Joel Garreau is an explorer of culture, values, and change.
To aid those who follow later, he frequently publishes mental maps.

Radical Evolution: The Promise and Peril of Enhancing Our Minds, Our Bodies, and What It Means to Be Human was published in 2005 by Doubleday.  In it, Joel takes an unprecedented, sometimes alarming, always spellbinding look at the hinge in history at which we have arrived. For hundreds of millennia, our technologies have been aimed outward at altering our environment in the fashion of fire, agriculture, or space travel. Now, for the first time, we are increasingly aiming inward at modifying our minds, memories, metabolisms, personalities, progeny and possibly our immortal souls. Radical Evolution is about altering human nature -- not in some distant tomorrow, but right now, on our watch.

Joel's reputation as an astute interpreter of culture and values was launched with the 1981 publication of The Nine Nations of North America.  He describes how the continent behaves not so much like 50 states or three countries, but nine separate and powerful civilizations or economies that pay scant attention to political boundaries in the course of forging their own destinies.   For decades, Nine Nations has been embraced by critics, columnists, readers, marketers, political operatives and academics, putting Joel on the short list of the world's most prominent cultural demographers.  With the rise of those striving to explain our painful 21st century culture wars, it has returned to the fore once again in ways Joel never originally dreamed. 

Ten years later, Joel focused on who we are through the prism of the modern metropolis we are building in Edge City: Life on the New Frontier. In what was termed "groundbreaking" work by The New York Times, Joel points out that we are building the biggest change in 150 years in how we live, work, play, pray, shop, and die. The cities of the 21st century are not the 19th century versions like downtown Chicago or Philadelphia. Rather, they are the more than 180 enormous new centers of commerce that have sprung up in the last 30 years -- places like Silicon Valley in California and the Route 128 corridor outside Boston, places shaped by the automobile, the jet passenger plane, and the networked computer.  With our crises fueling hopes for working at home and online delivery of everything, Version 2.0 of our dispersal and agglomeration is exploding in The Santa’Fe-ing of The World: Does your city have a future?

Joel is the principal of The Garreau Group, the network of his best sources committed to understanding who we are, how we got that way, and where we’re headed, worldwide.
A long-time reporter and editor at The Washington Post, Joel is now Professor of Culture, Values and Emerging Technologies in the Emeritus College of Arizona State University.

Joel is a Future Tense Fellow at New America in Washington, D.C. He has served as a fellow at Cambridge University, the University of California at Berkeley and George Mason University, is an affiliate of The Institute for Science, Innovation and Society at Oxford, and is a Science Journalism Laureate at Purdue.  He was a long-time member of Global Business Network, the pioneering scenario-planning organization, and is the troll of a small forest in the foothills of Virginia's Blue Ridge.