Forktalks #1 event - The Fork in the Road Project

Foreign.

This is Gert Leonhard, and welcome to my podcast.

So my name is Glenn Heemstra. I'm a longtime futurist, probably best known for founding the website Futurist.com in the early 1990s, where I now still serve as futurist emeritus and a member of the Futurist.com think tank. And two of my think tank colleagues, Brenda and Bronwyn, are here as well, and I'll be introducing them more fully in a moment. But first, I want to just take a couple of minutes and tell you a little bit more about the Fork of the Road project, about how really David and Gerd came up with it. And then I'm going to toss it to David, who's going to say a word of welcome, and then back to Gerd, who will take us a little bit through the logistics as well as say anything he wants to say about the project. And then we'll get into the four really wonderful speakers that we have for this live stream. The story of the Fork in the Road project goes something like this. In the late 1960s, around 1970, the great futurist, designer, philosopher, engineer Buckminster Fuller had come to the conclusion that human beings had now acquired the technological capability and the knowledge to enable really, everyone on Earth to live a relatively comfortable life, but that we were at a choice point. And he wrote a book in 1969 and literally in which he used the term that we were at a fork in the road, that if we chose one fork, we could use this capability which human beings had now acquired to enable everyone on Earth to live a decent life. Or we, we could go down an alternative fork in which we could use the knowledge that we have and the technological capabilities in ever more destructive ways until humanity literally could face oblivion. So that's kind of the background of the concept of the fork in the road. And sometime in the year 2020, late in 2020, Gerd Leonhard and David Houle came together and began talking about what they had been talking to audiences about. David, known as an environmental futurist, the futures for climate change, and had also been talking a lot about the need to reform and rethink capitalism. Gerd had been talking about the mix of humans versus technology, or humans with technology, and advocating that human beings take more of an assertive role in controlling where technology goes, rather than letting technology eventually control us. They contacted me and said we should do something to raise the sense of urgency. The IPCCC had said that climate change, for example, is something that we need to do something significant about in the next 10 years that we can't wait any longer to really make quite radical changes. Then these other areas were also on their minds. And so they proposed that we write a manifesto, which we did in late 2020, called the fork in the Road Manifesto. Presumably, most of you on the live stream tuning in have read the manifesto and added your signature to it, which we're inviting everybody to do. If you have not, please, after the live stream, go to the forkintheradproject.com and you'll be able to read the manifesto and add your signature and invite friends and colleagues of yours to sign it as well. Essentially, what we say in the manifesto is that we're confronted as a human species with four interlinked crises, if you will. The climate crisis being predominant and the first one that we mentioned, the second, the need to rethink and even reinvent the concept of governance, democracy, and especially capitalism and economy. Then there are two focus on technology. One, on the need for humans to manage technology, in particular things like artificial intelligence. The second area of technology has to do with human enhancement. We have all kinds of means by which we might enhance and change human beings. And obviously we need to take very conscious control of that, rather than into the day being controlled by it. The manifesto says that these are urgent issues around which we need action. Now we set out to collect signatures, the idea that we might be able to influence decision makers and other significant people in the country of the United States and around the world to treat these issues with more urgency. As the project has gone on, and we've got some feedback from some of you who are on the live stream and others, it began to become clear to us that perhaps the major contribution that we can make, since there are many other organizations interested in these issues, either singly or together, in actually putting out very good policy papers and policy proposals and solutions to climate change and so on. Something which we don't need to necessarily repeat that what we might be able to do is to add to the narrative around urgency, but also add to the narrative a sense of possibility. As futurists, we tend to work with organizations and enterprises and so on, eventually on the concept of what could we do to create a future that we really want. Sometimes we call that the preferred future. Gerd these days is calling it the good future. And we might be able to add to that narrative. And so we've decided to create some programs that might take us in that direction. And this is the first one, this livestream is the first of those programs. We've invited four wonderful speakers. Brenda Cooper, Bramwell Williams, Philip Cutler, and then David Houle, one of our three principal founders is also going to do a short presentation. So that's the background to what we're doing. You'll hear more before the program is over about what we might be doing next from here. But at this point, let me toss it to David, add your word of welcome and say a word, and then we'll come back to you, of course, as a speaker.

David. Sure.

Thank you, Glenn. Thanks for everybody for being here. I can already see we have people from many countries. And for those of you that know me and are on partly because I thank you for attending. And all I really want to say is that we really are at a fork in the road and pretty much every aspect of humanity and we do still have time, but we've arbitrarily said 2030 because we need to create urgency across the board in all of the topics that Glenn talked about. I'll come back later and I'll be giving a presentation on climate change. But I want to thank you again for being here. We feel that it's a metaphor that's known globally. Everybody knows what Fork in the Road is. It's a great meme, and we want to tell the story about how we can find the road and the path to the good future we want to create. So back to you, Gerd.

Great. It's really a pleasure to see everybody here. And sorry again for the YouTube troubles. We're still gathering stream here. So my view on the Fork in the Road project is something I've been hoping for for a long time, is that we would get together a couple of hundred or thousands eventually of the brightest people and the most visionary people to create momentum and urgency and also a hopeful message. Because one thing that has really bugged me about being a futurist and looking at the future for the last 20 years is that now many people look at the future and they're saying, oh no, it's not going to end well. The future is bad. So first the robots are coming to take our jobs and then they kill us. And on top of that, we have climate change. So now we have a positive thing that we're trying to tell a story of a good future. We're trying to figure out how we can be creative and getting the message out and also putting lots of pressure on people to actually change and create a good future together. So, anyway, I'm used to monologues, so I'm going to stop right here and we're going to pass it on to our first speaker. And I'm very excited about this event and some really great speakers coming in. I think Glenn is going to introduce Brenda.

