Futures Beyond Dystopia: Creating Social Foresight (2004)

psychics and scientists, all want a glimpse of tomorrow. Well, so do I, which is to say, we are all human. One of the great difficulties with Futures Studies is that it is the future of human beings we are particularly interested in, and in order to understand the future of humans, we obviously must understand their present. For us to better understand what might be, we have to better understand what is, and odd as it sounds, our understanding of the what is of humanity has, until recently, been something of a disaster. But without an adequate map of the present, our maps of tomorrow simply amplify and exaggerate the gaps in today’s understanding (as the briefest examination of past predictions will quickly demonstrate). The point is that to better forecast tomorrow, we must better understand today. Enter Integral Futures Studies. ‘Integral ’ means ‘comprehensive ’ or ‘inclusive’. In the past few decades, a concerted effort on the part of numerous researchers has resulted in what many believe to be the first comprehensiv