Garry D. Peterson

Garry D. Peterson
  • PhD
  • Professor (Full) at Stockholm University

About

247
Publications
277,635
Reads
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38,832
Citations
Current institution
Stockholm University
Current position
  • Professor (Full)
Additional affiliations
July 2003 - May 2008
McGill University
Position
  • Research Assistant

Publications

Publications (247)
Article
Many challenges posed by the current Anthropocene epoch require fundamental transformations to humanity's relationships with the rest of the planet. Achieving such transformations requires that humanity improve its understanding of the current situation and enhance its ability to imagine pathways toward alternative, preferable futures. We review ad...
Article
Full-text available
The Nature Futures Framework (NFF) is a heuristic tool for co-creating positive futures for nature and people. It seeks to open up a diversity of futures through mainly three value perspectives on nature – Nature for Nature, Nature for Society, and Nature as Culture. This paper describes how the NFF can be applied in modelling to support decision-m...
Article
Full-text available
The Anthropocene is characterized by accelerating change and global challenges of increasing complexity. Inspired by what some have called a polycrisis, we explore whether the human trajectory of increasing complexity and influence on the Earth system could become a form of trap for humanity. Based on an adaptation of the evolutionary traps concept...
Article
Full-text available
Burkina Faso and the wider Sahel region have experienced substantial changes in rainfall, population, and landscape use. These changes have altered ecosystem services, the benefits that people receive from ecosystems, and rural livelihoods. However, it is difficult to assess the magnitude of these changes because of missing and fragmented social, a...
Article
Full-text available
Human societies face existential challenges on multiple fronts: climate change, biodiversity loss, altered biogeochemical flows, social unrest and injustices. Innovative solutions are needed to shift current trajectories towards a sustainable and just future. Futures thinking enables people to explore and articulate alternative futures and find pat...
Preprint
Full-text available
Korea's rapid economic development has positioned it as a key player in Asia's economy and globally, albeit with significant environmental and societal consequences. The Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), serving as a buffer between North and South Korea, holds immense historical, cultural, and ecological value and conservation and transformation potential....
Preprint
The predominance of catastrophic and dystopian visions about the future makes it difficult to envision and articulate pathways for sustainability transformations towards more positive futures. To address this challenge, the "Seeds of a Good Anthropocene” (SoGA) project began over a decade ago, in 2014. The project seeks to identify and amplify exis...
Article
Full-text available
Motivation Foresight methods are increasingly recognized as essential for decision‐making in complex environments, particularly within development and research settings. As foresight methods continue to gain prominence for decision‐making, their application in these settings grows. Funders and policy‐makers can benefit from the experience of transf...
Preprint
Full-text available
Human societies face existential challenges on multiple fronts: climate change, biodiversity loss, altered biogeochemical flows, social unrest and injustices. Innovative solutions are needed to shift current trajectories towards a sustainable and just future. ‘Futures thinking’ enables people to explore and articulate alternative futures and find p...
Article
Full-text available
Future dynamics of biological invasions are highly uncertain because they depend on multiple social–ecological drivers. We used a scenario‐based approach to explore potential management options for invasive species in Europe. During two workshops involving a multidisciplinary team of experts, we developed a management strategy arranged into 19 goal...
Chapter
Full-text available
In line with its mandate, the IPBES task force on scenarios and models developed a methodological guidance to accompany the foundations of the Nature Futures Framework, a flexible tool to support the development of scenarios and models of desirable futures for people, nature and Mother Earth, welcomed by the IPBES Plenary in decision IPBES-9/1. The...
Article
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Invasive alien species are one of the major threats to global biodiversity, ecosystem integrity, nature's contributions to people and human health. While scenarios about potential future developments have been available for other global change drivers for quite some time, we largely lack an understanding of how biological invasions might unfold in...
Article
Landscapes have typically been produced by varied, diverse, and long-term interactions between people and nature. However, most landscape planning and ecosystem service mapping approaches focus on the biophysical aspects of landscapes rather the social. Spatial representations of people’s perceptions, mental models, and local knowledge of ecosystem...