Yeah, thanks Gert. I'm going to introduce Brenda. And by the way, for those of you who've tuned in, the process we're going to use now is we're going to introduce to each speakers one by one. They'll have, they've put together five minute presentations, just the kernels of some of the most important things they're interested in and talking about now. And then we'll have five minutes for questions. Those of us who are speaking on the live stream might ask a question or two, but on the YouTube channel there's the chat function and if you're there, please be typing in questions. And Gerd and his team will be monitoring the questions that you ask via the chat on the YouTube live stream and then bringing those questions over. And when it's Brenda's term to answer some questions, hopefully we can feed some of your questions in and then at the very end of the four presentations, if we have some time, which we may or may not, we'll see how it goes, we may be able to then feed in some additional questions. So be typing your questions in if you have them. With that, let me introduce Brenda Cooper, whom I'm very excited to introduce. Brenda is a renaissance person, has just an astonishing career. She's a senior information technology executive, has been for many years in that role in municipality, in municipal government here in the United States. But recently in the last couple of years shifted to a very large private sector construction and engineering company where she's the director of information technology. She's a futurist, is a member of the Futurist.com think tank and occasionally makes presentations on the future. But most of all vocationally, she's a writer and she writes science fiction, award winning science fiction. She has 12 novels. My last count, when I looked at her website last night, 67 published short stories and has also published some nonfiction and even some poetry. And having read Brenda's books, it occurred to me what Brenda has been writing in her 12 novels is really she's been writing the Fork in the Road manifesto in the form of novels because she has one series about climate change and about sort of post climate change and the need to rewild the world. She has another series about robots, artificially intelligent robots who have taken over the outer reaches of the solar system and are in conflict with the United States. So they really are Gerd coming to kill us. And that's a great series. And she has another series about biologically enhanced humans and the conflict between them and normal humans and the discrimination between them. And there's a true thread in all of her writing which is how do you seek a more just society both economically and socially? And so I highly recommend recommend her books. Then one more little known fact about Brenda who lives here in the same area that I do in the Seattle, Greater Seattle area in Washington state. As a very young information technology executive and self taught HTML coder, when the World Wide Web was brand new, Brenda wrote the original raw HTML code that created the first Futurist.com website. So I've always been appreciative of that. So with that, let me introduce Brenda Cooper. And Brenda, you're on and we're looking forward to what you have to share with us.

Great, Glenn, thank you very much for that. So as Glenn mentioned, I'm a writer, and to a writer, story really matters. The stories that we tell ourselves about the future, they create our beliefs and they inform our actions. If we believe the road we're on is leading us to a dark place, we'll probably hunker down and pour toilet paper or something. And if we believe that there's a positive future, we will move forward in a way that helps us invest and create that future. And story can really, really create hope. But I'm going to start by talking about another powerful way that story can work is it can warn. It's important to know where we don't want to go as much as it's important to know where we do want to go. So one of the stories that warned us quite a long time ago was 1984, written by George Orw. He wrote it in 1949 about authoritarian governance that he saw in Stalinist Russia. And it's a really dark book. It deals with surveillance, it deals with fake news, it deals with power that doesn't care about human happiness. But it still sells tens of thousands of copies a year because it's still relevant today. All of those issues are still happening now, some of them in spades. And so it's important to understand and take from science fiction the warning so that we can understand which fork we want to take in the road. I prefer positive fiction, you know, a little more like Gerd there. And so I'm going to mention a couple of really positive books that I think are really worth focusing on. One is a book called Blue Remembered Earth by Alastair Reynolds. That came out in 2012. I think he's a very under appreciated novelist in the United States, but he's very well known in many other parts of the world and it tells a really positive and technically fascinating far future. And then if you want to read a book about our current future that really in fact talks a lot about how we might implement the things every other speaker today is going to talk about, pull up Kim Stanley Robinson's the Ministry for the Future that came out just a few months ago. It's super well researched and it's utterly absorbing and I really think if you were interested in this call, you would be interested in that book. Most stories of the future depict a world with both utopian and dystopian elements. They celebrate the strength of humanity, the strength of our hearts and our souls in the face of really difficult challenges, which of course is something we need to do right now. We are facing really difficult challenges and we need to connect who we are, the most or our best and highest selves to what it is that we're trying to resolve. And we need to learn that we can succeed. And stories can tell us both that we can succeed and maybe suggest ways we might succeed. Now you don't have to read novels in order to use story to help tell people about the future. You can also use vignette. So let me give you a small example. I've been talking with some of the others frankly on this call and other futurists about population and what are we going to do about the amount of people that we have on the earth right now? Can we sustain that? So let me tell you a very short story about a woman named Mariana 30 years from now. So Mariana pulled her sister's child, Liam into her arms and she buried her face in the glorious smell of baby shampoo. Touching her cheek to his small and soft one, she imagined him with a brother or sister, a prize from the lottery she entered every month in hopes that she would be chosen to have a child. But no more. I'm so sorry, Liam, she whispered. I know, I know you need a brother or sister, but you need a new house further up the hill even more. Mariana had already started packing the kitchen, using the careful placement of chipped coffee cups into paper lined nests to cement her decision. She set Liam down carefully and she went outside blinking and on her way uphill to the family planning clinic to trade her fertility lottery tickets for a house outside of the flood zone, she turned to look below where the ocean crashed against an abandoned row of homes at the far end of their street the ocean was healing she'd seen a dolphin just yesterday she bowed her head and whispered to the waves, I'm doing this for you as well. So that's two paragraphs meant to create a feeling and start a discussion. It's not meant to solve a problem that those two paragraphs will not solve the problem, but they can engender discussion and they can give people some ideas. So I've seen small vignettes like these included in scenario planning, in education pieces, in corporate strategic plans, because when you have a human character in a situation, in a setting, you can really drive home the implications and the complications of our choices so that you can create hope in a science book that's really appropriate to the Fork in the Road project. James Hanson ended his nonfiction work about the storms climate change will bring with a story. So we actually. The last. The last chapter was actually a story about the future. So I encourage all of us to tell stories about what waits for us and how we climb the path upward and how we get there. So thank you.

