Barbara Marx Hubbard was an author and public speaker who devoted her life to exploring a better future for humankind.

Through her observations of the planets ills, such as climate change and warfare, she saw an opportunity for a shift in collective human consciousness.

Her activities as a futurist a term usually used to describe those who systematically attempt to predict possible, probable and preferable futures for the world led to a prolific writing career and even inspired her to run for high office.

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Marx Hubbard was born in New York City just before the financial crisis of 1930. She was the first daughter, out of four children, of Irene and Louis Marx, a successful toymaker.

Because of her fathers business, Marx Hubbard had as many toys as she could have wished for but, when she was just 13, the death of her mother would leave a profound mark. She realised from an early age that more toys cannot make us happy. She said it was one of the most important lessons of her life.

Following the conclusion of the Second World War, Marx Hubbard studied political science and attended Pariss La Sorbonne University for a year. It was there she would meet her first husband, Earl Hubbard, outside a restaurant. She asked him to share the bottle of wine she was having on her own. He told her: I am an artist seeking a new image of man commensurate with our powers to shape the future.

She finished her studies at a womens liberal arts college in Pennsylvania, where she graduated with the highest honours. After college, she moved to Connecticut to start a family with her husband, and they had five children together.

While living in the Constitution State, she spent years writing and editing books about consciousness along with her husband, who was an artist and also a futurist.

In 1965, Hubbard Marx came across Jonas Salks writings about the future of humanity. She would send a letter to the inventor of the polio vaccine and it changed her life. Salk, who allegedly told her she had stated his vision better than he ever could have, arranged to meet her and this encounter empowered her to go to Washington to spread her message on the evolution of human consciousness.

She divorced her husband and started to write on her own. It was in Washington that she started her career as a motivational speaker who believed that when enough good people realise how prevalent they are, their synergy will evolve human culture quickly.

She is said to have founded, or at the very least coined the term for, conscious evolution, a movement imagining a new story for the evolution of our species with us becoming conscious participants of our evolutive path. She began giving talks, teleseminars and courses in the US.

Scientists have identified a four-legged creature with webbed feet to be an ancestor of the whale. Fossils unearthed in Peru have led scientists to conclude that the enormous creatures that traverse the planets oceans today are descended from small hoofed ancestors that lived in south Asia 50 million years ago

A. Gennari

A scientist has stumbled upon a creature with a transient anus that appears only when it is needed, before vanishing completely. Dr Sidney Tamm of the Marine Biological Laboratory could not initially find any trace of an anus on the species. However, as the animal gets full, a pore opens up to dispose of waste

Steven G Johnson

Feared extinct, the Wallace's Giant bee has been spotted for the first time in nearly 40 years. An international team of conservationists spotted the bee, that is four times the size of a typical honeybee, on an expedition to a group of Indonesian Islands

Clay Bolt

Fossilised bones digested by crocodiles have revealed the existence of three new mammal species that roamed the Cayman Islands 300 years ago. The bones belonged to two large rodent species and a small shrew-like animal

New Mexico Museum of Natural History

Scientists at the University of Maryland have created a fabric that adapts to heat, expanding to allow more heat to escape the body when warm and compacting to retain more heat when cold

Faye Levine, University of Maryland

A study from the University of Tokyo has found that the tears of baby mice cause female mice to be less interested in the sexual advances of males

Getty

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has issued a report which projects the impact of a rise in global temperatures of 1.5 degrees Celsius and warns against a higher increase

Getty

The nobel prize for chemistry has been awarded to three chemists working with evolution. Frances Smith is being awarded the prize for her work on directing the evolution of enzymes, while Gregory Winter and George Smith take the prize for their work on phage display of peptides and antibodies

Getty/AFP

The nobel prize for physics has been awarded to three physicists working with lasers. Arthur Ashkin (L) was awarded for his "optical tweezers" which use lasers to grab particles, atoms, viruses and other living cells. Donna Strickland and Grard Mourou were jointly awarded the prize for developing chirped-pulse amplification of lasers

