Back to the Future: Can we change our sustainability futures by looking at our past?
Mark Anderson
Sustainability Behavior Team, Senator George J. Mitchell Center; Senior Instructor, School of Economics
Sustainability scientists have identified stakeholder engagement as an essential part of finding solutions to sustainability issues. How do we engage the future, a key stakeholder in this arena? Can we simply assume that their interests will be just like us today? We think not. How then can we know that the future might want from us? Using the idea of a Maine Woods National Park and the history of Baxter State Park as an example, we will demonstrate a technique called retrospective assessment to estimate what the future might think about our decisions today.