Editor's Foreword.

There are around seventeen times more words in the English language than there are visible stars in the night sky.

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For over one hundred thousand years, humans have used language to share stories together. Carried in our words are the hopes, aspirations, fears and doubts of billions of people, our forebears and our contemporaries. Those words weave together into the skein of human history and tell of a primate that has overcome existential threats and elevated itself to become the most advanced species in the known universe.

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Many of those stories have taken place around a fire. Indeed, fire and language are the tools with which humans conquered the Earth. None of today’s technological advances would have been possible without the forges of the industrial age. Those forges would not have been possible without our ability to communicate and share ideas.

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Our words and stories speak of our apotheosis, but they also record our hubris.

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In our rush to humanise the planet we’ve crushed biodiversity, altered the chemical composition of the atmosphere, polluted the waterways, sterilised the soils and consumed the planet’s resources far beyond sustainable limits.

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Storytelling may have begun sat around a campfire, with the natural world above, below and to all sides of us, but today communication with each other is more likely to take place in the glow of a synthetic screen than the flicker of firelight. With all our immense successes and technological gains, our vast networks of communication and cooperation, have we lost something? Is it possible to fully address sustainability without unplugging ourselves from the daily addictions of the modern world?

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FiresideX explores these questions and more and it is my hope that this magazine will be equal parts evocative, educational and inspirational as we seek the answers together.

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I hope you enjoy reading it.

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Richard Potts

Editor, FiresideX