Following Claire Marshall’s thought-provoking opening story, ON Core attendees came together to craft a letter to the future, reflecting on the journey so far and imagining what lies ahead. As we looked towards the future of research and its impact on Australia, the letter encapsulated a vision for how innovation and collaboration will shape the country’s future.
Check out the ON Core 2025 letter to the future, crafted and presented by Claire Marshall:
Thank you all again. What a wonderful day we have had. I have seen seeds of the forest eco-system germinating everywhere.
I want to share something that I wrote today. I want to thank you all for the ideas you’ve shared. They are so important because our imaginations are fuelled by the ideas of others.
After all, how can you imagine the symbiocene if no one has ever told you about it? How can you believe the world can be different if you haven’t heard of examples of change happening in other places?
I learnt so much being with you all today, and I thought perhaps I would put it into a letter to the attendees of the ON Core conference in 2035.
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Dear Future ONCore participants,
Today we gathered on Turrbal and Yuggera Country to grow a forest eco-system.
We heard that it takes time to build relationships, it’s hard to have empathy at speed.
And we vowed to get better at getting the right people in the right room more quickly, and making sure we are all speaking the same language.
We heard that diversity brings with it so many benefits like diverse perspectives, higher profitability, better and more cohesive teams, less groupthink and greater innovation.
And we vowed to make an effort to create a system that works for women, LGBTIQ people, people with a disability and First Nations people, not get them to adjust to the current system
We explored how we can use best-practice holistic programs that take into account a person’s whole life. Their caring responsibilities and where they live – because often these challenges give us undiscovered strengths. Multi-perspective decision-making is a must when you have kids. And if you live in a rural area, you are bound to be entrepreneurial. Innovation through desperation.
And we vowed to look at the timing of the programs we run, the funding considerations and if it is enough for everyone no matter where they come from. We vowed to build the bridge for the trucks, and then let everyone else drive on it.
We explored whether we have got stuck with a vision of success that means scale and size.
We vowed to cherish and support community innovations.
We explored how to get research out of the lab and we learnt the hard truth that “innovation without a problem is delusional”.
We vowed to start by thinking of the end, and pay as much attention to what happens with research, as we pay to the research itself.
We explored the future of impact. We saw the challenges that we face regarding geopolitical shifts and misinformation.
And we vowed to act with cool heads, placing our ethics front and centre as we navigate a difficult path.
We explored the possibilities of AI to revolutionise how we do – well everything- and we vowed to design, develop and deploy our human skills in an AI world.
We explored how to make new connections to each other, and we vowed to double down on our commitment to our purpose. Letting it drive everything that we do.
We learnt about how we can better elevate Indigenous wisdom throughout the innovation process. We learnt about the positive impact that is sparked when culture meets science.
We vowed to always have reciprocity in our hearts – and bringing in the lawyers to put it in our contracts
We explored how colonisation has changed the order and the systems of place.
We vowed to sit and listen before we move, to partner without fear, to be humble and to embrace a learner’s mindset
We learnt about teamwork and how to listen better, how to have tough conversations, and recover from setbacks.
We vowed to keep playing – to have fun improvising together
We promise these things for you because we know that things will only be better in 2035 if we change them now. We vow to be the mother trees that will share their sugars with the young trees below.
We also vowed that we would not forget this when we left the room.
But that can be hard.
Vows are easy to forget, so maybe we need something to help us. So let me tell you a quick story about – the Iron Ring.
In 1900 construction began on the Quebec Bridge in Canada, but just as construction was nearing completion, the bridge collapsed and seventy-five people were killed. An inquiry showed that doubts had been raised by some of the younger engineers. But they were not taken seriously, they were told – just to keep working. Construction resumed.
Again engineers tried to raise their concerns. Again they were pushed aside and when tragedy struck again and the bridge collapsed for a second time – the Canadian engineering industry was forced to do a lot of soul-searching.
How could this have happened? Why did more engineers not speak out? Why were they not listened to? The answers that came back were not good. A culture ruled by costs not by responsibility. Profit motives leading to pressures to take risks.
In an interesting deviation from the expected, they didn’t address this with more rules and regulations. Instead, they realised that they needed to change the culture. To make sure that every engineer knew and felt confident in the fact that their first responsibility was to the people who would use the bridge, not to those paying them.
Exactly one hundred years ago in 1925 they introduced a ritual for all graduating engineering students in Canada. It was called the “Ritual of the Calling of the Engineer” but colloquially it’s known as the “Iron Ring”. In it, every student recited a poem by Rudyard Kipling (who had previously written a story about bridge builders). They were also given an iron ring to wear on the pinky finger of their dominant hand. This was designed to clink on the table when they signed a contract, reminding them of their oath. This ritual continues to this day.
In today’s Australia, we are not seeing bridges collapse. Instead, we are seeing bushfires take homes and lives, both human and non-human. We see one in a thousand-year floods happen twice in a month. We see droughts, and storms of a severity we have never experienced.
We have also seen people raise concerns, and these concerns not be listened to. Maybe it’s time we introduced a ritual of our own. That we can call on when we have to make big decisions.
But I don’t think we need a famous English poet, because we have something better. The oldest living culture on earth. People who have lived in harmony with nature, in the symbiocene for 65,000 years.
We can listen to any of our First Nations community’s stories. They will give us our inspiration. And in those moments, where we need that clink on the desk, well it’s right at our feet.
Because wherever we can feel our feet on the ground, we know that this land that we stand on, has had others walk before us in harmony with nature for over 65,000 years.
We can look up to the sun and remember that even though it is 151 million kilometres away without its rays we wouldn’t be able to see anything, but we also wouldn’t survive because plants need light.
We can take a deep breath and remember that when we do we can thank the trees for this exchange.
And we can listen to our gut. A gut that is filled with the living organisms of our place.
We can see that we are entangled with the world around us, in ways that our modern world allows us to forget.
What if every time we had to make a big decisions, we took a deep breath and pressed our feet into the ground? Or found a sit spot and marvelled in how nature works together – and remembered that our decisions are not made for us alone.
So dear people of 2035. We cannot pretend to know what life will be like for you as its story is still unwritten, but our story we know. We are a forest eco-system working, evolving and growing impact together.
And while you might feel far away, I remember this quote from Bill Bryson who said “that every time we breathe, we exhale some 25 sextillion molecules of oxygen – so many that with a day’s breathing, we will in all likelihood inhale at least one molecule from the breaths of every person who has ever lived”.
So even across time we will be connected. We will think of you when we make our decisions and we hope you will remember us kindly when you live them.
Till then,
Your friends in 2025.