Josh Floyd is known as an international leader when it comes to energy and sustainability. He is a Director (and Energy, Systems and Society Fellow) of The Rescope Project, a founder of the Centre for Australian Foresight, and a member of the Editorial Board for the journal Futures. Josh has developed unique experiences through close working relationships with both the Strategic Foresight Program in Swinburne University’s Australian Graduate School of Entrepreneurship and with the National Centre for Sustainability.
Interviewed by: Rebecca Mijat
Audio Transcript
Rebecca Mijat
Hello and welcome to futurepod. I'm Rebecca Mijat. The futures and foresight community comprises a remarkable and diverse group of individuals who span academic, commercial and social interests. At futurepod, we seek to honor and to learn from the wisdom of those who have established and developed our field, to connect and support the practice of those who work in this space, and most importantly, to give pathways and inspiration to those who wish to join us in creating humane and better futures for ourselves and those who come after us. Today, our guest is Josh Floyd, a strategic foresight consultant based in Melbourne, Australia. Josh draws on experience with future studies, strategic foresight and systems thinking and practice. He finds these useful for making sense of situations in which humans find themselves that are characterized by inherent uncertainty, and for organizing thinking and action that can improve those situations. Josh is interested in enabling both individual and collective learning in support of ways of living that in turn regenerate the conditions required for that support. His work explores overarching themes associated with relationships between energy and society, because he believes this context is essential for making sense of and dealing with life in contemporary human societies. Welcome to futurepod, Josh.
Josh Floyd
Thanks, Bec.
Rebecca Mijat
So how did you get into foresight and future studies?
Josh Floyd
Well, the story that I guess I've got in mind for that really goes right back for me, I mean, back to childhood. So I grew up in a household where my father worked for the CSIRO [the Australian Government's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation]. And he was developing metallurgical technology that was really responding to this is in the early 70s, to the emerging understanding around limits to growth. So he actually talks about how the Limits to Growth discourse, was really informing the program that he was working in, where he was developing technology to increase the recovery of metals from available ores, and also recovering material from waste streams, and also to reduce the environmental impacts of existing production techniques for making metals. So that was something that I I knew about from as far back as I can remember. I also remember having conversations with him around things like the oil shocks in the 1970s, and so forth. So I had this sort of appreciation for the biophysical context for the world that we lived in from right back then. I mean, it sounds crazy that there are things that I might have been aware of, or thinking about when I was, in my memory five years old. But that's the memory that I now have. And it's probably fairly reconstructed based on interests that evolved subsequent to that. But that's where I see it all going back to. And then I guess, skip forward, and I ended up studying mechanical engineering, and then working in the metallurgical industry for a company that my dad actually founded, my family founded founded to take forward this technology that he developed in the 1970s, when the CSIRO decided that they weren't going to continue to support its development. So he set out to do this, I was really interested in what he was doing, what that technology was about, given that background context to it that I had been aware of my whole life. And I really had this interest in how technology and everything that went along with that could be used to improve conditions for people around the world. I'd also been brought up with this real appreciation for, I guess, the different contexts in which people in different cultures and from different backgrounds are living, particularly around inequality, economic inequality. My parents had traveled a lot before I was born. My dad actually rode a motorbike with a sidecar, took it from Australia, and took it on a ship to Sri Lanka or to Ceylon at the time, and then traveled overland from there to the UK to do his PhD in 1966. And then my parents drove back again in this little Austin minivan in 1970, just before I was born, and so that really shaped my understanding of things growing up, I grew up with the stories and slideshows from those travels as basically my introduction to the world, and it had a big impact. So when I started working in the engineering area, I had this idea that it was a place where you could really contribute to and actually grapple with big questions about human development. And I guess I pretty quickly found out that you could only go so far with that, within that engineering context. It really sort of provided me with a way of coming up very quickly against the limits of that technical and technological approach to dealing with, to understanding what's going on in the world and responding to it. And so I got, I guess, a little bit disheartened by that, you know, engineering approaches to understanding the world, dealing with its problems, are really good for dealing with