 How do you retain hope in a time that isn't hopeful? When we talk about the future of the planet and the environment, we feel bombarded by negative visions, dystopias, collapse, and degradation. And there's a good reason for that. When we look around at the unprecedented pace of anthropogenic change, it raises serious concerns about the future of the biosphere. But we know that people behave based on what they believe about society and what they expect for the future. So if we simply extrapolate current trends out into the future, we run the risk of being self-fulfilling, of creating the varied dystopias that we hope to avoid. So I'm here today to tell you that the future doesn't have to be bleak. In fact, we can point to an emergence of new ideas, innovative ways of thinking, and on-the-ground sustainability projects that bode well for the future. As people are confronted with challenges to society and to nature, they increasingly are responding with projects to bring about a more just, prosperous, and ecologically diverse world, what we call a good Anthropocene. And stories and visions are a critical component of bringing this good Anthropocene around. But so far, the inspirational visions that we've managed to develop tend to be these utopian fantasies that are unrealistic, or they overestimate the power of the mainstream changes to create real changes to the status quo when we know that the future, especially a good future, is likely to be radically different than the world of today, evolving different power structures different human-environment relationships, all sorts of different ways of living. So how do we solve this problem of needing stories that are both inspirational but remain fundamentally grounded and realistic? Well, I propose that we start with those emerging ideas, those on-the-ground projects, those new thoughts and ways of living. And we call these things bright spots or seeds of a good Anthropocene. One example of a bright spot or a seed of the good Anthropocene is a project called Health in Harmony. Health in Harmony is a project that works in Indonesian Borneo to protect both rain forest and people. And here's what they do. They offer communities free or low-cost health care in exchange for commitments to reduce deforestation. And over the five years that they've been working there, they've seen a 68% decrease in illegal logging and an improvement in every human health indicator that they measure. When they listened to the communities, they realized that people weren't cutting down trees because they wanted to. They were doing it because they needed medicine. And so what Health in Harmony does is they reconnect the feedback cycle between forest health and human health by ensuring that people can have good human health by protecting the forest health. What we're doing in the project that I'm working on is collecting examples of these bright spots from all around the world. We have 500 of them collected so far and we're aiming to collect thousands more. And we've built a database about these bright spots that enable us to understand how they emerge, why they grow, where they spread to and what kinds of change they inspire either in place or around the world. We're using that database to develop a theory of transformation in which we see that these seeds or small-scale experiments change people's meta-narratives about the world. That in turn fuels more experiments, more change in meta-narratives, more experiments. And over time, these growing experiments, people's lived experience in the world begins to change. And as that happens, we sometimes see a window of opportunity opening through a crisis and the opportunity to consolidate this change into a new regime, a new meta-narrative. We can also use our database to understand that individual seeds are often successful by doing what health and harmony does, by listening and by connecting feedbacks that have been broken through global trade. So scenario planning is the practice of developing stories, multiple stories about the future in order to help us anticipate or think about the future. And it's been used in the military community, in the business community, and in the international scientific community for many years to try to anticipate the future and adaptively respond to it. The scenarios that we've developed in the scientific community, like scenarios of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment or the group tasked with developing scenarios about climate change, they tend to follow the same handful of ideas about how the future is going to unfold. And they lack the surprises, the non-linearities, the rich detail that's the hallmark of how real history unfolds. So another thing we're doing with our bright spots is using them to develop better scenarios. We take a handful of these bright spots, we throw them together, we confront them with one challenge of the Anthropocene, and we ask, how do they come together to thrive in the world? By using these on-the-ground projects, it means that our stories are both more diverse and more realistic. Developing these sorts of inspirational stories about the future that remain grounded in reality, it is a critical challenge for the global community, especially with programs like the World Economic Forum itself trying to develop scenarios that help us bring about better governance in the world. By using things like bright spots, we can tell better stories about the future that help us change direction to a good Anthropocene before it's 2.8.