Reuters/AP

The Ledumahadi Mafube roamed around 200 million years ago in what is now South Africa. Recently discovered by a team of international scientists, it was the largest land animal of its time, weighing 12 tons and standing at 13 feet. In Sesotho, the South African language of the region in which the dinosaur was discovered, its name means "a giant thunderclap at dawn"

Viktor Radermacher / SWNS

Scientists have witnessed the birth of a planet for the first time ever. This spectacular image from the SPHERE instrument on ESO's Very Large Telescope is the first clear image of a planet caught in the very act of formation around the dwarf star PDS 70. The planet stands clearly out, visible as a bright point to the right of the center of the image, which is blacked out by the coronagraph mask used to block the blinding light of the central star.

ESO/A. Mller et al

Layers long thought to be dense, connective tissue are actually a series of fluid-filled compartments researchers have termed the interstitium. These compartments are found beneath the skin, as well as lining the gut, lungs, blood vessels and muscles, and join together to form a network supported by a mesh of strong, flexible proteins

Getty

Working in the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso, a team led by archaeologists at the University of Exeter unearthed hundreds of villages hidden in the depths of the rainforest. These excavations included evidence of fortifications and mysterious earthworks called geoglyphs

Jos Iriarte

More than one in 10 people were found to have traces of class A drugs on their fingers by scientists developing a new fingerprint-based drug test.Using sensitive analysis of the chemical composition of sweat, researchers were able to tell the difference between those who had been directly exposed to heroin and cocaine, and those who had encountered it indirectly.

Getty

The storm bigger than the Earth, has been swhirling for 350 years. The image's colours have been enhanced after it was sent back to Earth.

Pictures by: Tom Momary

Included in Wellcome Image Awards, this 3D image of an African grey parrot shows the highly intricate system of blood vessels.

Scott Birch. Wellcome Images

Another Wellcome Images Award winner, this time of baby Hawaiian bobtail squid. The black ink sac and light organ in the centre of the squids mantle cavity can be clearly seen.

Macroscopic Solutions. Wellcome Images

The people are thought to have been unusually tall and strong. The tallest of the skeletons uncovered measured at 1.9m

YouTube

Sunspots are caused by interactions with the Suns magnetic field and are cooler areas on the stars surface.

Nasa

Paleontologists Sarah Moore and Jamie Jordan believe they have discovered a Iguanodon dinosaur, a herbivore that was around three metres tall and 10 metres long

Cambridge Photographers/Wienerberger

Scientists have identified a four-legged creature with webbed feet to be an ancestor of the whale. Fossils unearthed in Peru have led scientists to conclude that the enormous creatures that traverse the planets oceans today are descended from small hoofed ancestors that lived in south Asia 50 million years ago

A. Gennari

A scientist has stumbled upon a creature with a transient anus that appears only when it is needed, before vanishing completely. Dr Sidney Tamm of the Marine Biological Laboratory could not initially find any trace of an anus on the species. However, as the animal gets full, a pore opens up to dispose of waste

Steven G Johnson

Feared extinct, the Wallace's Giant bee has been spotted for the first time in nearly 40 years. An international team of conservationists spotted the bee, that is four times the size of a typical honeybee, on an expedition to a group of Indonesian Islands

Clay Bolt

Fossilised bones digested by crocodiles have revealed the existence of three new mammal species that roamed the Cayman Islands 300 years ago. The bones belonged to two large rodent species and a small shrew-like animal

New Mexico Museum of Natural History

Scientists at the University of Maryland have created a fabric that adapts to heat, expanding to allow more heat to escape the body when warm and compacting to retain more heat when cold

Faye Levine, University of Maryland

A study from the University of Tokyo has found that the tears of baby mice cause female mice to be less interested in the sexual advances of males

Getty

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has issued a report which projects the impact of a rise in global temperatures of 1.5 degrees Celsius and warns against a higher increase

Getty

The nobel prize for chemistry has been awarded to three chemists working with evolution. Frances Smith is being awarded the prize for her work on directing the evolution of enzymes, while Gregory Winter and George Smith take the prize for their work on phage display of peptides and antibodies