proximate causes around issues. But you don't spend a lot of time going back digging deep into the sort of deeper underpinnings. And I had this real yearning for doing that, for understanding what was going on behind the situations we had in the world around economic inequality and around the environmenta impacts of the development that I'd benefited so much from. And so I stepped away from that engineering career and really went exploring for a few years. And it was in the course of that exploration that I encountered future studies as an area that really sort of spoke to me as a way of grappling with these questions that I had had, across my whole life, at a much deeper level. The way that I encountered that was actually really interesting. I met Frank Fisher, who had been the director of the Graduate School of environmental science at Monash for about 25 years from the 1970s through to early 2000s. And he had actually given Richard slaughter his first job when he came to Australia. And so I met Frank, his program at Monash was actually in the process of winding down when I met him in about 2003. And he said, well, if you if you want to go and study in these sorts of areas, why don't you go and talk to Richard Slaughter. And so I had a look at what Richard was doing, and it really spoke to me, it was the first time I'd encountered a situation where it was legitimate to ask questions of the depth that really spoke to me about what's going on in the world, and about the human situation. So that's the sort of the long arc of how I ended up there. And, you know, it just then made sense to really sort of engage with what was happening at what was then the Australian foresight Institute.
Rebecca Mijat
Yeah. And so then you studied for a master's at the University?,
Josh Floyd
So I did that, the [Master of Science in Strategic Foresight at Swinburne University of Technology], and actually, when I initially met Frank, I was looking for opportunities to do a PhD at the time and he said, go and talk to Richard about this. And Richard said, Well, you know, come and enrol in the master's program here, and then we can talk about that later. And so yeah, I ended up doing the master's program. And the way things played out there, those other plans didn't ever eventuate. But things went in other interesting directions.
Rebecca Mijat
Did you want to speak more about the disillusionment that you're experiencing?
Josh Floyd
Yeah, and it's probably worth qualifying that too, in that it wasn't all disillusion, it was more around hitting the limits of where I could go with the sorts of inquiry that I was working with in the context I was working in. And subsequent to all of that, I've really come back to appreciating where that all came from. The work that I do now draws a great deal on that background, which was a really good background to have. But what happened is, through the 1990s, I was working in this metallurgical technology development area. And most of our projects were in developing countries, India, China, South America or Africa. And so I was doing a lot of site work. So going to supervise the installation of plants, and the startup of these metallurgical plants, plants to make copper and tin, to process a whole lot of materials like that, in places like India and China, and so working literally at the coalface of economic development, in those places, when things are really starting to boom, in China especially. And it really gave me a deep appreciation for where that development trajectory was heading. It was fairly easy to see that if it was going to go as far as we've gone in the Western world, in the global north, then the consequences of that were going to be quite extreme in terms of the environmental implications, but also in terms of how the benefits of that sort of development were being distributed. It was really interesting to see that happening in places that were characterized by extreme poverty in many situations, and where the benefits to the people who are actually working in these places, were nothing like the benefits that have been realized by working classes in the Western world. At least that was the impression that I had working alongside people in those countries. It brought to light for me the limitations of that economic development model. And so I started searching around for other things. Around that time, actually, when I was working in India, in I think it was 1998, I read Eric Drexler's book 'Engines of Creation', about molecular nanotechnology, that told this miraculous sounding story of how technological development could potentially overcome every sort of economic problem, every economic challenge that we ever faced. And I read this and gave it a lot of consideration. I mean, it really appealed to me. And I spent a couple of years looking into this area and looking at whether my engineering background could take me into those sorts of areas. And in doing that, once again, it brought me up against the limits of that technologically driven approach to development. I met with people who were really enthusiastic about those areas. And yet there was something there that was missing to me. There were questions around the human context for all of this that just seemed to be missing. And so I was really, in a sense, despairing about where it is that we could ask these questions, and they could be treated as legitimate.
Rebecca Mijat
So Josh, what was it about foresight that helped you in that situation when you're a little bit disillusioned and hitting up against limits?
