Designing 2050:
Toolkits for our
young EcoWarriors
Dr Peter Ellyard
Shaping your own future and our world’s
future. I am dedicating this column in this issue,
and the ones that will follow, to the young warriors in our movement.
You and your older mentors and supporters are bonded together by our shared commitment to build a more sustainable and livable future for all. There are still many people who
still believe that we can’t either predict the future or even
shape it. I have dedicated my working life to developing toolkits so that we can, indeed, better predict and shape the future, and over successive issues of SwitchOn Magazine I will
show you how to do this well. This includes you becoming
the best person you can be, so you can thrive – both you as
an individual, and to help other people and species to thrive
as well.
Some of these will assist us to harvest the sun better for
our energy so we do not need to use fossil fuels at all, or
turn all our waste into industrial resources that can be reused, thereby abolishing waste as a concept completely.
Others will help us to act without harming the environment
Throughout your lives you will be able to contribute best to or ourselves while we are acting.
assist our future world to become more prosperous, sustainable and livable, if you yourself are able to make wise and Indeed my definition of a sustainable action is doing
successful choices about your own future life and career path. something without causing net harm to the environThere are many who believe that the future mostly happens ment.
to us and we cannot really shape it. These are what I call future-takers. All of us should become resilient future -takers
for there will always be some things that the future will deliver to us that will be beyond our control. However we can
be future-makers as well. And we can set to be, and become,
purposeful future-makers. In a play by George Bernard Shaw
‘Back to Methuselah’, the serpent says this: You see things
and you say, Why? I dream things that never were and I say,
Why not!
Imagination is our route to the future, as much as memory is our route to the past. More than 70% of the jobs
and products and services that will available in twenty
years when you are young adults have yet to be invented.
As I will show in future columns we can, even now, talk about
what these jobs, products and services might be. Many of
these will help us build a sustainable future.
My definition of a healthy action on the other hand is doing something without causing net harm to oneself. I use
the word ‘net’ to say that sometimes we can cause damage,
though if we can still fix this up it is still OK. In our current
world we can’t yet do most of this, but in the future, and
probably in your lifetimes, we will become superb at accomplishing all of this.
Most of you who will make such a future a reality will not
only be very aware of your capacity to harm the environment
but will also be smart and knowledgeable enough to invent
new ways of avoiding net harm to the environment, thereby
prospering economically while you are also doing both ecological and social good.
The future engineer, designer , writer, artist , economist and
the entrepreneur will, amongst others, help us create a sustainable and healthy future and because they will be creating
innovations by dreaming of inventions, products and services,
that so far, never were, and by saying why not!
In my next column I will discuss how you can build a thriving
life and career path for yourselves that will also allow you to
become better environmental heroes and warriors as well.
SBN welcomes our National Patron, Dr Peter Ellyard, as regular contributor for this new feature ‘Designing
2050’. Dr Ellaryd is Chairman of the Preferred Futures Institute and is one of Australia’s most renowned
Futurists. He is known for his unique perspectives on, and as a speaker about, global trends and emerging
global markets, and for his concepts and tools that enable individuals, organisations, communities & nations
to become more effective shapers of their futures.
20 SwitchOn