Article
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Unlabelled: To halt further destruction of the biosphere, most people and societies around the globe need to transform their relationships with nature. The internationally agreed vision under the Convention of Biological Diversity-Living in harmony with nature-is that "By 2050, biodiversity is valued, conserved, restored and wisely used, maintaini...
Preprint
Biosphere Futures (biospherefutures.net) is a new online database to collect and discover scenario studies from across the world, with a specific focus on scenarios that explicitly incorporate interdependencies between humans and their supporting ecosystems. It provides access to a globally diverse collection of case studies that includes most ecos...
Article
Full-text available
Nearly a billion people depend on tropical seascapes. The need to ensure sustainable use of these vital areas is recognised, as one of 17 policy commitments made by world leaders, in Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 14 (‘Life below Water’) of the United Nations. SDG 14 seeks to secure marine sustainability by 2030. In a time of increasing social-...
Article
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Envisioning positive scenarios that recognize the multiple values of nature is fundamental for designing transformative changes in local socio-ecological systems. This study developed a protocol with three specifications for operationalizing the Nature Futures Framework (NFF) in a landscape scenario analysis using a multi-objective optimization fra...
Preprint
Full-text available
1. Invasive alien species are one of the major threats to global biodiversity, ecosystem integrity, natures contribution to people and human health. While scenarios about potential future developments have been available for other global change drivers for quite some time, we largely lack an understanding of how biological invasions might unfold in...
Preprint
Full-text available
Future dynamics of biological invasions are highly uncertain because they depend on multiple environmental, societal and socio-economic drivers. We adopted a qualitative scenario approach to explore the future of invasive alien species (IAS) in Europe and created an overall strategy for their management that considers different plausible future dev...
Article
Full-text available
How do social-ecological systems change over time? In 2002 C. S. Holling and colleagues proposed the concept of panarchy, which presented social-ecological systems as an interacting set of adaptive cycles, each produced by the dynamic tensions between novelty and efficiency at multiple scales. Initially introduced as a conceptual framework and set...
Article
Full-text available
Ecologists are challenged by the need to bridge and synthesize different approaches and theories to obtain a coherent understanding of ecosystems in a changing world. Both food web theory and regime shift theory shine light on mechanisms that confer stability to ecosystems, but from different angles. Empirical food web models are developed to analy...
Article
Full-text available
Food is essential to people and is one of the main ways in which people are connected to the world’s ecosystems. However, food systems often cause ecosystem degradation and produce ill-health, which has generated increasing calls to transform food systems to be more sustainable. The Swedish food system is currently undergoing substantial change. A...
Article
Full-text available
Times of crisis offer a rare opportunity to understand the mechanisms underpinning the resilience of complex adaptive systems. The coronavirus pandemic that started in 2020 overwhelmed health systems worldwide and forced governments, businesses, and individuals to deploy a range of coping and adaptation strategies. Through an online survey targetin...
Article
Full-text available
Achieving global sustainability goals requires most people and societies to fundamentally revisit their relationship with nature. New approaches are called for to guide change processes towards sustainable futures that embrace the plurality of people’s desired relationships with nature. This paper presents a novel approach to exploring desirable fu...
Article
Full-text available
While the scientific community documents environmental degradation and develops scenarios to identify the operational margins of system Earth, less attention is given to how decisions are made that steer the system in one direction or the other. We propose to use strategy games for this purpose, increasing the representation of human agency in scen...
Article
Full-text available
Social-ecological interactions have been shown to generate interrelated and reoccurring sets of ecosystem services, also known as ecosystem service bundles. Given the potential utility of the bundles concept, along with the recent surge in interest it is timely to reflect on the concept, its current use and potential for the future. Based on our ec...
Article
Resilience is the capacity of any system to maintain its function, structure and identity despite disturbances. Assessing resilience has been elusive due to high levels of abstraction that are difficult to empirically test, or the lack of high quality data required once appropriate proxies are identified. Most resilience assessments are limited to...
Article
Full-text available
In a complex and turbulent world, there is heightened interest in managing for resilience. However, resilience guides, particularly those used in the development field, often lack a theoretical grounding in complex adaptive systems. There is a demand for guidance on how to operationalize complexity in applications of resilience, such as resilience...
