EP 49: On Board an Old Decrepit Luxury Liner - Peter Black

 
 

From COVID-19 quarantine, Peter Black walks us thoughtfully through the worlds of veterinary epidemiology and how a full Foresight toolbox can help in the Long Game and the Hard Game. Peter has some important reflections on how we have come to this current COVID-19 moment on-board an outdated old vessel and what will make the difference between snapping back to spend more and more money in keeping her afloat or taking only what we need to re-set the future.

Interviewed by: Peter Hayward

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Peter Hayward 

Hello, and welcome to futurepod. I'm Peter Hayward. Futurepod gathers voices from the International field of futures and foresight. Through a series of interviews, the founders of the field and the Emerging Leaders share their stories, tools and experiences. Please visit futurepod.org for further information about this podcast series. Today, our guest is Peter Black. Peter is a foresight practitioner, and a veterinary epidemiologist with extensive experience in addressing emerging infectious disease threats. He spent 14 years as a field veterinary officer and then 16 years in policy roles about national and international animal health issues. In 2005, Peter gained a Master's degree in Strategic Foresight from Swinburne University of Technology. Peter appreciates and understands the basis of different worldviews and believes this is fundamental to working across disciplines. He has developed a capacity to view opportunities and threats through a range of lenses by using a number of different frameworks, leading to a larger range of strategic options. Welcome to futurepod, Peter.

 

Peter Black 

Thanks, Peter. Real pleasure to be here.

 

Peter Hayward 

Great to be glad to be talking again. So question one. What's the Peter Black story?

 

Peter Black 

Well, I am a veterinary epidemiologist and I gained my masters of Preventive Veterinary Medicine from the University of California in 1993. And at that stage, I was working for the state government in Queensland. And when I came back in 1994, there was the first case of Hendra virus in Australia. It was in Queensland, people may remember a number of racehorses and a trainer died.

 

Peter Hayward 

Yes- That was Vic Rail  wasn't it?

 

Peter Black 

 Yes - Vic Rail . And the following year, you might also recall that a fellow died in Mackay in Queensland. And in retrospect, he was exposed within a month of the cases in Brisbane with Vic Rail. We had a meeting to work out how that could happen and that's when, after a whole lot of thinking, the idea of bats being involved in the spread, was investigated. And it turned out that in fact, bats (specifically flying foxes) were the source of the virus. That really piqued my interest in emerging infectious disease. Then   in 1996, the first case of Australian bat lyssavirus occurred in Rockhampton when I was the veterinary officer there and I was involved in that investigation as well. So my interest in emerging infectious d isease had been spiked. And then I actually moved into an area of risk management because of the case or the outbreak of Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy. BSE okay.

 

Peter Hayward 

Mad cow disease  - that's the one.

 

Peter Black 

And at that stage, it was my interest was focusing around the risk management and risk perception, and the fact there was a big inquiry called the Philips inquiry, which looked at how that was managed in the UK. And it wasn't just around the policy issues, but how they communicated risk. And it wasn't just around the science. And I heavily moved into the area of risk analysis, risk management, and policy until I moved to a head office position with a focus on risk management. I was trying to influence and incorporate risk management more fundamentally into the animal and plant health service there and developed an interest in strategy and policy. It was very lucky that that stage that the department, was offering positions to undertake the Graduate Certificate in Foresight through Swinburne. So that was a very start with Richard laughter in 2001 and I put my hand up to be involved in that. I was interested in the response within the department - - was that you're a veterinarian, this is not for you. This is for people who are working in the policy space. You're a technocrat. I responded quite vigorously and defended the fact that I didn't think that was an attitude which was very helpful to the department. To their credit, I was allowed to go forth and start the grad certificate. And what I thought was foresight beforehand and what I learned that first year was amazing, but just the breadth of the course and the thinking blew me away.  I found that I was quickly covering areas which I hadn't anticipated. I t opened up my thinking, to the extent that I ended up changing my role and moving to Canberra in the national office, the Office of the Chief Veterinary Officer. I  applied for a job down there, and moved to Canberra, which was a pretty big move at the time for me.  I'd already developed this interest in foresight, but I had to work out whether I was going to get permission to continue this in the Commonwealth department. And within a year, it was pretty clear that there were some people there who are very supportive. And so I actually could move into the Masters through Swinburne. The breadth of it was exciting to me, but also the fact that you and Joe and Richard, were encouraging us to apply what we were learning on the job right as we went. And that's what I tried to do with my role in Canberra. So in 2003, in terms of stepping out and actually doing something, we got permission within the department to run three workshops with Sohail Inayatullah in the department to introduce foresight, and as a result of those workshops, a whole lot of things were planted. And I must admit, I had to keep watering and plowing the field for some time after that. But we did end up with a scanning framework and a scanning network post that set of workshops. I also linked with Kate Delaney, who was setting up the Australasian Joint Agency Scanning Network across a number of departments. And that's still going on, as is the scanning that's happening within the animal health and biosecurity area within the current Department of Agriculture. It's easy to become cynical and a little bit critical. And I did decide I made a conscious effort. And part of it was as a result of some of the learning at the foresight course for sure. I remember very well, the exercise we did in the space capsule, when we were given all the data about what we had at our disposal, and how we sat there and continued to debate, even after you warned us a number of times, and we all died.

