Promise Ahead: Humanity's Journey Toward a Culture of Meaning. A sweeping overview of the human journey as we travel toward a more sustainable and soulful way of living on the Earth. We will look beneath the headlines and explore the deeper currents that are now changing our lives--from adversity trends to opportunity trends, including the Internet revolution.

Duane is the author of Awakening Earth (Morrow, 1993) and Voluntary Simplicity (Morrow, 1981, revised 1993). He is the co-author (with Joseph Campbell, Willis Harman, and others) of Changing Images of Man (Pergamon Press, 1982). He is the author of the report Collective Consciousness and Cultural Healing and the primary author of the report Global Consciousness Change: Indicators of an Emerging Paradigm (both Millennium Project, San Anselmo, CA, 1997) . He has also written more than 30 articles, a number of which are available at this web site.

He has spoken publicly on a wide range of subjects for audiences such as business executives, government bureaucrats, college students, and the general public. His current specialization is speaking about both the challenge and the opportunity facing the human family as we enter a new millennium.

In the early 1970s, Duane was a senior staff member of a joint Presidential/Congressional Commission on Population Growth and the American Future. He then became a senior social-scientist with the think-tank SRI International, where he co-authored major studies on the long-range future, such as Alternative Futures for Environmental Planning: 1975-2000 (for the Environmental Protection Agency); Anticipating Future National and Global Problems and Limits to the Management of Large, Complex Systems (both for the president's science advisor); and City Size and the Quality of Life (for the National Science Foundation).

In 1981 he co-founded and, until 1990, was the director of Choosing Our Future. The goal of this non-partisan, non-profit organization is to revitalize the conversation of democracy by mobilizing our tools of mass communication in ways that serve us as citizens. Examples of some of the actions the organization has taken include: In 1984, Choosing Our Future objected to the renewal of the licenses of the major television stations in the San Francisco Bay Area on the grounds they were not providing citizens with enough informational programming. In 1987, they developed a pilot electronic town meeting with ABC-TV in San Francisco which was viewed by 300,000 people and featured live polling of a random sample of the Bay Area public. In 1989, Choosing Our Future organized a broadly based, community-voice organization to produce televised forums on broadcast television for citizen dialogue and feedback. Choosing Our Future is currently inactive.

Duane has an M.B.A. from the Wharton Business School and an M.A. in Economic History from the University of Pennsylvania.