Article
Full-text available
Scenario analysis has emerged as a key tool to analyze complex and uncertain future socio-ecological developments. However, currently existing global scenarios (narratives of how the world may develop) have neglected biological invasions, a major threat to biodiversity and the economy. Here, we use a novel participatory process to develop a diverse...
Preprint
Full-text available
While the scientific community has focused on documenting environmental degradation and developing scenarios that help identify the operational margins for system Earth, less attention has been given to the mental models of decision-makers that underpin environmental policies. We suggest that global efforts to stop deforestation and biodiversity lo...
Preprint
Achieving global sustainability goals requires most people and societies to fundamentally alter their relationship with nature. New approaches are called for to guide change processes towards sustainable futures that embrace the plurality of people’s perspectives on nature. This paper presents a novel approach to exploring desirable futures for nat...
Preprint
Full-text available
Achieving global sustainability goals requires most people and societies to fundamentally alter their relationship with nature. New approaches are called for to guide change processes towards sustainable futures that embrace the plurality of people’s perspectives on nature. This paper presents a novel approach to exploring desirable futures for nat...
Preprint
Full-text available
The Nature Futures Framework (NFF) is a heuristic tool for co-creating positive futures for nature and people. It seeks to open up a diversity of futures through mainly three value perspectives on nature – Nature for Nature, Nature for Society, Nature as Culture. In this paper, we describe how the NFF can be applied in modelling to support policy....
Preprint
Resilience is the capacity of any system to maintain its function, structure and identity despite disturbances. Assessing resilience has been elusive due to high levels of abstraction that are difficult to empirically test, or the lack of high quality data required once appropriate proxies are identified. Most resilience assessments are limited to...
Chapter
Full-text available
Key methods discussed in this chapter Double uncertainty matrix, Mānoa, scenario archetypes, La Prospective, causal layered analysis
Article
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A key sustainability challenge in human-dominated landscapes is how to reconcile competing demands such as food production, water quality, climate regulation, and ecological amenities. Prior research has documented how efforts to prioritize desirable ecosystem services such as food and fiber have often led to tradeoffs with other services. However,...
Article
Full-text available
Global Environmental Assessments (GEAs) are in a unique position to influence environmental decision-making in the context of sustainability challenges. To do this effectively, however, new methods are needed to respond to the needs of decision-makers for a more integrated, contextualized and goal-seeking evaluation of different policies, geared fo...
Article
Different regions, with different contexts and values, will follow different sustainability transformation pathways, giving rise to tensions and opportunities as the outcomes of regional pathways interact. To navigate these changes, we need a better understanding of how regional pathways interact to produce outcomes for people and nature. Different...
Preprint
Full-text available
Scenario analysis has emerged as a key tool to analyze complex and uncertain future socio-ecological developments. However, current global scenarios (narratives of how the world may develop) have neglected biological invasions, a major threat to biodiversity and the economy. We used a novel participatory process to develop a diverse set of global b...
Preprint
Full-text available
Creating a sustainable and just future necessitates a transformation in how people interact with the Earth system and one another. Yet there is no “one-size fits all” approach; different regions with different contexts and values are likely to follow different pathways. These will give rise to both tensions and opportunities as the outcomes of thos...
Preprint
Full-text available
How do social-ecological systems change over time? In 2002 Holling and colleagues proposed the concept of Panarchy, which presented social-ecological systems as an interacting set of adaptive cycles, each of which is produced by the dynamic tensions between novelty and efficiency at multiple scales. Initially introduced as a conceptual framework an...
Article
Full-text available
Global environmental change challenges humanity because of its broad scale, long-lasting, and potentially irreversible consequences. Key to an effective response is to use an appropriate scientific lens to peer through the mist of uncertainty that threatens timely and appropriate decisions surrounding these complex issues. Identifying such corridor...
Article
Full-text available
There are many calls to use the COVID 19 crisis as an opportunity for transforming to a future trajectory that is more equitable and environmentally sustainable. What is lacking is a cohesive framework for bringing these calls together. We propose that such transitions could be informed by lessons from three decades of scholarship on abrupt and sur...