Thank you, Brenda. I do have a question. Thank you. That was a terrific story, by the way. I actually found it quite moving. The issue of population is actually quite interesting, as, you know, one thought on the climate change side is that we should limit population, but there are others, interestingly enough. Elon Musk recently in an interview said he thought one of the two most significant existential threats is the potential of population collapse, which is also an interesting thing. What's your view on policy wise? What we should do about population is an issue should have policies about as implied in the story or not?

Actually, I think the best way to control and manage population is to empower women, to make birth control available, to create vibrant, beautiful cities where people can live densely and healthily, and to go ahead and rewild a lot of the Earth. I really, really like the idea of rewilding half of the Earth. So, you know, I'm kind of on that path. There's a company called Forterra or a nonprofit called Forterra in our area doing.

A lot of that.

So, yeah, can I throw in? I have a slightly different view on the population issue. You know, I think it looks threatening and it was threatening for a while, but I kind of feel like we're now coming to the point where it's much less of an issue. If you're looking at statistics from Max, Roger and others saying, okay, yeah, we're going to grow to be 12 billion, but not 20, and by the time we are growing like this, we can go to other planets. So there are different arguments. I'd be interested to see what the audience here thinks about this. Any of you guys want to chime in or do we have Anything interesting from YouTube? I see a bunch of comments here, but no questions, really. Just a bunch of hellos. That's good. Anybody want to comment?

Yeah, sure. So David here, I take the opposite view and I ask this of you, Brenda. It seems to me that I'll be presenting a climate change that if we don't do anything relative to the climate crisis, there'll be death and destruction and war over resources and stuff. I really think that rather than having our offspring and their offspring fight for survival, that if we, we might be able to get through population planning, get it down to 5 to 6 billion by the end of the century. Is that something that you agree with or what are your thoughts on that?

I would love to see there be slightly fewer humans, but I don't think that any authoritarian way of doing that is going to work. We watched the one child policy fail in China, so I don't think we can do that. I think we have to do it by creating incentives that are probably more positive than my little story here. I was telling that to be an example and to create conversation, which hate obviously did.

And.

I really think the more we empower women and the more we put women in power, the better we're going to do with population. But we absolutely have to address climate change. If we don't address climate change, it won't matter how many of us there are, we'll all die anyway. I mean, we simply have to address it. It's super, super important and we have to address it in positive ways.

How are you doing on time, Gerd, in terms of moving on?

Okay, time to mute button now. I think we should move on because we can discuss a little bit more later. Right.

So let's say thanks to Brenda. That was terrific. Actually. It was really a good example of how a short story, your two paragraph story can stimulate a conversation was really a good illustration of that and I think we should really take that to heart. So I believe Gerd. No, I think David's going to introduce. Correct.

Yes.

So I have the great privilege of introducing Phil Kotler as he's known to the world. He's the father of modern marketing. He's written 80 books, most of them about marketing. He's probably the most sourced person on marketing in the world. And for the last 50 years, marketing equals Phil Kotler. I'M fortunate to know him as a friend. He's been a mentor to me to some degree. We co founded the Sarasota Institute, a 21st century think tank, and had a lot of conversation about that over the last couple of years. Phil has published books about capitalism and the need to reinvent democracy. We've had a lot of conversations and written a lot of articles about that. He's here today to talk about real quickly the possibility of a new model for global democracy. So it's my pleasure to introduce Phil Kotlin, my good friend.

Phil.

