyst for runaway growth in mobile-game revenue is the advent of a mobile-payment system, which would allow people to make purchases directly from their phones while immersed in video-game play.

“Right now we’re exclusively paying through plastic, bank accounts, cash, and that’s about it,” Wong said. “But soon we’ll get the ability to use our phones to make payments.… Once that happens, [users] can pay without feeling like [they’re] paying.”

Wong also sees an enormous rise in the value of the virtual economy (VE), which roughly refers to exchanges of virtual goods, links, and digital labor such as tweeting. An April 2011 report commissioned by the World Bank valued the virtual economy at $3 billion at the end of 2009. Wong predicts the VE could grow to $300 billion in the next 10 years.

“These [virtual] goods can be reproduced into infinity with no physical barrier,” he told THE FUTURIST. “The challenge is to use marketing, scarcity, and exclusivity to make the goods meaningful and valuable.” Of Kiip, he said, “We’re building that.”

Wong is particularly sanguine about the potential of new currency systems built around social network platforms. One example is Facebook credits, a system that allows users to buy virtual goods on all the games across Facebook, such as the popular Mafia Wars, Evony, and Farmville.

“The World Bank report leaves out the companies that have the power to consolidate virtual value, like Facebook,” said Wong. “The dollar and euro are yesterday’s news. What happens with Facebook credits or other credit systems? That’s the fascinating question.”—Patrick Tucker

Sources: Brian Wong (interview at WorldFuture 2011), http://kiip.me.

Knowledge Map of the Virtual Economy by Vili Lehdonvirta and Mirko Ernkvist (World Bank publications, 2011), Information for Development Program, www.infodev.org.

The Smell of Future Video

Scent transmission could add another layer to digital and streaming broadcasts.

Virtual-reality enthusiasts have long argued that a truly immersive, multisensory entertainment experience needs to fully engage the senses: sight, sound, and smell.

Researchers at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), in collaboration with the Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology in Korea, are working to move such experiences a step in that direction by adding smells to movies, television shows, advertisements, video games, and more. They have developed a new incarnation of an idea that arguably dates back to the earliest days of the silent film era and was showcased at the 1939-40 New York World’s Fair as Smell-O-Vision—though perhaps a more accurate term for the concept would be telesmell.

An artificial scent-delivery process raises all kinds of questions. For instance, would telesmell add another dimension to works being presented or would it be a superficial distraction that runs counter to the creators’ intentions? Would it irreversibly alter the entertainment landscape in a positive or negative way? Would it become the “next big thing” or a short-lived fad? And can it be done in a way that’s inexpensive and safe?

Up until this point, the answer to that last question has been up in the air, so to speak. Previous systems were bulky, slow, and crude. They ran out of odor information quickly or were otherwise unable to reproduce the scent consistently, allowed very little control over the amount and intensity of the scents released, and left lingering scents that intermingled like cheap perfumes in a crowded subway car.

Home entertainment centers are also getting flatter and thinner, and watching videos on portable electronic devices is becoming more commonplace. Therefore, a viable telesmell system would have to be a small, compact, nonmechanical device compatible with a wide range of hardware, from gaming consoles to smartphones, according to the researchers at UCSD and Samsung. Thousands of scents can potentially be generated on command in such a device, and it would be relatively inexpensive, they believe.

The change in the viewing experience would be pronounced. “Instantaneously generated fragrances or odors would match the scene shown on a TV or cell phone,” says Sungho Jin, UCSD Jacobs School of Engineering professor of materials science. He gives the example of characters onscreen eating a pizza. “The viewer smells pizza coming from a TV or cell phone.”

Jin tells THE FUTURIST, “The image on the screen should be synchronized with electrically triggered odor release from the chamber array attached to the TV or cell phone.” He compares this process to the way in which sound was added to movies at the end of the silent movie era.

In the proposed system, which the researchers refer to as the X–Y matrix odor-releasing system, the scents are stored in a container made from a silicone-based polymer called polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS), which has been used to time drug release in patients and has the capacity to act as an on/off switch. A rubberlike substance, PDMS is optically clear, nontoxic, nonflammable, and found in everything from contact lenses to processed foods. It is stable over a wide range of temperatures, and it protects its contents from contamination or from leaking out.

