the studio with me this morning good morning margery good morning says ham and you have a guest who is quite well known i think to our listeners i imagine so i don't see is here with us and he's a well known futurist step to vist and author and we're particularly interested to talk to him about his latest book journey to the future good morning nice to be with you margery so journey to the future has a subtitle too doesn't it what's the rest of it a better world is possible  that like to think this program is about it's about changes for the better because there is no question that we are all facing a multitude of challenges and i can't think of one since i read your book you didn't  as you were working through everything there so what i'm going to do first of all is to use the opportunity that we really help with authors and ask you a bit about how you came to your point of view about the world and the change needs to happen and quite quickly well oh my goodness marjorie that really has to go back to my teenage years i would think so yes i have been an activist for social change ever since i left school and the number one question in my mind when i was at school in england from the age of sixteen sort of seventeen eighteen was why does it seem that nature seems to be harmonious and sort of peaceful and organized and humans seem to be a mess  two million years old in china but also being a jesuit so he actually came to a new understanding of evolutionary theory which is that soko evolution of material complexity through all the darwinian rules and of consciousness is a greater capacity for consciousness as we get more complexity in our brains of evolution and we're just learning unlike a child falls off a bike when it's learning to ride a bike we make mistakes and we know and so that gave me a sort of whole sense of progress which is much deeper than the enlightenment  progress to do with science and rationality which i'd love as well this went whole a whole way deeper into the whole nature of the evolutionary process and when did you come to understand that you're a big picture thinker who are in the minority i think right by the time i don't you know i was on a hill in southern india literally i was twenty one years old and i understood that this is the unfolding process of evolution including the nature of consciousness spirituality was a pretty big theme and i was going to spend my life writing about it talking  down about it dancing about it singing about it i don't know well except for the dancing so far that will come there's a lot of you know yes right and we've had a pleased to have you in the neighborhood yeah with with all of the big picture thinking that that you've solutions to preventable epidemic not how to cure cancer but how to prevent the courses and that's when we really saw the changes that were happening in epigenetics how can exposure to particular chemicals can change the gene the the the way the genes express themselves so you got the fix genes but they turn on and turn off according to the genetic influences some of which are environmental and can be passed on through two generations and so a grandfather you know being exposed to pesticides can lead the at that's maybe the mindset that lead some people to believe that climate change is a fairy long term thing when actually the statistics that we have show that the current climate change crisis is about know i think the fundamental problem with our understanding climate change is that virtually all of us a very very poorly schooled in ecology so you know you probably could line up the whole cabinet and they couldn't explain the carbon cycle and so so there's just a lack of understanding of how it is that you know a gas like carbon dioxide which is released when you burn fossil fuels traps heat in the atmosphere and how that's always been essential you know because even to understand the past ice ages this is just you know within the last hundred years we began to get understanding of that life you went back to fifteen thousand years the b two kilometers of ice above our heads so all the past climate cycles were caused by natural variations in the orbit of the planets in the stuff around the sun and things like that but now because we're releasing the ocean is being you know midlife cold out of the ocean only four hundred million years ago so you got another you know billion or two years of life evolving in the ocean before that and within one two generations we're just doing this massive wrongness to it because of our failure to understand the ecology what plastic means and to understand the ecology of marine life and fish catch and stuff like that well after the second world war i think people were in a state of euphoria they thought with concrete the great half evil  and they thought now is the time for everybody to get a piece of an ever increasing public eye and that was the big mistake i think that socialism ate you know that's a very interesting north american perspective i grew up in england  and that was not the feeling after world war two the global feeling was oh my god we're exhausted and that was just draining the creativity to do anything new was gong you know and on top of that the there was a new w wasn't one of mass consumerism in europe at that time no it wasn't fifteen years of just recovery rebuild everything from the mess but in north america where no one ever get bombed of course america came out top of that stuff yes the corporations went to town in the whole new realm go to yes  twenty four years old who by the magic of fiction gets to spend four days in the future in the twenty thirty two and yes come thank you for his gone completely hundred percent renewable energy but the global climate crisis is still happening atmosphere environment relationship doesn't require rationing but it's going to be even elizabeth may couldn't come out and say that in public now without the media torrent tearing her to shreds you know us not being famous political people so we can discuss this stuff in a more calm way going out on the farms to grow much more food the sense of the community working together to help each other build the air raid shelters to help each other do stuff so in the book when this is ten years russian in the neighbors are all working together saying you know how can we share our trips in our car let's go to joint  of solar energy that will come on board and in