Article
Full-text available
Scientists have repeatedly argued that transformative, multiscale global scenarios are needed as tools in the quest to halt the decline of biodiversity and achieve sustainability goals. As a first step towards achieving this, the researchers who participated in the scenarios and models expert group of the Intergovernmental Science‐Policy Platform o...
Article
Full-text available
Targets for human development are increasingly connected with   targets for nature, however, existing scenarios do not explicitly address this relationship. Here, we outline a strategy to generate scenarios centred on our relationship with nature to inform decision-making at multiple scales.
Article
Full-text available
The Anthropocene presents a set of interlinked sustainability challenges for humanity. The United Nations 2030 Agenda has identified 17 specific Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as a way to confront these challenges. However, local initiatives have long been addressing issues connected to these goals in a myriad of diverse and innovative ways....
Preprint
Scientists have repeatedly argued that transformative, multiscale global scenarios are needed as tools in the quest to halt the decline of biodiversity and achieve sustainability goals. As a first step towards achieving this, the Expert Group on Scenarios and Models of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Serv...
Article
Full-text available
Scenario development helps people think about a broad variety of possible futures; however, the global environmental change community has thus far developed few positive scenarios for the future of the planet and humanity. Those that have been developed tend to focus on the role of a few common, large-scale external drivers, such as technology or e...
Article
Research practice, funding agencies and global science organizations suggest that research aimed at addressing sustainability challenges is most effective when ‘co-produced’ by academics and non-academics. Co-production promises to address the complex nature of contemporary sustainability challenges better than more traditional scientific approache...
Preprint
Full-text available
Ecologists are challenged by the need to bridge and synthesize different approaches and theories to obtain a coherent understanding of ecosystems in a changing world. Both food web theory and regime shift theory shine light on mechanisms that confer stability to ecosystems, but from a different angle. Empirical food web models are developed to anal...
Article
Full-text available
Globally, food systems face multifaceted sustainability challenges and the need for food system transformation is increasingly acknowledged. However, there is still a lack of knowledge on the pathways for transformation and how they will play out in diverse regional social-ecological contexts. We explored transformation towards more sustainable and...
Article
The ecologist C. S. Holling was a visionary of change in nature and society.
Article
Full-text available
In the Pamir Mountains of Eastern Tajikistan, the clearance of mountain forests to provide fuelwood for an increasing population is a major source of environmental degradation. International development organisations have implemented joint forestry management institutions to help restore once-forested mountainous regions, but the success of these i...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
The workshop drew on the ‘nature futures’ participatory scenario-building exercise initiated by the IPBES expert group on scenarios and models, and other biodiversity modelling initiatives such as the ISIMIP project2 working on adding biodiversity to the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs) scenarios framework, the 'bending the curve' initiative3 l...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
The workshop entitled ‘From visions to scenarios for nature and nature’s contributions to people for the 21st century’ was organized by the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) expert group on scenarios and models and its technical support unit, and hosted by the NF-UBC Nereus Program, the Peter Wall Institute f...
Article
Full-text available
Context Humans continually transform landscapes, affecting the ecosystem services (ES) they provide. Thus, the spatial relationships among services vary across landscapes. Managers and decision makers have access to a variety of tools for mapping landscapes and analyzing their capacity to provide multiple ES. Objectives This paper characterizes an...
Article
Full-text available
Brazil, home to one of the planet’s last great forests, is currently in trade negotiations with its second largest trading partner, the European Union (EU). We urge the EU to seize this critical opportunity to ensure that Brazil protects human rights and the environment. Brazil’s forests, wetlands, and savannas are crucial to a great diversity of I...
Article
Access to ecosystem services and influence on their management are structured by social relations among actors, which often occur across spatial scales. Such cross-scale social relations can be analysed through a telecoupling framework as decisions taken at local scales are often shaped by actors at larger scales. Analyzing these cross-scale relati...