Thank you, David, very much for the introduction. We are coming to a fork in the road and the way I will put it is shall it be American capitalism or Nordic capitalism? I will make the case for moving to Nordic capitalism and I'll explain what I mean by that. American capitalism needs to change, not to socialism or something else, but a better form of capitalism. It is true that the United States has the largest GDP, but our Gross National Happiness stands at 19 in the world, the 19th country on happiness. Our Gross National Health stands at 16. Even Canada is a happier and healthier country. So we have problems. We have a shrinking middle class. We have the most billionaires in the world and also many poor people. And by poor people, I don't mean the 15% under the poverty line. I mean the 30 or 40% who can't meet their living standard really without borrowing a lot of money and working on credit. And these are people who can't send their kids to college and so on and so forth. In fact, what are some of the problems? Well, many young people cannot go to college because the cost of a four year degree is $200,000 in a good college. Young people either don't go to college or they go and they graduate with a high dent debt that they have to carry, a huge debt. Now many families have illnesses or surgery that will cost them $50,000 or $100,000 that will wipe out their entire savings if they don't have insurance. And let's look at this problem about even having babies. Many families need $20,000 to have a baby. And I don't mean buying the chair for the baby, I mean getting prepped to have a baby and trained to how to handle the baby and then burying the baby and so on. $20,000. And then from the age of that birth to 17 years later, a family will spend between $175,000. If it's a low income family, I don't know where they're going to get the Money from. But that's the estimate all the way. For a wealthy family, it will cost them $372,000 to raise that child to the age of 17. No wonder our birth rate is dropping. And by the way, our marriage rate is dropping. Why? Well, because we used to get married in order partly to have children. If we're less interested in having children, we may be less interested in getting married. What does that mean about reproducing our size of population? Well, one answer may come from what I call looking at the Nordic countries, namely five, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Finland and Iceland. All of them practice economic democracy. The other names are social democracy or welfare capitalism. All of them have strong trade unions, which we don't have. Won't everyone agree that the fact we had unions in the past was good for us? Didn't they raise our standard of living? And we don't have unions. Germany not only has strong unions and collective bargaining, but they also sit on the board of directors with representation of the workers interest and all of the Scandinavian, all the Nordic countries too. So I want to make a case that all the Nordic countries enjoy the highest living standard. They are all in the top 10. Whenever you have. What are the top 10 countries in health and happiness? All of the Nordic countries are in the top 10 and they have much less income disparity. In fact, here's what you get. If you're willing to pay a few more dollars in taxes. You get either free college education or low cost education. You get free or low cost excellent health care for all citizens. I'm just describing the features of the Nordic countries. A much longer worker vacation time. Do you know that it's two weeks for the United States standard time for vacation, it's four weeks in many European countries. Italy goes to six weeks. Maternity and paternity benefits. We don't have much of that. Child care and care for the aged parents, we don't have much of that. So the Nordic idea is a good life for all citizens and all it costs is a little higher income tax rate. Our income tax rate's maximum tax rate is 39.1%, 39% roughly in Stockholm and Sweden and so on, it's 70%. So you have to pay more for all these goodies. Now I believe that American opinion is moving this way. Many students of mine and I'm pretty much in touch with the younger generation and they are our future. Many say I'd rather pay higher taxes and get more benefits. We can get the money for that through higher income taxes. A wealth Tax, higher estate taxes. Sure enough, we have two senators who ran for president on those planks, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. They said Medicare for all colleges should be free. Wages should be raised to a living wage, unions should be established to give workers a voice, and so on and so forth. So what needs to be done? This will be my last point. American industry will still be based and should be based on private ownership with the aim of profit maximization. Although I would add to profit maximization two more things, sustainability as a purpose to and also dealing with social problems as a purpose. Second, American companies, I believe, and wealthy Americans would be willing to, some of them, I hope, would to pay higher taxes. By the way, we have a thing called the Giving Pledge that was pushed by Bill Gates and Warren Buffett that now has 211 billionaires signed up from 23 different countries. And all of them say they will give away half of their profits within the next 10 years to good causes. So there are even billionaires who feel they should give more back. And my future prediction is the following. If we take the Nordic fork in the road, my prediction is Americans will end up being happier and healthier people. Thank you.

Oh, great. Thanks very much, Phil. That was amazing. Really great to have you here. So I have a question right away and then we can play it. We have some more questions from the audience. The stakeholder economy that's been making the rounds in a business roundtable thing and that has been everywhere discussing exactly this returning back to people Planet Prosperity purpose maybe. What do you think of that initiative? Do you think it's real or is it just sort of greenwashing?

It's an excellent question. And it turns out that very recently a lot of leading CEOs have started to talk about needing to move from shareholder orientation to stakeholder orientation. Shareholder orientation is where we say that everything in the way of profits go right to the people who gave us the money, the capital and that. And so profit maximization will lead to the best results overall. I would counter that by saying that companies that move to honor their stakeholders, namely their team players, their employees, their partners, their agencies, everyone who makes them successful, that if we reward them appropriate levels of reward, the company's shareholders will make more money. Now, notice that that's not against an argument against shareholders. Actually, it's an argument that shareholders will get even more money if the company runs itself as a stakeholder company. And by the way, look at the World bank and look at Klaus Schultz Schwab, who has put out a new thing, a new theory called the Great Reset, in which he says that companies that have really embraced stakeholder capitalism do far better than those who stay at shareholder capitalism. Thank you for your question.

All right, thanks, Phil. Anybody else want to ask a question? We have some comments here from YouTube. I want to say, first, the Fork in the Road project is international right now. We have a bit of a heavy emphasis on Americans, but we have a South African here and a Swiss person, of course, myself. And yes, we're still working very much on finding the way forward and finding action. And we also have a question from somebody about if the Fork in the Road project recommends de growth. Well, the answer to that is the Fork in the Road project doesn't recommend anything at this point. We are creating narratives. We don't have a singular opinion at this point. We are still at the point of. Of tuning the agenda, except for that we want to have the future to be good.

But I may, if I can add a little remark about the DeGrow thing. I'm reading as a marketer specialist a lot of new material called Anti Consumerism as a movement. And it takes several forms. Those who are environmentally concerned about climate change and so on are in a sense moving toward anti consumerism because we may be consuming too much and rushing the stage where we're going to have a planet that doesn't work very well for anyone. Secondly, there's a group of people who want to simplify their lives. Less trash around less things to preoccupy their time to. To start consuming less. Thirdly, there are market activists is the name I give to people who want to attack styles of living which are so unnecessary. Do you know any billionaire has more than enough to live a beautiful Life? Why have 20 billion? Why have 200 billion? As is the. The luck or the curse of Amazon's leader. So the question is there may be eventually a degrowth purpose, a degrowth movement that we are building. Every billionaire has his own battleship now. They are fantastic boats. One boat was just created by Jeff Bezos, which needs a second boat to have a helicopter pad on it. So the helicopter cannot land on the big boat which has sails. So this kind of absurdity has to be addressed. Thank you.