Josh Floyd
Yeah, the thing that really struck me was a deep critical appreciation for the foundations of human knowledge systems. The questions that were being asked in this area were beyond anything that I'd encountered in my education before that or in my training and practice. And yet, they'd always been interesting to me really, why is it that the particular forms of knowledge that are privileged in our society have the status that they do? Where do they come from? What's the basis for them? What's the basis of their legitimacy? Do they deal with everything that we might need to know? Are there are other questions that might also need to be asked? And the first thing that I encountered in the foresight area was really just the blurb on the Swinburne website for the strategic foresight course. And I think there was something that Richard Slaughter had written there, or perhaps a link to a paper or something like that, where I thought, hang on, this is actually going somewhere really interesting in terms of digging down into the foundations of what we think it's worthwhile to know about and to talk about and to inquire into.
Rebecca Mijat
So were there any particular tools or methods that you came across, that really you were drawn to use or to explore more?
Josh Floyd
So I think the first thing that really stood out to me and it wasn't so much a tool or method although it then pointed towards search for appropriate tools and methods around this. And that was this insistence in on understanding the mind of the practitioner, in good foresight practice, or at least that's what was presented to me as the foundations for good practice in this field, when I first encountered it, that actually turning the the gaze back on the practitioner, to turning that inwards and looking at the practitioner's mind and the way that we make sense of things was really refreshing to me. That just made so much sense. Rather than just taking things for granted, taking for granted what we see out there in the world, that we might be able to bring that back and reflect and shine that light on ourselves and our own sense making. So anything that could could really deepen that appreciation for how it is that we as humans make sense of things, was really appealing to me. It seemed that in the foursight area, there was some attention to that. Then it was only once I started engaging with the field more that I came to understand and appreciate that this was quite an unusual view of things in this particular place that I happened to have fallen in with. I mentioned Frank Fisher and how he introduced me to Richard Slaughter. I started working with Frank, teaching in a postgraduate course in sustainability at Swinburne, right around the time that I started the foresight course. It was through Frank that I encountered the work of people like Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, and especially Gregory Bateson. Frank had pioneered bringing the ideas of thinkers like these in the systems area, into environmental science. And so because of the connection between Frank's work, and Richard's, I was primed for looking at ways of engaging with such ideas in the foresight space. And so that was what really appealed to me at the time. Being able to explore ideas around the ways in which we actually engage with the world shape what we see what we perceive, in the sense that we make of it, and how changing that, training those ways of seeing, picking up new tools, new ways of looking at the world, new frameworks for thinking, looking at how that could actually affect what we're able to see. And that was tremendously exciting to me, the idea that there might be whole worlds out there, that had flown under the radar previously that could be revealed, through picking up new tools and techniques, new habits of thought, new systems of ideas.
Rebecca Mijat
And so fast forward to now, do you have the same energy and focus around that? Is that still interesting for you? Or do you tap into that?
Josh Floyd
Absolutely, in fact, right at the moment, I've been going back and rereading Gregory Bateson's 'Steps to an Ecology of Mind'. Because his daughter, Nora Bateson from his second marriage, wrote this absolutely magnificent book a couple of years ago called 'Small Arcs of Larger Circles', that had just come to awarenss for me, I started reading this and it just spoke volumes to me. And so these ideas are absolutely central to everything that I do now. That's been now an almost, I guess, going on two decades, journey of inquiry for me, and yet I don't lose any of my enthusiasm for that.
Rebecca Mijat
One of the things in the introduction I mentioned, and from your bio as well is around systems thinking, and that is a particular interest iand way that you work and operate and, can you speak around systems thinking as a tool?
