Worldchanging.com co-founder Jamais Cascio works in the field of scenario development. He’s used his skills on all sorts of projects from video game design to building alternative energy scenarios. In his recently published lecture, he talks about specific things we can do to build a better world.

[Creative Commons photo by Andrés Larsen]

Each year, the TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) Conference invites experts from a variety of fields to share their knowledge in 18 minute lectures. Jamais Cascio gave this talk back in February of 2006 discussing solutions for a sustainable future. He talks about the need for optimism and how, “focusing only on negative outcomes can really blind you to the very possibility of success.” He emphasizes staying positive, citing scientific and technological advances that help us better understand our impact on the world around us and how to lower that impact.

He even touches on the power of social networking! The Earth Witness project he describes sounds like a really exciting idea - one that might be doable using a microblogging service like Twitter that allows folks to send texts straight from their cell phones to the web!

Check out the whole video after the jump.

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Should population growth be curbed?

Immediately, we are faced with important moral, ethical and religious quandaries.

I write this in the light of a piece that appeared in the UK’s Observer. In it, John Gray, a political philosopher, states:

The uncomfortable fact, which is ignored or denied by both ends of the environmental debate, is that an energy-intensive lifestyle of the kind enjoyed in the rich parts of the world cannot be extended to a human population of nine or 10 billion, the level forecast in UN studies for the middle of this century.

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While some people tout better and more energy-efficient technology as one solution to our current fuel and climate challenges, their expectations might be overblown. A new study from the UK Energy Research Centre, for example, finds that improved efficiency sometimes creates a tendency to use more energy, or to engage in other activities that counteract the efficiency gains. It’s called the “rebound effect,” and it can work either directly or indirectly to reduce expected energy savings from improved efficiency.

Rebounds occur, for example, when someone who buys a more fuel-efficient car decides to take the occasional longer day trip because, “Hey, I’m not spending as much on gas anymore.” They can also happen when someone who’s improved his home insulation uses the money saved on heating and cooling to pay for a plane trip to Orlando.

Then there’s “backfire,” also known, somewhat bizarrely, as the Khazzoon-Brookes postulate. That’s the even worse effect that can occur when a new energy-efficient technology actually causes overall energy use to increase. It happened, for instance, after the steam engine came onto the scene. Nineteenth-Century Scotland saw its total coal consumption increase tenfold thanks to the steam engine, which made it possible to mine coal at a lower cost, which made it cheaper to produce iron, when then lowered the cost of steam engines and drove the development of the railway industry.

While backfires are uncommon, rebounds are not. A recent report from the InterAcademy Council noted that technology improvements over the past 20 years have helped drive a small decline in the world’s energy intensity — which compares energy consumption to economic output — but not in its overall energy consumption. And the United National Environmental Programme’s latest “Global Environmental Outlook” (GEO-4) warns that, while technology can help defend against environmental stresses, it’s sometimes important to look beyond the “technology-centred development paradigm.”

The UK rebound report concludes we could be overestimating our savings from improved effiency by anywhere from 10 to 50-plus percent. It adds that policy-makers need to start taking rebounds into effect now if they want to enact energy- and carbon-reducing measures that actually work.

While daily news reports and studies mercilessly remind us just how troubled things are, a picture — as the tired but true old saying goes — is worth a thousand words. And that’s what you find plenty of at the Global Education Project: pictures, maps, graphs and charts that illustrate at a glance the many different trends affecting Planet Earth. Whether you’re interested in human life expectancy, soil degradation, water consumption or global reserves of fossil fuels, you’ll find not only graphic images but lots of well-referenced information at various pages on the site.

The Global Education Project’s site focuses on 10 key topics: development and debt, energy supply, fishing and aquaculture, food and soil, fresh water, global ecology, human conditions, toxic pollution, wealth and weapons. A separate page for each topic offers, in addition to graphics and background information, lists of related links and recent news about that particular subject.

To get an idea of how much more punch a graphical map can deliver than a statement of fact, consider first this nugget from the Website’s "Food and Soil" section: "About 2 billion hectares of soil, equivalent to 15 per cent of the Earth’s land area (an area larger than the United States and Mexico combined), have been degraded through human activities."

Then see what that statement means visually by checking out the soil degradation map.

Was your reaction "Wow?" Mine was.

The Global Education Project is a non-governmental organization in Canada that’s been publishing educational wall posters and producing issue-oriented events for the past 15 years. The group’s production team got together in 2005 to create the — as it aptly calls them, "jaw-dropping" — maps and other graphics now on the Website. All of that imagery is also available in the Global Education Project’s 27-by-36-inch wall chart, which is describes as a "book on one page."

If you’ve found yourself having a hard time convincing others — whether it’s your family members, students, co-workers or friends — about why it’s crucial to start living in a more environmentally responsible, sustainable way, the wealth of information you’ll find both on the Global Education Project’s Website and poster might be just what you’re looking for.