One of the secondary effects of the latest set of crises to grip the world is the rise of essays and articles from various insightful folks, laying out scenarios of what the future will look like in an era of limited resources, energy, money, and so forth. Most of these follow a similar pattern: a list of reasonable depictions of a more limited future, and at least one item that seems completely out of the blue.
The best example has to come from James Kunstler’s description of the world to come in his “non-fiction” The Long Emergency and his explicitly fictional World Made By Hand. Along with his schadenfreude-soaked claims about the end of suburbia, automobiles, and all things superficial, he comes in with stark assertions that we’ll all be making our own music and acting on stage for each other, instead of listening to that damnable recorded “rock-roll” music and the disco and suchlike.
Yeah, I’m no big fan of JHK’s reactionary futurism, but this points to a bigger trend, one that I’m seeing across a variety of political spectra: the vision of an apocalyptic near-future as a catalyst for making the kinds of social/economic/political/technological/religious/etc. changes that the ignorant or deceived masses wouldn’t have otherwise made.
This isn’t just Rapturism, where a glorious transformation happens, which may or may not have nasty results for some; in that kind of scenario, an apocalypse isn’t a trigger so much as a possible side-effect. In this kind of scenario—“aspirational apocaphilia”—the global disaster is a requisite enabler.
It’s a notable trend in that it’s something that those of us who consider ourselves ethical futurists need to pay close attention to in our own work. I’d love to see the current crises result in a variety of more sustainable social patterns—but I have to be careful not to mistake my desire with what would be a useful forecast.
Uncertainty and Resilience
Ecotrust has launched People and Place, a webzine looking at the relationship between humankind and its environment. P&P‘s inauguratory issue features an article on resilience by Brian Walker of the Resilience Alliance, Resilience Thinking. The editor at P&P asked me to write a companion essay—Uncertainty and Resilience—and it’s now available on the site.
In my work as a futurist, focusing on the intersection of environment, technology and culture, the concept of resilience has come to play a fundamental role. We face a present and a future of extraordinary change, and whether that change manifests as threat or opportunity depends on our capacity to adapt and remake ourselves and our civilization—that is, depends upon our resilience.
My piece looks at how defaulting to least harm (or graceful failure, as I’ve called it elsewhere) and foresight are useful additions to the model of resilience that Walker proposes.
Resilience seems to be my theme of the moment. It’s appropriate for the times, I suppose. When things seem to be falling apart, it’s helpful to remind ourselves that we have ways to endure.
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