Josh Floyd
As an engineer, I started to get an appreciation for, I guess, the interrelatedness of things. You know, I was grappling with situations, with systems, even with technological systems that I could see were behaving in ways that were beyond the sort of simpler analytical techniques that I had at hand for making sense of them. There were things going on that I was encountering, I'd be involved in building plants that that I've helped to design, and they'd be behaving in ways that were, really quite unanticipated, for a whole range of reasons including the cultural contexts in which we were implementing them, but just in terms of the interactions of different pieces of equipment and technical systems. And this was fascinating to me that, you know, here we are building these things, and we don't know exactly how they're going to function, how they're going to operate. So that really started to build for me, I guess, an appreciation of systems ideas, and I didn't really know what that was, at the time, I didn't have a language for it. I hadn't dealt with any of this stuff in my engineering education, it probably could have been there, if I'd been primed for that at the time. But it wasn't front and center, and you had to go searching for that, I think, if it was going to be there at all. So I had what was for me, this sort of native encounter with the systems domain, with the sort of situations that the system sciences had then been developed to grapple with and make sense of and interact with. But then I was really fortunate in meeting Frank, when I did around 2003. He'd also come out of an engineering background, but then went into the environmental science area. At a time when the systems sciences were really, I guess, a lot fresher than they perhaps are now. And where there was still a lot of excitement, a real enthusiasm for what they might be able to reveal. You know, this is where conversations around the distinctions between reductionistic thinking and holistic thinking were really capturing a lot of attention. So Frank had started bringing this into environmental science and had taken it a lot further than the sort of hard systems approaches. At around that time there was -- through the work of sort of people who I've mentioned Gregory Bateson, Francisco Varela, and Humberto maturana -- an appreciation was starting to emerge of the need to put the systems thinker into the systems that you're looking at, and understand the thinking processes, as part of the systems that we're dealing with. This is really the whole second order cybernetics movement, that I think started emerging around the late 60s, early 70s, in response to the perceived limitations of the hard systems approaches of getting out there and trying to map real systems that exist in some absolute objective way out there in the world. And so when I was first introduced to the idea that there is actually a systems field out there, that there are ways of studying these sorts of situations that I was starting to pick up on, in organized and formal ways, my entry point into that, rather than being sort of the engineer's entry point of the hard systems approach was actually the what you might call the soft systems approach, where the ways of thinking about the world and the practitioner's tools for thinking about it, were part and parcel with the systems that you were trying to understand. Yeah, so that's been there right from the start. So just before I met Richard slaughter, and was sort of inducted into the futures and foresight area, that was also a foundational part of what I was starting to look at.
Rebecca Mijat
Is there a framework that you find particularly useful that you'd like to share with the listeners?
Josh Floyd
I think, pretty much anything that gets us to critically reflect on the foundations for the knowledge systems we're dealing with, and the knowledge claims we're making, is going to be very, very helpful. But there is a particular framework that I think is really useful, a foresight site specific framework that I think is really useful here. In fact, for me, it's kind of the gold standard in terms of providing guidance. And that's a framework that Joe Voros put together in about 2005 in a paper that I think he published in the journal Foresight, called the generalized layered methodology. And it's this idea, that consciousness, that the knowledge that we construct in consciousness, can be seen through four layers, going from the contents of consciousness at the most sort of superficial level, down into constructs of consciousness. And then below that, again, capacity of consciousness and then at the most foundational level, looking at the conditions of consciousness. There's a lot of depth to this and probably more than we can go into now. But I would definitely recommend that anyone who wants to look at organized frameworks for digging down into the foundations of knowledge claims in a foresight-relevant context, you really couldn't do any better than that. Interestingly, I guess a lot of listeners will be familiar with Sohail Inayatullah's causal layered analysis. And Joe, in that generalized layered methodology, actually situated causal layered analysis within that, and then made an attempt at expanding beyond that by adding these deeper layers. So it's I think almost a turbocharged version of an approach to futures thinking that really has a lot of currency, and that a lot of people will be familiar with. And I think when you get down into that really deep layer that Joe is pointing to there, the conditions of consciousness, there's something in that that I hadn't really appreciated until Joe had put this paper together and drawn it to attention. Actually, I was studying [in the Master of Strategic Foresight course at Swinburne University] when he wrote this. And we were having some conversations around some of the ideas that were going into it, so it was a really interesting time to be there. But the thing that he really made clear for me was the importance of macro history in understanding those conditions of consciousness. And that was a really new idea for me. It situated contemporary futures and foresight, thinking in a much broader, much longer term, deeper view of, I guess, the human situation, and Joe of course continued on looking at big history and looking at foresight and futures in the context of big history. And I guess, in my mind, I've got this idea that it really sort of started there with this, this model that he'd put together, I don't know if he'd said in the same ways, but I see the, the sort of origins of his explorations into big history right there in that that model where he highlighted macro history as so foundational to, to making sense of how it is that we make sense of things. And that's really stuck with me, I guess, looking at what's going on at the moment in the world, you know, we might look at things on a 30 or 50 year, sort of time horizon, and situating that in a much broader sweep of human history, and really big history beyond the human story itself, I just find really helpful and really exciting. It's a really good way to get some perspective on what's going on, you know, in the immediate present, but even looking out sort of 30 years or so, into the future, to be able to bring that back and put that into a sweep of history that might be over thousands or tens of thousands or even millions of years, it really helps with working out what's significant, what's important. And especially with looking at the incredible panoply of ways of making sense of things that we've got available to us.
