future imagination involves two distinct steps, each of which is difficult. The first step involves questioning or rejecting the present, resisting its claim to be natural. The second step means constructing a plausible alternative, moving between an awareness of limits and a search for transcendence of those same limits.

What does the future hold looking ahead from the third decade of the third millennium? Despite unprecedented economic and technological progress, the world as we know it is unraveling, sharp social and wealth inequalities persist, political ideologies abound, and climate change is overdetermined. Because these socio-economic, political and ecologic

good folks are pushing hard across the entire range of human endeavors to find new ways to see, better ways to work. Yet I’ve also heard from these same people, time and again, how hard it is to break out of the professional constraints of convention, common practice and assumed continuity. How hard it is to get those with assets and authority to l