Article
Full-text available
We explore how remittances shape the effect of rural out-migration on the potential for local forest transitions. Building on an existing theoretical model of social-ecological regime shifts that links migration, farmland abandonment, and forest regrowth, we incorporate migrant remittances as an additional rural-urban teleconnection. We also extend...
Article
Cascading effects of regime shifts The potential for regime shifts and critical transitions in ecological and Earth systems, particularly in a changing climate, has received considerable attention. However, the possibility of interactions between such shifts is poorly understood. Rocha et al. used network analysis to explore whether critical transi...
Article
Full-text available
Regime shifts, i.e., large, persistent, and usually unexpected changes in ecosystems and social-ecological systems, can have major impacts on ecosystem services, and consequently, on human well-being. However, the vulnerability of different regions to various regime shifts is largely unknown because evidence for the existence of regime shifts in di...
Preprint
Full-text available
Regime shifts are large, abrupt and persistent critical transitions in the function and structure of systems (1, 2). Yet it is largely unknown how these transitions will interact, whether the occurrence of one will increase the likelihood of another, or simply correlate at distant places. Here we explore two types of cascading effects: domino effec...
Chapter
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Chapter Highlights: 1. The rapid urbanization associated with the Anthropocene provides an imperative for humans to think differently about the future. 2. The “seeds” approach describes how niche experiments can, over time, coalesce to shift the dominant regime onto a more sustainable trajectory. 3. To achieve positive urban futures, it is vi...
Article
Full-text available
Resilience thinking has frequently been proposed as an alternative to conventional natural resource management, but there are few studies of its applications in real-world settings. To address this gap, we synthesized experiences from practitioners that have applied a resilience thinking approach to strategic planning, called Resilience Planning, i...
Article
Full-text available
In order to construct urban environments that limit negative impacts for global sustainability while supporting human wellbeing, there is a need to better understand how features of the environment influence people's everyday experiences. We present a novel method for studying this combining accessibility analysis and public participatory GIS (PPGI...
Technical Report
Full-text available
What is IPBES? IPBES—the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services—was established in 2012 to serve a role linking the science and knowledge about nature and nature’s benefits to people with policy and decision-making. IPBES has many expert groups, including one that focusses on Scenarios and Models of Biodiversity of Ecosy...
Article
Increasingly, ecosystem services have been applied to guide poverty alleviation and sustainable development in resource-dependent communities. Yet, questions of access, which are paramount in determining benefits from the production of ecosystem services, remain theoretically underdeveloped. That is, ecosystem assessments typically have paid little...
Data
Multiple ecosystem services (ES) can respond similarly to social and ecological factors to form bundles. Identifying key social-ecological variables and understanding how they co-vary to produce these consistent sets of ES may ultimately allow the prediction and modelling of ES bundles, and thus, help us understand critical synergies and trade-offs...
Article
Full-text available
Targets for human development are increasingly connected with targets for nature, however, existing scenarios do not explicitly address this relationship. Here, we outline a strategy to generate scenarios centred on our relationship with nature to inform decision-making at multiple scales.
Article
Full-text available
Multiple ecosystem services (ES) can respond similarly to social and ecological factors to form bundles. Identifying key social-ecological variables and understanding how they co-vary to produce these consistent sets of ES may ultimately allow the prediction and modelling of ES bundles, and thus, help us understand critical synergies and trade-offs...
Article
Many decision-makers are looking to science to clarify how nature supports human well-being. Scientists' responses have typically focused on empirical models of the provision of ecosystem services (ES) and resulting decision-support tools. Although such tools have captured some of the complexities of ES, they can be difficult to adapt to new situat...
Article
Ecosystems influence human societies, leading people to manage ecosystems for human benefit. Poor environmental management can lead to reduced ecological resilience and social–ecological collapse. We review research on resilience and collapse across different systems and propose a unifying social–ecological framework based on (i) a clear definition...
Article
The concept of a poverty trap—commonly understood as a self-reinforcing situation beneath an asset threshold—has been very influential in describing the persistence of poverty and the relationship between poverty and sustainability. Although traps, and the dynamics that lead to traps, are defined and used differently in different disciplines, the c...
