Dreaming the Future: Reimagining Civilization in the Age of Nature

By Kenny Ausubel, foreword by David W. Orr.

The world is entering a period of great change. The environment is collapsing. Social disruption abounds. All around, it seems, societies are experiencing breakdown—even collapse. Out of this chaos, however, comes the opportunity to avoid a complete breakdown and instead foster a breakthrough. It is time, argues award-winning social entrepreneur, author, journalist, and filmmaker Kenny Ausubel, to reimagine our future and our connection to each other, and to nature.

In Dreaming the Future, Ausubel tracks the big ideas, metatrends, and game-changing developments of our time being led by some of the world’s greatest thinkers. As more communities take the initiative to shape their own future and become more resilient, Ausubel shows how it’s possible to emerge from a world where corporations are citizens, the gap between rich and poor is cavernous, and biodiversity and the climate are under assault—and create a world where people take their cues from nature and focus on justice, equity, diversity, democracy and peace.

Ausubel is a co-founder of Bioneers—an organization that foreword author David W. Orr describes as “one part global salon…one part catalytic organization.” In a similar catalyst fashion, Dreaming the Future offers readers engaging, and at times humorous, essays that even people steeped in the realities of a world gone wrong and the struggles to right it will find refreshing and provocative.

“Without doubt, Kenny Ausubel has one of the most glorious minds on the planet. Herein he has crafted a dazzling treasury of essays, a rosary of startling truths. His ability to describe the cataclysmic loss of living systems contrasted with the luminous and untold rise of human awakening is unique among living writers and speakers. Read this for its brilliance, but read it also to find joy in the intricate reimagination of what it means to be a human being at this parlous moment in civilization.” -Paul Hawken, social entrepreneur, author Blessed Unrest, The Ecology of Commerce