Analog Version: What If the Park Dreamed Back?
In this analog Spiral Lab, participants began with billion-year-old rocks as companions, listening to the park as both witness and author. Together, they named griefs and gifts, released patterns of harm, and imagined futures worth inheriting—from truth-telling and repair today, to healing and belonging across generations.
Futures Line: What if the Park Dreamed Back?
What if a park could dream?
At the Our Parks × TEN Baltimore Symposium, we invited participants to listen with the land and imagine Baltimore’s Leakin Park in the year 2075. Their future-voicemails became the first Futures Line recording—a layered soundscape and foresight artifact that carries themes of healing, belonging, and stewardship.
From Input to Interbeing
If regenerative participation is to become a meaningful part of foresight, we must expand our understanding of what foresight practitioners do—and how we show up.
We are not extractors of insights or deliverers of predetermined scenarios. We are gardeners, composters, and stewards of living processes. Our work is less about directing movement and more about cultivating the conditions for emergence, belonging, and transformation.
From Input to Interbeing
Despite good intentions, many public engagement processes remain transactional, time-bound, and symbolic. They ask people to show up, speak up, and then move on. These forms of participation tend to reinforce the illusion that listening has occurred, while leaving little space for transformation or relationship.
A Call to Action: Building a Public Interest Futures Brigade
When it comes to futures thinking — the ability to anticipate, imagine, and shape long-term possibilities — there is no public interest pathway. Foresight careers are still largely confined to corporate strategy departments, government agencies, public policy think tanks, management consulting firms, and military strategy departments. Meanwhile, communities on the frontlines of social, economic, and environmental change are left reacting to futures they did not design.