Remember the future? It used to be a crucial element in American life, and for awhile, Democrats owned it. FDR's New Deal, Truman and the Marshall Plan, JFK's New Frontier and the Apollo space program, and LBJ's Great Society, Clinton's bridge to the 21st century, defined future-oriented ideas and policies.
But now, there is only one book on the best-seller list that emphasizes the future: "Winning the Future" by Newt Gingrich. The Bushoids' proposals for new manned lunar and Mars programs, as insidious as they might be, are further evidence that Republicans not only own the Apocalypse and the Rapture, they are taking possession of the future.
But the greatest challenge to the future is the Climate Crisis, which the Bushwhackers deny is real. It will be one of the great challenges humankind has ever faced, and it tells us that it's time for Democrats to step up and take back the future.
In the first diary in this series, I wrote about reframing to focus on the urgency of the climate crisis.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/2/24/205954/650
In the second, I addressed the set of challenges involved in dealing with the effects of the climate crisis that will occur in our lifetimes, since nothing we can do now will prevent the climate upheaval process that is already underway from continuing for at least the next generation, and probably more.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/2/25/18198/8104
In this diary I want to explore reframing the climate crisis to address the set of challenges we must meet simultaneously with protecting ourselves and mitigating near-term effects. These are the kind of efforts the debate so far has been about: stopping the damage done to the earth's atmosphere so that climate is not harmed to a more or less tragic extent.
Unfortunately, we've passed that tipping point. Perhaps we can lessen the tragedies but we can't prevent global heating: it is happening and will continue to feed on itself for some time.
But we can perhaps slow it down and prevent it from getting even worse in the second half of this century and beyond. How can we frame the climate crisis so we will actually do this?
I suggested that in order to motivate and explain all that needs to be done to prepare for and deal with the inevitable effects of the climate crisis in our lifetimes, we need to reframe at an appropriate level, with something on the order of "We are all in this together."
That alone requires expanding conceptually our idea of who "we" are. To meet the second set of climate crisis challenges, which is to change our behavior today in order to make things better for generations who will live after we are gone, will require other expansions. That's why the climate crisis is such a test of human capacities, and the capacities of our societies. We are going to have to think and feel more comprehensively, taking into account not only the whole world now, but the whole world in the future.
Framing the Future
The truth is out there: we will lose the future to Rapture apocalyptics, corporate technocrats and neo-conservative regressives if we do not reframe a more progressive sense of the future.
We must expand on the conceptual frameworks of who "we" are to mean not only everyone on the planet now, but everyone on the planet in the future as well as the planet itself.
We must base our frame of the future on expanding the progressive ideas championed by Democrats and Greens and other progressive parties and movements.
We must re-imagine that future, not with optimism necessarily, but with hope. Hope is a quality of the present, informed by a responsibility to the future. It is emotionally supported by a vision, but enacted by creativity and will.
We face this challenge specifically in the climate crisis.
The Climate Crisis Future
A crisis caused by climate is not in itself unprecedented, at least in specific localities, but our situation may well be. Because we know more or less what is coming, and more or less what we could conceivably do, even what we should do, to reverse the process that we unthinkingly began: killing the ability of our planet to sustain our lives.
The possible outcomes of the climate crisis are of course complex, but they come down to a few basic alternatives: Human civilization may weather the crisis with comparatively minor catastrophes, while much of the rest of life on earth reshuffles: some species die off, others expand, and eventually the ecosphere rebounds and continues to flourish.
Human civilization may not survive, either at all or in a continuously evolving way. This is likely to be coterminous with a vastly changed flora and fauna, and very probably a marked and dangerous decrease in biological diversity.
At the end of these possibilities is the end of civilization, the end of human beings on the planet, and the end of "life as we know it", although some forms of life may continue. A totally dead planet as a result of the continuing alteration of the atmosphere, though that might take many years, is not outside the realm of possibility either.
Some climate models predict conditions that would mean the end of life as we know it. Including the end of us, by the end of the next century.
So what do we do about all of that? Won't we have our hands full just coping with each catastrophe as it happens?
Our society is biased towards not only the individual, but towards the present. But we are complex beings, with complex cultures, that have the equivalent of recessive traits. Much of our present-centeredness is the result of this historically unusual period of prosperity in this place, together with the persuasive mechanisms our most powerful institutions and media use on us. But we also have half-buried traditions and untried potentials. Our memories may be vague and unformed, but we do have them, lurking somewhere in the stories passed down to us.
