From the middle of this century, our response to Coronavirus doesn't look too bad, say these authors
Last week, as the upheavals consequent upon the Coronavirus were coming into view, we ran a blog based on a Demos Helsinki scenario on “Sustainable lifestyles” - commissioned in 2012, but running all the way to 2050. It’s jam-packed with hopeful narratives about an improved and sophisticatedly localised world, after a “economic crash” in 2020. They’re brilliant, but not prophetic enough to posit a pandemic as the event which exploded the old model - however, very few were.
It seems that thinking to the middle of the century is a fertile way to cope with the enormity of Coronavirus. That distinct old human capacity for anticipating our future, and adjusting activity in the present according to that, is serving us well. We found three pieces published this week which look back from 2050 - and we’re delighted that they seem to be generally optimistic. (Leave Hollywood to the button-pressing dystopias - though we wish they’d change the tune…)
From the Common Dreams blog, sustainability and green veterans Fritjof Capra and Hazel Henderson lay out a very expansive (and hopeful) vista. An extract below:
The newly aware “grassroots globalists,” the armies of school children, global environmentalists and empowered women joined with green, more ethical investors and entrepreneurs in localizing markets.
Millions were served by microgrid cooperatives, powered by renewable electricity, adding to the world’s cooperative enterprises, which even by 2012 employed more people worldwide that all the for-profit companies combined. They no longer used the false money metrics of GDP, but in 2015 switched to steering their societies by the UN’s SDGs, their 17 goals of sustainability and restoration of all ecosystems and human health.
These new social goals and metrics all focused on cooperation, sharing and knowledge-richer forms of human development, using renewable resources and maximizing efficiency. This long term sustainability, equitably distributed, benefits all members of he human family within the tolerance of other species in our living biosphere.
Competition and creativity flourish with good ideas driving out less useful ones, along with science-based ethical standards and deepening information in self-reliant and more connected societies at all levels from local to global.
When the coronavirus struck in 2020, the human responses were at first chaotic and insufficient, but soon became increasingly coherent and even dramatically different. Global trade shrunk to only transporting rare goods, shifting to trading information.
Instead of shipping cakes, cookies and biscuits around the planet, we shipped their recipes, and all the other recipes for creating plant-based foods and beverages; and locally we installed green technologies: solar, wind, geothermal energy sources, LED lighting, electric vehicles, boats, and even aircraft.
Fossil fuel reserves stayed safely in the ground, as carbon was seen as a resource, much too precious to burn. The excess CO2 in the atmosphere from fossil fuel burning was captured by organic soil bacteria, deep-rooted plants, billions of newly planted trees, and in the widespread re-balancing of the human food systems based on agro-chemical industrial agribusiness, advertising and global trading of a few monocultured crops.
This over-dependence on fossil fuels, pesticides, fertilizers, antibiotics in animal-raised meat diets, all were based on the planet’s dwindling freshwater and proved unsustainable.
Today, in 2050, our global foods are produced locally, including many more overlooked indigenous and wild crops, saltwater agriculture and all the other salt-loving (halophyte) food plants whose complete proteins are healthier for human diets.
Mass tourism, and travel in general, decreased radically, along with air traffic and phased-out fossil fuel use. Communities around the world stabilized in small- to medium-sized population centers, which became largely self-reliant with local and regional production of food and energy.
Fossil-fuel use virtually disappeared, as already by 2020 it could no longer compete with rapidly developing renewable energy resources and corresponding new technologies and upcycling of all formerly-wasted resources into our circular economies of today.
Because of the danger of infections in mass gatherings, sweat shops, large chain stores, as well as sports events and entertainment in large arenas gradually disappeared. Democratic politics became more rational, since demagogues could no longer assemble thousands in large rallies to hear them.
Their empty promises were also curbed in social media, as these profit-making monopolies were broken up by 2025 and now in 2050 are regulated as public utilities serving the public good in all countries.
The global-casino financial markets collapsed, and economic activities shifted back from the financial sector to credit unions and public banks in our cooperative sectors of today. The manufacture of goods and our service-based economies revived traditional barter and informal voluntary sectors, local currencies, as well as numerous non-monetary transactions that had developed during the height of the pandemics.
As a consequence of wide-spread decentralization and the growth of self-reliant communities, our economies of today in 2050, have become regenerative rather than extractive, and the poverty gaps and inequality of the money-obsessed, exploitive models have largely disappeared.
The pandemic of 2020, which crashed global markets, finally upended the ideologies of money and market fundamentalism. Central banks’ tools no longer worked, so “helicopter money “and direct cash payments to needy families, such as pioneered by Brazil, became the only means of maintaining purchasing power to smooth orderly economic transitions to sustainable societies.
This shifted US and European politicians to creating new money and these stimulus policies replaced “austerity“ and were rapidly invested in all the renewable resource infrastructure in their respective Green New Deal plans.
In The National, Scottish journalist and radical George Kerevan takes a conceit from William Morris’s utopian classic News From Nowhere. The Sleeper awakes from his slumber at the beginning of the Corona-era, in a world where decades have passed. He’s guided around it by Peter, from one of the local cooperatives:
The first thing The Sleeper noticed as they reached the village was the absence of cars, especially the big SUVs the weekenders like to show off in. “The Virus really made people think again about their quality of life,” Peter explained. “We became more co-operative and decided to live in harmony with nature rather than destroy it.
“We call this The Big Change. In America, they refer to it as Bernie’s Revolution. Some oldsters like you call it socialism, but not the top-down kind. It took the shock of all those people dying to make the world ditch capitalism and consumerism.”
