About This Section
Surviving the Future is a blog about the past, the present, and the future. It is a series of reflections on design, strategy, and values for a world of limited resources and limited space—a world in which we must develop new habits or risk the future of the earth itself. The essays in this section come from the blog, with minor revisions.
Surviving the Future is about the past, because in the past we have both created a civilization and destroyed our environment in ways that affect the present.
It is about the present, because only in the present can we take steps that will modify the future and allow us to survive in it.
It is about the future, because if we do not act to change our civilization—to make it more creative and less destructive—humankind and the earth may not survive.
In this series of reflections I ask two central questions. Neither is technical:
- How can we sustain and not destroy our environment and our future?
- How can we preserve the many values and achievements of human civilization while doing this?
These reflections do not reject either Western civilization or the more global civilization that is now growing around us. They do not reject technology, and they do not identify a sustainable future with deprivation. My goal in writing them is to look for ways to rethink the design of our society and our values so that the best of our civilization may be preserved.