Foresight: Volume 16 Issue 6

Descent pathways

Joshua Floyd, Richard A. Slaughter

The purpose of this special issue is first to highlight the need for wider understanding of the “civilisational challenge” facing humanity, as it encounters and then exceeds…

“New beginnings” within a new normal for the four futures

Jim Dator

This paper aims to offer real and explicit reasons for viewing the futures of humanity and Earth as positive, fulfilling and meaningful, if humans view it as such and act to make…

Future Earth: declining energy use and economic output

Patrick Moriarty, Damon Honnery

The purpose of this paper is to show that the observed strong link between global economic output and primary energy use will continue in future; and attempts to replace fossil…

The denial of limits and interior aspects of descent

Richard A. Slaughter

The purposes of this paper are as follows. Part one examines the role of denialism in the context of proposals advanced through the much-abused Limits to Growth (LtG) project…

Voluntary simplification as an alternative to collapse

Samuel Alexander

This paper aims to re-examine Tainter’s dismissal of the voluntary simplification strategy. Joseph Tainter argues that “sustainability” is about problem-solving and that…

Conjuring clean energy: exposing green assumptions in media and academia

Ozzie Zehner

This research presents uncomfortable questions about the viability of alternative energy technologies, which arise during economic contraction and degrowth but are scarcely…

Sense-making and acting for descent futures: human and cultural pathways

Joshua Floyd

This paper aims to make the case for continued opportunity for high levels of human well-being under descent conditions characterised by declining economic throughput and…

Societies Beyond Oil: Oil Dregs and Social Futures

Katerina Psarikidou

Not the Future We Ordered: Peak Oil, Psychology and the Myth of Progress

Sandra Geitz