 

Peter Hayward 

Yes, you did. You remember that too! Most people did die.

 

Peter Black 

So I decided to actually put my energy into what I could in the role that I was in. And that developed over a number of years. But we ended up increasing the number of workshops that were run because different people were joining the department in different roles. I was combining it with my epidemiology discipline skills. We actually ran a number of workshops in other countries because I was increasingly starting to do things around disease control in Southeast Asia. I wanted to share some of the stuff around foresight. So we actually ran some workshops in Vietnam, Philippines, and Indonesia, and  Sohail, again, was involved. At the same time, there was a development of the Australian Biosecurity Cooperative Research Center for emerging infectious disease, which ran from 2003 to 2010. There was a big focus through that CRC on emerging infectious disease. And I was interested again, in trying to bring some foresight influence into that thinking where I could, and applying a number of lenses around emerging infectious disease related issues. I was interested in the fact that there was a lot of really good scientific work happening within that CRC, but there wasn't so much a focus on why diseases were emerging. I thought this is where the foresight area really had a part to play and ended up co-supervising a student who looked at that in some detail. I also found that from the reading that I was doing in the foresight course that I was quickly moving into other areas which were broader, much broader than my epidemiology training, like global environmental change, food systems, sustainability and what that really meant, complex adaptive systems, post normal science, eco health and one health approaches - and ecological economics. I was starting to see the world in a whole range of different ways and in 2006, we ran a workshop as part of the International Symposium for Epidemiology and Economics, where we had people from different disciplines coming together. I was starting to get very interested in the fact that a lot of the gold was at the edge of disciplines where it was actually where disciplines come together. And so that workshop, we had Sohail (obviously as the futurist and a sort of a polymath). We had Professor Tony Michael, who was a human epidemiologist from the Australian National University, and had done a lot of work across a lot of fields, but was very influential in human health and climate change, very big thinker. He had written a book in 1993, called 'Planetary Overload'. We had David Waltner-Towes, from the University of Guelph, who was in the Eco health area. And Peter Daszak, who was a zoologist, working on emerging infectious disease and who is now with EcoHealth Alliance in New York. If you follow some of the COVID stuff that's happening at the moment, you'll probably see his name. So we brought those people together and we ran a workshop about the role of veterinary epidemiologists in  ecohealth and trying to apply a number of different frameworks. And I learned something from that. There was some people who found the future stuff at that workshop absolutely mind blowing and exciting. There are others who couldn't see the sense and wanted more of the very technically focused examples of how to do X, Y, and Z. We ran another workshop, post that for veterinary epidemiologists at the Gold Coast, where we tried to apply what we'd learned from the first workshop and we didn't have all the heavy hitters. It  was just myself and another colleague, who worked in the emerging infectious disease area, Dr Hume Field, who did a lot of work with the bats in Australia around Hendra and also went on to be involved in the Nipah virus  outbreak in Malaysia. But at that workshop, we applied integral frameworks, we introduced CLA, we did start off with a shared history, etc. So we had pulled out different parts of the six pillars approach. I was still trying to develop internally to see where Peter Black was going to go within his position and we were engaging other people to keep things rolling within the department. And it is the long game. I was doing more and more in the region, linked to not just animal disease, but zoonotic influenza, because you may recall of H5N1 influenza emerged in 2004. It actually started early, but was recognized more formally in 2004. The world was becoming very interested in the fact that this could mutate into a pandemic flu and there was a lot of energy around that. So I worked on that area for a number of years, but it by about 2014, I developed a lot of networks in the region. And I felt that I had come to the end of my role in a sense within the Commonwealth Department and what I could achieve. I took a position with the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization in Bangkok, working on influenzas, H5N1 initially. It developed into a number of others because other viruses emerged while I was there. (well actually H7N9 had emerged before I started). So I was working on zoonotic influences, and other emerging infectious diseases. And it's interesting to note that the actual name of the program, which is supported by the US government, USAID was the emerging pandemic threats program. Yeah, prophetic. They were thinking very clearly about some of the issues, which are very important to the current state of play. Within that emerging pandemic threats program, there was another program, which was called PREDICT. Part of that program was actually sampling animals across the globe, especially wildlife looking for and identifying a range of hitherto unknown viruses.  That work was also coupled with some of the work we're doing with FAO looking at the interface between wildlife, domestic animals and humans, to see what potential transmission pathways there were for some of these new viruses. And the work that PREDICT did identify a number of Coronaviruses in a number of places. They identified a lot of other viruses, not just Coronavirus, but they were out there and that work had already been done. When I was still with FAO, I was again trying to encourage people within FAO to have a more foresight perspective and encourage them to attend a course in Bangkok which Sohail ran with Josh Wagner. Again, trying to expand the group of people had a range of perspectives so that - not that I wanted to have a cohort around me - but I definitely wanted some people to appreciate why some of this thinking was important. I had done that in a range of ways across many years. But in 2018, I moved back here to Australia and for the last 18 months, two years, I have still been consoling into the region. But I've been trying to increase some of the foresight focused work that I'm doing. I'm trying to see what the entry points are in a number of those ways in the work that I do. And you really have to dial it to the appropriate level, depending on who the client or the audience is. I'm still coming to grips with it. So that's where I am now and of course, I'm now in the grip, as the world is, of COVID-19. I am looking on, with great interest as an epidemiologist, but also some horror about how things are unfolding.