Rebecca Mijat
So what sort of future do you see say, in 30 years time?
Josh Floyd
Well, I think, you know in many ways, it's a really deeply uncomfortable question for me. And I, I'd love to throw it back to you for a moment and say, Well, why 30 years? What is it about 30 years that's makes that a relevant context for thinking about the future?
Rebecca Mijat
Yeah, good question. For me, personally, I feel like it's still within my life, lifespan. So thirty year's time I'm hoping still to be here on earth. And in terms of how quickly change is happening now, doubling my life. What would it look like?
Josh Floyd
Yeah, I was thinking the same. That's, you know, I'll be 76 and so what comes to mind here is that 30 years is both a really long way out to be thinking -- perhaps not as futures and foresight practitioners, we might, you know, think that we're accustomed to doing that -- but in a broader sense of contemporary societies, it's a really long way out to be thinking. But it's also, in a sense, not far enough. And I'm thinking here, like, the fact that, or the view, the perspective that the climate change that we may already have locked in, could impact on, and I think I'm right with this, the next two ice ages that we would expect to occur based on the historical cycle of ice ages. And I'm paraphrasing this based on a talk from Clive Hamilton last year, based on his most recent book, I think this is what he said, that the amount of warming that we've got locked in, climate scientists working in this area think that it could impact on the occurrence of the next two ice ages. So we're talking about tens of thousands of years of impact from things that humans have been doing over the last few hundred years. So in a sense, 30 years is just this tiny, tiny sliver and really to understand the things that are going on, and the sort of impacts that changes that are being wrought on the world, you've got to take it out so much further than that. But I'm also thinking about this question, and, you know, anything that I say, is going to be contestable, it's going to be open to challenge. And so I'm really interested in the conversation about *why* anyone might think that the 30 year time horizon for the future could look a particular way. And I, I kind of have this real discomfort about answering this question directly. Because the conversation about why I think what I think about what might happen, is so much richer and so much more important, than the particular details of what I think. I've spent a lot of time looking at the energy context for human futures. It's kind of a throwback to my engineering background. And even beyond that, you know, I trained in mechanical engineering, mechanical engineering is all about energy conversions, the engineering of systems for converting energy from one form to another, in order to enable pretty much everything that we do day to day, in the in the modern world. And so one way or another like it or or hate it, energy questions are foundational to human futures, you can't get away from it. And so as essential context, that's a place that I spent a lot of time looking, but really, it's just context, its context for bigger questions about, you know, how it is that we want to live. Energy considerations really constrain and enable the forms of social organization that are available to us. And that's why I look at that sort of area. So this is an area I've given a lot of attention to. And so it's probably a relevant context to respond to your question. And so I think on a 30 year time horizon, there's a very good chance that we're going to need to be organizing our societies and the economies that support them in very, very different ways. A lot of the work that I do is around looking at whether alternative sources of energy can allow us to continue on more or less with business as usual, organizing societies in the way that we organize them now. Or whether we might need to look well beyond energy systems and the technologies by which energies are converted and different energy sources to actually look at what it is that we want to do in the first place. And so again, you know, this is where a lot of discomfort comes up for me because the conversation really needs to be for me about why do I see things in a particular way in order for that to have any relevance. But my understanding of things is that we're very likely to have to scale back the extent