Future Insights: Action over Hope
In this series of interviews, we ask the Future Works Council to share their hopes, fears, and predictions about the future.
A conversation with Henk Rogers about taking actions instead of having hopes, being accountable for the world we’re leaving to forthcoming generations, and an optimistic outlook on the future.
0. Tell us a bit about yourself. Where are you living right now, who do you live with, and what you are currently working on
I am currently based in Honolulu, but in the process of moving to my apartment in New York City to focus on building Blue Planet Alliance. Right now I’m working on a couple of things. First of all, ending the use of carbon-based fuel. That’s one of my missions. I’ve expanded it to figure out ways to fix everything related to global change and global improvement. I want to put back everything we’ve taken and rebuild the world to what it was when we found it. So that’s taking up most of my time. I spend 10% of my time making a backup of life by going to the Moon or Mars. The remainder is spent 10% on the business and 80% on Blue Planet.
1. What are your hopes for the future?
I don’t have hopes; I know that everything will be fixed at some point in the future but I’d like it to be sooner rather than later. I’d like us to become sustainable by 2045 because it’s the 100th anniversary of the United Nations — a great day to fix everything. That’s my expectation and what I’m working on.
I don’t hope for it. I’m going to make it happen.
That’s an inspiring way of looking at it! In that case, what changes do you see coming in the next 10 to 30 years?
In the next 10 years, we will switch to electric vehicles and stop producing internal combustion engines. For ground travel such as trucks and buses, we will switch to hydrogen, so at the end of 10 years, all carmakers will be either making hydrogen or battery-based electric cars. I think we will be well on our way to replacing fuel like oil, gas, or coal for electricity, and instead use wind, solar, and geothermal-powered solutions. I believe that air travel will take a little longer to make the change; for example, hydrogen planes will take an additional 10 years. I think that we will probably see the first hydrogen planes in 2040. A shift in shipping should also be done in the next 10 years. Maersk said they’re power all of their shipping with renewable energy by 2035. And when they realize that they can save a lot of money, it might happen sooner.
As far as culture is concerned, I think the issue of the “haves” vs. “have-nots” will persist a while longer, and the “haves” (wealthy) have to share their wealth instead of hoarding it. That’s not an easy thing to do. Perhaps with cryptocurrency, we’ll see some of that. But right now, there’s too much control on who, where, and how much one can make money.
2. What are your fears about the future?
Of course, I have fears. One fear is that nationalism and populism get to the point where people don’t understand science, or they choose not to believe it. That is a big fear of mine. Look what happened under the Trump administration. We backed out of the Paris Agreement, which was ridiculous, in my opinion. They say, two steps forward, one step back. I hope there are not too many back steps regarding what humanity has achieved. The world is ready to move forward. But some people are so self-centered that they don’t care about our collective future.
Okay, so you see poor governance as a threat to our future, is that right?
It’s not necessarily the government. The government reacts to the sentiment of the people. So, if the people’s sentiment is ignorance and fear, then there’s a risk that the people will elect somebody that is a danger to democracy. The problem is that we can actually elect an idiot.
And we’ve seen it happen before.
We see this happening in Brazil and the Philippines. There are plenty of idiots who are in power. We just have to survive that
3. What are you most excited about 10 years from now?
I’m excited by the people outside the government mobilizing to make change. I felt this kind of strong positive movement as a student when we were demonstrating against the war in Vietnam. That was a period when I felt the people were rising up and saying, “No, we don’t want this!” Eventually, no matter how much power they had, the government had to bend to our will. That’s what I’m excited about; that people will stand up even more and fight for a promising future for all of us.
Are you talking about the grassroot movements rather than NGOs and organizations or both?
I think this is precisely the one thing that I need to have happen — I need to connect the NGOs and the grassroots movement, which I plan to do with my new NGO in New York, Blue Planet Alliance. I’m deeply aware of what things look like in the nonprofit world. It’s a lie that all of the NGOs in the world are working towards the same goal — to be a force right now, to work together. The mission of the Alliance is to create a world in which humanity and nature live in harmony. Who can disagree with that? Who wouldn’t want to work towards that?
That’s true; it’s just that very few people know how to do it.
Well, that’s why we have to teach people how to do it. That’s the trick if you will. For example, I’m building an app that offers simple ways to learn how to live more sustainably.
I noticed that your organization has a school program to educate future leaders.
Yes, that’s on the foundation side. Our Blue Planet Foundation is based in Hawaii and focused on efforts in the United States. The Alliance is more focused on bridging our efforts to the rest of the world. In the U.S. we’re only 6% of the global population. Everybody else in the world has the right to similar resources and lifestyles. That is why we have to learn how to live sustainably ourselves, to be able to support the rest of the world in living more sustainably.