The Sleeper, who had been a lefty of sorts in the previous world, was intrigued. “But how do people earn a living?” he enquired. “Somebody has to do the dirty work, surely?”
Peter said kindly: “Well, there were machines and AI to do all that before the plague. The problem was the profits went to a few billionaires while a lot of folk had to work on zero-hours contracts in shit jobs to survive. We kept the robots, got rid of the billionaires, divvied up the goods and cut working hours dramatically.
…Eventually, most people on the Atlantic Archipelago (previously known as the British Isles) realised that the solidarity and initiative shown by communities during the era of The Virus was a more efficient and satisfying way of running society than going back to the insecurity and state bureaucracy they had previously known. “Now we run things collectively”, explained Peter. “We call it taking back control.”
The Sleeper was mystified. This went against everything he had been told to think by the BBC and Daily Express. “But how do people find the time to take part in direct democracy?” he asked. “They must have jobs to do and families to look after. Besides, you need experts.”
It was Peter’s turn to be perplexed: “Well, with the swift conversion to AI and job-sharing, our average work week is around 20 hours, so that leaves plenty of time for community discussion. People also have the leisure and interest to become their own ‘experts’, if that’s their fancy. Why delegate running society to somebody you don’t know?”
The World Economic Forum website runs an extract from the new book by Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac, architects of the Paris climate agreement, titled The Future We Choose: Surviving the Climate Crisis. The first part of the extract is an extremely downbeat imagining of “The World We Are Creating”.
We’re going to quote from the second part, “The World We Must Create” - but after that, you should go back and read the darker passages. In the meantime, read how the trees saved us:
It is 2050. We have been successful at halving emissions every decade since 2020. We are heading for a world that will be no more than 1.5 degrees Celsius warmer by 2100.
In most places in the world, the air is moist and fresh, even in cities. It feels a lot like walking through a forest, and very likely this is exactly what you are doing. The air is cleaner than it has been since before the Industrial Revolution.
You have trees to thank for that. They are everywhere.
It wasn’t the single solution we required, but the proliferation of trees bought us the time we needed to vanquish carbon emissions. Corporate donations and public money funded the biggest tree- planting campaign in history.
When we started, it was purely practical, a tactic to combat climate change by relocating the carbon: the trees took carbon dioxide out of the air, released oxygen, and put the carbon back where it belongs, in the soil. This of course helped to diminish climate change, but the benefits were even greater.
On every sensory level, the ambient feeling of living on what has again become a green planet has been transformative, especially in cities. Cities have never been better places to live. With many more trees and far fewer cars, it has been possible to reclaim whole streets for urban agriculture and for children’s play.
Every vacant lot, every grimy unused alley, has been repurposed and turned into a shady grove. Every rooftop has been converted to either a vegetable or a floral garden. Windowless buildings that were once scrawled with graffiti are instead carpeted with verdant vines.
The greening movement in Spain had begun as an effort to combat rising temperatures. Because of Madrid’s latitude, it is one of the driest cities in Europe. And even though the city now has a grip on its emissions, it was previously at risk of desertification. Because of the “heat island” effect of cities— buildings trap warmth and dark, paved surfaces absorb heat from the sun— Madrid, home to more than 6 million people, was several degrees warmer than the countryside just a few miles away.
In addition, air pollution was leading to a rising incidence of premature births, and a spike in deaths was linked to cardiovascular and respiratory illnesses. With a health care system already strained by the arrival of subtropical diseases like dengue fever and malaria, government officials and citizens rallied.
Madrid made dramatic efforts to reduce the number of vehicles and create a “green envelope” around the city to help with cooling, oxygenating, and filtering pollution. Plazas were repaved with porous material to capture rainwater; all black roofs were painted white; and plants were omnipresent.
The plants cut noise, released oxygen, insulated south- facing walls, shaded pavements, and released water vapor into the air. The massive effort was a huge success and was replicated all over the world. Madrid’s economy boomed as its expertise put it on the cutting edge of a new industry.
Most cities found that lower temperatures raised the standard of living. There are still slums, but the trees, largely responsible for countering the temperature rise in most places, have made things far more bearable for all.
Reimagining and restructuring cities was crucial to solving the climate challenge puzzle. But further steps had to be taken, which meant that global rewilding efforts had to reach well beyond the cities. The forest cover worldwide is now 50 percent, and agriculture has evolved to become more tree-based.
The result is that many countries are unrecognizable, in a good way. No one seems to miss wideopen plains or monocultures. Now we have shady groves of nut and fruit orchards, timberland interspersed with grazing, parkland areas that spread for miles, new havens for our regenerated population of pollinators.
Luckily for the 75 percent of the population who live in cities, new electric railways crisscross interior landscapes. In the United States, high-speed rail networks on the East and West coasts have replaced the vast majority of domestic flights, with East coast connectors to Atlanta and Chicago. Because flight speeds have slowed down to gain fuel efficiency, passenger bullet trains make some journeys even faster and with no emissions whatsoever.
The U.S. Train Initiative was a monumental public project that sparked the economy for a decade. Replacing miles and miles of interstate highways with a new transportation system created millions of jobs— for train technology experts, engineers, and construction workers who designed and built raised rail tracks to circumvent floodplains.
This massive effort helped to reeducate and retrain many of those displaced by the dying fossil fuel economy. It also introduced a new generation of workers to the excitement and innovation of the new climate economy.
NOTE: if you need something grittier than uplift, see this piece from The Conversation on the attractions of the full-on-scary pandemic artwork.