Future Tense ABC listen

Many of us take actions to improving the environment and make for a better planet. But in a consumerist world where status is all, it can be hard to avoid making choices that negate your original intentions and send you back to square one. It happens in everyday life when picking a car or choosing a new house. And it happens on a large scale. For example where mass tree-planting occurs in habitats that were never meant to be forested. Shouldn't we know better?

Insecure housing has long-term effects on both individuals and communities, it's impacting the social fabric of countries around the world. Corporations buying up housing stocks are further adding to the pressure. In rich and poor countries alike the cost of housing is outstripping growth in incomes. As a result, more than 100 million people have been made homeless, according to the UN. While more than 1.6 billion lack adequate housing and essential services. We also explore some possible solutions. But the big question mark hanging over the future of the sector remains political will.

For more than a decade serious news organisatons, including public broadcasters, have increasingly relied on social media and other third-party digital distribution platforms to reach audiences. But now the big tech platforms are no longer interested in traditional news. So, can public interest journalism survive without the online networks they let cannibalise their content? How can serious news outlets avoid slipping into obscurity? And what impact would such a decline have on our culture and democracy?

It's estimated that by 2030 more than 100 thousand satellites are likely to be buzzing around in low-Earth orbit – and the implications of that for our dark skies is potentially significant. We hear from the Executive Director of the non-profit network DarkSky International. Also, is our environmental future written in the past? Paleo-conservation could be the answer to how we adapt to the adverse effects of climate change; and in Stockholm, engineers and builders are hard at work creating an entire city district in wood – from apartments to office towers. So, what's the advantage to building in timber?

The world's largest Universal Basic Income trial is currently underway in Kenya. It involves 295 villages and more than 20,000 families. The trial has just reached the two-year mark and Nobel-Prize winning economist, Abhijit Banerjee, joins us to talk about its progress – both economic and social. Also, why it's counterproductive to talk about "screentime" and people being "addicted" to their phones; and speech writer, Lucinda Holdforth, who worries that we've supplanted old fashioned values that emphasised community responsibility with a new array of virtues that are all about personal wants and a focus on self.

Most people want to eat better. And many of us have embraced the trend toward "natural" foods and conscious eating. We equate "natural" with healthy, nutritious and virtuous, but that can often be way off the mark. New research shows many healthy alternatives are anything but. And our embrace of the term natural is more about expressing identity and morality rather than healthy eating. Empowering people to understand what and how they should eat is what it should be about – and one way to do that is by using a food labelling app.