Joel Garreau - Radical Evolution

We live in one of the most tumultuous and exciting times in human history. With our cultural, political, economic, and spiritual systems colliding, breaking down, and transforming in the mixing bowl of the twenty-first century, it is very difficult to predict what the world or our lives might look like even a few years from now. For the June-August 2009 issue of EnlightenNext magazine, we decided to peer into the crystal ball and find out what the future—unpredictable as it may be—might have in store for us. We’ve spoken to a number of our favorite visionaries, asking them questions such as “How bad do things have to get before they get better?” and “What game-changing social or technological innovations are on the horizon?”

In this installment in a series of EnlightenNext interviews with futurists, associate editor Joel Pitney speaks with Washington Post reporter Joel Garreau, author of the bestselling book Radical Evolution, about some of the new technologies that he says not only could help us tackle some of our most difficult challenges but may also dramatically alter what it means to be human. Drawing on a wealth of research into emerging trends across several industries, Garreau envisions a future where memory pills greatly enhance our learning capacities, nanotechnology makes solar our most efficient source of energy, and bioengineered bacteria cleanse the atmosphere of excess CO2. Despite our current economic crisis, the good news according to Garreau is that it is in times of crisis that society is most willing to accept the radical new ideas that will help to define the world of the future.

BIO

Joel Garreau is the author of Radical Evolution: The Promise and Peril of Enhancing Our Minds, Our Bodies–and What It Means to Be Human, published in 2005 by Doubleday. Garreau burst onto the culture and values scene with the 1981 publication of The Nine Nations of North America, a book that described how the continent was behaving not so much like 50 states and three countries, but nine separate and powerful civilizations or economies that paid scant attention to political boundaries in the course of forging their own destiny. Ten years later, Garreau focused on who we are through the prism of the modern metropolis we are building in Edge City: Life on the New Frontier. In what was termed “groundbreaking” work by The New York Times, Garreau pointed out that we are building the biggest change in 150 years on how we live, work, play, pray, shop, and die.

Garreau is a reporter and editor at The Washington Post and principal of The Garreau Group, the network of his best sources committed to understanding who we are, how we got that way, and where we're headed, worldwide. He has served as a senior fellow at the University of California at Berkeley and George Mason University and is a member of Global Business Network, the pioneering scenario-planning organization. He is also the troll of a small forest in the foothills of Virginia's Blue Ridge Mountains where he lives with his wife and two daughters.