of the energy that we have available to us. And that means scaling back the size of the physical transformations that our societies rely on. And that we pursue as part of what it is that we think is worthwhile doing as humans. You know, what does that mean, in concrete terms? Living a lot more locally than we do now. Probably traveling less, probably having much more constrained webs of supply for the things that we want, in order to live well. It's really tricky, though, on a 30 year time horizon with this, I mean, you'd have to say plus or minus 30 years almost in terms of some of these things. But with the climate imperative, there's a there's a really fairly well established body of work now around the rate at which we need to transition away from fossil fuel energy systems, to alternatives. And we're talking here about renewable energy systems as our best bet here. So there's a growing body of scientific and engineering opinion now that really, the rate at which we need to decarbonize economies is far too high, we need to do it way more quickly than transitioning out our energy systems would actually allow us to do. So one way or another, even if we could have forms of social organization and economic organization, more or less along the lines of what we have now, and at a similar scale to what we have now, powered by renewable energy systems, the rate at which we need to ramp down our fossil fuel usage, in order to stay within the carbon budget that's available to us is so high -- and this is the carbon budget, if we want to avoid very dangerous levels of warming -- the rates at which we need to do that are so high, that we can't do that just by replacing existing energy systems with alternatives. So one way or another, we really need to be looking at the way we organize our societies, if we're going to respond adequately to the climate situation. Whether or not we're able to do that, well, that's a that's a big question. And I think there's really good reason to suspect that we might not, that we might be heading towards levels of warming, that are really pretty terrible. I think our best pathway forward in that is to have really deep, serious conversations at the societal level, amongst all citizens about how it is that we want to live and what it is that we need in order to live well. I'm pretty sure from my couple of decades of inquiry in this now that we really, we've got a lot of leeway with this, a lot more than we probably give credit to, in terms of how we organize things. The ways that we run our lives, the expectations that we have of the world, and of what it should be able to give us. My hope, and I know, many would see it as a naive hope is that we're able to grow a level of desire to engage in different narratives about what it means to be human, that we might just get to a point, where enough people might get to a point where they're dissatisfied with where the existing narratives around development, around ideas of a good life, are just simply not fulfilling enough. That people want to go somewhere else with that. And I do see signs of that. I mean, you know, it's crazy that we're only now in 2018, talking about banning disposable plastic shopping bags. I mean, this is stuff that we could have done decades ago, and we definitely could have done back in 2005. And we didn't do it. We're talking about doing it now. I mean, that's just ridiculous. And yet, you look at the conversation that's happening around that the concern around marine plastic pollution You know, things like the ABCs War on Waste series, it really seems to be getting conversations happening about things that were completely off the agenda a few years ago. And these are not conversations that are happening in the formal political sphere. These are conversations that are happening around kitchen tables, on the street, in people's workplaces. I see a greater willingness amongst people to have deeper conversations, at the same time, as we're eroding our capacity for that through social media and the powerful interests that control how that plays out, and how those channels are structured. So in a sense, on one hand, I see this as eroding our capacity for structured deep, thinking together about the situations we're in, while at the same tim. I think there's this deep thirst and yearning for something better than that.
Rebecca Mijat
So Josh, having that view, how do you personally live your life?