An electrical current heats the liquid odor solution inside the container, creating enough pressure to push open a tiny hole at the top, just long enough to release the built-up gas. It seals back elastically and stores the solution until the next cycle. The polymer container is long-lasting, and when scent solutions start running low, they could be replaced.

The system features 10,000 odors preserved in aqueous solutions, each in tiny PDMS containers. The liquids are heated electrically via thin metal wires laid out on a 100x100 cell matrix, which greatly reduces the system’s bulkiness. Currently, the smells can be sensed only up to 30 centimeters (about 1 foot) away.

The researchers are also looking at other ways to improve their prototype. “Such a system should not be too expensive. The price would depend on how many devices are made and sold,” according to Jin. “It may take several years before such a system becomes commercialized.”

There are other potential applications for this technology, aside from entertainment and advertising. One possible field that might benefit is telemedicine.

“One can imagine vapor-based therapeutic drugs in the future (rather than the current solid or liquid-based drugs), which physicians can remotely release,” Jin says. Patients would breathe in the medicine through their nose, absorbing it into their system.

Jin highlights a possible security application, as well: alarm systems. “For example, if you want to repel a burglar at home or at a … government lab, you could design the alarm system in such a way that … you could trigger a severe skunk smell that the typical person could not withstand.”

This brings to mind potential security threats. For example, terrorists could create panic in a public space by transmitting a scent that replicates mustard gas or another dangerous chemical. However, Jin believes such an incident is unlikely.

“Odors or poison gases cannot be transmitted through phone lines or Internet lines,” he says. “But if a terrorist plants an array of different poison gases [using a similar technological method] in a subway station, the selected poison could be released and stopped in a controlled way by remote electronic signals at selected time intervals. [This] would be an advanced version compared to what the terrorist might be able to do today—in other words, just activate a switch and release one type of gas uncontrollably.” While such a system would be more sophisticated, there are currently easier ways for criminals to create panic in the streets.

When and if telesmell ever becomes commonplace, media consumption will likely be the most greatly impacted arena—and it is probable that new uses for the technology will continue to be discovered, as well.—Aaron M. Cohen

Sources: University of California, San Diego, Jacobs School of Engineering, www.jacobsschool.ucsd.edu.

Sungho Jin, UCSD Jacobs School of Engineering professor of materials science (e-mail interview).

Unwasted Energy

Physicists seek ways to harvest “junk” energy in the environment.

From the vibrations filling the air when jets take off to the waves generated by radio and television transmitters, our environment is full of largely wasted energy. Now, researchers are seeking ways to capture that energy and turn it into useful sources of electricity.

One of the challenges is that communications devices transmit energy at different frequency ranges, so whatever devices are used to harvest this energy needs to hone in on the right band in order to capture the energy. (Currently, scavenging devices can work in ranges from FM radio to radar.) Then the energy needs to be converted from AC to DC, and stored in capacitors and batteries.

At Georgia Tech, a rectifying antenna used to convert ambient microwave energy to DC power was developed by a team led by electrical and computer engineering professor Manos Tentzeris. The gathered power could be used for wireless sensors, RFID tags, and other monitoring tasks.

“There is a large amount of electromagnetic energy all around us, but nobody has been able to tap into it,” says Tentzeris. “We are using an ultra-wideband antenna that lets us exploit a variety of signals in different frequency ranges, giving us greatly increased power-gathering capability.”

Tentzeris’s team is also taking advantage of new 3-D inkjet printing technology to build sensors, antennas, and energy-scavenging devices on paper or flexible polymers.

Another promising source of “junk” energy is the vibrations produced on roads and airport runways.

At the University at Buffalo, physicist Surajit Sen and his colleagues have taken a mathematical approach to studying energy exchange between particles. They discovered that altering the surface area of adjacent particles can change the way energy moves, thus making it possible to control the energy channeled.

