United States Department of Agriculture Ten Principles for Thinking about the Future: a Primer for Environmental Professionals David N. Bengston Preferred Future Expected Future Environmental High Tech Collapse Transformation Present Historical Roots of the Future Forest Service Northern Research Station General Technical Report NRS-175 December 2017 Abstract Every decision we make is about the future, but most of us are never taught how to think critically about it. This guide addresses this issue by identifying and reviewing 10 principles for thinking about the future, along with related strategies for improving environmental foresight. The principles and strategies are drawn from the transdisciplinary field of futures studies. Taken together, these principles and strategies can help guide environmental planners, managers, and policy makers toward well-considered expectations for the future. The Author DAVID N. BENGSTON is a research social scientist and environmental futurist with the U.S. Forest Service, Northern Research Station, 1992 Folwell Avenue, St. Paul, MN 55108, [email protected]. Acknowledgments The author thanks George Kubik, Andy Hines, Lynne Westphal, and an anonymous reviewer for many helpful comments and suggestions on an earlier version of this paper. Cover Art Tree with limbs representing plausible futures. Artwork by Haley Anderson, used with permission. Quality Assurance This publication conforms to the Northern Research Station’s Quality Assurance Implementation Plan which requires technical and policy review for all scientific publications produced or funded by the Station. The process included a blind technical review by a reviewer who was selected by the Assistant Director for Research and unknown to the author. This review policy promotes the Forest Service guiding principles of using the best scientific knowledge, striving for quality and excellence, maintaining high ethical and professional standards, and being responsible and accountable for what we do. Manuscript received for publication 8 August 2017 Published by For additional copies: U.S. FOREST SERVICE U.S. Forest Service 11 CAMPUS BLVD SUITE 200 Publications Distribution NEWTOWN SQUARE PA 19073 359 Main Road December 2017 Delaware, OH 43015-8640 Fax: (740)368-0152 Email: [email protected] CONTENTS Introduction ............................................................................................................. 1 1. The Future is Plural ............................................................................................ 3 2. The Future is Possible, Plausible, Probable, and Preferable ................ 5 3. The Future is Open ............................................................................................ 7 4. The Future is Fuzzy ............................................................................................ 8 5. The Future is Surprising .................................................................................10 6. The Future is Not Surprising .........................................................................11 7. The Future is Fast ..............................................................................................13 8. The Future is Slow ............................................................................................15 9. The Future is Archetypal ................................................................................16 10. The Future is Inbound ..................................................................................18 Conclusions ............................................................................................................19 Literature Cited .....................................................................................................21 General Technical Report NRS-175 Page intentionally left blank “[A]ll decisions are about the future.” ~ Kenneth Boulding (1973: v) INTRODUCTION Whether you agree or disagree with these visions of the environmental future, their influence has been History is a required subject in school, and rightly so. felt for generations. But these legacy futures may not We need to understand the forces that have shaped the reflect our relationship with nature today, let alone the past and present. History is taught from elementary many possibilities for a significantly different future school through college. Some environmental and relationship with nature in a rapidly changing world. natural resource professionals have even had a course in environmental history. But very few have had In addition to legacy futures, our thinking about the a single class—or even a short course—in futures future is often saddled with views of the future as frozen studies or strategic foresight. Most have never heard in the “permanent present,” in part due to our brain’s of these terms. We have not been taught principles for hard-wiring, which makes it difficult to imagine real thinking about the future or strategies for improving change (Sommers 2012). As the renowned economist foresight, despite the critical importance of clear John Maynard Keynes (1937: 13) said: “[T]he idea forward thinking for our personal, professional, of the future being different from the present is so organizational, and societal success. Every decision repugnant … that we, most of us, offer a great resistance we make is about the future, every policy and plan is to acting on it in practice.” Peck (2009) asserts that one based on implicit or explicit assumptions about the of the most important challenges we face is to open future, but the vast majority of students in educational people’s minds to the idea that the present and the systems around the world are never taught how to recent past may not largely define the future. think critically about it (Bishop and Hines 2012, Lum 2016). Instead, we develop intuitions about the future Lacking formal training in thinking about the future, informally through popular culture, which is filled being immersed in outdated images, and being stuck in with fanciful and recycled images and ideas. These the permanent present, we acquire ideas and intuitions have been called legacy futures (Cascio 2012) and used about the future in a haphazard way and end up with futures (Inayatullah 2008)—ideas that emerged decades defective mental maps of the future. These maps are ago and are stuck in our heads as default images. limited and often counterproductive. Many individuals Legacy futures related to nature and natural resource and organizations rely on narrow, idiosyncratic, and management derive from many sources, including backward-looking views of the future. Common but classic environmental literature. Persistent images of the unhelpful ways of thinking include seeing the future future of nature and our relationship with the natural as predictable, a dice game, scary and unknowable, world include: unchanging, or predetermined. These modes of thought are inadequate for the complex and changing world we • The dismal assessment of the future of live in today. Environmental decisionmakers require population growth and agricultural production high-quality foresight to successfully deal with the of Thomas Malthus (1798), growing pace and complexity of change. Lum (2016: vii) defines foresight as “insight into how and why the • John Muir’s 19th-century preservationist vision future will be different from today.” Developing robust (Muir 1997), foresight requires a type of critical thinking that is the • The utilitarian preferred future of Gifford focus of this paper. Pinchot (1947), • The biologically impoverished dystopia of This paper reviews and synthesizes core principles for Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962), thinking about the future and related strategies for developing environmental foresight. These principles • Julian Simon’s cornucopian dream of limitless and strategies are drawn from the transdisciplinary natural resources (Simon 1981), and field of futures studies (Bengston et al. 2012, Cook et • The Club of Rome’s models of resource depletion al. 2014) and the large body of work of academic and and limits to growth (Meadows et al. 1972). consulting futurists. The principles distill what leading 1 futurists have learned through decades of study from not a comprehensive review, but it is based on a wide a variety of disciplinary perspectives and theoretical reading and synthesis of the futures research literature. frameworks. For more than 50 years, futurists and allied There is some overlap in the strategies presented scholars in other disciplines have thought deeply and because many are applicable to more than one principle. creatively about the nature of the future, developed There is also a degree of paradox in some of the many insights about change that shapes the future, and principles because the future often unfolds on multiple created practical strategies and methods for developing paths that contain paradox and contradiction (May useful foresight. 1996). Taken together, the principles and strategies described here can help guide environmental planners, The following sections outline 10 principles for thinking managers, and policy makers toward well-considered about the future along with a set of strategies to apply expectations for the future. each principle to planning and decisionmaking. This is 2 “It is important that the future be seen as a number of possible alternatives. Futures, not future.” ~ Eleonora Masini (1993b: 8) 1. THE FUTURE IS PLURAL The Principle A core principle for thinking