The Future

One of my life's ironies, as I've said and written before, is that as my personal future shrinks, I become more concerned about the long-term future. What will the world be like when my grandchildren are my age? What kind of lives will their grandchildren enjoy? Will my grandchildren's grandchildren live in a world in which they can utter the verb 'enjoy' with pleasurable memories? This year I have read 3 provocative accounts of the human condition, as well as the prognostications of eminent people who speak for the United Nations, the World Bank, other prominent top executives including President Obama. Not, of course, the prime minister of Canada or any member of his government, which goes on its lemming-like way, ignoring all the warning signals, dismantling agencies and measuring systems so no one, they hope, can even observe what is happening in climate-sensitive or environmentally threatened regions, anywhere in Canada.

The first warning in 2013 came from Paul and Anne Ehrlich in Proceedings of the Royal Society, in a comprehensive summary of the evidence that Homo sapiens, along with most other living creatures is an endangered species. This month, Daedalus, the quarterly journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, carried an essay by two historians on "future history", purportedly looking back from 100 years hence at the mistakes and misdeeds of our time that led to the destruction of western civilization. Al Gore, Vice President of the United States in the Clinton administration, has written at greater length in a weighty monograph, simply called The Future. Al Gore considers 'trends' that are shaping our present and future:

1. Globalized economy, or Earth, Inc. The proponents of globalization think only of what profits they will get, seldom consider investing in sustainable systems
2. Computers and the internet - a 'global mind'
3. Power in the balance.Al Gore implies what I perceive, a power vacuum, absence of visionary leadership when humankind has never needed visionary leadership as much as we do now and in the near future
4. "Outgrowth" socially, demographically, and political chaos
5. "Reinvention" of life and death - consequences of biomedical advances
6. Multiple interactions of these five trends threaten humans and other living creatures in the global ecosystem in many complex ways. Mass extinctions are occurring; sustainable agriculture is seriously threatened by extreme weather; pollution is causing widespread, often poorly understood harms; we have embraced dangerous new technologies such as fracking with no regard for their possible or probable adverse consequences. The gravest dangers come from the disrupted climate and from the increasingly damaged marine ecosystem. And, I must add, from the human swarming that began just over 100 years ago and led to unsustainable quadrupling of the population from 1.7 billion in 1900 to 6.4 billion by 1999, 7 billion a year ago and a projected 9 billion by 2050.   

Al Gore tries to remain optimistic but it is difficult to present a convincing case for a constructive and positive outcome of the present environmental and ecological situation. The world is too firmly in the grasp of the greedy and visionless, concerned only about short-term profits.  Collectively these substantial essays and a weighty monograph send a powerful message that can be ignored only by the most ideologically blinkered and wilfully wrong-headed among the educated classes. Yet I know several who fit this description, nice people who persist in believing the lies and distortions of the energy industry's tame pseudo-scientists and propagandists, refuse to accept the readily available scientific evidence and increasingly obvious signs all around them of rapidly changing climate, erratic seasons, extreme weather events, species extinctions and all the rest. 

I'm 86, well past my "Use by..." date, have lived a long, productive, useful and happy life.  I hope my grandchildren and those generations after them, will have opportunities for as much to enjoy as I have had.  But I fear that the odds against are rising.

References

1. Paul Ehrlich, Anne Ehrlich: Can a collapse of global civilization be avoided? Proc R Soc B 280:2013 - .pdf
See http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/280/1754/20122845.full.pdf+html

2. Naomi Oreskes, Erik M Conway: The collapse of Western Civilization: a view from the future. Daedalus, 2013: 142:40-58

3. Al Gore: The Future; Six drivers of global change. New York: Random House, 2013; available in pdf and as an e-book