Humanity

“Look, but don’t touch.”  It’s a common refrain in outdoor education programs for today’s children, and—according to a recent New York Times blog post—it is creating a new generation of kids without much interest in nature.

On Nov 26-28th, I will be speaking at the Creative Innovations 2012 event in Melbourne, Australia. The theme of the conference will be “Wicked Problems, Great Opportunities! Leadership and courage for volatile times.” One rather unusual interview was with The Age Magazine on the future of visual arts. Writer Michael Lallo encouraged me to go a little crazy in our discussions so here is what we talked about.

According to Oregon’s Living Tongues Institute, one of the world’s languages dies every 14 days. By the next century nearly half of the roughly 7,000 languages spoken on Earth will disappear, as young people abandon native tongues in favor of English, Mandarin, or Spanish. For most of us, the language we speak is like the air we breathe. But what happens when we wake up and find that our air is going extinct?

By Jay Gary

After a three-year absence, and with the encouragement of WFS President Tim Mack, I hosted a Religious Futurists gathering in Toronto that drew 39 conference participants. I opened the program with a 10-minute overview of the future of religion, from Toronto 1980 onward, and various milestones in publishing and meetings.

Everyone has a favourite iconic Japanese consumer product – the Sony Walkman, a Panasonic DVD recorder, Blu-ray disc player, a Canon, Nikon, Minolta or Pentax camera or even a Toyota Prius. But this century will witness the long, slow sunset of Japan’s power. That’s because the country’s ageing and depopulating society will drag the economy down with it, as it has already started to do.

Nobody thinks that pouring more sand onto a pile of sand -- or even pouring more abacuses onto a pile of abacuses -- is the least bit likely eventually to prompt the pile to "wake up" and become intelligent, even though the pile grows incomparably more complex the larger it grows.