 

Peter Hayward 

Yes, yeah, sure. We'll, we'll talk some more about about that probably in their final question. The Peter Black now, in 2020, talking to the Peter Black starting out on the journey, if you could give advice to yourself that you would have listened to? What advice for the journey you were starting would you have given yourself?

 

Peter Black 

In the foresight journey, I think it would have been give yourself permission and accept that sometimes it's going to be much harder than you think. Yeah, from an institutional perspective, if I look back at what we achieved, within the Department of Agriculture, there are some good things. There are now positions which formerly have strategic intelligence and foresight in the position descriptions, which wasn't the case, you know, 15 years ago. And there is still a scanning network. But I would still say we didn't get anywhere near the vision that we had anticipated, after the first set of workshops.  I now understand that that's not that unusual. That it is actually a pretty, it's a long game. And it's a harder game than I anticipated. I think my enthusiasm, especially early on, was admirable. And I think we needed that we needed that level of support from my colleagues in the department to keep it rolling along. But it wasn't enough to really build some of the momentum, which was required. And looking back, I don't think we had courted some of the higher level executives, as champions in a way which was going to help us translate into real activity. I also think, in retrospect, it was difficult to bring this forward from within an animal health focused area of the department. It probably would have been easier if it came from something which was a much more broadly policy based area within the department. So that was a lesson. But in terms of a message back to me, I think, certainly follow your passion. I've got no problem with that and I think I have followed my passion in many ways. But I think in some respects, I have sold myself a little bit short, because I didn't want to step out of some of the comfort space around the epidemiology, which I have an affinity for, I suppose. But maybe I would have made bigger inroads if I had, and perhaps being less risk averse would have helped. I think in retrospect, if I look at what I did, I was stepping out, but I always had, you know, one hand on the safety rails. I didn't step out as far as I should have or could have. And maybe missed some opportunities. So message to Peter Black from 15 years ago - go a bit more wild.

 

Peter Hayward 

Yeah, look, I think you're being a bit harsh on yourself. I mean, I think the thing we all learned is, it is difficult to work against established paradigms and tradition. And the angle of going into science disciplines, where you're trying to introduce more of a meta perspective is is really difficult for people.

