While the exiting Shell CEO predicts 80% oil demand 30 years from now, actual innovators like Dow are teaming up with research universities to extract ethanol from algae farms that turn carbon dioxide into alternative fuels.

We need to keep propogating these stories in order to make innovation-resisters anachronistic. We need to stop wishing and hoping that the fossil energy gods will wake up to the possibilities of creating fuels that will ultimately drive demand higher than ever thought possible.

Government censorship continues in so many parts of the world; billions of people live in censor-oriented cultures. Never mind that censorship, through producing costly dramatics, never kept communism from imploding from people’s instrinsic and deep hunger for connection rather than isolation. When we stop trying to control people’s minds, people’s minds will naturally seek and express what is beautiful and true.

Sustainable fashion means you’ve been given the information of where the clothing comes from, who makes it and what it’s processed with to ensure the item is worthy of the eco-friendly message it’s sporting.

Green Living Online defines some of the more common fabric terms and their potential sustainability factors. We will and should see more fabric and all consumer products coming with the “stories” of their composition, origins, and socio-economic impacts. A planet of conscious consumers will shape conscious design, production, and distribution.

I’ve long quipped that the closest I ever got to seeing action in a uniform was Cub Scouts. We learned how to camp, but not why to camp. It was a rite of passage to an unknown that would escape even flashlights the size of car batteries.

What should we be preparing children for? If we assembled all the scout masters, stage directors, and sports coaches and asked them for what kind of future should we be preparing children, what would they come up with? We are in fact using the important real estate of “extra-curriculars” to prepare them for something, or nothing.

Maybe we should at least be intentional about it.

Robert Wright’s Evolution of God tracks the history of the divine from back in the day when “the Big Guy” sported multiple personas to modern monotheist times where He appears in no fewer versions, given the fact that there are 30,000 divine sects just within Christianity itself. God has gone through countless iterations, paralleling the evolution of human capacity for moral sensibilities and behaviors.

The whole business raises the question of the future of God as he appears in his “only one true form” in an endless evolution of religions and religious fusions that we can expect to see far into the future. Will people pray to the “God” of their team to ultimately beat the “God” of the other team (read: sports team, nation, religion)? Can we unambivalently declare that no future generation will allow our God to change? Will future generations faithfully protect the static integrity of God as He is dogmatized and theologized today?

If human beings continue on the moral trajectory of the past 3000 years and become a planet of moral beings, what could possibly be the God of that planet?

If the urban farming movement gets moving, it could implode the rural farming dynasty and collapse with it the embedded racism that has been endemic to American rural culture since the 1600’s.

Wouldn’t that be something?

Isn’t that reason enough to intersect agricultural innovation and social justice?

To all who strive to be unique, the universe loves you. To those who strive to be unique, the only ones who will love you are those who, also, strive to be unique. A future different from the past will thrive on those who strive on being unique.

Today I completed the copy for my 8th book, “The Stories that Connect Us” due to be released late July. It was a profound learning experience for me, giving me the perspective of how, in fact, we are our stories. When we get that, we invite each other into new possibility spaces and those who enter, will create a future different from the past.

When we get that, our connections will be rooted in our narratives. We will treat each other as sources of meaning, which is what narrative is, rather than tools for our own purposes. It is a perspective that will transform communities and put in our hands the freedom to love.

In our men’s group tonight one of the themes was the wisdom of being receptively open, listening, observing, paying attention to emergent trends, the possibilities that unfold in their own way and reveal themselves to those conscious enough to notice their emergence. The future is not always something we need to conjure and engineer. It can be an emergence that we notice and contribute to its realization.

Innovation guru John Kao assembled government policy leaders from around the world recently in San Francisco to explore the potential appropriate role of governments in supporting innovations. Many countries like the US, Britain, India, and Finland already have innovation positions and metrics integrated into economic strategies.

The emerging consensus is that the future of government is not to arrogantly “pick winners and losers” but to “create the conditions” for innovation, especially innovations that address figural social issues like aging, health care, food, water, and quality of life.

The whole matter reflects the reality that governments would be socially irresponsible not to be strategic about their role in fostering the conditions for innovation. This is a whole new dialogue for exploration where at least this group of visionaries talks about government’s role as “facilitator” rather than “mandators” and “controllers” of market innovations. It is another brilliant example of the power of shared responsibility between government and business.