Thanks, Phil. We need to move on to the next speaker and we're going to still have a bit of a summary there. Otherwise, we'll be here tomorrow morning. So I want to introduce, it's my great pleasure to introduce David Yule. David, I've known him for quite some time. He's a prolific author. You have to Read his latest book, the 2000s, which is now available, I think in an updated way. He has lately become a bit of a climate futurist. He's co authored two books on the climate. He's spoken at NASA, the EPA and many others. He's writing a series of books and he's a big force behind the Faulkner Road Project. So great to have you here. And of course now he's going to talk to you, to you in five minutes no less, on what we have to do about climate change and global warming. Thanks, David. Take it away, please.

Thanks, Gerd. So, you know, there is a little bit of tongue in cheek with the title, but the point is so many people are lost as to the full picture of facing the climate crisis. So I'm listing very quickly the issues that we all have, we have to deal with. And most of us are just thinking of some of them. So first of all, we have left the time of denial and what I've called we've entered the time of disconnection. The time of denial is over. We should stop talking about is it real, is it not? I don't talk to climate change deniers anymore. They're flat Earth people. What we've entered though is a time of disconnection. The time of disconnection is most easily described by asking you a question. Anybody who's listening to me now, if you've been concerned about the climate crisis for the last 10 years, have you in that last 10 years bought an SUV, a pickup truck, bought something new rather than used, bought an article of clothing you didn't feel you needed and so you're disconnected from what you say you believe in. You're consuming, you're consuming too much. Every time you buy something new, it takes away from the Earth in some way. That's one thing. We need to talk to the five things. The first of course is lowering greenhouse gas emissions asap. This is essential to keep the warming from going up. This is usually what most people think about is decarbonizing. That's just getting off of carbon. It doesn't solve the problem we have. It's the first step. The second step is we have to draw down CO2 from atmosphere. I'll talk about that. The next thing is we have to develop a crew consciousness. Crew members of spaceship Earth, the hundreds of millions to billions. We need to develop conscious non consumption. This is where it goes into population. And since that's a theme, I can answer some questions about that. Have to develop conscious non consumption. And finally we have to have regeneration for the present and the future. Living things on the planet now lower greenhouse gas emissions. In the book that I wrote with Bob Leonard, who's in attendance here in 2019, we realized that 77% of all energy is sourced from fossil fuels in 2019. 30% or we have to reach down to 30% by 2030 are severe consequences. There's no other simple way to state it. That's what the fork in the road is relative to lowering greenhouse gas emissions. The interesting thing is the top 20 countries in the world account for 80% of all fuel of all energy consumption. So if those top 20 countries GDP I should say lower between 2019 and 2030 from 77 to 29, the poor countries, the other 75, 175 countries don't have to do a thing. So this deals with climate justice. If the wealthy large countries who putting up the most greenhouse gas and consuming the most energy take care of it, the rest of the world won't have to do anything. And finally, Every year since 1970, greenhouse gas emissions have gone up. Except for 2020 where several billion people for two months self quarantined. So not only did we lower greenhouse gas emissions by going to a screen economy, but we showed that we can do this and that we are the cause of the problem. We have to be the cause of the solution. We don't need to save the planet, we need to save ourselves from ourselves. Drawdown. This is the thing that most people don't understand. In 1800 there were 730 gigatons of carbon in the atmosphere. 2020, 1350. Why is that? The reason for that is that the cause of warming to date and the reason for that is that CO2 lasts in the atmosphere for hundreds of years. There's CO2 up there now. That came from Newcastle in 1800. The point is the warming we have is resulting of what's already in the atmosphere. Cutting carbon emissions doesn't mean we'll lower the temperature because it will stay at this because of the greenhouse effect, we actually have to take it down. In other words, another way of thinking about it is that we are 730 gigaton species living in a 1350 gigaton climate. So we have to remove 550 gigatons to stop the warming. It'll stay this way. We've gotten this way because of what's already up there, not what we're putting up there today or tomorrow. Crew consciousness my favorite quote. McLuhan came out with it right around the first Earth Day in 1970. There are no passengers on Spaceship Earth. We are all crew. This motivated me to set up a nonprofit called thespaceshipearth.org so the crew consciousness, we have to move from being mindless passengers and cruise shippers to crew members and Spaceship Earth. When you're on a cruise ship, you don't know where the food comes from, where it goes the air, where the air comes from, where it goes the waste, where it comes from, where it goes. Right. You have to educate all humans on their actions they take. This is the cause of climate change siloed thinking. We are disconnected from the actions we take to the consequences to the planet. We are of the Earth, not above it. The Earth isn't here for our consumption and our pleasure. We are one of the millions of species and we have to think of it that way. And we have to act with the knowledge of no resupply to the spaceship. As Fuller said, we're an operating manual. Spaceship Earth. That's in a way with this fork in the road project is to come up with an operating manual for Spaceship Earth that will work. And you need to know that if you eat a hamburger, four ounce hamburger in a restaurant, you're putting up six pounds of CO2. You got to get connected to your action. And will we have the ability to maintain the mission of of sustainability or will we have to abort right now? There's no resupply. So regeneration for the future in the present. And interestingly enough that Brenda mentioned the Ministry of the Future. This is a fabulous book. If you really want to read a great science fiction book that will educate you about this page in particular, please read the Ministry of the Future. We need to protect, preserve and nurture all living things that existing today. We have 150 species becoming extinct every day. That includes plants. That is depending on who you believe. One 10,000 faster than normal. All living things in the future must be considered. We need to think of our grandchildren and their children. We need to think of all species going forward. Humanity again is of not above other species. Future generations have a voice today. And every action we take we need to think is this action regenerative or not? That's even much more restrict than sustainability. But we built up 200 years of debt relative to the planet and we need to work off that debt. So the other thing from E.O. wilson was 50% has to become wilding. The problem with that is you can't just take big chunks to get to 50% like Russia and Canada, the United States, because there's all the microclimates around the equator. So you have to have 50% of all the different climates to be able to do that. That's one of the things that kicks into the population conversation. So conscious non consumption. We are conscious consumers. We need to go to conscious non consumption. Earth Overshoot day is the metric for this. Earth overshoot day should be midnight 12:31. In other words, we have not consumed more than the planet can regenerate within a year. In 2019, it had moved down to 729. Earth Overshoot. And we've been overshooting the reserves we have on the spaceship since 1970. Currently we consume 1.7 Earths a year, meaning we're 70% over the Earth's ability to replenish itself. So conscious non consumption is what we have to do. And I have the URL up here and I have it in this last slide. This is where you can go and do your own footprint. It's astounding to me. I was in March, I took away all my air travel and I got up to November. So it's a way to measure how you can be part of the solution. So I just leave this, the Fork in the Road project, of course, the footprint calculator to where you go to to see what your footprint is. Your carbon footprint is world meters.info that's fabulous. You can see all the changes live real time. Climate Change Resources is probably the biggest obungsman site if you want to learn about climate change. And of course my nonprofit thisspaceshipearth.org to create crew consciousness. Thank you.

