Description:

Today we are talking about the Future.

What then of our future? Yours and mine. How do we, as a society, think about the future? How do we think about our future becoming better for more people? How might we think, plan, and work towards the kind of worlds we want - rather than the kind of worlds we just stumble upon?

Well, on today's show we talked to some people who wake up to these kinds of questions every day.

We'll start with a conversation that we had one-afternoon last week, in an unusually warm boardroom in downtown Montreal. We joined a conference call with a few of the folks working at Policy Horizons - namely Marcus Ballinger and Pierre-Olivier Desmarchais. 

Next up is our conversation with Dr. Andrew Merrie from the Stockholm Resilience Centre. We spoke with him about his project, Radical Ocean Futures, which uses science fiction prototyping and mixed media to imagine multiple futures, based on emerging research into oceans.

Music featured in this episode:

• Intro " R U Well" by Best Fern
• Outro "Plans fall through" by Alexia Avina
• Back from the Brink, Life Underwater, The Last Fisherman, by K. La Luna for the Radical Oceans Futures Project
• Various sound effects include "Ambiance, Creepy Wind" by InspectorJ

The people interviewed in this episode are:

• Pierre-Olivier Desmarchais is a policy researcher at Policy Horizons, a think-tank in the federal government of Canada's public service with the mandate "to identify emerging policy issues and explore policy challenges and opportunities for Canada, as well as to help build foresight literacy and capacity across the Government of Canada." He is also a PhD candidate in law at Laval University where his doctoral thesis class="graf graf--li graf-after--li">Marcus Ballinger is Senior Policy Adviser at Environment and Climate Change Canada, currently on assignment at Policy Horizons. He has 20 years of experience in international affairs and policy related to multilateral environmental agreements, trade and development.
• Dr. Andrew Merrie finished his PhD in Sustainability Science at the Stockholm Resilience Centre, based at Stockholm University, in 2016 and currently works as a communications officer at the Centre. He's one of the principal authors of the Radical Ocean Futures project which seeks to "explore tools that can help us to think creatively and imaginatively about our future oceans and assess how unexpected changes, along with human responses to those changes, may play out in a complex world that is, at its heart, surprising." You can read more about it in WIRED Magazine here or even in Nature!

A few things referenced in the show

Worth visiting:

• Check out those flying taxis
• Reddit Science AMA: Radical Ocean Futures
• K. La Luna (aka Dr. Kaitlyn Rathwell) website
• Simon Stålenhag's website
• The Bono of Futurism
• Our bet for the next (& best) Disney Princess? That's right: "Pirate Queen" Ching Shih.

Recommended reading

From Horizons:

• Canada 2030: Scan of Emerging Issues-Sustainability
• What if… the Internet of Things facilitated the circular economy?
• What if… self-driving cars were the new mass transit solution for cities?
• What if… consumers took more extreme measures to help build sustainable behaviour?
• Behavioural Insight Brief: The role of narrative in public policy

From Radical Ocean Futures:

• In the scientific journal Futures, "Radical ocean futures-scenario development using science fiction prototyping" (2017)
• The super-duper cool profile of Andrew Merrie in WIRED magazine

Did you miss that show we mentioned on Transdisciplin-whatnow?

• Wondering what transdisciplinarity actually means? Check out our second show, we have some answers.