 

Peter Black 

Yeah, it's interesting how some people got it almost immediately, and others resisted it almost to the end. And you really had to, I mean, what I was trying to do in the department in a way was infect a number of people with this broader perspective. It worked to some degree, but we probably didn't get the level that we needed to drive it harder. I'm not saying it's finished, though, because those seeds are still there, they're still popping up. I t's encouraging to see some of the thinking which is happening now. I suspect that post COVID in a whole lot of countries, there will be increased interest in foresight. I think that the countries which invested heavily in foresight in the last 20 years, often did, post a disruption. I think Singapore did post SARS. I know that the scanning that they were doing in Singapore because we developed relationships with people working in Singapore. But the melamine contamination issue in China, which you might recall, which was in the milk powder, they quickly got the message. And because they import a lot of food, that the requirement from their scanning was to be finding things before it hit the paper. So those things drive investment in some of the areas. I think the UK actually invested quite heavily in foresight post the Mad Cow issue and the big outbreaks of foot and mouth disease in 2001. And DEFRA did have quite heavy foresight activity for a while there. But the UK Government, with its horizon scanning, did start to step up and was looking at a whole broad range of issues around foresight then.  Again, I think it followed some major disruptions. So I think COVID will lead some countries to do this again. But it requires a bit more than just setting up a unit etc.

 

Peter Hayward 

Question 2,  one more ask the guests to discuss the use of a favored tool or method that is central to their practice, what do you want to talk about?

 

Peter Black 

Well, the framework, which tended to use and it's as a result, really, as the fact that the initial workshops that we ran with Sohail were around the six pillars. So the six pillars is a framework, which I'm comfortable with. I can tell you that at the time, when we first ran the first workshop with Sohail,  I wasn't too sure about some of the stages. So the mapping with the shared history, no problem at all and in fact, for the people that I've dealt with, in the last 15 to 20 years, the shared history always goes well. Yeah. And the futures triangle is variable, but you have to set it up in the right way, and then it is definitely something which is easy. And I would say also that the Emerging Issues analysis in the groups that I've run, has also been pretty clear, except that what it points out, as does the shared history, is the narrowness of the views in the room. So quite often, what we'll find is we'll get a whole range of stuff, but  because people are coming from a pretty reasonably similar background, you're not getting the outliers, which you need to stimulate some of the conversation. When you start to talk about this, the penny drops for many people. I remember from the workshop we ran at the Gold Coast,  one of the feedbacks at the end of the workshop was: 'fantastic, but we didn't have enough other disciplines here'. They recognized because we had spoken about the people who aren't in the room, that they had probably missed something by not involving other disciplines or people with other points of view. At one of the other workshops we ran with the department, we specifically actually invited people who are going to have different perspectives from outside the discipline. That turned out to be very useful. So I would always encourage that, if it's possible. Some institutions, of course, are very comfortable with that. What is was going to come back to that was the first workshop, the timing issue, I thought, I'm not sure how these people are going to get this, you know, this is this is too far, too fast, for them. It was really surprising that that session with Sohail was fantastic. It went really well. So I learnt then not to prejudge what a group of people can achieve with the right sort of facilitation. Of course, the CLA issue was covered very well, and I would say it's one of the things which has stuck with me in terms of the way I look at a lot of things. I did hear Zia in one of your interviews recently saying that CLA is one of the things which all Australian foresight people seem to talk about, and I'd be guilty of being one of those. The power of the metaphor, we didn't cover that quite so clearly in the first couple of workshops, but the later workshops with Sohail has come through really powerfully. And I think that the metaphor issue is very central to how the range of options you come up with can be so different in terms of addressing an issue.

 

Peter Hayward 

Yeah, well, we we tell ourselves powerful stories to understand the world. And how those stories explain what we're to do. And those stories both energize us, but they also lock us in to certain things we can do.

 