All right, thanks very much, David. That was really enlightening. We could speak for another hour, just about another day on this topic. Do we have questions, comments from the other speakers or from the public? Anybody?

One quick question. I'm also conscious of time here, but David Michael Mann, the great climate scientist, is saying over and over and over again that an overemphasis on individual responsibility lets the large institutional actors who are really the source of pollution off the hook. It's an interesting question for the Fork in the Road project. Do we speak mostly to individuals? Do we speak eventually try to speak mostly to institutions? What's your take on that balance of personal responsibility versus speaking to institutions who really are the true drivers of climate change?

So you and I've spoken, Glenn, about nuclear and all that. And I take the position that it's all the above all energy. And the answer to that is these dualities is slowing us down. Should it be personal, it should be both crew Consciousness, the corporate level, crew consciousness at the individual level. Individuals always say, what I do matter. Well, if you are part of the crew and the crew becomes a billion people, then it matters in the aggregate. But however we believe we've made changes, we are worse off in 2021 and all aspects of facing the climate crisis than we were 10 years ago. And yet we've been talking about it, but we're arguing, should it be wind, should it be solar, should it be nuclear, should it be. It's all of the above. The answer is yes to all aspects. That's the point of the fork in the road project is urgency. I know we got time short. I'd love to take further questions, put them in the chat. But back to you, Gerd.

Yeah, please, put them in chat. I just want to add one more thing before we go to Bronwyn finally for the crowning departure. Basically there is good news. And the good news is this. COVID 19 was a test run for climate change and many things that we've gotten used to With COVID 19 we'll have to do that again and much more so than ever before. And now around the world, especially in Europe, you know, I get the feeling that people are finally saying, it's real, it's coming, we got to take action. We can't miss this again like we did with the pandemic. And that is really making a huge difference. We are going to go full scale into climate action later this year. That I'm convinced of that. And I do hope that we can just contribute a tiny piece of momentum to this. Okay, so let's move on to Bronwyn. Thanks very much for being here, Bronwyn. And Glenn is going to make the intro.

Yeah, I'll just say just a few things about Bronwyn. Thank you for being here, Bronwyn. William's from Johannesburg, South Africa. We're very happy that she had time to join us. Bronwyn is a young economist, trend analyst and futurist. She's a partner in a company called Flux Trends. She's the co author of a book that just came out last in the last few weeks, the Future Starts now, published by Bloomsbury. If you follow Bronwyn on social, you discover two things. Number one, she's extremely busy, extremely in high demand for the presentations. But more importantly, the reason I think that she's in high demand is that she rarely spouts a typical futurist cliche. She's always challenging the edge and pushing our thinking beyond, beyond where we normally are. So I'm very interested to hear what Bronner is going to share with us from the perspective of Johannesburg of Africa and her view on what's needed in the economy. You're on.

