Futures Thinking
The opportunity to usher in a new Renaissance.

Sometimes our opportunities seem so vast as to be insurmountable. But breaking big visions into discrete buckets makes them seem more doable. We don't all have to do everything, but we can all do something.

Spencer R. Scott is on the science team at a climate-focused nonprofit called One Earth. He also co-runs a sustainable demonstration site, Solar Punk Farms, with his husband. In his spare time he thinks about the future and writes a great newsletter, As If We Were Staying. 

He sees the transition to a civilization operating with ecological principles as the opportunity to usher in a new Renaissance. 

He holds up Janine Benyus's identification of some of Life’s Principles here on Earth:

Life runs on sunlight. 

Life rewards cooperation. 

Life builds from the bottom up. 

Life banks on diversity. 

Life recycles everything. 

Life builds resilience through diversity, 
decentralization, and redundancy. 

Life optimizes rather than maximizes. 

Life selects for the good of the whole system. 

In short, life creates the conditions conducive to life.
Then he uses these principles and the work of sustainable development scholar, Jiahua Pan, as inspiration for an "ingredients for an ecological civilization" list.

Article: An Ecological Civilization is the Renaissance We’ve Been Waiting For