Peter Black 

Yeah, very powerful. And I have seen that working in the region, as I have with many countries in Southeast Asia, particularly. I would think that one of the challenges around the metaphors, but also more generally, is that a number of the countries that I have worked with really have a used future. They're following very much a development pathway, which they didn't almost choose, it's just, well, maybe they've chosen it, but they chose to repeat what's already happened in other parts of the planet, much to their detriment. To actually open up that conversation is possible, but you've got to choose the right time and the right group. We did do back casting and I think back casting is a very powerful tool used in the right way, and visioning. But again, it depends on where you're at. For some of these things, they work better with different groups than others and it's whether you've read the audience well enough, during the first couple of sessions around the mapping the shared history, etc, and the futures wheel, as to how far you take them at the end. Now, Sohail seems to be able to do this with groups irrespective, whereas I think I would have much more difficulty. He's a master. There are some places where I still wouldn't step unless I was a bit more comfortable. The other frameworks that I just want to mention, though, that sometimes when we're working with people, and it's not always in a workshop setting, it's just talking about what might be required for the future. The discussion around the futures cone is quite enough for them to actually understand that there are a range of futures out there, and that you can do things to pull the curve towards your preferred future. That can be for some people. I very heartening. I would say to that the other framework, which I used, especially early on in getting support within the department was the generic foresight approach that Joe Voros has had, or has, you know, with what's happening, what's really happening, working all the way through down to strategy. The reason I use that was that for people in that department, it was, although it's not truly linear, it helped them identify where things were fitting in and while we were doing things at different times, using different methodologies or tools, to help us work towards that. The issue around the difference between what's happening, or what seems to be happening, and what's really happening is where the big chasm seems to be in a lot of the work that I do. That's why for the emerging infectious disease type stuff, I spend a fair bit of time in that space. So rather than just looking at the fact that there's a new virus, and it's led to a new disease, can we unpack that in a whole different way. So a whole lot of these methods can help in that. And the one I suppose that I've used a lot has been causal layered analysis, and I use that especially as an example, around Nipah virus. I presented that at an international conference in 2003 in Chile, to try and get some broadened perspectives around why this virus emerged in Malaysia at the time. So for Nipah virus, it's a disease which emerged in Malaysia in 1999. It now is known that it came from flying foxes and entered into a piggery, a large piggery. The pigs infected people, the people who are looking after the pigs nipah virus is a paramyxovirus in the same viral family as Hendra. But the reason that Nipah emerged in 1999 wasn't simply just the fact of course that the virus exists in flying foxes . The virus exists in flying foxes as  Hendra virus has in Australia for many 1000s of years, at least. What had happened in Malaysia was that there had actually been a government policy to increase pig production to supply the Singapore market. And this piggery was actually a very big piggery. It's the largest piggery in Malaysia at the time. As part of the efficiency drive, they had planted mangoes, between the pig pins in the piggery. So at the same time, they are producing pigs, they're also producing mangoes, and the mangoes were actually right above the pig pens. So the mangoes were dropping into the pig pens. Now, what drove this? Well, of course, they were maximizing their profit for the area that they had, they were being super efficient in inverted commas. And that's what attracted the flying foxes to the mangoes and allowed the transmission to the pigs. Over 105 people died in that outbreak and they ended up slaughtering more than a million pigs. So my discussion with the CLA was that, okay, it was the fact that there was a piggery, close to flying fox colonies etc. But the fundamental driver under this was much more within the CLA framework. At the worldview level, it was around resource consumption, efficiency, economic growth, and that was what drove this. The myth and  metaphor was around 'West is best', or almost, maybe even 'technology will save us'. So this thinking that CLA reveal showed that the issue was at a much more fundamental level. I was trying to share that with people about how the other issue was that it actually had to be a very big piggery for the virus to get established. If it had been a very small piggery, it wouldn't have been big enough, the virus would have got introduced and actually died out. But with a large piggery, you could actually have the dynamics within the piggery of having enough susceptible animals because you're getting piglets born all the time that you would get ongoing transmission. So actually a very big piggery was required to get transmission into the pig population, which raised the whole issue around thinking of intensive production, how intensive is intensive enough? What are the implications of intensive production in a whole range of circumstances. And that has flowed through into my thinking also around influenzas. And potentially, we'll see, it may even be important in the COVID story, it's a bit early to tell, but whether there actually has been some wildlife animal being farmed at some level, which may have allowed the transmission from bats at these wet markets.

 

Peter Hayward 

Yes, and at a kind of metaphor level, we can live with a notion of a universe that is random and has chance, we're less comfortable if in fact, we discovered that we in fact, are complicit in our own harm.

 

Peter Black 

Yeah, this is why I do not like the war metaphor around COVID-19. The virus is out there. It's a co-evolutionary process with us as we populate and develop in inverted commas, the planet, but the virus is not out there to destroy us. It's just taken advantage of a niche which has become available. And we are complicit in that. So you're very, right in that respect. I think there is some randomness to it, but sometimes we create the conditions which increased

 

Peter Hayward 

stacked the dice, stacked the dice!

