Negotiating ecology: Marine bioregions and the destruction of the Southern California Bight

Bioregional studies tend to focus on landscapes and associated cultural and biological diversity. This essay provides a general overview of the ecology of the Southern California Bight (SCB), which is the coastal marine bioregion of southern California. The bioregion is considered one of the most threatened ‘hot spots’ for biodiversity in the world. The SCB includes the Channel Islands National Marine Sanctuary, the Channel Islands National Park, and a designated ‘biosphere reserve’ of the United Nations Man and the Biosphere Program. The essay describes the destruction of southern California's coastal watersheds and wetlands, and provides a summary of the significant decline in ecological productivity of the marine bioregion. Despite the decline in general marine ecosystem integrity, there has been no large-scale planning effort that focuses on the entire coastal marine bioregion. With this in mind, the essay provides an overview of recent policy initiatives that call for the establishment of Marine Protected Areas or MPAs to protect marine ecosystems. Without a new institutional approach to the entire bioregion the future of the coastal marine ecosystems of the system is rather dim. With this in mind, the author recommends a number of institutional changes that support large-scale bioregional planning.     

Cognitive representations of the future: Survey results

This paper reports the results of a web-based survey concerning how people think about the future. Five hundred and seventy-two people from 24 countries completed the survey. The results indicate that when the respondents hear the word ‘future’, they think about a point in time 15 years into the future, on average, with a median response of 10 years. Respondents think less about the future than the present. On the other hand, they tend to worry more about the future than the present. Respondents’ ability to imagine the future goes ‘dark’ around 15-20 years into the future. Most of the respondents are optimistic about the near term, but become more pessimistic about the longer term. Respondents believe that humankind is not acting very responsibly with respect to a whole host of environmental and social issues but is acting responsibly with respect to technology. Almost half of the respondents would not wish to have been born in the future. Most of the other respondents would have preferred to have been born 50-500 years into the future. Approximately 45% of the sample believes that humankind will become extinct. The data suggest that Christians are more optimistic and less worried about the future and do not believe that we will become extinct. Males worry less but also think more about the future. There is a strong correlation between thinking about the future, clearly imagining the future, and being optimistic about the future. It is concluded that individuals have diverse and rich conceptions about the future but that they think less about the future than futurists might hope. Individuals’ considerations of the future are highly influenced by their identities and worldviews. Future research should focus on better unraveling these relationships and on understanding their implications for futures-oriented policy making.     

Practical bioregionalism: A philosophy for a sustainable future and a hypothetical transition strategy for Armidale, New South Wales, Australia

To reorientate society towards sustainability, a clear vision based on a coherent philosophy is needed to act as a compass point. This research describes one possible ‘eco-utopian’ approach, and uses it to develop a hypothetical set of transition strategies aimed at the transformation of an Australian regional community. The vision combines bioregional principles with ecological modernisation theory to present a model of a small-scale society that is socially and ecologically responsive. In this model, communities are organised primarily around naturally defined regions, but are outward looking and globally engaged. Political decision-making is democratic, participatory and collaborative. An ethos rooted in the notion of a global civil society provides vision and desirable levels of accountability. Production and consumption are local, cooperative and use natural resources efficiently. Existing social and political trends suggest that the bioregional model developed in this paper is both pragmatic and possible. A hypothetical case-study approach is used to illustrate how such ‘practical bioregionalism’ may be successfully adopted. An initial 25-year plan, with five desired outcomes, is outlined for the Armidale Plateau region of New South Wales, Australia. Key strategies include use of Local Agenda 21 processes, the development of a bioregional strategic plan and partial economic localisation. Implementation requires active participation of the community, including government and business actors. It is argued that the proposed transition strategy is also of direct relevance to achieving sustainability goals in larger urban areas and the global South.     

Future Search as ‘real-time’ action research

This paper explores essential links between the brief planning meeting that we call ‘future search’ and the action research tradition of pioneer social psychologist Kurt Lewin. The two practices, based on common values, employ different procedures. Unlike action research, future search involves stakeholders in collecting and organizing their own data, and deciding what to do, all in a single meeting. Unlike scenario planning, future search leads people to create the future they most desire without assessing the probability of attaining it, We work on the assumption that people who put their energy into what they want are more likely to have it. We think of future search as an intersection of three levels of social change practice: (1) a meeting design based on four key principles to be described; (2) a theory and philosophy of facilitating that might be characterized as ‘doing less so that participants can do more;’ (3) a whole system change strategy requiring no special training, systems theory or vocabulary. This article highlights the first level, showing how principles grounded in the Lewinian tradition are translated into a meeting design that stimulates ongoing cooperative action.     

What future for Middle Eastern studies?

