Interview With Jamais Cascio Of Worldchanging and Open the Future. May 7th, 2008 E-mail to a friend
(www.openthefuture.com)
Jamais Cascio is a writer, ethical futurist and co-founder of WorldChanging. He also blogs at Open the Future.
He is a Global Futures Strategist for the Center for Responsible
Nanotechnology, a Fellow at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging
Technologies, and a Research Affiliate at the Institute for the Future.
Jamais was a natural person to ask about the Future of Green.
gThink: How do you see cities and suburban sprawl changing to meet the incoming wave of green technology?
Jamais Cascio: I expect three big categories of change, each at different speeds:
*
Cross-migration, meaning the re-emergence of the city as the
residential center for the middle class and the simultaneous move of
lower-income families from the cities to the hollowed-out suburbs.
Think gentrification on a massive scale, along with the shift in income
and tax base that it provides. This is already happening, and will
likely accelerate.
* The rise of the green refit
industry—companies and contractors who specialize in taking a
pre-Inconvenient Truth home and making it much more energy-efficient.
Especially because of the slow-down/slump/collapse in the housing
market, the demand for remaking what you already have should outpace
the demand for something new. This isn't happening much, yet, but green
building contractors are starting to pay closer attention.
*
Redesign of urban/suburban spaces, including housing density and
transportation networks. Because of the first category, this won't
happen in the suburbs as fast as it needs to. The cities, conversely,
could see a renaissance.
GT: How are new car and energy technologies going to change the way we live?
JC: There's
a reason why cars are so popular, and it's not just the machinations of
the auto industry. Cars provide a set of services not readily replaced
by our current models of public and non-auto personal transit. I
explore this in some depth here.
As
for energy, I think the big change will come from the proliferation of
solar-power polymer materials. Once we can make nearly any product a
source of energy—whether or not it becomes entirely self-charging—it
changes how we think of both our built environment and our energy usage.
GT: Is the recession going to make this a moot point?
JC: For
a while. One under-appreciated benefit of a recession is that, because
of the reduced manufacturing and work travel, carbon emissions tend to
decline.
GT: What's the
next step for the green movement? As consumers tire of false claims and
attention drifts elsewhere, how do we evolve the movement to make sure
that it stays, well, sustainable?
JC: I
think the next step for the green movement is to get away from the
hard-to-define concept of sustainability and focus more on
resilience—the capacity to withstand unexpected shocks. Sustainability
depends on knowing where your demands and costs are in order to meet or
reduce them; resilience is better for uncertain futures, because the
concept is predicated on flexibility.
GT: What do you think the next ten years hold for green? What are the changes that we need to anticipate?
JC: In
the best scenario, the next ten years for green is the story of its
disappearance. Not that it goes away, mind you, but that it becomes
nearly invisible in its ubiquity. How often do we take note that our
building has electricity, or lighting? We rightly assume that any
modern building is going to include such obvious and necessary
components. I'd like to see green take that same path, becoming so
critical that we start to assume its presence, and only notice when
it's absent.
The most likely scenario doesn't go quite that far.
It's something of a cycle between "green is a fad" and "green is
fundamental," with public attention triggered by events such as
legislation passing, cool new technologies, and major climate/weather
events.
I don't want to see this, but it should be noted that
there's also a scenario where the combination of industry
counter-pressure, weak policymakers, and mass media only able to focus
on one thing at a time results in the decline of green awareness... at
least until the next big disaster wakes us up again, by which time it
may well be too late.
