1974-1976
From September 15, 1974 through August 18, 1976, I was on a leave of absence from the University of Hawaii and employed by the Ontario Educational Communications Authority (OECA. Also known as TVOntario and TVO) in Toronto, Canada as head of their Futures Project. During that time, I was also a Visiting Professor in both the Department of Industrial Engineering and the Department of Adult Education of the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE), as well as in New College, all of the University of Toronto.
My involvement with OECA resulted from my meeting Ran Ide, CEO of OECA, at a conference of the WFSF in Rome, Italy in 1973 where he saw some of my future-oriented multi-media productions. He then invited a small group from the Rome conference to attend a workshop on "The role of the media in the move to a Conserver Society," held in Toronto in March 1974. From that came his invitation for me to come to Toronto to work with OECA on a "Futures Project."
According to my terms of employment, while I was at OECA I was "to design a framework for the Futures Project" and "to arouse interest in the Project and build support for it in Canada and internationally, particularly in the academic world." In carrying out these two activities, I worked with several producers and directors in TVOntario, CBC-TV and radio, the National Film Board of Canada, BBC2-TV (The Open University, England), WNET-TV (New York City), KOCE-TV (Costa Mesa, California), and various film and television production companies and persons in Canada. The resulting TV productions included "Energy Energy," a three-hour special on energy supply and demand, broadcast over TVO March 16, 1976; "Futures Spaces," three one-hour shows on the UN Habitat theme of Human Settlements, broadcast over TVO, May 31, June 1 and 2, 1976; Intros and Extros to twenty-six half-hour episodes of the BBC-TV series, "Dr. Who," broadcast every Saturday evening during Fall 1976 over TVO; and more than ten hours of additional programming dealing with the future which were broadcast over TV Ontario, CBC-TV and radio, and other private TV and radio stations in Canada [The "Dr. Who" series was so popular that, after I returned to Hawaii in August 1976, TVO sent a crew to Hawaii to film Intros and Extros for another sequence which was shown in Canada in 1977].
In addition to these various media productions, a major activity was organizing and running a second international workshop in Toronto for OECA on "Alternative Futures and the Role of the Media."
In my attempt to "arouse interest" in the Project, in addition to teaching regular classes on the future each semester at New College, University of Toronto, I co-founded The Club of Gnu (a group of students, faculty and townspeople--including Marshall McLuhan--who met every Wednesday noon in the Common Room of New College to discuss various aspects of the future), and was a guest lecture in many classes at the University of Toronto. I also spoke to all Toronto-area and Ontario universities (Queens, Waterloo, Western Ontario, and York) and community colleges (Algonquin, Centennial, Humber, Lambton, Mohawk, Ryerson, and Seneca) and Toronto Teachers College, working primarily through each College's Professional and/or Curriculum Development Officers. I also spoke to many school boards, administrative and teaching groups, and classes throughout the Province; at various Provincial governmental agencies (especially the Ministries of Education and of the Environment), and worked extensively with the Province's Royal Commission on Electrical Power Planning. Finally I spoke to many community and professional groups, such as women's clubs, men's clubs, the YMHA, local chapters of the World Future Society, and the like throughout the City and Province. Among them were the International Association for Adult Education; Associated Women's Councils; Annual Convention of Phi Delta Kappa; 6th Muskoka Conference on the Future; Canadian Medical Association; East York Library Association; Annual convention of Canadian University Press Representatives; Association of Mechanical Contractors; Ontario Art Educator's Association; Annual Convention of Calgary Teachers Association; Ontario Association of Education Officials; Ontario Association of Social Science Teachers; Metro In-Service Education Association; International Association of Community College Educators; and the Ontario University and College Placement Officers Association.
Outside the Province of Ontario I spoke several times to the Science Council of Canada in Ottawa and to several of the Council's committees; the Technological Forecasting Group of the Ministry of State for Science and Technology; the Ministry of Urban Affairs; and the Privy Council of the Prime Minister.
I also discussed the Futures Project, and other aspects of futures research with faculty and students at other universities and colleges elsewhere in Canada: Douglas College, McMaster University, Sault Ste. Marie College, Simon Fraser University, the University of Alberta, the University of British Columbia, the University of Manitoba
New College arranged a special symposium on "Futurism vs. Marxism" which used as the focus of discussion my paper prepared for the Rome WFSF Conference, titled, "Neither there nor then."
I participated in several provincial and national conferences, including a symposium on the development of the Great Lakes Ecomenopolis, sponsored by the Society of Ekistics and the Metropolitan Planning Commission; Massey Lecture symposia on "The politics of the steady state;" Conference on "Dilemmas of modern man" in Winnipeg; Seminar of the Cultural Paradigms Project of the Advanced Concepts Center, Environment Canada, in Ottawa; conference on "Population growth and the future of Canadian education;" a conference on Technology and Growth sponsored by the Ministry of State for Science and Technology in Ottawa; Conference on "New Values for a Global Society" in Collingwood;
I also participated in an international panel on "The Arts and Human Settlements" during the United Nations Habitat Forum in Vancouver, Canada. I made daily reports on the activities of the Habitat Forum from Vancouver to various Pacific Island communities over the PEACESAT network.
I prepared and presented visual material for a workshop of the World Order Project of the Institute for World Order, held in Dubrovnik, Yugoslavia in January 1975.
And in England, I consulted with and prepared audio-visual material for the course, "Art and the Environment," conducted by Simon Nicholson for the Open University.
I visited the following groups and individuals in the US on behalf of the Futures Project: Earthrise, Inc., (Providence, Rhode Island); Jerome Agel, Al Levin, Alvin Toffler, John and Magda McHale, and the Institute for World Order (New York City); the Educational Research Center, Syracuse University; the Futures Group (Glastonbury, Connecticut); the Futures Program, School of Education, University of Massachusetts, Amherst; Senators John Culver and Ted Kennedy, various futures specialists of the Library of Congress, the Office of Technology Assessment, and Hazel Henderson's Center for Alternative Futures (Washington, DC); the Center for the Study of Social Policy of the Stanford Research Institute, Advent House for the Study of the Future, the National Center for Experiments in Television; and the School of Architecture, University of California (San Francisco Bay area).
In matters not directly related to the OECA Futures Project:
I participated in a workshop on Politics and the Future, convened by Alvin Toffler at his home in Washington, Connecticut. This led to our creating the Committee for Anticipatory Democracy and a three-day presentation by the Committee on futures research before a special meeting of the US House of Representatives in Washington, DC in September 1975 The Committee then created the Institute for Alternative Futures, which still exists as a major futures consulting firm to government, business and other groups, in Alexandria, Virginia.
As a National Humanities Scholar for a week, I conducted a series of workshops and presented public lectures on Education for the Future, at the invitation of the Cathedral High School, Springfield, Massachusetts;
Presented a paper titled "De-colonizing the future," at the Second General Assembly of the World Future Society, Washington, DC;
Lectures and workshops on the future for Monterey Peninsula College (California)
Lecture and workshop for the summer institute of Master of Arts in Liberal Studies, Dartmouth College;
Participation in the conference, "Project Knowledge 2000" sponsored by the National Science Foundation, at the IBM headquarters in New York
Participated in an international conference on "Malaysia 2001," held in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, which was modeled after the "Hawaii 2000" conference of 1970;
And taught in what was to become the first WFSF Futures Course, at the International Center for postgraduate Studies, in Dubrovnik, Yugoslavia, in February 1975