Josh Floyd
While, you know, I tell most people now that my sort of primary role identity in life isn't as a foresight practitioner, or, as a energy philosopher, as Mike McCallum likes to call me or as an engineer, as I once was, or...it's really as a carer, which has come about through, I guess, my family situation. My primary role, my primary sort of priority is as a carer for my family, for my kids. And I see that extending out into the work that I do in the foresight area. It really is about how do you develop the capacity for care? And so, so much of what I do is around that question and the personal practice of just learning to care for the world that we have, and the futures that we might bring about, more deeply. So, I've written in the past, not for quite a while now, but about this idea of what I call embodied foresight, that is really taking foresight out of the intellectual, conceptual, cognitive realm, into present embodied action, learning to see through the way that I live day to day, and actually taking the way that I'm making sense of the world and saying, OK, how does that apply to this little microcosm right now? You know, it's little challenges, like, with my kids saying that, you see that piece of rubbish over there? You acknowledge its existence, you own it. So my kids, they're 10, and eight years old, and for them, it is absolutely, just the standard thing to do that you go to the beach, if you see some rubbish on the beach, you pick it up, and you take it with you, not three pieces, but all of it, anything that you see. And if I was to walk past rubbish on the beach, plastic, marine debris on the beach, and we see a lot of it, we spend a lot of time on the coast and in the water. And so seeing that all the time and over time seeing the increase in it. If I was to walk past it, they wouldn't let me do it, they would give me a real dressing down for that. So really trying to bring, I guess, a level of really immediate care to the situations that I find myself in. It's what it's about. And there's nothing, nothing that's too small in that. Really sort of committing to that transformation at an individual level and therefore learning about what does it actually take for us to do this collectively as a society. In the process, I think, you know, over many years now finding that the things that were we to do them collectively would actually address the challenges, the dilemmas, that we face as a humanity at a huge scale, are actually not nearly as hard as they're made out to be, when we talk about them, sort of in that formal political sphere, and in, you know, polite, official discourse around our problems. It's actually not that hard. So, I'm constantly looking for opportunities to conduct my life in ways that can, not just reduce the impact of it, but can contribute to, I guess, generating places of health and well being, places that I'd like to live in, places that I think are going to be good for my my kids to grow up in. And in doing that, you know, in a tiny, tiny way, hopefully, entraining that with the people that I'm living with. And there are successes and failures with that. I've had staggering failures around that at a personal level, you know, at a really deep personal level. But then, being open to the learning that that can throw up, to I guess, approaching life with, with an openness and a continual openness to learning and to being skeptical about what I know and what I do, and how that's contributing to things. Being willing to look at that, and revise that and change things about that, and adopt new viewpoints on that, in response to the context that I find myself in, that's what it's about. I got this way of phrasing this from Nora Bateson's book, 'Small Arcs of Larger Circles' that I mentioned earlier on, I don't know if she quite says it in this way, but this is how I've sort of internalized it and that is 'learning to learn, as life learns'. Are there ways of being human that can fit with and flow with the way that life as a whole learns, can we see the evolutionary and developmental processes that are being played out through life as a whole, as a form of knowing and learning in its own right, that goes way beyond the far narrower ways of knowing and learning that are usually legitimate within human contexts, learning to be part of life as a whole. And, you know, maybe in Joe Voros's terms, part of the whole cosmological sweep of big history as a whole. Seeing what it is that I am and that we are in those much bigger terms. So that's my practice, what I try to do day to day, and you know, there are sort of formal ways that I go about that, formal practices that I engage in that I've found useful for that. But there are a lot of ways of going about that.
Rebecca Mijat
Can you give us an example of embodied foresight?