And sometimes when we remember the past, we remember the future.
A Brief History of the Future
Remember the future? It was once very important, and not so long ago.
The future as we know it didn't really exist as a useful concept until the age of industrialization, when people could see change happening in their lifetimes. The potential and promise of the future is central to the idea of America. For awhile, America and the future were almost a single concept.
The future was the dream that got people through the Great Depression. In "The American Clock", a play about the 1930s by the late and lamented genius of the American theatre, Arthur Miller, one character recalled: "Then and now, you have to wonder what really held it all together, and maybe it was simply the Future: the people were still not ready to give it up."
It was the immigrant's faith, and it fueled support for the New Deal. John F. Kennedy is the most popular of American Presidents today partly because he is associated with visions of the future, from the New Frontier to the nuclear test ban treaty and the Apollo space program.
From the Kennedy era to the mid 1970s, the future was a hot topic as reflected at the bookstore. Alvin Toffler's "Future Shock," Arthur C. Clarke's "Profiles of the Future," Robert Theobald's "Futures Conditional," John McHale's "Future of the Future," Hazel Henderson's "Creating Alternative Futures" were all in paperback, as were the books of Buckminster Fuller, Marshall McLuhan and Gregory Bateson, and still other paperbacks on the future of education, the environment, the arts, geopolitics, population, technology and religion.
In the 1970s North American universities catalogued over a thousand futures studies courses; there were futurist PhD programs and future studies in high school. There were more than 200 futurist organizations headquartered in Washington, and political figures talking the futurist talk included Ted Kennedy, Jimmy Carter---and Newt Gingrich.
Today few futures studies courses or programs survive, though some of their concerns and approaches recur in other programs with different emphases and trendier names, like Utopian Studies. Only a handful of organizations continue in Washington (including one of the oldest, the World Future Society, which claims 25,000 members in 80 countries.) A Meet-Up of Washington futurists scheduled some months ago as part of an International Futurist Day signed up all of three people. In contrast, hundreds signed up for meet-ups of witches and Italian language devotees.
What British professor of Political Economy Robert Skidelsky wrote at the end of the year 2000 still seems largely true: "Today we live entirely in the present. For most people the past has little meaning; there is no future on the horizon except more of the present, apart from the ambiguous promises offered by science." After interviewing a number of professional futurists, writer Jack Hitt concluded in early 2001, "I believe we the people have actually changed; we have turned the corner...Our cultural gaze turned away from the future...[O]ur once-ranging future has shrunk into a snug and warm place, as cozy and shag carpeted as a suburban den."
This was before 9-11, yet the subsequent sense of a struggle for the future of civilization modified but did not displace this attitude. The predominate attitude towards the future remained indifference, though colored by fear. "If the events of Sept. 11 reminded us of anything, " wrote Joel Pollack in May 2002, "it is that the age of Armageddon is far from over."
But during the Bush years, regressives began to take charge of the future again. As mentioned before, the only book in recent memory on the best seller list to focus on the future is by Newt Gingrich. This is in some ways a regression to the 1950s, when the RAND corporation think tank began the first systems analysis applied to the future. Though it produceds tudies applying systems analysis to urban problems, health and education, its early fame came from Herman Kahn's nuclear war scenarios and his calculations in megadeaths.
This was military-industrial complex futurism, and it is the U.S. military industrial complex that is once again taking charge of the future under Bush.
Yet some ideas at the heart of futurism in its heady and often progressive days remain fruitful, such as the distinctions in possible, probable and preferable alternative futures, and especially the guiding concept of trying to approach the future as a comprehensive whole.
Futurism's value was in the insistence on synthesis: the economic future (studied by economists), for instance, would always be unrealistic without considering the political future, the future of technology and their impacts on communities, individuals and the environment. In fact the most lasting legacy of futurism is probably the environmental impact statement.
Factoring in so much data and proportions of value, taste, intent, greed and courage, required calculation of probabilities beyond the abilities of humans or machines, so its no wonder that a lot of technocratic future forecasting imploded. But for many futurists that was never the point. The attraction of the future was not that you could predict it, but that you could influence and shape it.
