This website is based on work of the past thirty years which continues today.

In the 1970s I came to see, as others did, that world society was in an early stage of a 'great transformation' affecting every aspect of human life, as has happened from time to time in history.

Three possible responses were:

• Business As Usual;

• HyperExpansion (HE), boosting the drives of the industrial age - centralising, scientific, technical, economic; and

• Sane, Humane, Ecological (SHE), inspired by a new, genuinely post-industrial direction for human society's next stage of development. Based on principles of Enable and Conserve, SHE would give priority to the needs of people and the earth.

I recognised that the actual future would be shaped by a mixture of all these and other responses, or visions, or scenarios. But I have focused since then on what the third one – the sane alternative – would mean in practice.

Some people still claim that people who support an alternative on those lines have no constructive proposals to offer. Such people are ignorant and wrong.

Over the past thirty years or more, increasing numbers of people around the world have been exploring what changes a sane alternative would mean for various aspects of life - for work, for health, for economy, for information and knowledge and education, for food, for the ways we use energy and technology, and so on - and how to bring about those changes.

Sustainable Development; People-centred Globalisation; Combining economic efficiency with economic justice; Progress that is socially just and environmentally benign; Money and Finance as servants not masters. Ideas and concepts like those are not just pipe-dreams. They are essential practical goals for the future of our one-world community.  

The conventional idea of progress, with indiscriminate economic growth, socially and environmentally damaging globalisation, and remote government decisions closely linked to the interests of business and finance, is not a possible way forward. It's not enough now to say "the future doesn't have to be like that". It can't be like that. Those who think it can are leading the world to disaster on a catastrophic scale.

Against that longer-term background, much of my work in recent years has been about changing the worldwide system of money and finance, which now imposes systemic inefficiency and injustice in almost every other sphere.

Money is the main scoring system for the life of society. Changing the scoring system to get a better game should be a priority for people with many different concerns, not just a special interest in money and finance.

Some users of the website will be interested in its more visionary ideas, others in its more practical topics; some in the future of work, others in the future of health; some in the history of ideas, others in action to change the present state of affairs; and so on and so forth.

I aim to make it as easy as I can for people to find their way around the website, in accordance with their different interests and preferences. Click here for tips on how to use it.

James Robertson