Whose Century Is It?: Ideas, trends & twists shaping the world in the 21st century

If you like Whose Century Is It?, check out this preview of my new limited series podcast with the Global Reporting Centre, On China's New Silk Road. I've teamed up with great local journalists on almost every continent to explore how China's global ambition is seen around the world, and at the impact Chinese investments in one of the biggest global infrastructure efforts ever, are having on the ground. 

Next time you sip your tea or bite into a bar of chocolate, or load up your grocery cart with other treats, spare a thought for the underpaid or unpaid workers who made it possible. Modern slavery comes in many guises, and politics professor Genevieve LeBaron of the University of Sheffield in England, who's done field studies on the subject, is here to tell you how it happens, and what you might want to look out for as you shop.

We're pretty clever, we humans, but we ignore unintended consequences at our peril -- like climate change, after a couple of centuries of fossil fuel-driven growth and innovation. Can we innovate our way out of that growing crisis, or must we cut back and conserve if we want a habitable planet? Or both? Science journalist and author Charles Mann, author of 1491, 1493 and The Wizard & the Prophet, tells the tale of these two competing approaches through the lives of the 'wizard,' Norman Borlaug, father of the Green Revolution, and the 'prophet,' William Vogt, early ecologist and author of the hugely impactful 1948 book, Road to Survival. 

In the imagined world of novelist Eliot Peper's near-term future in such books as Bandwidth and Borderless, San Diego's burning, polar ice caps have melted, everyone's got their heads in their digital feeds, and a powerful social media company called Commonwealth controls --well, seems like just about everything. Eliot talks to host Mary Kay Magistad about writing speculative fiction, about the value of sci fi in helping us all think through current crises and possible futures, and about what sci fi has seen coming, and what it's gotten just plain wrong. 

Embedded in each language is a reflection of life as lived by its speakers, over thousands of years. And when a language disappears, that embedded knowledge is lost. As the world grows more connected, and as dominant cultures push their own languages for wider use – think English, Chinese and Arabic, for starters -- languages are disappearing. As many as half the world's 7,000 languages may be gone by the end of the century. The good news is that linguists are on it, like this episode’s guest Laura Welcher, who oversees the Long Now Foundation’s Rosetta Project in San Francisco.

Not so long ago, Myanmar (Burma) was a good news story, with democratic reforms, a booming economy and falling poverty rates. Then came ugly military-led attacks on Rohingya Muslims, who killed, raped and burned houses, and forced more than 700,000 Rohingyas to flee to camps in Bangladesh, with little pushback from pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi. What does this mean for Myanmar's democratic future? Khin Ohmar, an exiled Burmese human rights and democracy activist for 30 years, shares her thoughts.

What happens when you mix the efficiency and energy of the entrepreneurial world with the idealism of philanthropy? A growing number of social entrepreneurs say, you can do a world of good. But just like real entrepreneurs, more such efforts fail than succeed, and both smarts and resilience are needed for the long haul. Jonathan Lewis, author of The Unfinished Social Entrepreneur and founder of the microcredit funder MCE Social Capital and cofounder of Copia, a kind of mail-order catalogue for poor women around Nairobi, shares what he's learned over years as a social entrepreneur. 

Can China become a global leader in innovation by protecting state-run companies from competition at home, while acquiring innovative companies abroad? Can that innovation be sustained in a society where free speech and intellectual inquiry is sharply curtailed? China's leaders are betting on it, and in this episode, journalist-turned-business analyst Jim McGregor, chairman of APCO Greater China, mulls over the odds.

Populist leaders and strongmen often rise at times of dizzying, unsettling change. But what if that's exactly the wrong kind of leadership to face the challenges and seize the opportunities of this century? Futurist Bob Johansen argues the era ahead will be one with less hierarchy, more shared and shifting leadership, and clarity and agility will be rewarded, while rigid certainty will be punished. 

Breathe in. Breathe out. The oxygen that keeps you going, that keeps life going on earth, comes in part from the vast Amazon rainforest, most of which is in Brazil. Lush, vast and rich in biodiversity, it is the lungs of the planet. But it also attracts miners, loggers, farmers and developers who, over the past 40 years, have contributed to reducing forest cover by some 20 percent. Foreign investors have played a role too -- American, European and now, Chinese.  Many dams have been built. Hundreds more are planned, to create power to drive further development in the Amazon, creating short-term profits, but at what cost to the planet? Speeding climate change, and losing species are only the start of it. Host Mary Kay Magistad travels in the Amazon with Jon Watts, environment editor with The Guardian newspaper, and author of When a Billion Chinese Jump: How China will save mankind, or destroy it, to explore the complicated present and uncertain future of the Amazon, and what it may mean for all of us.