Future Active

Edited by Aaron M. Cohen

Symposium Tackles Sustainable Transportation

University of Virginia professors from such diverse departments as business, nursing, urban planning, and architecture came together to discuss sustainable transportation at the symposium “The Car of the Future / Future of the Car.”

The event was conceived as a multidisciplinary exploration. “If you want to approach the subject properly, you need expertise that comes from many different disciplines,” said co-organizer Manuela Achilles, program director of UVa’s Center for German Studies.

Guest speakers included bestselling author and futurist Jeremy Rifkin, president of the Foundation on Economic Trends, who presented on “The Third Industrial Revolution and the Reinvention of the Automobile.” Christopher Borroni-Bird, GM’s director of advanced technology vehicle concepts and co-author of Reinventing the Automobile: Personal Urban Mobility for the 21st Century, spoke as well.

Daniel Sperling and Deborah Gordon, the co-authors of Two Billion Cars: Driving Toward Sustainability (Oxford University Press, 2009), also gave a presentation. Their book examines, among other things, the global emphasis on individual car ownership.

Most of the sessions were free and open to the public. University undergraduates also participated in “The Car and its Future,” a contest that gave them the option to either write an essay or design a project around the symposium’s theme.

Source: University of Virginia Center for German Studies, http://artsandsciences.virginia .edu/centerforgermanstudies.

Ten Likely Global Occurrences

“Much can happen in ten years—just review the past decade.” So begins the Copenhagen Institute for Futures Studies’ report “Ten Tendencies Towards 2020.” With this in mind, the CIFS analyzes 10 shifts that the organization believes are already well under way and examines how they could play out in the future, charting potential consequences.

The fact that things are already moving in these general directions, with some momentum behind them, is what distinguishes these as tendencies as opposed to trends. A panel of Danish executives from different industries rates the significance of each item on the list, on both industry-wide and global levels.

Some highlights from the report are as follows:

• Due to a number of factors, ranging from aging populations to the financial crisis, companies will place increasingly greater value on employees’ talent and ability, to the point where talent will be “regarded as a company’s most important asset for future growth.” In order to retain talented employees, businesses will compete with each other to offer better work environments, larger salaries, and other benefits. Worth noting: “One method of identifying potential and existing employees’ undiscovered talents in the future could be brain scanning.”
• The 10-year economic prognosis looks good for many countries in Africa—particularly the so-called African Lions, which include Botswana, Egypt, Libya, Mauritius, Morocco, South Africa, and Tunisia. Fueled in no small part by attention from investors in China and India, “the region’s economic capacity is one of the fastest growing in the world,” according to the report. However, there will continue to be substantial divides between haves and have-nots within these countries. Worth noting: Africa could become an increasingly popular vacation destination for Westerners.
• In contrast, “the indications are that Europe’s glory days are coming to an end,” according to the CIFS. One (perhaps all-too-likely) scenario shows Europe and the United States experiencing zero economic growth. “On the other hand, it is possible to set up scenarios in which [basic] reforms are gradually implemented, and there is a return to growth, albeit at a lower level than we experienced during the decade from 2000-2010.” Worth noting: Spain, the EU’s fifth largest economy, recently made headlines when it reported zero growth for the third quarter of 2010.
• A renewed and lasting interest in collectivity and community will benefit global society. Examples of such range from social networking sites to urban car-sharing programs. The CIFS writes, “The communities of the future will be based on co-creation.” In other words, rather than competing against each other, talented people will work together to find innovative solutions to overarching problems. Worth noting: The report suggests that digital media could be facilitating a kind of collective intelligence on a global level.
• Mental doping is on the rise. Prescription medications such as Adderall, Ritalin, and beta blockers are being used (and abused) more and more as brain stimulants by students and workers looking to improve their mental performances. Yet, cognitive-performance enhancement does not have the same stigma attached as physical-performance enhancement has. “Is this a development that gives cause for concern? Opinion on this is divided,” the report says. Whether such substances will be banned from schools and workplaces—or at least tacitly allowed—is a big question. Worth noting: This tendency overlaps with intensifying genetic research, personalized medicine, and the pioneering of such methods as in utero gene therapy.

The CIFS report is a follow-up to 2003’s “Ten Tendencies Towards 2010.”

Source: Copenhagen Institute for Futures Studies, www.cifs.dk.

Legendary Conservationists Share Award

President emeritus of the Missouri Botanical Garden Peter H. Raven and Harvard University entomology professor Edward O. Wilson were the co-recipients of the 2010 Linnaean Legacy Award. The award was presented to the two colleagues in recognition of their contributions to the field of biological classification by the Linnaean Society of London and the International Institute for Species Exploration at Arizona State University. The ceremony was held at the New York Academy of Sciences as part of the conference “Sustain What? The Mission to Explore and Conserve Biodiversity.”

During the conference, scientists also worked on developing an ambitious 50-year plan to discover and classify at least 90% of the Earth’s species. It is estimated that only 20% (1.9 million) of all species have been discovered and classified so far. What’s more, experts predict that around 30% of all species will become extinct during the twenty-first century. This massive extinction is “changing the entire character of life on Earth,” Raven told the crowd. Preserving the various species—the so-called living environment—is essential to protecting the physical environment, Wilson said during the joint keynote presentation.

Raven’s past articles for THE FUTURIST, including “A Time of Catastrophic Extinction: What We Must Do” (September-October 1995) and the cover story “Disappearing Species: A Global Tragedy” (October 1985), have also sounded this alarm. In “A Time of Catastrophic Extinction,” he suggests ways to prevent what he warns would be “an episode of species extinction greater than anything the world has experienced for the past 65 million years.”

Source: The International Institute for Species Exploration at Arizona State University, www.species.asu.edu.

Europe’s Blue Future: Offshore Energy

The Marine Board of the European Science Foundation presented a report at the EurOCEAN2010 conference that details how Europe could get half of its electricity from renewable marine resources by 2050. The plan entails researching and developing innovative ways to harness energy from offshore wind, tides, and ocean currents, as well as marine biofuels such as algae.

The report, entitled “Marine Renewable Energy: Research Challenges and Opportunities for a New Energy Era in Europe,” points to the fact that the EU currently imports more than half of its energy and that this amount is projected to increase if current trends are unchanged.

In making its case, the Marine Board highlights potential economic benefits, such as job creation and new business opportunities—which were dubbed “blue jobs” and “blue growth” at the conference. The Board’s projections show that “by 2050, the Renewable Ocean Energy sector could provide 470,000 jobs, which corresponds to ten to twelve jobs (direct and indirect) created per megawatt installed.”

Developing the technology means developing new bodies of knowledge in fields ranging from engineering to ecology. It also entails crafting innovative legislation to help facilitate it. “Marine renewable energy is in its infancy, but it has remarkable potential, so the target of 50% is ambitious, but achievable,” said Marine Board chair Lars Horn. “We just need research, industry and policy to come together.”

The report further recommends comprehensively assessing the available aquatic resources, and developing ways to properly monitor them, in order to keep track of the environmental impacts caused by large commercial-scale installations. Such issues could include electromagnetic disturbances and problems caused by altering water circulation patterns. The report states: “There is limited data or knowledge on the medium- and long-term environmental impacts of Marine Renewable Energy devices.” The Board advocates finding better ways to research, predict, and respond to potential cumulative impacts. To that end, it also advocates for the creation of an initial test site.

The Marine Board is a co-organizer of the EurOCEAN2010 conference, which was held in October 2010 in Belgium.

Sources: European Science Foundation, www.esf.org. EurOCEAN2010 Conference, www.eurocean2010.eu.