 

Peter Black 

the dice in some directions, and we've done that on a number of occasions. In fact, the influenza H5N1, the stacking of the dice, in my view was the great increase in chicken numbers in China and Vietnam between 1993 and 2003. But more more particularly, the rapid increase in duck numbers because ducks, dabbling water birds are really the source of these influenza viruses. And the numbers increased drastically between 1993 and 2003. And what was the driver for that? It was a way for people to get into the cash economy. It was actually encouraged in parts of Southeast Asia.

 

Peter Hayward 

Question three, the one where I asked Peter Black, citizen of the world, how do you make sense of the emerging futures around you and you choose whatever context and timeframe you want to put on how you make sense of the emerging futures?

 

Peter Black 

That's a great question, Peter. And I must admit, straight up that it's been dominated since COVID-19, with thinking around the COVID-19, current play. And I've started to recognize that one of the models, which is potentially making sense for me, or options, one of the futures is like, we're all on a big, old, one luxury ocean liner in some sense, which is looking pretty decrepit, and is getting harder and harder to maintain. But there are a lot of vested interests who want to keep it rolling. And because of a number of threats, there's a bunch of groups who are working on different decks in different rooms, they're getting together and they're designing a range of other watercraft. Many of them are sailing boats, or boats, or maybe even a run by renewable energy, etc. But they're looking for something which is more aligned to a much softer position on the planet, but can also handle storms much more adeptly. And, more importantly, is looking to offer a much more comfortable living experience for a lot more of the global population. That's one of the emerging futures that I can see. That's preferable to the one where a whole lot of money is spent to redevelop the luxury liner, in my view. In my own little patch of the planet, I feel that I've had a fortunate life and I've been spoiled in so many ways, but I have two daughters, 28 and 25. The options for their emerging futures, can still be very exciting and rewarding. But they are coming from such a different base, from when I was at that age, and try and put myself in their shoes and appreciate that. I'm recognizing how difficult that is. Yeah, that I have some definitely have blind spots. If you ask them, they'll tell you how many. But I'd really love to be able to appreciate that more. And I heard Zia in one of your interviews, talking about the fact that they really engaging with young futurists now to see what can be created.I think that's really important. So I would definitely endorse that view that there's a need for that. The other thing that I do see in this emerging future is that the COVID-19 is getting so much attention at the moment, and rightly so. But the big challenges that were there before COVID-19 are still there, climate change is still happening. Okay, the emissions may have slowed because of the decreased economic activity at the moment, but the trajectory is still way worse than we need it to be. And a lot of attention has to be paid to that. So at the same time that we're dealing with COVID, we can't forget about the other big global challenges. Climate change is a big one, which needs attention, but also inequality and inequity across the planet. And that's going to be punctuated or emphasized as a result of COVID-19. So we need to not only walk and chew gum at the same time, we probably need to walk, chew gum and learn the violin at the same time. And that's the way the emerging future looks to me.

 

Peter Hayward 

It's interesting to say that, I mean, in Australia, particularly, I mean, our political leadership was looking fairly last during the bushfires process. Yeah. And in fact, I'd say around the world, there was a lot of political leadership that was looking fairly powerless and fairly lost as to what it should do. One of the things I've seen, Peter is that COVID has actually almost given leaders a chance to lead again, because they can see obvious things to do.

 

Peter Black 

Yeah, and also, they didn't have an option. I mean, this has really jammed home that need to act. I think. I do also think that there's a much clearer understanding, at least in some quarters now, that you can't wait for the data. You know, this is giving us a really classic example where the transmission is happening and you put it in a measure and you're not going to see the result of that measure for a couple of weeks. I saw a guy from WHO, Michael Ryan interview. And he was talking, he has a lot of experience with dealing with disease outbreaks and pandemics. He spoke to the fact that if you won't act until you're right, you will always be late. You need to get out there and act. Yes, you may revise what happens, but the good has to be followed. Don't wait for the perfect. If you need the data before you act. It's too slow and I think this has been shown quite clearly now.

 

Peter Hayward 

So do you think that the seeming unwillingness for political leaders to respond to a very slow unfolding catastrophe like climate change? And what has been a relatively rapid response It might have been slow but you have got to say they have moved very quickly in countries when they could. Do you think it's going to flow back over or do you think that once this, once this virus is under control, then people return to their old, 'I don't agree with the science' response to climate.