Getty/AFP

The nobel prize for physics has been awarded to three physicists working with lasers. Arthur Ashkin (L) was awarded for his "optical tweezers" which use lasers to grab particles, atoms, viruses and other living cells. Donna Strickland and Grard Mourou were jointly awarded the prize for developing chirped-pulse amplification of lasers

Reuters/AP

The Ledumahadi Mafube roamed around 200 million years ago in what is now South Africa. Recently discovered by a team of international scientists, it was the largest land animal of its time, weighing 12 tons and standing at 13 feet. In Sesotho, the South African language of the region in which the dinosaur was discovered, its name means "a giant thunderclap at dawn"

Viktor Radermacher / SWNS

Scientists have witnessed the birth of a planet for the first time ever. This spectacular image from the SPHERE instrument on ESO's Very Large Telescope is the first clear image of a planet caught in the very act of formation around the dwarf star PDS 70. The planet stands clearly out, visible as a bright point to the right of the center of the image, which is blacked out by the coronagraph mask used to block the blinding light of the central star.

ESO/A. Mller et al

Layers long thought to be dense, connective tissue are actually a series of fluid-filled compartments researchers have termed the interstitium. These compartments are found beneath the skin, as well as lining the gut, lungs, blood vessels and muscles, and join together to form a network supported by a mesh of strong, flexible proteins

Getty

Working in the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso, a team led by archaeologists at the University of Exeter unearthed hundreds of villages hidden in the depths of the rainforest. These excavations included evidence of fortifications and mysterious earthworks called geoglyphs

Jos Iriarte

More than one in 10 people were found to have traces of class A drugs on their fingers by scientists developing a new fingerprint-based drug test.Using sensitive analysis of the chemical composition of sweat, researchers were able to tell the difference between those who had been directly exposed to heroin and cocaine, and those who had encountered it indirectly.

Getty

The storm bigger than the Earth, has been swhirling for 350 years. The image's colours have been enhanced after it was sent back to Earth.

Pictures by: Tom Momary

Included in Wellcome Image Awards, this 3D image of an African grey parrot shows the highly intricate system of blood vessels.

Scott Birch. Wellcome Images

Another Wellcome Images Award winner, this time of baby Hawaiian bobtail squid. The black ink sac and light organ in the centre of the squids mantle cavity can be clearly seen.

Macroscopic Solutions. Wellcome Images

The people are thought to have been unusually tall and strong. The tallest of the skeletons uncovered measured at 1.9m

YouTube

Sunspots are caused by interactions with the Suns magnetic field and are cooler areas on the stars surface.

Nasa

Paleontologists Sarah Moore and Jamie Jordan believe they have discovered a Iguanodon dinosaur, a herbivore that was around three metres tall and 10 metres long

Cambridge Photographers/Wienerberger

By 1984 she was an influential public speaker. This led her to a brief encounter with mainstream politics ahead of the US elections that year as she sought to become the Democratic vice-presidential candidate. At the partys national convention in San Francisco where almost 4,000 district representatives had gathered to nominate candidates for the presidency and vice-presidency more than 200 delegates nominated her.

In her bid to earn the delegates votes, she gave a speech calling for the creation of an Office for the Future and also a Peace Room in the White House, in order to scan for, map, connect, and communicate what is working in the United States and the world. Lawyer Geraldine Ferraro, the first women to run for vice president, ultimately received the Democraticnomination.

A 2016 documentary on her life, American Visionary: The Story of Barbara Marx, detailed her Birth 2012 campaign, an ambitious initiative looking to create a Global Birth Day by connecting 100 million people over a webcast, who would join through silence or meditation, to foster the emergence of a sustainable planetary civilisation, in contrast to what she perceived was a negative panic about the end of the world.

The publicity from this event led to many more public engagements, where she continued her quest to inspire people to reimagine a better world.

Last month, Marx Hubbard, who had lived at the Sunrise Ranch, a spiritual retreat in Loveland, Colorado, was hospitalised for a knee injury and died a few days later surrounded by her family. Her memorial was streamed on YouTube for her thousands of followers.

Barbara Marx Hubbard, futurist, author and public speaker, born 22 December 1929, died 10 April 2019

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