How can thinking about the future help us live and act more sustainably in the present? In this episode of Green Minds, host Esther Vallado speaks with Anita Silva about futures literacy as an essential eco-competence for navigating uncertainty, complexity, and change.
Anita defines futures literacy as the capacity to consider possible futures when making decisions today. Rather than focusing on prediction or forecasting, futures literacy invites us to use imagination as a tool for shaping reality. It helps people move away from fear-based or doomsday thinking and toward choices that are intentional, ethical, and grounded in hopeful action.
Drawing from her background in creativity, innovation, and clowning, Anita highlights the importance of staying present, observant, and responsive to what is happening around us. For her, futures literacy is deeply connected to adaptability and responsiveness — the ability to stay with uncertainty without rushing to easy answers. This quality, she suggests, is crucial for both sustainability learning and personal resilience.
The episode explores futures literacy as a transversal competence that activates many others within sustainability frameworks. By helping people imagine alternatives, it supports agency — shifting learners from guilt or overwhelm to a sense that their actions, however small, matter. Futures literacy enables people to act even without certainty, trusting that learning, adjustment, and course correction are part of the process.
Anita reflects on how this competence shows up across her many roles — as a trainer, facilitator, consultant, writer, and parent. Embracing multiple identities, she explains, offers flexibility and helps people face uncertainty with greater confidence. Rather than seeking fixed answers, she prefers creating safe but challenging learning spaces filled with questions, dialogue, and exploration — spaces where discomfort is not avoided, but held collectively.
From an educational perspective, the conversation explores futures literacy through the lens of head, hands, and heart. Knowledge involves understanding that futures are plural, shaped by narratives, values, and choices. Skills include facilitating balanced conversations about difficult possibilities while keeping hope alive. Attitudes such as humility, bravery, joy, and comfort with uncertainty are essential for engaging meaningfully with the future.
Measuring futures literacy, Anita notes, is not straightforward. Signs of progress include learners becoming more comfortable with uncertainty, slowing down decision-making processes, considering ethical alternatives to dominant narratives, and acting without waiting for perfect clarity. Often, these changes emerge long after a training ends — reminding educators that learning continues beyond the classroom.
The episode also addresses challenges. In increasingly complex and uncertain times, people often seek simple explanations and absolute truths. Futures literacy asks us to resist this impulse and instead cultivate systems thinking, imagination, and openness. Anita emphasizes the importance of playfulness, storytelling, humor, and joy in reducing resistance and making space for hopeful conversations about the future.
The episode closes with a powerful reflection on ecoliteracy and responsibility toward future generations. Becoming ecoliterate, Anita suggests, helps us become “better ancestors” — shifting away from extractivist mindsets toward care, regeneration, and community well-being. By redefining success and embracing imagination, futures literacy becomes a pathway toward futures where both people and planet can thrive.
In this podcast, you can listen to:
- What futures literacy means and why futures are plural
- How imagination supports sustainability learning
- Why futures literacy activates agency and other eco-competences
- How educators can work with uncertainty and discomfort
- How playfulness, storytelling, and joy foster hopeful futures
We close with a reminder that futures literacy is not about predicting what will happen — but about choosing, together, what kind of future we want to help create.