 

Peter Black 

I don't think we're gonna go back to the 'I don't agree with the science' response. But I do think there are still vested interests, who may not want fast action on climate change. But I think that the growing movement across the planet is accepting that something really does have to happen and it has to happen fast. How fast that will happen is really debatable. I think it's interesting, though, that meetings like the World Economic Forum, which you wouldn't say necessarily the most progressive, in terms of thinking, have been recognizing that over the last five years or so, the risks which are getting the highest likelihood and impact ratings from business, and now clearly moving into the environmental field. So they're paying more attention. And it's interesting, they did a survey this year, also with a group, which was sort of I think they call them the shapers which were younger. And of course, the younger ones saw that even more acutely. So there's a generational issue here. The Greta Thornburg's of the world, more power to her, I think her message is absolutely right. People who don't want to hear it, though, of course, won't. And we know that just screaming about the facts, doesn't change people's behavior, there need to be other levers. Wouldn't it be great if as part of the package, to bring some economic recovery in Australia, there was investment in some way in rapidly moving to renewables? I mean, I know I'm dreaming. But that would be a very good use of resources with a bigger payback, I would think.  Actually, other futures issue, which is emerging for me is the economic frameworks are clearly a problem. And how do you actually move to another set of or another way of thinking. I've been reading around some sustainable, steady state economic stuff, Herman Daly, its old, but still relevant and some of the green economics.  I think there's going to be more focus on how can we shift this to another way of looking at how we live on the planet, without destroying the natural capital at such a great rate. And probably very big discussions, I would hope, around what true sustainability is, because we're nowhere near it. And even in the blog piece that Sohail and I wrote around Black Swans,  at the end, talking about, including cost benefits of changing agricultural practices, or whatever, and taking into account the impacts of emerging infectious disease. I think we want to go way further than that, you know, it shouldn't actually be cost benefit, it should be around what the planet needs to continue to support us. But there's also value in nature in itself. You shouldn't have to put a cost on stuff. At least the way we cost it, is not reflective of what the real value is, and we are not doing that well at all. And in emerging future, which I'd like to see, that would become very transparent and obvious, not just to people who are thinking about it, but the people who are just living or sleepwalking almost on the rest of the planet. If that became just the normal background, the way we see things,  we would be living in a much different way with a different footprint on this earth.

 

Peter Hayward 

Final question 4, the one I ask, and I think you had a good practice at this for quite a few years, how do you explain what it is you do to people who don't necessarily understand what it is you do.

 

Peter Black 

For people who are in more traditional departmental type frameworks, I often explain the work I do as a very advanced and expanded form of risk management. That's because it's coming at them from where they can understand how it might help them. I think that sells it shor, but it gets me in the door in a sense. For other things that I do, I tell them or try to explain to them that we are trying to expand that range of strategic options, so that you can see things from a different set of perspectives and you may come up with, not necessarily solutions, but pathways, which are more resilient and more robust. So the issue around resilience, some of them get that, that you want to have something which is going to handle a range of different threats, or futures, which are thrown at you. But developing really robust policies and approaches is probably just as important, if not more important, in the sense that they can adapt as things move ahead. And that's more difficult. But I do try and explain that that's one of the strengths of thinking this way. So that's what I'm on about. The only thing that I actually explained what I do, if I'm depends on who I'm talking to, I will explain that what I'm trying to do is infect a number of people with some foresight, basic literacy. Or infect people with enough interest that they might go chase this up, so that there is further work around it. In the regional work that I've done with the FAO, we have talked about futures policy planning and we've put it into that context. A lot of that is only an opening, because a lot of countries would like to have some idea of where they're headed in terms of their production, but also what some of those threats that will come with it changing in production or land use, so that they can actually get in front of the game. Now, obviously, really good foresight would help them, but I am not selling foresight directly within that space. I'm just saying that there are some methodologies that can be used here, which will help with futures, Policy and Planning. So I changed my message a bit to suit the audience. But in the end, we're trying to make wise decisions. Wiser decisions which understand what the external world is, and what the socio economic drivers are, and how they might change over time, so that we're better positioned. If I have to give it in a sentence, it's basically we would like to help make much wiser decisions, which support a much more sustainable way of living.

 

Peter Hayward 

Given that you're coming from a risk, and to some extent, you've always had the kind of specter of you know, the next big pandemic, which we talked about the next Spanish flu, we've probably got it now. How does that balancing with hope and giving people agency to believe they can respond?

