Hence it is my view that dissenting futures can be unambiguously positive and, moreover, they can
be brought within imaginative, intellectual - and thus practical - reach. The focussing concept of a
wise culture places the pursuit of wisdom above raw technical power. 11 Such a culture is farsighted
and imbued throughout with transpersonal awareness. To our great cost, a sense of this
‘transformational’ future is not easy to find in industrialised cultures or their dominant institutions -
but it can certainly be derived from carefully reflecting on the sources drawn upon here. 12 The
route from here (the slide toward destruction) to there (a future worth living in) is through the
growth of human awareness across the planet and the implementation of a host of future-saving,
future-creating, structures and processes. Most of these already exist in culturally marginalised
forms. But they are also metaphorical seeds which await the opportunity to grow. A powerful key
to their mainstream emergence is an advanced futures discourse which can critique and re-shape
existing agendas. Such a discourse can be developed through speculative writing, futures studies
and associated fields. 13 Overall, the goal is to work toward the creation of social foresight and the
steady emergence of societies and cultures that are not merely past-driven, but responsive to the
emerging near-term future context.