the future it's all over the place when patrick gets the axe the price has fallen so low that everyone's doing you losing a thousand dollars a year if you don't install so well i like the idea that you came up with a pinless way of delivering this information to people when did ever plan ahead the characters are going to emerge you can't actually even plan ahead conversation because one of the delights of writing in this way is that it appears in the process of writing i had massive planning to do once i'm going to ninety years ahead i had to write the history  most of it is local but i'm thinking people are going to be asking questions about the wider world so what's happening in the middle east i thought oh my goodness i haven't even and i thought of that at the time and most people still do think that's the the thorniest political problem on the planet you know they've been at it f territory and starting to go into that deep history and shout what is that what paradise mean in the muslim faith in the jewish faith and so share the history share their music share their spirituality share the values share the hopes for the future and the women started realizing that so much in common at a deeper level in the men has been spending a hundred years using violence and getting absolutely nowhere so they said well it's also have a go sounds a little bit like the irish women and the irish question to the fact that they came together when it's do you think it's really relevant i called a friend in england together talking about peace and reconciliation the two of them you know because from his perspective it was war and in war you kill other soldiers i mean none of you know how many british soldiers kill germans i mean all of them and so understanding specs on one hand is terrorism the other i sees it a civil war say but yeah the progress in the middle east in particular with the interesting insights that's and i dreamt this up initially then i checked it out instead of a one state solution or a two state solution have a federation of israel palestine within that you can have two separate states same as we do within canada then i started searching and lo and behold there are jewish groups supporting that there are muslim groups supporting that palestinians supporting that and the whole constitutions are written for this so using those themes together with the women coming in and be much more dominant i found a way to craft a future solution for isis and the terrorism i just saw the need for a strong alliance of other nations including turkey russia saudi arabia america coming together militarily and you know and then you got to get back to the core problems behind all these disputes and still yes and i still think another purpose behind this book was to give people hope as a platform to work from instead of taking the luxury of giving into despair and it's hugely important i mean i've been giving quite frequent presentations to high schools i get between two hundred four hundred kids in the theater at the gym and right beginning i say when a slide show photo of practical solutions of electric vehicles and solar panels and organic farming and youngsters being here isn't just a change in the world and i asked them again and two hundred hands will go up saying yes i feel hopeful and i'm i'm just showing them photographs and they're not getting the material you're not getting the material they need and teachers come up to me often say well we don't know all this stuff so the teachers are teaching about climate change from the problem perspective this is going to be saleable rise is going to be drought is going to be famine it's all going to be terrible your future is a mess i was teaching social studies in canada grade eleven social studies you know when they brought out a new textbook and it almost broke my heart textbook because it laid out all the problems and it made it look as if that was just you know  and that's just the way life was and it's partly the impulse to critical thinking that goes on in universities and colleges that we go to criticize we go without the impulse to vision and when you stop and think that every single good thing that we've achieved started should stop slave trade that's the analogy somebody we know has recently started to grow up for vancouver island to deal with topics connecting environment and economics yeah that's pretty difficult to do when he gets to the future vancouver in twenty thirty two is that it actually is no longer a capitalist economy at all it's a someone described him it's a green corporative entrepreneurial economy so it's and he has a lot of th a quite a big chunk of the book when he's learning about the new economy and the role of corporation both among you know informing businesses and community groups training young people how to stop businesses in the schools being normal for youngsters at school to have someone come in from chamber of commerce as a mentor to help them start a business and the business of them selves corporate ing to gether putting a small slice of the profits on income into a pool to share in training needs in research and development in joint contracting and all that sort of stuff which is model every every innovation in the book is modeled on something already happening ninety percent of them ninety nine percent so this is modeled on the italian region of a million ramani a south of venice where they make you know lovely cheeses and things like that where they've been doing this coming out of people that have the happiest the highest happiness quotient in the whole of italy so you're combining the process of cooperation with business success and getting everyone wins coming out of it and business is something humans do business is absolutely essential so so if you take away business you really haven't got an economy if you take away business the impulse to take risks and be brave and courageous and put a bunch of money out on some new idea we wouldn't have radio stations we wouldn't have you know vehicles we wouldn't have airplanes every big initiative someone's taken a risk in a capitalist sentence with money the other people are put out willing to lose and right i mean luckily capitalism invented bankruptcy law so that you can you know now you can take a risk without anything standing on the streets in your family as well which is you know you can't afford to do but the transition from capitalism