Chapter
Ecosystems are shaped by natural processes such as predator–prey interactions and climate, as well as by human activities such as harvesting and pollution. Resilient ecosystems are able to absorb disturbances, but chronic stressors may reduce the capacity of an ecosystem to cope with change (Trends Ecol Evol 15:413–417, 2000). The ability of ecosys...
Article
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The spatial extent of ecological processes has consequences for the generation of ecosystem services related to them. However, management often fails to consider issues of scale when targeting ecological processes underpinning ecosystem services generation. Here, we present a framework for conceptualizing how the amount and spatial scale (here disc...
Article
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The concept of resilience is currently being widely promoted and applied by environmental and development organizations. However, their application of resilience often lacks theoretical backing and evaluation. This paper presents a novel cross-fertilization of two commonly used approaches for applying resilience thinking: the grassroots movement of...
Article
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The emerging discipline of sustainability science is focused explicitly on the dynamic interactions between nature and society and is committed to research that spans multiple scales and can support transitions toward greater sustainability. Because a growing body of place-based social-ecological sustainability research (PBSESR) has emerged in rece...
Chapter
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• The Arctic is undergoing rapid, sometimes turbulent change beyond anything previously experienced. That change is due to climate change, resource extraction, tourism, political change and other factors, driven primarily from outside the Arctic – and it has global implications. • Within the rctic, the integrity of ecosystems and the sustainability...
Article
• Theabilityofpeopletoself-organizeunderlies resilience in the Arctic. The erosion of this ability is found in all cases we examined that exhibited a loss of resilience. Self-organization requires knowledge, local-level monitoring, and the ability of people to define problems and implement an agreed-upon plan. • Historically,manypoliciesofArcticnat...
Chapter
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The full Arctic Resilience Report 2016 can be downloaded from https://www.sei-international.org/publications?pid=3047. Arctic social and ecological change threatens the integrity and sustainability of Arctic communities and ecosystems. These changes are driven primarily by human activities – and mainly from outside the Arctic. While human-caused c...
Chapter
Full-text available
The full Arctic Resilience Report 2016 can be downloaded from https://www.sei-international.org/publications?pid=3047. Key Messages • The Arctic Council can build upon its activities that strengthen resilience, and ensure that resilience monitoring, policies and practices take an integrated social-ecological approach. Deeper and more frequent inte...
Article
Full-text available
The scale, rate, and intensity of humans' environmental impact has engendered broad discussion about how to find plausible pathways of development that hold the most promise for fostering a better future in the Anthropocene. However, the dominance of dystopian visions of irreversible environmental degradation and societal collapse, along with overl...
Article
Full-text available
Ecosystem service assessment and management are shaped by the scale at which they are conducted; however, there has been little systematic investigation of the scales associated with ecosystem service processes, such as production, benefit distribution, and management. We examined how social-ecological spatial scale impacts ecosystem service assess...

Questions

Questions (3)
Question
Can anyone recommend books or papers written in English on the environmental history of Japan. I am looking for research beyond Conrad Totman's Japan: An Environmental History, and I am particularly interested in synthetic work the Meiji Restoration reshaped connections between people and nature as shaped greatly expanded international trade.
Suggestions of research from political ecology, economic history, agricultural history, or historical geography that addresses these issues would also be great.
Question
Service systems consist of a network of people and technologies that provide services to people.
For example, two highly cited paper that lays out a framework for Service Systems is:
Spohrer, J., Maglio, P. P., Bailey, J., & Gruhl, D. (2007). Steps toward a science of service systems. Computer, 40(1), 71-77.
&
Henry Chesbrough and Jim Spohrer. 2006. A research manifesto for services science. Commun. ACM 49, 7. http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1139922.1139945
I would like to know what people who work on "service systems" consider to be other key papers on service systems. Especially related to analyzing how multiple actors interact to create services, for example cell phone producers, app producers, consumers, & telcos.
Question
Fiction offers a valuable way to think out life in an accessible integrated fashion. Many visions of the near future (10-50 years) are dystopian, what are good novels that explore positive green or sustainability oriented futures?

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