The planetary crisis we face demands that we build a new world at a scale, scope and speed we’ve never seen, or even anticipated. To build a better world, we must first explore our new realities and work to imagine the potential (not just the peril) our future holds. We’re living into that future, together here within what feels like an ever-smaller planet. All good thinking is now planetary thinking.
Alex Steffen is an award-winning writer, speaker and foresight consultant, “One of the world’s leading voices on sustainability and the future of the planet” (Vancouver Sun).
From 2003 – 2010, he ran the pioneering sustainability and social innovation project Worldchanging.com, and edited two best-selling Worldchanging books. Before that, he worked for almost a decade in newspapers and radio, covering planetary change on four continents.
Alex Steffen is a prolific writer and public thinker, having written thousands of pieces, been profiled in numerous media interviews and given hundreds of talks to audiences around the world. Over the last ten years he has also advised some of the world’s most forward-looking institutions, investors, philanthropists and NGOs.
In 2013-2014, he was Planetary Futurist in Residence at the design and innovation firm IDEO.
His 2012 book «Carbon Zero: Imagining cities that can save the planet» is an exploration of the kinds of design, technological and policy innovations that can transform our cities into low-carbon engines of prosperity.
In 2016, Steffen successfully ran a crowd-funding campaign for The Heroic Future: a three part series of documentaries on how we might imagine a sustainable future. The theme was you cannot build what you cannot imagine. The series was filmed in front of a live audience over three nights in September 2016 at the Marines’ Memorial Theatre in San Francisco.
Alex has a rare ability to connect planetary thinking to our most practical concerns, and his lively, engaging talks have wowed hundreds of audiences with their combination of practical sense, visionary insight and humor.
From the stage of the TED Conference to boardrooms of leading corporations to lecture halls in some of the world’s most prestigious universities, Alex Steffen has shown a remarkable talent for helping audiences understand the role of world-changing ideas and trends in their own lives and work.