Futuresinfocus

Eric W. Sanderson is a landscape ecologist for the Wildlife Conservation Society at the Bronx Zoo, director of the Mannahatta Project, and the author of Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City. In 2013 his book Terra Nova: The New World After Oil, Cars, and Suburbs was published and set the stall for how we should be thinking about building a new world around us.Sanderson’s argument is that the world we live in now is very much an artifact of decisions our grandparents and great, grandparents made about how we build cities, transport ourselves, and how we used the land around us. We still live with those decisions and our children, and their children will live with the decisions we make now, ten-twenty, and one hundred years into the future. We cannot keep kicking the can down the road for 2032 and beyond. We cannot change the laws of physics, but we can change human laws.He argues for three shifts:·      We adjust taxes around the costs (for example what the lan