Middle Eastern Studies (MES) has increasingly come under attack in recent years. The critics have included the more politically oriented (as with Martin Kramer who reproached Middle Eastern scholars for failing to serve US interests) as well as generalists in various social science disciplines (who have criticised MES for having produced ‘theory-free’ work thereby failing to serve the cause of building cumulative social scientific knowledge). Middle Eastern scholars have responded to such criticism by seeking to point to various contributions MES has made over the years. These debates between Middle Eastern scholars and their critics have revealed three alternative future courses for MES: (1) going back to its roots in ‘Oriental Studies’ (as called for by Martin Kramer in Ivory Towers on Sand); (2) establishing itself firmly in the discipline-oriented social sciences (as called for by the avatars of methodology in the Social Sciences); (3) building upon the pioneering works of those Middle Eastern scholars who have sought to theorise from Middle Eastern experiences thereby contributing both to MES and the disciplines. Pointing to how the sides to these debates differ radically in terms of their understanding of ‘theory’, the article will suggest that the future of MES would be shaped depending upon which understanding of ‘theory’ comes to prevail.     

Can internally generated futures accelerate organizational learning?

After many years of scenario planning, this paper takes a moment to reflect on its use within, and value to, organizations. The author states that ultimately the benefit of scenario planning must result from ‘changed and more skilful action by the organization within its business environment.’ Navigating through the business environment is discussed as taking on two forms, that of strategising and learning where the former is dominated by ‘knowing by gaining control’ and the latter by ‘knowing by participation’ and reflection. Taking this logic a step further, van der Heijden sees the purpose of scenario planning as being categorisable along two dimensions content/process and thinking/action producing a matrix of four categories of purpose. Although he sees these four reasons for using scenario planning as harbouring different degrees of difficulty and likelihood of success, he advocates above all that organizations think carefully about which category is appropriate for them and ensure that the process of scenario planning is designed to support this goal.     

Confronting tourism's environmental paradox: Transitioning for sustainable tourism

Tourism requires environmental resources as core ingredients and compelling backdrops for the production of tourism experiences. Paradoxically it also depends on the protection of the ecological integrity of these features for sustained competitiveness. This ‘resource paradox’ has epitomized relationships between tourism and the environment for decades. However, unprecedented reportings of the frequency, severity and persistence of adverse weather conditions; climate change; natural disasters; disease outbreaks; and various forms of environmental pollution, cumulatively highlight the urgency for more systematically managing tourism's resource paradox. This paper characterizes the industry's environmental and sustainability performance, and suggests planning and management approaches that will be needed to move it towards a more sustainable future. It uses a case study of ‘sustainability-focused’ tourism destination planning to illustrate the type of collective actions that must occur if the industry is to successfully manage tourism's challenging environmental relationships. It is argued that more collective and vision-oriented approaches to tourism industry planning are needed to address broader and more pervasive environmental and sustainability challenges.     

Systems approaches to economic development for indigenous people: a case study of the Noongar Aboriginals of Australia

This paper illustrates a case study in the application of systems approaches to securing economic development for a specific group of indigenous people in Australia. The case study combines Field Anomaly Relaxation (FAR) with Effects-Based Operations (EBO) planning to realise more purposeful actions and endeavours in pursuit of economic development. The approach is a hybrid of Checkland’s Soft Systems Methodology (SSM), Rhyne’s FAR and an advancement of the EBO process emerging from within national security domains. The paper focuses primarily on the use of FAR as a means of understanding an economic development problem space within a present and future orientation, with minor reference to EBO planning as a method of bringing about purposeful change within a combined solution and design space. The paper seeks to demonstrate the utility of ‘soft’ approaches, such as FAR, in the exploration of economic undevelopment and how more purposeful corrective actions can result if they are harnessed to a deepened understanding of the problem space.     

The future of western societies: multicultural identity or extreme nationalism?

The Y2K study assumed that ideas about the future among the young generation might tell something about the direction of that future, since it would be increasingly in charge. The respondents in 1967 tended to hope for more equality (classes, genders, nations, races) but were pessimistic in their predictions, though extreme nationalism and xenophobia were not really on the map yet. The article then reviews or presents recent studies on attitudes to various categories of immigrants and forms of integration. Differences relate to the country the study was made in (the Netherlands most positive) and the category of immigrants one asks about :‘asylum seekers’ seen negatively and ‘illegal immigrants’ even more so. The youngest respondents are generally most positive, or least negative; this may indicate that intolerance and racism is again on its way out after a period of growth. The future that may be foreseen on the basis of this lies somewhere between the multiculturalism some hope for and the integration by sheer assimilation that others demand.     

