Flourish in Demographic and Ecological Crises

May 1, 2026

In 2026, I am thinking, writing, crafting, and consulting with a purpose in mind: that of the educator. To me, the educator spans the wide range of work that I do, both formally and informally, in and outside of postsecondary institutions, workplaces, conferences, professional development sessions, and on/through social media.

Last week, I attended two very different talks, back-to-back. One was on the stark workplace implications of an aging population around the world as the replacement (fertility) rates drop. The other was on designing cities for the Anthropocene.

A key takeaway from attending both that has stuck with me is how to flourish in a crisis that is that once demographic and ecological.

The first, a clarion call to reimagine our workplaces and workforces, was a visually compelling and engaging presentation by the Dan Pontefract. Featuring insights from his new, soon-to-be-released book, The Future of Work is Grey, Pontefract showed our lack of readiness for the implications of a fast-aging population.

Through compelling storytelling and images, and the occasional sound effect, Pontefract showed how our ideas and strategies about career journeys with their built-in ageism is obsolete. With fewer and fewer children being born, and fewer younger adults, and increasing numbers of older adults, Pontefract, as the cover of his new book illustrates, argued that we need workplace strategies for a global society that is more like a “bulb” (that is, with increasingly share of older folks) than a bell (where there’s lots of younger workers).

Instead, Pontefract encouraged us to consider different needs of “eras” (rather than generations) of career development:

·      Rivers (younger workers developing and building)

·      Rocks (middle-aged workers consolidating)

·      Rubies (older workers, with institutional memory and crystallized intelligence).

Pontefract assembled a range of case studies of what various workplaces, particularly in Germany and Japan, both countries with aging populations and low replacement rates, are doing to retain and leverage their “rubies.” This includes:

·      ERGs (employee resource groups) for older workers

·      cross-generational mentoring

·      hiring older workers for less physically-demanded work

·      ‘releasing’ older workers from senior leadership roles (that the “Rocks” would like) but allowing them to work at the same pay to leverage their extensive experience

·      Choosing graduated retirement over a period of time rather than a fixed date

During the Q&A, Pontefract suggested that this demographic transformation is akin to climate change.

In my second talk, on designing cities for the Anthropocene, the trio of speakers focused on how urban design can respond to the Anthropocene or this era where humans and their activities became the chief agent of planetary change.

It opened with a presentation from ROM’s inaugural curator of climate change and included how an Ontario lake, Crawford Lake, has played a seminal role in designating the conceptualization of the Anthropocene, before moving to exploring how cities are adapting and implementing strategies to naturalize cityscapes from Dusseldorf to Seoul.

The second presentation, by Prof Nina-Marie Lister, from Toronto Metropolitan University’s School of Urban Planning and founder and director of its Ecological Design Lab. Lister’s talk celebrated the “leading with landscape” approach of the design thinking behind the recently-opened Biidasige Park in the revitalizing Port Lands, just of the east of downtown Toronto. Lister reminded us that the park project, the largest waterfront revitalization project in North America, was part of a larger endeavour to mitigate flooding risk of the formerly-encased mouth of Don River, Lister points to the immense possibilities of reimagining urban landscapes that create new spaces for biophilia and biodiversity, mitigate climate risk, improve air quality, and build new forms of livability, recreation, and flourishing urban ecologies.

The last presentation was given by Julia Czerniak, architect, landscape architect and designer, and Dean and Professor at the University of Buffalo, Czerniak showed us various creative proposals to redesign the campus ecology of the University of Buffalo. Czerniak’s presentation continued the themes of biodiverse landscapes, the blurring of our earlier divides of urban and natural, and incorporating design thinking elements of climate change resilience, lower energy consumption so that human and non-human species can thrive and flourish.

Taken together, while both talks showed positive ways from our workplace systems to the planning of our cities, that respond to “polycrisis” in ways that showcase ingenuity, intentionality, and crafting systems of biological and human diversities in which we can prosper.

The Future of Work is Grey by Dan Pontefract