to a new corpus of economy includes key things like what patrick finds is the future corporations operating in  vancouver benefit corporations in a benefit corporation based on what exists today where all twenty benefit corporations in vancouver the key relief requirement on a director is not just to make money come what may but to create a benefit for the community or the environment as well as making a profit so this is what people are calling social enterprise with social enterprises slightly different then you have community ownership and it's it's it's there's other definitions there are a lot of of protecting wildlife or restoring nature whatever it might be and so that changes the legal d n a of at the core of capitalism because if the core of capitalism is a mandate that you must maximize capitalism come what may and the week all over the place we can meet each other in different cultures because previously people lived in little villages and i guess because we're talking pretty globalization and you live in a little village in your ancestors have been there for all we know for ten thousand years and your mind is full of prejudice and impulse basically because do something and yet they would have time to think it through so when people were asked what you want as well stop capitalism or stop greed or if you can't do anything with that now so what patrick discovers when he gets to twenty thirty two is that  been a second big financial crash and in response to that a lot of suffering coming out of it people losing their homes or in the jobs all the normal stuff so there was a desire to do an occupy two point zero number one and people said no no wait a minute i didn't work let's stop and think  those five themes by an a massive amount of community engagement and discussion then they basically put together website called twenty five solutions dr ward g and start then petitioning writing letters getting politicians on board and people looking the saying well this this is really practical stuff  and i was very encouraged to see how many canadians are actually supporting it in a poll that came out in england of all places in britain last week but the what patrick discovers is that is a leap leap leap there of many things like th the there's no student debt whatsoever in the future because all the new practice based on what's being discussed and proposed right now in oregon where you college is free when you finish you pay three percent of your income for the next twenty one years training was universal yes and in order to fund the cost which i didn't really need help with because of us money in the family and there were all these sliding scale things going on but have cabinet ministers people even corporations who don't know what the carbon cycle is is the core of our problem it's you know they just don't understand it a tiny little glimpse from the future that covers this is the patrick discovers that the humpback whales a back feeding in vancouver i love it but the book is locally situated to sit so it's such a pleasure to be able to fish the places and the kinds of people says and there are lots of other things to cover with with guy but do you need to make a station very well i could do that right now and just remind our listeners that you're listening to c h l y one a one point seven f m your listener and student supported campus and community station based in the imo but of course heard everywhere at c h l why dot ca and we'd like to thank everyone who donated to the station during our spring fund drive and of course mention that donations are welcome at any time online at  ca by visiting us at the station and lois lane which is accessible these days or by calling two five zero seven one six three four one zero now there is something  cool special happening in and imo and that is that global village has a pop up store that just opened yesterday i think in ny mo north town center which some people may still think of as mall it's across from pas and jaws the pet store and it'll be open until may twenty eighth in celebration of fair trade month fair trade continues to be one of the most effective ways for us to help fight poverty around the world by supporting people who are providing fair incomes where encouraging solid growth in micro economies in many countries and speaking of cooperatives that guy's just been talking about man of those producers in other countries are cooperatives if i'm not mistaken here right so buying your next scarf chocolate bar wooden spoon still bag reading card or soccer ball could be com or just pop into the store once again not imo north town center right across from the pet store and i just thought i would mention that the david suzuki foundation's campaign to help monarch butterflies includes planting a pollinator friendly garden and this seems like the time of year to do that so you can go to david suzuki dot org what and then click on what you can do to find no ok yes and some place just the last couple of days i picked up a little flyer that said what you can do to help the bees as well so there there's lots going on and this is really a good time of year to look into that so that you can help pollinators in your garden now finally i just thought i would mention a heads up here that you may have received a pale yellow envelope in the mail in the last couple of days that says two thousand and sixteen cents is on it and i just know people who don't open their mail or they toss it aside you know for a while but it turns out that you we have to act on that by may tenth which is just a week from the day when this show goes on the air you have to complete your census form online it's required by law and the  you the coordinates and a secure access code so just it also expects you to be internet savvy and to do it on line and there's a soft hearted comment if you don't want to do that you can write a letter oh my today yes there is i think a toll free phone number that you can well anyway the program that you're listening to is changes and today marjorie's stewart is talking with guy author of journey to the future of a better world is possible something that we all need to shift our thinking towards i think and away from the doom and gloom and it i have led an activist life for fifty years at the community level i don't really like the professional in federal levels which is part of why in an activist life you learn that it's