No more World of Tomorrow
Published in the Kildare Nationalist, May 2007
My favourite books as a child were the ones that described the world of tomorrow. Growing up in the 1970s and 80s and reading the popular science and science fiction of the decades before, I absorbed with a child’s gravity the mile-high skyscrapers, moon bases, flying cars – all the things I was told I’d see myself someday when I was very old – like 30 – in the futuristic 21st century.
The predictions of that era make easy spoof targets now – how many times have you seen parodies of Star Trek? – but I admired their optimism, their faith that we really could work out our problems. We’re so used to hearing that the end is near that we’ve lost that faith — when was the last time you saw a science fiction movie about a happy future?
People’s ideas of the future still float between these two extremes – we dismiss problems like peak oil and climate change because “we’ll just invent something, and there’s nothing we need to do,” or we fear that “we’re all doomed, and there’s nothing we can do.”
If you listen to the news, certainly you might think we’re doomed. Global oil production stalled two years ago, and has remained stagnant ever since despite rising demand. Climate change is also progressing much faster than scientists’ worst fears, and could also create an economic disaster. In 2006 the British government’s Stern report predicted that we can reverse climate change, but if we don’t we will lose five to 20 percent of our Gross Domestic Product per year. Five percent of our GDP per year is losing half our economy every 14 years. The last twenty percent drop was called the Great Depression.
Warnings about these issues get more dire every year – writers who study them describe this as the “long emergency,” the “collapse,” even the “Die-Off.” But I wonder if we’re not looking at these issues the wrong way.
The world peak oil and climate scientists predict is “doomsday” only in the sense that it is a little more normal than we have come to expect. In only a few generations we have come to expect that we will be many times richer than our parents, that our houses will be larger, our travel cheaper, our technology unimagined even a few years ago. We have lived our lives in a boom and think it normal. We hop in our cars and travel at 100 kilometers an hour, make the house a sauna all winter, cross an ocean in a day, call a friend on the other side of the planet. We become enraged if we experience even the slightest delay in any of these things.
Let’s say peak oil scientists are right and our oil production has to drop by a third in 12 years. The Irish have been there before – we were driving a third less in 1996 than today, so 12 years from now might look a lot like 12 years ago.
Or let’s use America as an example. If Americans, 20 years from now, were making half as much money as today, had to cut their driving by three-quarters and crowd almost twice as many relatives into their homes, they might well see themselves as living in Hell. But they’ve been there before – those were the statistics of the 1950s, which people at the time and ever since see as a golden age.
Bottom line: we’ll probably never have those flying cars or moon bases. Life might not keep getting more frantic, more globalized more impersonal forever. Would you have been happy eating a pill instead of food, or living in a mile-high building, or traveling down the highway at unnatural speeds? Our world might “collapse” in the sense that its bubble might burst, but it will return to something more normal — negotiating with neighbours, taking care of animals, extended families — less like Star Trek and more like the town of Mayberry on the Andy Griffith Show. And is that the end of the world?
The things we all want in life – family time, community – all have the potential to increase in the years ahead, and the things that make us unhappy – stress, fast-paced lives, traffic, pollution – all are likely to decrease.
We could get that great future after all. It just might look a lot like the good old days.
