John Knight

Framework for Our Future John Knight

We are routinely reminded of the social and environmental issues pervading the present: pollution, global warming, species extinction, social volatility, fake news, the growing disparity in wealth. These issues prompt us to act but leave us to decide which of the many proposed solutions will deliver the future we hope for. Should we put our faith in technology, innovation, the market? Should we trust science, change our behaviour, adjust our lifestyles? Should we just carry on as usual?

Our decisions will necessarily influence our future.

Framework for Our Future treats our current circumstance as part of a dynamic, complex human-environment system. It describes how we (as individuals), our culture and the environment interact, with feedback, over a wide range of scales to form the humanenvironment system and the constraints this imposes on our lives. It provides a model of the system that helps us to more fully appreciate how we arrived at our current circumstance, our contribution to it, how we change and our views about our possible futures. With this in place, Framework for Our Future asks us to consider an alternative possible future, viability, and suggests how we might gain the wisdom, and make the decisions and changes, to achieve it.

Framework for Our Future is an abridged version of Viability, Complexity and Us: The Framework Constraining Our Future (Knight 2019).