one thing to identify an issue and to rant about it and to vent and to get out of your system but at some point you have to say to yourself what is the alternative and a lot of what our show talks about and tries to support is genuine ecologically sound and humane alternatives to the way things are which are crushing us so what i'd like is a large number of alternatives that your book is offering and in order to do that you had to set up a website because people people who if they're like me they come necessarily figure out where they heard the bit about something or other and they found to that page and it's just there's too much information to cope with with it with notes and and in texas and so on so there actually is a website that you can go to to further explore the issues that that you trip over and it's a very helpful way to become involved in the alternatives the guy is exploring in this hopeful way about the future if we do things right and his written this word cintra p and from tommy which sounds a little bit to giv many people carry as much information in their heads so somehow or other you have to find a way of sharing so that on the web site all of the end of the book is one hundred forty endos the book is full of little numbers which give you references or you can you can see every single getting a biologist and a physicist and they because he says we need to know what this thing is properly to and it's a it's a major breakthrough concept scientifically that happens during the twenty twenties and premised through right ok down to the atoms have rudimentary agency and consciousness and when in the final chapter when this is all being laid out before we g going this is a deep history going right back to the origins of the universe and then central is a of it's like a force which causes old units of existence whether molecule or human to know james lovelock who wrote the god hypothesis and he's basically simply saying that the earth itself is a self regulating ecosystem sort of thing there's been no scientific backup for his theories  apart from the fact that obviously we're all ecologically into tangled and we keep tripping over that we keep finding out that everything is connected everything is you know is all connected but this is this is far bigger than the guy hypothesis in terms of  greater cooperation among themselves for the betterment of the whole so when we seek to stop the slave trade or to stop climate change or to sort of get economic justice or to get peace in the middle east the same impulse the course adams to get together and for is a within is to everything which is integrating the spirituality of our existence with the material form of our existence so which is very powerful in terms of giving us a new story because the absence of a story has been one of the interest and if it individualism and for a long time europeans have talked about north america and latin american certainly talk about north american individualism here and what an obstacle it is to there making local progress but you know this is the joy within seem to be thinking is an individual ism is the the power of confidence and courage that gave us so many brilliant things on the planet the individual people like that whether it's  got a million dollar grants and he's got a whole team and they've developed the optic ation out in the ocean that is stationary in the ocean currents drive the plastic into it and then they stick i'm trying to recycle tony's is working on it so this shit individual is of a sixteen year old saying i can do that and making it happen and that jon secada said what tradition and i'm really saying oh you can't get a career doing that you know but that's what parents should be looking for is who is the person this child was meant to be in the ideal what absolutely absolutely bringing us forth into a full glory but an awful lot of parents saying well you know you go to get it you've got to be an accountant you've got to be a lower you've got to do what i did in the sack process but having one child who's a federal civil servant with the benefit package is a great people struggling coming off welfare who've been you know not having a skilled job because welfare has been totally changed in the future and everyone has basic income what we call citizens income due to a reform of the tax system the abolition of global tax havens more income coming in the federal government more fantasy in the tax system everyone is getting you know seven fifty thousand dollars a month basic guaranteed you know unconditional income which is a call for stability in our lives and the whole housing problem has been eliminated you know this because out of a fundamental belief that everyone has a right to housing and part of the crisis that started this off is the impossibility of living in baquba or of buying a house if it with the cost because projects living in vancouver single stuff and going to the future how they tackle the whole thing by basically housing including inheritance taxes so that because right now two thirds of canadians own property and their parents and property so they will inherit one third don't have property their parents don't own property will never inherit and in victoria vancouver wrong to the gap between owning and not owning is now unbridgeable you can't you know thirty years ago you could choose if you got a job thousand dollars in rent or thousand dollars in mortgage and make the jump and start paying now it's impossible plus the huge pressure on fi i do a certain amount quiff them food sustainability and one of the things that happens is that to first nations approach to food sustainability is completely ignored everything is treated in and so he's he has a justification for not understanding the history the last twenty years so anyway she explains about organic food that well the canadian government got really concerned about the full cost of of conventional chemically based food so they commissioned a study like what percent of the money to farmers to help them through the transition and build up with the today that soil and so the pharmacy the yield is the same if i go again to take over supports i don't have any worry about breast cancer and other kinds of cancer again so why would i not do it so the whole country goes  and with that your limon aging a whole lot of pesticides and things like autism is a big chapter on health care when patrick