This week’s Future Here Now explores what I think is the macro-challenge of the Fusion Era: dealing with the detritus of the Industrial Era. Detritus covers a lot of categories – vacant houses, brownfields, forever chemicals, micro-plastics – and “dealing with” that detritus ranges from cleaning up to re-using to creating something entirely new out of it. Already, remediation industries and professions are among the fastest-growing across a range of industries.
This new reality is going to not only consume a larger and larger portion of our resources (gasoline, water, budgets), but it’s going to force us to work in ways that will upend some of the core precepts of the industrial era, including such chestnuts as economic growth and consumption as entertainment. And it will force us, each of us, to change some of our core assumptions, while it also makes it harder and harder to hold on to what we’re used to.
On the other side, though, I suspect we may come to a new normal that makes the crap we currently put up with look primitive.
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