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Alex Steffen

Co-Founder, WorldChanging.com

How do we create a future which is sustainable, dynamic and prosperous? That's the question my work as a writer and foresight consultant seeks to answer.

That work has taken me around the world, working as an environmental journalist on four continents (where I wrote about everything from Japan's fast breeder reactor program to the UN "Earth Summit" in Rio de Janeiro); has led me to provide strategic consultation to over 50 different environmental groups (on issues ranging from the fate of endangered species to the future of "smart growth") and foresight projects (anticipating, for instance, paths for a Pacific Northwest transition to sustainability, what green neighborhoods of the future might look like, and how to prevent the next use of nuclear weapons). I have also been the president of the board of Allied Arts (the venerable Seattle urban design advocacy group), a co-founder of the Livable Communities Coalition and the Fuse Foundation, as well as having served on the boards or steering committees of something like twenty other NGOs and campaigns. I have spoken at a number of conferences, and have been a newspaper columnist (for Seattle's the Stranger), a radio producer and guest host (for Seattle's NPR affiliate, KUOW) and an on-air television news analyst. Along the way I did my graduate work at the University of Washington's Jackson School of International Studies.

I've written or commented for the New York Times, USA Today, the LA Times, the Wall Street Journal, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Seattle Times and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Seattle Weekly, Fast Company, Red Herring, Blue: the Magazine of Adventure Travel, NPR's All Things Considered and Morning Edition, Marketplace and elsewhere. Essays of mine have been widely reprinted, translated into German, Japanese and Spanish, and anthologized in the 2050 Project's book Choosing our Future. I am currently finishing a book on the future of environmental sustainability (forthcoming from Chelsea Green press).

Here are a couple things I've written that have proven popular:

I guest-edited the latest (and hopefully not the last) issue of the Whole Earth Review.

Here's a frequently-quoted editorial on smart growth and sprawl.

Another frequently-quoted piece, a review of Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon.

E-mail me at [email protected].