The Futures Foundation

Reports of a visionary proposal to install 10m solar rooftop panels in the US are significant not only for their own news value, but as a further indicator that the green revolution is bursting onto centre stage in a polity long dominated by fossil fuel interests.  And it is certainly "a good start", as one advocate for renewable energy put it -- perhaps wryly.

“It’s a brilliant and visionary idea to put solar energy into the middle of the discussion on energy,” said Arjun Makhijani, the president of the Institute of Energy and Environmental Research. “A goal like that is very important because it will mean the solar manufacturing industry will have certainty that there will be a demand at the other end."

Makhijani was responding to a local newspaper, the Battleboro Reformer (03 07 08), with comments on a proposal from Vermont Senator, Bernard Sanders to  encourage the installation of 10 million rooftop solar units on homes and businesses over the course of 10 years. At one kilowatt-hour a unit, that could supply up to 10,000 megawatts of energy, or approximately the output of 13 nuclear reactors.

A major exhibition planned for San Francisco at the end of August is being called "the largest celebration of American food in history" -- and it's not fast food but Slow Food.  Its message is that Americans need to fix the food system or risk destroying their health and the planet. 

According to the San Francisco Chronicle 50,000 people are expected to participate, including some of the world’s leading food authorities, health care experts, farmers and policymakers.

"Slow Food Nation is the first such event to be held in the United States, although it’s patterned after similar events in Europe." the newspaper reported on June 30.  The exhibition will be held over the American Labor Day weekend (August 30 to September 1).

"Slow Food, a philosophy that food should be not only savored, but also produced with a social and environmental conscience, started as an Italian protest movement in 1986.

"Furious that McDonald’s had come to Rome, political activist Carlo Petrini organized a demonstration against the fast-food chain.

The recent FAO Summit in Rome called for $10 billion more to pay for higher food prices. Yet, without financial reforms, this money will merely fatten the players in the global casino.

The games of traders, speculators, hedge funds, private equity and even pension funds and charitable foundation and university portfolio managers, driving up prices of oil and food, invoke increasing outrage and demands for reform.

Ever since the 1980s when Britain’s Margaret Thatcher and US President Ronald Reagan spurred de-regulation of global finance and privatization, market fundamentalism became the main game.

But at last the world is seeing the difference between money and real wealth, between “demand” in markets and the real needs of people without money.  We cringe at the tragic pictures of poor people eyeing abundant, tempting supplies of food in the local markets around the world but who are forced to go away hungry or make their children patties made of mud, spices and whatever scraps of vegetation they can find.

When I was a young activist, the ’60s were not yet far enough away, and people still talked about “after the revolution.” They still believed in some sort of decisive event that would make everything different-an impossible event, because even a change in administration cannot bring a universal change of heart, and the process of changing imagination and culture is plodding, incremental, frustrating, comes complete with backlashes . . . and is wildly exciting if you slow down enough to see the broad spans of time across which change occurs. A lot of people then were waiting for the revolution; a lot of people now have lost faith that there will be one. The overthrow of the United States government seems extremely unlikely at the moment, but the transformation of everything within, around, and despite it has been underway for decades, including radical transformation in the governments of many other countries.

Sex before marriage. Bob and his boyfriend. Madame Speaker. Do those words make your hair stand on end or your eyes widen? Their flatness is the register of successful revolution. Many of the changes are so incremental that you adjust without realizing something has changed until suddenly one day you realize everything is different. I was reading something about food politics recently and thinking it was boring.

Do we really have a better life than our hunter/gatherer ancestors?   Dr Richard Eckersley, Visiting Fellow at the National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health at the ANU in Canberra and Founding Director of Australia 21, offers some surprising responses to that question in this talk for the ABC Radio program, Ockham's Razor (hosted by Robyn Williams)

An enduring myth of modern times is that life before it was miserable. In the oft-quoted words of the 17th century English philosopher, Thomas Hobbes, the life of man in his natural state was 'solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short'.

A good example of the Hobbesian school of thought is Bjorn Lomborg's controversial book, The Skeptical Environmentalists: Measuring the Real State of the World. Lomborg includes a long quotation from the historian, Lawrence Stone, which he also paraphrases in his final chapter: 'We are no longer almost chronically ill, our breaths stinking of rotting teeth, with festering sores, eczema, scabs, and suppurating boils'. He uses this to warn against 'a scary idealisation of our past' and as a descriptive benchmark against which to judge progress. It is recited as if it represents the human condition before we discovered material affluence.

Cultural diversity is now an economic asset for Europe, Alain Ruche of the European Commission[1] said at the Salzburg Global Seminar on Thursday (17/4/08).   And it is especially an asset in the emerging generation of international relations between knowledge-based societies.

At its meeting in Lisbon in 2000, the European Union agreed to a strategy aimed at making Europe the most competitive knowledge-based economy in the world by 2010. In his paper Alain Ruche drew on the work of scholars and thinkers around the world, including several Australian futurists, to demonstrate that this strategy needs further reform.

“The EU has understood the emergence of knowledge as an economic resource, but not as yet as the main resource in the knowledge society,” he said.

“We need to address the education challenge facing a knowledge society. Colleges and universities in Europe are still educating students for a world that no longer exists. 

The Rudd Government’s plan to hold a Vision 2020 conference in April is one of the most intelligent moves seen from government for a long time, according to Charles Brass, chairman of The Futures Foundation. “The choices we make today are the choices that create the future,” he said. “ For too long, these choices have been made for the wrong reasons -- for short term gain, and for limited beneficiaries.

"It is encouraging now to see the Federal Government make a positive effort to consider the future more wisely. This conference makes an excellent starting point, but let’s remember that on any map of the future, there be dragons. It would be reassuring to know that the organisers have included this awareness in their planning.”