“We could have chips that take energy from road vibrations, runway noise from airports—energy that we are not able to make use of very well—and convert it into pulses, packets of electrical energy, that become useful power,” says Sen. “You give me noise, I give you organized bundles.” —Cynthia G. Wagner

Sources: Georgia Tech, http://gtresearchnews.gatech.edu. University at Buffalo, www.buffalo.edu.

Connecting People to Their Governments

Mobile phones may become valuable tools for empowering the disadvantaged.

The world’s less-affluent populations cannot all afford personal computers, but mobile phones are much more within their financial reach. That’s why Nicol Turner-Lee, vice president and director of the Media and Technology Institute at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, looks to mobile phones and other handheld devices for Internet access as a great opportunity for empowering disadvantaged communities and ultimately enhancing democracy.

“Cell phones present a lower barrier to entry to underrepresented groups like low-income minority or elderly who need that constant contact. It’s an easier modus operandi for these communities,” says Turner-Lee.

Low-income adults and young people are increasingly using mobile devices to conduct banking, find jobs, and access medical help, Turner-Lee notes. She wants government to ensure that mobile transactions are secure, and she wants government agencies to make more information about their own operations Web-accessible.

“I think it’s a great opportunity with devices to ensure transparency and ensure the ability of citizens to access information in real time,” she says.

In February 2011, Turner-Lee co-authored a report on the future of “e-governance” with Jon Gant, visiting resident fellow of the Media and Technology Institute at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies. The report calls out the proliferation of mobile devices as a prime medium for a government to communicate easily and in real time with any of its citizens, whether they own computers or not.

“With the proliferation of mobile devices, especially cell and smartphones, governments can gain easy and immediate access to consumers, especially those that do not own a computer, and widen their distribution of significant data,” the authors write.

However, the report also expresses concern that not enough low-income and undereducated Americans have gained Internet access. The authors recommend education campaigns to encourage more disadvantaged adults to obtain Internet access, such as by showing how using a computer can make it easier for a citizen to interact with Medicare or to navigate Medicaid.

“The outcomes of open government will be the most relevant when they not only reduce the digital disparities that maintain a degraded quality of life for many Americans, but also offer a road to opportunity for these vulnerable groups,” the report states. “In the end, cities can begin to see healthier, safer, and more viable communities as a result of deeper engagement from all citizens.”

World Bank analysts also see much poverty-relieving potential in cell-phone usage. Laurent Besancon, senior regulatory specialist in the World Bank’s Information and Communication Technologies Division, says that India gained its first 3G (Web-accessible) phone services in 2009, and that, in that short time span, the number of 3G connections in India has surpassed fixed broadband connections.

“When we look at the future and we see the cost of platforms decreasing, we see an enormous take-up with smartphones,” says Besancon, adding that he expects Afghanistan to get its first 3G phone services sometime in 2012.

Afghans today are already enhancing their interactions with public services through conventional, non-Web mobile phones, according to Siddhartha Raja, a World Bank information and communications technologies specialist. For example, farmers in remote areas can call in and find market prices in major markets across the country. In the near future, residents of rural areas where doctors are sparse will be able to search through their phone’s on-screen directories to find doctors living in cities. Raja expects this to assist in cutting maternal mortality rates.

“The mobile phone might be the first regular interaction with the state that they would ever have,” says Raja.

Meanwhile, in India’s Kerala state, government agencies have been making many transactions, such as license and registration renewals, or checking voters’ identification and locating the correct polling station to cast a ballot, available over the phone. Raja anticipates more citizen-to-government transactions taking place via mobile phones as phone services and Internet services continue to expand.

“This is really something that is allowing anyone with a mobile phone—whether they are poor or rich—to get access to those services that were previously difficult to reach,” says Raja. “In a country like India, the question is how to expand and improve the connections to government, whereas in Afghanistan, the question is how to get citizens connected to their government in the first place.”—Rick Docksai

Sources: Nicol Turner-Lee (interview), Media and Technology Institute, www.jointcenter.org/institutes/media-and-technology. See also “Government Transparency: Six Strategies for More Open and Participatory Government” by Jon Gant and Nicol Turner-Lee, Aspen Institute white paper, www.aspeninstitute.org.

Laurent Besancon (interview), World Bank, www.worldbank.org.

Siddhartha Raja (interview), www.worldbank.org.

