Essentially everything we do is done by some other animals on Earth. We may do it more, or very differently, and certainly bigger. As humans, our continued survival depends on emphasizing some things we do, and finding a less prominent place, a different role, for other things. I am assuming that we want to continue developing the best parts of our civilizations, including that which we believe most honors us as human, and as the human race.
That's the positive approach. The negative is perhaps clearer, since we are built to engage emotions and intellect when we feel threatened. The threats becomes clearer every day. Some of us who believed the great dangers were coming (apart from the ones we grew up with, of war and nuclear apocalypse) didn't think we'd live to see them become so imminent. But that imminence is also, very sadly becoming clearer every day.
It's all there, in news reported today and yesterday. Evidence of global heating and the climate crisis mounts, as does the news of these early effects: just in our own country, the droughts in the West (subject of a long New York Times Sunday Magazine piece, called "The Future is Drying Up") and the southeast, and the ferocity of the California fires, fed by the interaction of normal and abnormal weather patterns with the direct effects of global heating.
News also of jittery world economic markets, so vulnerable and so dependent on "economic growth" that's clearly hitting the limits of our natural resources and the ability of our natural environment to recover from damage on an ever-larger scale, yet still sustain us. And linking these areas of concern, there is this thunderbolt from the Global Energy Watch Group study that concludes that the world supply of oil has peaked, and that it will now inevitably decline an average of 7% a year.
The topic of "peak oil" has been discussed for several years now, and this particular study will no doubt be subjected to criticism. Advocates for renewable energy will square off against oil company funded research, and it may be awhile before we're really any the wiser.
The soul of the future---the qualities of soul that we'll need to emphasize to get to the future--needs imagination, perhaps above anything else, at least to get started. We know that oil is being extracted from the Earth, and that supply, however vast, has to be limited. This report--that the supply of oil has peaked-- is shocking. Why? Because we did not anticipate this. We go on as if nothing fundamental will change--there will always be oil, always be forests, clean water, snow in winter, and so on.
Anticipating the future begins with acts of the imagination. It's done by science, by fantasy, by science fiction, by curiosity. They all ask, what if? What if, in an economically interdependent world, the fuel of that world is no longer so available? What if our often crowded and highly interdependent communities can't count on the resources they take for granted--plentiful fresh water, cheap food? What kind of a world might that be?
And if we imagine it, can't we anticipate it? Can't we plan for that future--that is, make plans that will make it better than what it seems it would be? And if we calculate the possibility of that anticipation happening, can't we take steps now to prevent it?
Anticipation has been part of why people envision the future: what if the future we imagine and calculate and anticipate, were to be our present? How would we feel? What would life be like? And if we don't like the answers, then those answers tell us what in general we must do now, to prevent that future, or (if we imagine a better future resulting from changes we make) to help create it.
What prevents us? Some would say our currently frenzied but actually easy lives, our self-centeredness, our wish to avoid such fearful visions. Part of it certainly is our ruling ideology, which is to react to events when or after they happen, not to anticipate them. . Our economy as well as our politics mostly runs on this principle. We see its weakness when we consider the what if--as we are almost forced to by something like this report on oil:
The report presents a bleak view of the future unless a radically different approach is adopted. It quotes the British energy economist David Fleming as saying: "Anticipated supply shortages could lead easily to disturbing scenes of mass unrest as witnessed in Burma this month. For government, industry and the wider public, just muddling through is not an option any more as this situation could spin out of control and turn into a complete meltdown of society."
We almost have to ask, What if it's true? And then we ask, how did it get to this point, before we did something about it? What if it is now too late? Wouldn't it have been better to anticipate it, and make the necessary changes?
That's contrary to the principles of global capitalism: constant growth using up resources and ignoring natural limits, and taking advantage of opportunities as they present themselves to the smartest and most powerful. So this blindness is willful, although mostly willed by those who gain the greatest advantage, however temporarily.
Yet in the scientific age, beginning at least with H.G. Wells at the start of the 20th century, some people have been pleading with us to see where we're heading and to anticipate the disasters ahead, and take steps to prevent them. In the 1960s and earlier, Buckminster Fuller talked about "anticipatory design science." That was the real point of his metaphor of "Spaceship Earth." On a ship, you can count on only what you left port with. The design of your ship has to anticipate what will happen to it and what might happen to it in its future.
But well before that, Natives of North America formulated a rule that was at the heart of many Indigenous societies: consider the effect of every decision on the seventh generation to come. Even many animals anticipate the future, and design for it. We humans have changed this world so much, to the point where what we've done and are doing threatens all that we've built over many thousands of years, as well as a lot of other life on this planet. If we fail to engage our ability to anticipate, to imagine and to act--if we cannot emphasize the soul of the future--then we face an awful future, and probable failure as a civilization, with all its developments of knowledge, morality and spiritual exploration, and perhaps failure even as a species. And our time to anticipate with sufficient time to act seems to be slipping by fast.
But if we do meet this challenge by engaging all aspects of the soul of the future, we will have taken the next step in fulfilling our best potential.
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