Top dogs have set the agenda for peace: international social position and peace attitudes

Everybody agrees that peace is good, but not on how to achieve it. The Y2K study contained many questions on peace proposals, as well as on prospects for East/West and North/South peace. It ranked these proposals by popularity and studied how the social positions of the 1967 respondents and their countries affected what proposals were preferred and their predictions on peace or war. It now turns out that, neither centre, nor periphery got it quite right. In the former East, the people set the agenda and removed the iron curtain. In the West, however, the top dogs set the agenda, with military intervention, even called ‘peace enforcement’, high on it. Recent political and military developments indicate that ‘peace’ is likely to remain ‘peace between top dogs’; there will be few advocates for putting severe conflicts and violations of human rights in the periphery (e.g. Burundi and Sudan) high on the peace agenda.     

Exploring client scenarios associated with scenario planning

All scenario planning projects have a ‘client’ and one of the most challenging tasks facing a scenario planner is the client's role or position in the way projects are conceptualized, delivered and received. The scenario planner has to establish and manage a ‘successful client relationship’—but what actually constitutes that for a scenario planning project?The client acts as the conduit between the scenario planner and the organization for which the scenario planning project is being undertaken.The ‘client as conduit’ implies several challenges for the scenario planner including:

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The client's awareness and understanding of scenario planning as a method for their organization to learn from the future [1].

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The client's level of commitment to learning from the future.

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The size and context of the scenario planning project.

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The position of the client within a network of people and/or resources required to run a scenario planning project.

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The client's involvement or position within the scenario building team created in the project.

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The benefits and risks accruing to the client through the execution of the scenario planning project.

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The client organization's capacity to act strategically; its power to perform.

This paper will explore, through storytelling, different pictures of client relationships associated with scenario planning. The stories are developed from a deep and extensive well of scenario practitioner and consulting experience over the last 15 years to explore and discuss these client issues, and how clients for scenario planning projects have evolved, and how they may enhance or restrict scenario planning projects in the future.     

Futurists and their schools: A response to Ziauddin Sardar's ‘the namesake’

A ‘futurist’ is the generic term for someone seriously engaged in the consideration of future conditions. ‘Futures research’ has a systems science orientation with a planning horizon in excess of 10 years. ‘Futures studies’ has a social science connotation and ‘foresight’ is the most popular term within the management science and corporate sectors. Five schools of futures researchers are defined: 1. Environmental and geosciences. 2. Infrastructure systems and engineering technology. 3. Social, political and economic science. 4. Human life, mind and information science. 5. Business and management science. The academic route to a futures qualification is outlined with a list of futures orientated organisations. The inclusion of urbanisation in the next generation of scenarios for climate change research and assessment, would involve replacing the notion of economic equilibrium by the concept of far-from-equilibrium stability. Finally futures research is described as an evolutionary science, which will possibly become integrated within complexity science by 2050.     

Whether the weather: comments on ‘An abrupt climate change scenario and its implications for United States national security’

In February 2004, the Department of Defense released ‘An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and Its Implications for United States National Security.’ Written by Peter Schwartz and Doug Randall of consulting firm Global Business Network, the study outlined a possible future with climatic conditions similar to those 8200 years ago and speculated on implications related to the subsequent availability of food, water, and energy. As a result of media coverage about the report, which notably included misconceptions about the study's intents, the document may have become too politically controversial for defense planners to engage at the present time and it has apparently not been widely distributed within the administration's national security personnel. Regardless of the document's status within the Pentagon, it is of interest to many who are actively involved in discussions about the future. Broadly, as with any scenario-based undertaking, there are questions about how the vision of the future has been crafted and, subsequently, how it may best be used to inform a decision-making process. More narrowly, this particular scenario is also significant for on-going debates about the role of environmental factors in matters of national security. This paper distinguishes between natural events and human actions to consider some strengths and weaknesses of Schwartz and Randall's text. It also makes recommendations to improve future efforts to understand the relationships between climate change and national security.     

The comovement of US and German bond markets

We use a vector-autoregression, with parameter estimates corrected for small-sample bias, to decompose US and German unexpected bond returns into three ‘news’ components: news about future inflation, news about future real interest rates, and news about future excess bond returns (term premia). We then cross-country correlate these news components to see which component is responsible for the high degree of comovement of US and German bond markets. For the period 1975-2003 we find that inflation news is the main driving force behind this comovement. When news is coming to the US market that future US inflation will increase, there is a tendency that German inflation will also increase. This is regarded bad news for the bond market in both countries whereby bond prices are bid down leading to immediate negative return innovations and changing expectations of future excess bond returns. Thus, comovement in expected future inflation is the main reason for bond market comovement.     