discovers from molly otherness that autism is on the decline the cancers on the klein and they don't actually know why they never discovered what was causing autism is probably a combination chemistry coming in so a lot of the regular toxic simply pulled out and out of nowhere or to some started to go away let's look at what you hope will come out of people reading this book i'm sure you have wide magnifying glass and my central copy for christmas and and she wrote back after a while and said you know i've been getting pretty doom and gloom about looking at the works i'm no longer able to do much and this is been the most inspirational book i've ever read she said it's restored my faith in humanity  can happen that just they brought back to life and and i when i'm giving talks about this now and i'm doing as many talks as i can people are just so uplifted to see a positive focus on what we can achieve instead of a list of complaints we got to stop this and we got to stop that and exhaust you activists burn out after two years because in an in some way if we just take the negative actually it's an indulgence we can criticize and criticize without doing the homework and thinking ok let's assume i'm in charge was nice to happen what is the future we visualize what is the and and every good thing we've achieved in the past is be premised by having a positive vision of the outcome it's true in spalls it's true in business any olympic champion is visualizing winning all the time so you visualize what we can achieve and people are finding it so uplifting and powerful and and positive because and it's also integrating the environmental challenges with the social and economic economic challenges with the crisis a meaning that's going on with people wonder what's happening and the crisis of loneliness and despair that's going on because it's so much community building where people are coming together on the street working together having potlucks together having street parties together endless all small groups and this sense of people becoming isolated and lost and despairing which is real and happening but it doesn't get newspaper headlines this is tackled because a real resurgence of community you have made reference to affordable housing to you and there are some extraordinary things happening around the world and within canada the city of medicine where they've dealt with homelessness by simply building housing there's a philosophy called housing first and you have the state of utah where they take empty houses and give them to people who in utah first principle that medicine how to doctor is that forgets about the problem about drunkenness and drugs and mental issues first get someone into a home then we can work with them to address the personal distress issues they have process that a lot of agents if they will be can take anyone it's until they stop drinking or still they stopped using drugs and that but really the homelessness is just the i should say tip of the iceberg it's the bottom of an inverted iceberg because with the massive housing so the first people to reach the toughest people to reach the bottom that's right within the people who are struggling to find any place to rennes you've got people at the low level who are just spending more money than they should on renting so they can't afford hydro bills so they can't afford to heat the home in winter then you've got to count surface the people living in the basements of the parents long off they should that's what i absolutely this book challenges that you know his we we go to reintegrate we it's easy to begin to assume that some people will always be marginal in struggling but when you go to scranton if you're in norway and that's not happening i hope they find a way to embrace an include people that even the prison philosophy it's all about rehabilitation and re including in the world because you don't that someone is just sitting out there lost and angry and the cost of helping people who have fallen off the system with all the different and have it done in every city we have a federal housing strategy ventral housing strategy and this will house a strategy working in partnership with nonprofits make it done make it happen and maybe we need to remind prime minister trudeau that to stat was quite good coming up with programs to w you know when my husband retired he took a retirement from teaching and he said his son engineer with a math science background so he had to plan his retirement he knew he didn't want to be bored he had a couple of issues that he wanted to deal with and of them was to find an affordable housing society you know so we have an affordable society i was in society in the community but but the trouble is when you when you start on a project people get a hold of the name of your project and they sort of for unemployment for the climate crisis for for food issues for you know all these things packed full of positive solutions that people can find and so the book is i deliberately some self publishing allowed to make i chose to make  five bucks so you can go on amazon or you know go to the books websites and all the states for just a time dollars you can reach up to it's the the book's website is w w w journey to the future dot ca all the sources of buying it whether it's a printed book on sit this one out all of us a cold to find a way in which we can contribute to one little piece of this huge global collective crisis the got climate change an ecological collapse at the top of it all social collapse an economic collapse coming along all of which we have solutions of which we can welcome but instead of you know two percent of us we need twenty percent of us finding a way to contribute and getting engaged and making it happen where you can when you can and support other people and it's all about love for our planet i mean one of the knowledge time using if your child is really sick you want to know how sick that child is in order that you can love it effectively and get the wreck correct so we need to know the bad news about our planet and the oceans of stuff in order that we can act effectively in a targeted practical way and make the changes we need and the book is called cheney to the future by god i don't see how the subtitle a better world is possible website journey to the future dot ca thank you guys i don't see any margery stewart for bringing guy today that's been wonderful