Thank you so much. Can you enable screen sharing so I can show you the images? Otherwise I'm happy to talk without them. Fantastic. Thank you so much. Hey. So we've heard views from very various different people today and I think that I want to start off with exactly what you said. I don't do a bit of a tip going back to St. Augustine and what he says with Hope has two beautiful daughters, Courage and anger. And I think that we need both of those things if we want to have a better future coming on board over the next while. I'm also very conscious that on this call I'm representing basically the global south and really the younger half of the world's population. And I'm not that young and I'm also not that diverse when you look at me. So I'm very conscious of trying to represent that broader pictures to some of these questions that we are trying to grapple with as we try to build a future that is both sustainable and hopeful, a future that we actually want to live in. And I think that one of the first things that we can definitely look at is that our social contract at the moment is simply not working for anyone. We've got mass protests going on across the world. You can see I just pulled a few images here. From everywhere, from Asia to, to America, it's Europe to South Africa, we have protests every single day. And it really does show that the status quo that we've built is simply not working for everyone. But worse than that, it's working in such a way that the winners keep on winning bigger and losers keep on losing harder. So we see inequality increasing both in terms of individuals, rich people getting richer, poor people getting poorer. Also in terms of the size and power of different nation states, once again, it seems the winners get to win bigger. They get to play according to slightly different rules. And also when it comes to corporations and to the sort of strata in society as we definitely seeing that bigger businesses, particularly over the last year, have got to win a whole lot more, whereas a lot of smaller businesses, particularly those that employ people in the middle class, have been essentially squeezed out of the marketplace, leading to this awful effect of the K shaped economy, which is really just a whole perpetuation of vicious and virtuous cycles. So winners keep winning, losers keep losing, and that is hugely destabilizing that is not a way to build a society that particularly young people can get excited about. If you want people to work towards a better future, you have to get them two things. You have to get them the agency to speak up and to do something about it. And you also have to equip them with the knowledge that they are able to use that agency in order to change the future. And that does require giving people hope again. And I think that that is the one big thing that's missing from a lot of our conversations. Even the presentations we've heard today, as much as heard was starting off today saying we want to make this exciting, we want to be hopeful about the future. We still seem to be stuck in a lot of our conversations about the problems that we have, the problems that we know about, social unsustainability, environmental unsustainability. And unfortunately, what does tend to sort of disturb me about the discourse that comes out when we try and grapple with these problems is how many of the solutions are asking future generations. And I'm speaking here once again as someone who lives in Africa, where all population growth is really going to come from by the end of the century. The constant that's going to have to deal with the consequences of the choices that we make as a global community. A lot of the conversations are essentially asking young Africans and young Asians and the young global south to make do with less than what the less the rest of the world is already enjoying here today. And I really want to challenge that thinking. So as important as that whole donut economics model really is, and as much as we have to keep that in mind, the fact that we have to operate within our resource bounds, we absolutely have to do that. There's not a negotiation there. At the same time, you also need to make sure that no one's being left behind, that everybody gets to enjoy in progress and growth as we go forward, I think it'd be a huge disadvantage for us to forget about the possibility of growth going forward. So things like anti population conversations and degrowth economics disturb me deeply. Because the very thought that I have to pass on a future to my young daughter that is going to be somehow less than the world that we have right now is to me a huge failure in society. And I think we have to do better than that. We have to be having conversations about how we can grow our doughnut using all the amazing things we have available to us. After all, that is what progress is supposed to be, doing more with less. And that does require us to focus on growth and Sustainability, not either or. So that's really the message that I want to put across. Because the alternative is we starting to promise people things like these ideas of fully automated luxury communism. So I'm using this. It is quite a bit of an exaggeration, but a lot of the conversations around de growth are very much to do with redistribution and promising people that they will have to give up some agency, some privacy, and in exchange they'll get more essentially free goods and services, more security, and more controls over their lives. But in reality, if we are pushing things like de growth, what we're going to get is not a fully automated luxury communism Jetsons utopia like the science fictioners of years past were promising, but more something more disturbing if we actually think about it. If we are framing our thoughts to be smaller rather than bigger, we are going to be facing more competition over scarce resources. Because that is of course, the flip side of any sort of degrowth means there's going to be more competition and more conflict over what is left behind. And the alternative, there is a much more sort of, please, so can I have some more world where more and more of our resources, our power, our money is concentrated into fewer and fewer hands, be they in the private sector or the public sector. I don't see a big difference between the net effect for the citizens of the world going forward who are having to essentially give up a lot of the autonomy over their own life in exchange for some sort of a handout that is determined, determined by a small elite group. And that is a feature that I want to walk away from. And the challenge for me to do that, therefore, is to put the future back into everyone else's hands. And to say that I would love to hear more conversations about how we can have both growth and sustainability. Not necessarily conspicuous consumption driven growth, but more creative driven growth. Because growth for me is really just working towards a world where creating quality of life improves for more people over the long term, using all the talents, all the technologies, all the ideas that we have available to us as a growing global community. That is of course, the beautiful thing about people. Economies that have higher population growth rates do tend to have more ideas and to be more prosperous for some reason. And societies where they do start to have the opposite effects do tend to tend to have shrunk horizons and also more conflict in a sense of darkening futures. And I definitely want to guard against that. I would love to hand a shinier, brighter, more prosperous future with wider horizons open to my daughter and hopefully one day my descendants too.

Wow. Yeah, that is great. Let's get some questions. I mean, I'm totally with you on the degrowth thing. You know, I think we have abundance in our future and I always say that we can solve all those human problems like energy, water, food and so on, but we have to make the right decisions. That's kind of like my take on it on the degrowth scenario. But anyway, let's get somebody else speaking here apart from myself. So guys, any questions, any comments? Brenda, Philip, don't be shy.

I completely agree. I think we have conscious non consumption. We have to decouple how we measure our success away from gdp. We have to move to the happiness. We have to move for feeling of self awareness and humanity first. That's what democracy should be about. Not so much knocking down economy, economic growth, but changing it to make it more human. Humanity first rather than economics first.