Josh Floyd
Yeah, that was pretty abstract, wasn't it? And I guess you know to put it in really concrete terms...so let me give you an example. Reflecting back on the planning for this interview this evening. So when you sent me the information about it, the thing that really stood out for me was that the biggest chunk of information on that page was about how to get to the place where we're having this conversation by car and what to do about that incredible encumbrance of a motor vehicle that you've brought with you because it's really hard to park around here. And you know, there's a lot of traffic, we're in the Melbourne's inner northern suburbs, and where cars are a big deal. So the biggest chunk of information on there that stood out to me was about how to get here by car. So, to make this concrete, what I would do in a situation like this is say, OK, how could I use something as simple as the instructions for how to get to a place where we're going to meet, as a way of kind of instantiating, or bringing forth the type of futures that I think we might need to be bringing into being. So for instance, putting on the public transport directions in place of car parking directions, or how to get here by bike, or the facilities that are there for allowing you to travel there by bike, I mean, I came here by by bike today, I don't live far away, which made it pretty easy. But you know, these are the sorts of things that I would look for just these little micro opportunities to play with the default expectations that we've got around things. Here's my take on why that information was there. Because you're wanting to respond to the expectations that the people who you've invited here to speak with are going to have, you know, you want to be respectful towards them, and make sure that things are easy for them, and are going to flow easily. And of course, all those myriad things that we do day to day that make things flow easily, are why we have the situations that we have today in the world, whether you think that's good or bad. That's how we bring them forward. So something as simple as sending out an invitation to a meeting and emphasizing the unexpected ways for getting there or the other ways of doing things that are going to flip those expectations. They're the sort of opportunities that I'm looking for, to surprise people, to do things in a way, in little microcosms like that, that are unexpected. To reach down into the gutter and pick up the rubbish that's down there. Even though I'm going to be getting dirty hands, I'm going to have to go and deal with that. And then taking that as an opportunity to ask someone if I can go into their shop and wash my hands and say I'm doing this because I just noticed that rubbish outside your cafe there looks like someone who's been here has dropped their disposable coffee cup in the gutter, it looks like 10 people might have done that. I've just picked them up. And I'm just wondering if I can come in and wash my hands. You know, they're the little concrete opportunities to shift things, to bring about shifts in perception and expectation. That, you know, can often be uncomfortable, I think, but so much of the discomfort I find is in initiating those situations. And once they're initiated, they kind of roll, more often than not, people are really willing to actually go there and look at what's going on.
Rebecca Mijat
I'd love to know how you talk about foresight to someone who doesn't know about foresight, what is foresight.
Josh Floyd
So I'm probably the worst person in the world for giving the really short, sharp, easy answer to that question, 'What is foresight?' I mean, I've got this orientation towards, I guess presenting things in a way that challenges people and gets us digging down into the context of why you would present things in that way and asking those questions about why? Why is this important? And so, I tend to present foresight in a couple of ways. The first one would be as an openness to letting the present self be changed by engaging conceptually with a range of possible trajectories that might unfold from the way things are at the moment. And the second way I think of foresight, or rather present it to people, is as a process for using futures as conceptual constructs, as per perturbations, as disturbances that can be used to reorganize the way that we are as selves, either individually or collectively. So for me foresight is a way of opening up entirely new forms of learning, and hopefully reorganizing us in different ways. And the fact that it's temporally oriented towards realities that are yet to unfold, in a sense, it's kind of by the by. It doesn't really matter, that that's the context for it. Except that that future temporal dimension just allows us to go to places that we otherwise can't. I think it's a way of exploring possibilities, entertaining possibilities that people will be open to, whereas they might not be open to it if we're talking about reinterpretations of past history, or trying to come to grips with what's happening now in the present.
Rebecca Mijat
This has been another production from FuturePod. FuturePod is a not for profit venture. We exists through the generosity of our supporters. If you would like to support FuturePod, go to the Patreon link on our website. Thank you for listening. Remember to follow us on Instagram and Facebook. This is Rebecca Mayer saying goodbye for now.
More about Josh
Josh Floyd: josh@joshfloyd.com
The Rescope Project: www.rescopeproject.org.au
Josh’s published book:
Carbon Civilisation and the Energy Descent Future: Life Beyond this Brief Anomaly
Carbon civilisation is powered predominately by finite fossil fuels and with each passing day it becomes harder to increase or even maintain current supply. Our one-off fossil energy inheritance is but a brief anomaly in the evolution of the human story, a momentary energy spike from the perspective of deep time.
Today humanity faces the dual crises of fossil fuel depletion and climate change, both of which are consequences of the modern world’s fundamental reliance on the energy abundance provided by fossil energy sources. Can renewable energy replace the fossil energy foundations of carbon civilisation?
This book examines these issues and presents a narrative linking energy and society that maintains we should be preparing for renewable futures neither of energy abundance nor scarcity, but rather energy sufficiency. For industrial societies, this means navigating energy descent futures.