4. What trends do you think will form our future?
Transparency. When we have more transparency, we will realize that some of our behaviors are destructive. That knowledge should change a lot of our behaviors.
I also think we can go into an era where people think more about the world rather than about a country, moving from nationalism and isolationism to a more transnational point of view. There will be a kind of, “We must fix the world” movement that does not belong to one country or another country. It belongs everywhere because of social media and the fact that we’re all connected.
Cryptocurrency will most likely be a part of that movement. We’re getting rid of the government telling us what we can and cannot do with our money.
Do you think transparency will grow through people’s initiative, or will it be forced through decentralized systems?
No, it’s never going to be forced on people because anything forced on people is subject to corruption. If something is being forced on you by the government, it means that basically, you don’t want something, they want it. And who controls the government? It’s big oil corporations or the gun lobbyists and many different interests who control the governments. So no, I don’t think it will be coming from governments. It’s clear who has money in the crypto world. Who has power should be clear as well. What are you consuming? What are you buying? All those things should be transparent, and they will be. It’s just a matter of time.
I guess what I’m asking about is whether you think it will be more of a cultural change or a technology and system change.
Technology is the bulldozer of cultural change in this case. If you go back in time, we had to do things with shovels. And now we have excavators. If we want to create social change, we have social media bulldozers available to us to rapidly initiate social change — so rapid that the existing powers will just be blindsided. Just like how cryptocurrency caught them by surprise. They didn’t know what to do about it. Now it’s becoming more and more mainstream. They can’t do much about it because we basically moved past the governments on this one.
Right, so the change will be interconnected.
Interconnected, that’s right. Obviously, technology can also cause harm, like the invention of the atom bomb. However, technology itself is not evil. It’s the people using technology in harmful ways that make it evil. Hopefully, most people love and teach their children to care about the world that they will live in. We should simply, collectively not destroy that world. Our children should demand that we clean it up before we die.
5. Fast forward 30 years. What will be the key changes for humanity?
Thirty years from now, we will have figured out the circular economy. We won’t have to mine for any more resources because we have already mined for enough resources in the world. We can reuse everything. It means we go to the garbage dumps and collect all the metal, and we can reuse all that. Because we have garbage dumps everywhere, we’ll have raw materials everywhere. There’s already enough aluminum in the world for us to have for the rest of the time for humanity. In 30 years from now, there will be about 10 billion people. So we will have about enough stuff we need for 10 billion people.
Of course, there’s got to be energy for everyone. If we have cheap or free energy, most of the problems should be solved. Energy is basically what keeps us from fixing everything — the cost of energy, to be more precise. If we had abundant, affordable energy, then we’d be pretty much free to do anything.
That’s true. We, as humans, are pretty good at problem-solving. However, sometimes our solutions generate new problems that are difficult to predict.
It’s just another problem. We discover issues like pollution and then we fix them. For example, Los Angeles and New York don’t have as much pollution as they used to. It’s always just a matter of decision-making — deciding we don’t want pollution, identifying the source, then, fixing the issue. Eventually, even places like Beijing should be pollution-free. You can’t see the sun there! It’s horrible. But people live in it, children live in it. Sometimes, many well-off families send their children to other countries to get an education and they’re going to come back not only with the idea that you should be able to see the sky but also with ideas like “Oh, we should be able to have freedom.” Again, the whole concept of nationalism, I think, will eventually fade away.
I lived in Japan for 18 years. You can take the bullet train from one end of Japan to the other, and there are borders between prefectures that you pass through. I guess Europe is kind of like that now. What I mean is, wars established these borders in the old days. And who gives a sh*t about those borders today? Nobody. People just move right across, not even thinking about what used to be a border. I feel that the world is going to end up there. I don’t know if it’s going to happen in 30 years. That’s harder.
It probably needs more time. Maybe a common global government could be a possible solution if that could work?
Well, that’s kind of what the United Nations is, but it has no teeth. First of all, for the Security Council to do anything, everyone on board must agree, and they seldom all agree. It’s sort of like a useless part of the United Nations because they never agree, so they never execute anything. I don’t know under what circumstances they would have decided if something is happening somewhere in the world that doesn’t affect their international interest. I don’t know if they can change the United Nations. I don’t know if that’s possible. It’s what we’ve got. However, if we, as the world want to move forward, we’re going to have to make the United Nations a little more robust.
Right. Presumably less bureaucratic too.
Well, bureaucracy is everywhere and kills everything. But unbridled anarchy also doesn’t work. The question is, where do you draw the line? If you can create more AI-based systems, then low-level decisions can be made much faster. That way, we can eliminate lots and lots of bureaucracy through AI and automation, and I think that that will happen.
Thank you for reading!
Interviewer: Justyna Cyrankiewicz, Creative Content Curator and Writer.
Editor: Joe Foxton, Head of New Business.
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