 

Peter Black 

I think agency exists as soon as you recognize that the way that we interact with the planet does mean that these things will happen from time to time.  Controlling the response or at least trying to manage the response is part of that. But I am also very careful not to give an impression that we are in control. I think in a way, I have got the view..... James Kay said it best probably, that part of a scientist's role is actually sharing about how the future might unfold. There should be hope in that. But don't kid yourself into believing that you will have control over that. You need to be humble enough to recognize there is a very complex world and there will be things which are difficult and we will muddle through. It becomes much more a part of your inner story about how you will adapt and live through that. I think hope is essential for most of us to get up in the morning and move forward. At the moment, with this COVID-19, it's very easy to become overwhelmed, especially by some of the information. But we still have these psychological biases, where we overestimate how good things are going to be. And I think that's a pretty good adaptive response, to make sure that we can function usefully in the world, especially under current circumstances.

 

Peter Hayward 

Let's close on question five, which we may as well talk about it. It's been it's been with us all the way throughout the conversation. So yeah, around COVID, us,  the future.

 

Peter Black 

I think COVID is gonna be it's a teaching moment, in lots of ways. I am a little concerned that if it turns the corner, and we come out with an outcome, which is a bit bit better than anticipated, there'll be a lot of pressure to snap back to business as usual.  It won't be business as usual, but there will be  pressure to come back to as close to that as possible as quickly as possible. And I think you even hear that in the narrative around, building the bridge so we can get through the other side and then we can quickly bounce back, economically within Australia. I would hope that that is not the case. Fundamentally, this should be a chance for us to reset. But whether we will or not, I think in some unfortunate ways depends on how bad things are or how long they last. The longer some of the pain lasts, the more likely it is that there might be extra energy to take the advantage around the reset and reconsider what the futures are that we want. So it's a bit of a mixed bag. COVID is also going to obviously in many countries highlight the inadequacies of surge capacity, and probably should and could lead to improved use of technologies which already exist, and how that could be used in the future, to manage other outbreaks or pandemics like this. I think we haven't taken advantage of some of the technology, but we also don't have a mature global worldview, which allows us to accept that life and death is pretty central to the way we have evolved on the planet forever. And that is going to be still the case in the future. There's no joy at all in this COVID. But there are some potential silver linings if society can respond in a range of different ways. I've seen there's a lot of interest, obviously in the futures community thinking about this. But there's also some who believe that that bounce back is going to happen faster than we might like. There's a lot of interest, not just in the futures community, but more generally, in people who are interested about their future, about what we can keep from the past, what we valued, but we want we definitely want to throw away. There's been a lot of discussion around the working from home issue and that sort of technology and that's all great. I think they will change. I think education systems will probably get a bit of a kick from this in terms of what can and can't be delivered. So there will be change come from this COVID no doubt. But I'd like to think that we can harness a lot of that energy towards a much more balanced future, about the way we live on the planet.

 

Peter Hayward 

So I accept everything you've said, and you aren't saying that it's up to the people with the policy positions to put the right policies in place. That's not all you're saying. But what are the changes that Peter Black is going to put in place as a result of COVID?

 

Peter Black 

I've reevaluated, like many people have, what's truly important in Peter Black's life. In some ways, Peter Black probably had bought a used future too and has come into stark relief as a result of COVID. So some of the things that I thought were going to be important to me in this stage of my life, which is, I wouldn't say semi retirement, but I don't want to be working 365 days a year. I want to have a choice about when I do and do not give my energies, to different things. That could still be true, but I think I'm going to be refocusing much more strongly on the importance of relationships, and my relationships with other people, but also my relationships with the planet. So waking up and looking outside and enjoying the fact that I can actually see green trees and the ocean in the distance and breathe clean air. Its value has gone up quite drastically with COVID. The fact that once my quarantine is finished, potentially I could walk on the beach with the dog and have a swim, which I always enjoyed, but I think that I might appreciate that a little more than I did a month ago.

 

Peter Hayward 

Well Pete, it's been great to catch up again, its been a long time since we had a chat. Thank you very much for taking some time out in your quarantine to talk to the future pod community.

 

Peter Black 

Been a real pleasure. Thanks so much. Look forward to talking again sometime.

 

Peter Hayward 

This has been another production from future pod. Future pod is a not for profit venture. We exist through the generosity of our supporters. If you would like to support your tripod, go to the Patreon link on our website. Thank you for listening. Remember to follow us on Instagram and Facebook. This is Peter Hayward saying goodbye for now.