The idea was to combine individual insight with information and points of view from many disciplines and many people in many different circumstances with different experiences, and try to outline visions of futures worth working towards in the present. The loss of that idea has been the most important. It leaves the future to those who dominated the past--- those aggressive, relentless, entitled few, and their hungry instruments.
Those few who see their future as rosy as long as they hold the reigns of power don't need a hopeful vision. The rest of us do, especially those who care as much about others and the future of the world around them as they care about their own tomorrow. We need a future we want to help make happen. If we don't find that vision or create it, the future will be shaped by those who are actively thinking about it, but in quite a different way
The New Future
We should understand that there is the possibility of a progressive vision of the future. But our frame can be simpler than that. We must get the future into societal consciousness again, and especially into the heart and soul of the present.
The future must become important to us again. This is the frame for the second set of climate crisis challenges: our responsibility to the future.
Responsibility to the future is in a way an older concept than the idea of the future itself. It is expressed most eloquently in the Great Law of the Haudenosaunee (Mohawk and Iroquois peoples): "In every deliberation we must consider the impact on the seventh generation to come."
Systems Thinking and Feeling
There are several conceptual tools and skills we will need to emphasize. One is an approach based on systems thinking. Unfortunately I don't know of a book that explains systems theory adequately for a general audience, but the truth is that we notice the behavior of systems every day. Every time we are stuck in traffic watching a distant stoplight, and note that we seem to move when the light is red and stop when it is green, we are observing a paradox of systems.
But the most crucial element of systems thinking for the climate crisis is not that hard to understand: there is a time lag between actions and their effect, especially when those actions are meant to reverse a trend set in motion. There are other complications that can be explained in simple terms, but the breakthrough must be the sense of responsibility to the future.
Systems thinking is crucial but it's not enough. We must also have systems feeling. "The systems approach begins when first you see the world through the eyes of another," writes C. West Churchman in The Systems Approach (Dell 1968). The basis for systems feeling is empathy, which is a basic human trait developed over eons of social evolution.
The Final Frame
We establish a sense of urgency, that we must understand what is happening and what will happen due to the climate crisis, and we must deal seriously with it.
We establish that we must deal with its effects wherever they are manifest, because it is in each of our interests to do so. In this interconnected world and within the single biosphere of this planet, we are all in this together.
We establish that in addition to our efforts to deal with the effects in our lifetimes, we have a responsibility to the future which will mean that we must find ways to alter our behavior today, including how we get and use our energy. We may not live to see the ultimate impact of these efforts on the climate crisis itself, but we do it for generations to come.
This is actually more of a conceptual problem than an emotional one, because many will argue that the evolutionary need to protect offspring which we already extend in nurturing and planning for our children, can be further extended to the environment everyone will need to live in the future.
These are frames, or even meta-frames, for approaching the climate crisis. I will end this somewhat philosophical and prophetic series with some practical observations and one practical suggestion.
Sooner or later the climate crisis will become a prominent public issue. Careful public leadership will include setting the frameworks for understanding it with something like the concepts I suggest if humankind is to rise to the occasion. But people will also want to have good practical alternatives as a way to start.
In terms of saving the future, the issues of environment and energy are becoming one issue. Dealing with the climate crisis impact on the future is likely to have all sorts of benefits in the present. Clean renewable sustainable energy is likely to improve global health. Much of it is decentralized, so more people can make use of it according to their needs. And it is almost certain to be an engine of economic growth.
While the regressive futurists look to mining the moon and the planets for energy and manufacture, progressive futurists look to new industries of clean renewable energy on earth. Eventually, if the regressives do not destroy the planet and our capacity to explore space with space warfare that will imprison us here behind a wall of orbiting debris, we might have the best of both worlds. But since regressive futurists have no interest in renewable technology (except hydrogen, which in itself is not renewable), and have no real plan for countering the climate crisis of the future, we must insist on the progressive vision.
My practical suggestion finally is to rally around the Apollo Alliance, an attempt to infuse the spirit of the original Apollo program into a set of policies that will make renewable energy technologies a national priority. As currently constituted, the Alliance includes environmentalists, labor and political figures who represent a variety of regional and racial constituencies. Whatever its limitations, it seems to me to be the best organized hope that unites what must be done with a lot of the people who must do it.