Fighting AIDS through Genome Editing

A new treatment might genetically adapt us to resist HIV.

The human immunodeficiency virus that causes AIDS keeps evolving in the face of new drugs. But a new “genome editing” treatment might enable humans to evolve to resist HIV. The treatment uses enzymes called zinc-finger nucleases (ZFNs) to remove problematic genes, such as that which makes a person susceptible to HIV.

“It’s about giving patients the tools to suppress the HIV virus, to keep the virus count to a low level where it won’t do them any harm,” says Paula Cannon, a UCLA microbiologist and immunologist who is developing a ZFN therapy.

HIV destroys T cells, the blood cells that combat viruses. According to Cannon, T cells’ weak link is a gene called the CCR5. If a T cell does not have the CCR5, HIV cannot harm it.

Cannon and her colleagues applied ZFN to human bone-marrow cells. Bone marrow is where all blood cells, including T cells, are manufactured. The ZFNs latched onto the cells’ genomes and removed the coding for CCR5.

Then the researchers injected these modified stem cells into baby mice. The stem cells merged into the mice’s bone marrow and started producing blood cells.

When the mice reached adulthood, the researchers infected them with HIV. At first, blood samples from the mice exhibited high viral counts. About 12 weeks later, Cannon and her team drew blood again and could no longer detect any viruses. The mice’s marrow cells were making CCR5-negative T cells that were withstanding the virus.

“I think of this as a therapy that will not necessarily completely remove the HIV from their body, but it gives them an HIV-proof immune system so that HIV won’t cause the harm that it normally does,” says Cannon.

She is now trying her ZFN therapy in the Los Angeles clinic City of Hope on patients who are HIV-positive and have lymphoma. She chose them because they typically undergo chemotherapy for the lymphoma, and prior to chemo, doctors remove some of their bone marrow cells to protect them from the chemicals. They reinsert the cells once chemotherapy is complete. Cannon will apply ZFN to the cells before reinsertion.

“Because the AIDS lymphoma patients already have these cells taken out and put back in them, it seems like a good place to start. We’re piggybacking on this procedure,” she says.

She would not be the first to try ZFN therapy on people. Sangamo Biosciences, a pharmaceutical company, conducted human trials in 2011 on a ZFN therapy that isolates, treats, and reinserts T cells. Philip Gregory, Sangamo’s chief scientific officer, says that most patients exhibited higher numbers of T cells six weeks post-treatment. The modified T-cells were replicating.

“We actually expand the number of T cells from what we take out of the body,” says Gregory. “They survive, whereas the cells that express CCR5 are continually killed by the HIV infection.”

According to Gregory, the increased T cell concentrations are significant because, while antiretroviral drugs suppress the virus, they cannot restore an immune system. ZFN treatments give patients their immune systems back and might even enable them to wean off their antiretroviral medications.

“If you can protect these cells from infection, you can halt the infection—and potentially arm the patient with cells that can suppress the infection without drugs,” says Gregory. “It’s the first step to controlling the virus in the absence of medication.”

Either ZFN method may be more reliable than a hypothetical AIDS vaccine or antibiotic, according to Carl June, a University of Pennsylvania pathologist who is working with Sangamo researchers. June says that HIV mutates repeatedly, so a drug that aims to kill HIV cells will not work for very long. Changes to the patient’s cells, however, could block even mutated HIV pathogens.

“If you can target a patient’s cellular protein rather than a virus, you’re much better off on a long-term factor. It would take a very big change in the virus to overcome it,” says June.

ZFN-based genetic treatments could also work against other genetically inherited diseases, June adds, such as sickle-cell anemia and immunodeficiency diseases. Doctors now treat those conditions with bone-marrow transplants, but patients have to take medications to stop their bodies from attacking the transplanted tissue. ZFN treatment would involve no meds.

“ZFN would be much lower toxicity, since you’re using the patient’s own cells,” June explains.—Rick Docksai

Sources: Paula Cannon, UCLA, www.ucla.edu.

Philip Gregory, Sangamo Biosciences, www.sangamo.com.

Carl June, University of Pennsylvania, www.upenn.edu.