During the middle and late 1960s, concern about the way the world might
be going began to move out of the arena of academic debate amongst
specialists, and became a topic of almost everyday interest to millions
of people. Concern about mankind's disruption of the natural balance of
'the environment' brought the term 'ecology' into widespread use, though
not always with the meaning to be found in the dictionary, and fears
that world population might be growing so rapidly that very soon we
would run out of food, resulting in mass starvation and a disastrous
collapse of civilisation, helped to make books such as The Limits to
Growth best sellers in the early 1970s. Today, quite rightly, decisions
on long-term policy with widespread repercussions - most notably, those
concerning nuclear energy planning - are a subject of equally widespread
public discussion. But all too often such debate focuses on specific
issues without the prob- lems ever being related effectively to an
overall vision of where the world is going and how it is going to get
there. At the Science Policy Res arch Unit, University of Sussex, a
group working on studies of social and tech- nological alternatives for
the future has been contributing to 'the futures debate' for several
years, cautiously (perhaps, in a sense, almost too cautiously!)
developing a secure foundation for forecasting the way the world may
develop.