We need to make sustainability sexy again. Right? We've got to make sustainability something that is a true attractive and not something that is essentially a narrative around taking things away from people. And that's a PR problem. I think a lot of the greatest ideas in the world have the worst marketing departments.

Brown 1. I couldn't agree more. Sustainability is a meaningless word unless it's at the global level. You can have a sustainable city, but it doesn't change the climate. You have to have sustainability at a global level. It has to be. And that's what the fork in the road is, to create a global sense of planetary sustainability.

Well, you know, I think I really.

Like Bronwyn's argument, which I'm very pleased that you made, Bronwyn, that the concept of degrowth is sort of a luxury for the wealthy. What we typically call the western world when the rest of the world is not attracted to that. What you're really talking about is a world of sustainable improvement. Maybe we don't use the term growth, but sustainable improvement and a much more wider distribution, even an equal distribution of that improvement. That's an image that's really compelling. Phil, got your hand up there? Yes. Take your mute off.

Yeah.

Brenda as well, I think. Later. Go ahead.

Okay. I think one of the basic problems has been mentioned and that has to do with the unequal distribution of. Of income, the growing gap of income and wealth. There's no doubt in my mind that we can't be passive about the need to legislate something to make more money available to people who don't have money. It would lead of course, to much more growth. We wouldn't even worry. We wouldn't worry about are we growing only 2%? If we had more money in the hands of more people and fewer in the hands of a few people, we would have the kind of growth and happy. We would generate much more happiness and health for more people in the world. So what can we do about that? I have an article listing 10 tax solutions to that problem. But that means interfering with the lives of a lot of people who have a lot of money. And it's the old moving around money from the wealthy to those who are not so wealthy. But I think we have to face that problem.

And Brendan, did you want to. Thank you, Phil. Brendan, you want to chime in?

I want to double agree on the fact that we have to solve the K shaped problem. I think that's significant and I really think it's very, very important that we don't make it about rich countries versus poor countries. It's very important that we acknowledge the importance of everyone. And Bronwyn, thank you for bringing that up. I think that was a critical thing to get into this conversation. And a real quick comment I want to make to a number of the commenters out there. I don't think at this point we've had a fascinating discussion about climate or about population, but I don't think we know the answer. I mean, I think what we're trying to work on is how urgent it is to try to figure out what are the right answers as we solve for a number of these other problems that may help us solve for population.

Frankly, the one thing I'd like to say is a quote from Gandhi. We have the capability to take care of everybody's needs, but we don't have the capability to take care of everybody's greed.

Well, now that it's quoting time, let me add my own quote from Henry Miller, which I love Henry Miller's book. He says one's destination is never a place but a new way of seeing things. And this fits the Fork Project so perfectly. Right. We want to provide a new way for people to see things and that is hopefully going to accelerate change. So I think that is sort of the tagline that fits the Fork Project with that.

Gerd, I'm going to toss it back to you and just I'm going to say closing comment and I'll toss it back to you to say sort of what comes next and accessibility of this video and so on if that's okay. And then we'll wrap it up because I know we're over the hour. For those of you who read the Manifesto and hopefully signed it. And again, I encourage you to do so. You might have noticed at the very end of the manifesto we quote another very influential and important futurist, Barbara Marks Hubbard, who was a friend of mine, but much more than that. She was a dear friend of Buckminster Fuller and a protege of Buckminster Fuller. And she wrote and these are the words we can the manifesto with. And it's kind of the point of the conversation we were having today as we see our future. So we act as we act, so we become. And I think what we're doing at the Folk Project in part is attempting us to see alternatives for the future that would take us toward a good future, in the words of gerd. So we hope to continue this kind of work and gerd's going to talk a little bit more about what might might come next. And thank you very much to all the speakers and to all of you attending. Thank you.

All right, thanks very much. First of all, I want to apologize again for the YouTube confusion. We'll fix that problem next time. We'll probably just use Zoom directly. This video will be made available on YouTube in sort of an edited way, make it look a little bit better very soon. So give it a day or two. Please sign up for the mailing list if you're not already on the mailing list. Fork in the road. Project.com has a mailing list and of course, the manifesto. The Faulkner Road Project is a collective. It is not funded. It is completely run voluntarily with voluntary time spent and money spent on whatever we are doing here. And at this point, it's truly sort of a tribe is probably the best word for it, nothing else. And we are still formulating sort of the consensus on many things. And we look forward to getting more opinions from you and more members. The way you can help us right now is simply this. Sign the manifesto. If you agree, spread the word about the manifesto on a global level. Tell other people about it. So we get more people to sign up and stick around for the newsletter and stuff, because we're going to have more public events probably once a month, and also member only events, which we're starting next month, where all of the signatories, which we'll call members, now get together and talk about one issue. So we're looking to create real value for the members there as well as for the public. And again, our emphasis is storytelling, narrative, hopeful, optimistic, not totally naive, but optimistic and looking for a good future and the bright future. So that's all I have to say. I want to thank you very much for participating, all of you. Also, this speakers. I know this is really unusual that people who are amazing speakers and longtime speakers and futurists actually contribute to events like this just by wanting to do it. So that includes myself and everybody else who's there. So thanks very much. Any other comments from anybody else or. No? Yeah, Glenn. No, he wants to say goodbye. Okay. Well, we're going to wave goodbye then. And thanks so much for being here, and we'll see you down the road. Live long and prosper. Bye. This is Gert Leonhardt, Futurist. Thanks for listening to my podcast. Check out my videos@gerdtube.com on YouTube.