ABSTRACT
There can hardly be an occasion where synergy between foresight and systems thinking can be more significant than in the future of humankind; this chapter will present a personal view illustrating this synergy. Sustainable world? It is an inappropriate question to ask about a planet that has existed for some four billion years. Foresight for, and systemic thinking about, a sustainable world needs much preparation. Whether the popular notion of sustainability is supportable leads to many questions about definitions, of which there are many – all of which create an aura of mysticism that can become misleading. My initiation into the mysteries of ‘sustainability’ came in the 1970s when Philip Holroyd and I learned the essentials of the ‘Limits to Growth’ debate and speculated about what would bring population growth to an end. Which of the ‘four horsemen’ would bring the apocalypse? Would it be War? Famine? Pestilence? Death? Or is it more likely all four causes will occur in unison? Or would there be some other events that could provide food for the horsemen? We speculated about these, knowing that there were and still are many wellsubstantiated events that could be apocalyptic. Asteroid impact, huge volcanic eruptions, the eruption of a giant caldera or super-volcano (Yellowstone Park is one), thermonuclear war, unusually strong sunspot activity with a marked increase in cosmic ray bombardment. The potential for climate change and the likelihood of the return of an ice age was well known, though we felt, along with so many other people, that the time scale for these two events seemed long enough for them to be a lesser focus of attention.
