'The World in 2050' : The Arctic and everything below

Everyone wants to predict the future, but Laurence Smith actually does so in his new book, “The World in 2050: Four Forces Shaping Our Civilization’s Northern Future” (Dutton, 2010).

Smith, a UCLA professor and geographer, traveled the Arctic region after receiving a Guggenheim fellowship in 2006. In Russia, Canada and the northern regions of Europe, he visited remote aboriginal villages, and studied both permafrost and demography.

He concludes that the future is a mixed bag of positive and negative: People will urbanize further; the global population will age; and aboriginal groups of the far north will gain a voice in how we spend our natural resources. It’s not how many people live on Earth, but rather how we live that will affect outcomes.

'The World in 2050' : The Arctic and everything below | Greenspace | Los Angeles Times