‘Exploratory landscape scenarios’ in the formulation of ‘landscape quality objectives’

The European Landscape Convention (ELC) calls for the definition of ‘landscape quality objectives’ (LQO) as “the formulation by the competent public authorities of the aspirations of the public with regard to the landscape features of their surroundings”. However, it is not yet defined how the integration of the visions of the public should be carried out. Notably in regions with poor participatory culture and in rural landscapes abandoned by people and consequently by their activities, dealing with the future does not seem a straightforward task. In these marginal rural landscapes the role of agriculture is being altered under the influence of the new rationale of the Common Agriculture Policy, so it may have to assume different functions in the future. Thus, this paper aims at showing how the development of ‘exploratory landscape scenarios’ can be a useful tool, firstly to find plausible landscape futures, and secondly to trigger discussions with the public regarding their aspirations for their landscape. The development procedure for ‘exploratory landscape scenarios’ builds on the ‘intuitive logics’ approach that focuses on the production of a variety of scenarios as starting point for discussion about the future rather than on finding an optimal one, which can limit the options unnecessarily from the beginning. The methodological approach is illustrated at a local scale by using the case study of Mértola in southeast Portugal. The results of the scenario exercise point out the adequateness of the methodology in the development of futures that are perceived as plausible by local stakeholders and, thereby, able to bring out their desires and threats towards the future of their landscape.     

The future of indigenous values: cultural relativism in the face of economic development

The outlook for the persistence of indigenous cultural values looks dim, based on historical trends, but recent revitalization efforts point to a more complicated future than a steady decline of diversity. The most powerful obstacle to the viability of indigenous values is the promotion of Western-style economic development initiatives that seldom acknowledge the legitimacy of values outside the materialist-rational paradigm. The evolution of more socially and environmentally oriented ‘progressive’ development policies renders Western values even more beguiling. A future in which indigenous values can survive and perhaps thrive will depend on pro-active efforts among indigenous groups to define their own development futures reflecting their own cultural values.     

Timing feminism, feminising time

This article deals with feminist engagement with the futures studies (and vice versa) and analyses the uneasy relationship that exists between the two. More specifically, it investigates the feminist theorizing of ‘patriarchal time’ and efforts to both decolonise and ‘reconstruct’ time based on feminist epistemological frameworks. Feminism is here understood as a social movement, ideology, theory, philosophy, worldview and a way of life. As such this term overlaps with, yet represents a distinct category from terms such as ‘women’, ‘gender’, ‘femininity’ and ‘women's movements’. Thus, feminism itself is historicized and spatially contextualised as is the notion of non-patriarchal ‘women's/feminist time’ developed by feminists.     

The dystopia of technoscience: An ecofeminist critique of postmodern reason

This essay addresses postmodern feminist statements on ‘women’ and ‘nature’, as expressed in the influential work of US theorist Donna Haraway and some of her European followers like Braidotti, Bryld and Lykke. It makes a critical reading of epistemological postures adopted by these postmoderns, revealing a number of internal incoherencies. And it finds their substantive analyses as unhelpful to radical political action in the here and now, as it is to utopian prefiguration of a just and sustainable future. The author argues from the perspective of an ‘embodied materialist ecofeminism’ and makes two claims. First, the postmodern preoccupation with methodologies of discourse analysis becomes counterproductive by deflecting attention from activism. Secondly, Haraway's quasi-celebration of capitalist patriarchal technoscience with it iconic cyborg, presents a dystopia that confuses the political focus of feminists, just as an aggressive neoliberal form of globalisation colonises and consumes the support systems of all life on earth.     

Anticipating the future: ‘Biotechnology for the poor’ as unrealized promise?

This article analyses visions of the future articulated by proponents of ‘biotechnology for the poor’, those who claim that an embrace of transgenic technology in agriculture is critical to alleviating poverty in developing countries. Specifically, we analyse how such ‘biotechnology for the poor’ proponents represent a future with or without transgenic crops. Such representations include visions of a beckoning (promising) future, where much is to be gained from an embrace of transgenic technology in agriculture, and an onrushing (threatening) future, where much will be lost if the technology is not embraced. The article shows that claims about a beckoning or onrushing future by ‘biotechnology for the poor’ proponents are based upon unexamined or problematic assumptions about the poor and poverty. As such, poverty becomes merely a moral backdrop against which visions of a future are articulated. Furthermore, ‘biotechnology for the poor’ writings do not engage in dialogue with alternative voices in articulating their perspectives on the future, losing a key opportunity to democratize debate about this crucial issue. We conclude by considering the policy consequences (in regulatory and institutional terms) of ‘biotechnology for the poor’ depictions of the future, particularly for the global South where such consequences will be felt.     

Free entry and business cycles under the influence of animal spirits

We provide a business cycle model in which endogenous markup fluctuations are the main driving force. These fluctuations occur due to some form of ‘animal spirits’, impelling firms in their entry-exit decisions within each sector. By contrast to existing models of the business cycle emphasizing the role of animal spirits, we do not rely on the sink property of the equilibrium to generate indeterminacy. Hence, while our model does pretty well in accounting for the main features of US business cycles, it avoids several criticisms addressed to these former models, concerning either their dependence upon strongly increasing returns, too high markups, or their implication of countercyclical movements of consumption.