I was recently in Bonn, Germany, for the UNFCCC talks, sitting on a panel of young people at a conference side event where we talked about ‘Re-defining Pragmatism’.
During the questions, I was asked one of the toughest questions that I’ve had to publicly respond to in a long time… “What is your vision for the sustainable world you want by 2050?”
We spend a lot of time in the environment/climate/justice movement talking about how we need to “take urgent action now”. We’re very good at talking about the changes that we want to see - more renewable energy, an end to coal and fossil fuels. We want to decrease wasteful, unnecessary consumption and have ‘cyclical’ production systems, recycling, instead of linear extract-use-waste systems. We want an end to materialism. We want an end to deforestation. We want people in the least developed countries to have clean water to drink and access to healthcare. We want bicycles, buses and trains, not cars. And if cars, fully electric. We want polluting activities to cost more so that there is a financial incentive to be environmentally friendly. We want a fundamental shift in the way that our society, industry and economy operate. We want local food production and an acknowledgement that we’re currently overpopulated and need, somehow, to address this. We don’t want biofuels that destroy livelihoods or which compete with food production. But limited amounts of biofuel, from agricultural wastes, if they would otherwise be wasted are ok. We want you to eat less red meat.
We say that we - today’s youth - are the generation who are willing to make these changes reality over the next four decades, during our working lifetimes. On this topic, youth in Bonn ran a ridiculously-successful t-shirt campaign called ‘How old will you be in 2050?’ Personally, I’ll be 65, just retiring after dedicating my working life to the sustainability transition.
But when all of these changes are in place, in 2050, how will the world be different? What sort of society will we have? What is the key difference between now and then? We know that we need ‘a fundamental shift’, but what to?
This was the question that I was confronted with (and surprised by) at the side-event last week. While I know the answer in my heart, and have thought about it in countless ‘visioning sessions’, I have rarely had to articulate it.
I started to list the things that I outlined above… “We want a world where all the electricity comes from renewables, no more fossil fuels, a world where people ride their bike instead of driving cars.” It was about this moment that I realised that this was fairly predictable, and not what the Texan reporter was looking for.
“But all that is the obvious stuff. What we need between now and 2050 is a fundamental revolution in our social values. Where we understand and focus on what really makes us happy, instead of how much money we make.”
Without wanting to waffle for too long in responding to the question, I pointed to an end to wasteful materialism and the capitalist growth-at-all-costs economy, and referred to the study of happiness and the happiness economics that they do at Harvard, and other places.
I also managed to briefly outline a few aspects of my vision - a world where we no longer ‘work jobs we hate to buy shit we don’t need’, where we entertain ourselves with arts, music, sport, community, cooking and sharing meals with friends, instead of going to the shopping mall to ‘consume’.
There’s obviously a lot more work to be done here. Communicating a positive vision of the sustainable future - and not just the stuff/technology/practices that it has in it, but the values which underpin it - is crucial to our success. I’d like to start collecting these visions and over the next few months, synthsise them into something that is widely communicable. Then we can make this vision not just personal, but political too.
Two experiences that I’ve collected in the past five months of travelling give me some indication of the world that I want to head towards
1. It’s Easter Sunday in Amsterdam today, and everything is shut. People are staying in their houses and not out on the streets as they usually are in Amsterdam. So it’s been quiet all day. I’m standing on the balcony listening to some birds and sipping tea. Then, suddenly, emerging from around the corner, an eclectic four-piece band (Trumpet, Saxaphone, Tamborine and Accordion!) bursts into my quiet reality playing sweet Samba music. They’re colourfully dressed, appear totally impromptu, and are a mix of ages and races. There is no choreography. I watch for a few minutes as they make their way down my street - windows are opening, people stepping onto their balconies to see what is going on. Some are even dancing. The street is alive! When the song finishes and the band disappears around the next corner, a polite round of applause comes from the balconies, and people return to whatever they were doing before. Such random acts of beauty and kindness are something that I envisage being not just ‘random’ in 2050, but a focus of our existence.
2. In January I had the immense pleasure of living at London’s Temporary School of Thought. Just today I came across a notepad where I had recorded some reflections on the school, which I’ve never had the opportunity to share. I think that this goes some way towards the vision that I am trying to articulate.
“From day one in this society we are made to conform, to be less free, with less choice - through indoctrination by our school systems, through fear of authority, through rigid moral rules imposed on us by closed-minded religions, and through the false ideals that advertising causes us to pursue. In direct opposition to this conformity, the community here [at the Temporary School] is totally free - we educate ourselves how and when they want to, we explore the nuances of existence and life, and we are constantly discovering new ways of thinking.
An authority unto itself alone, with no recognition or even acknowledgement of systemic powers, the moral code of the School and it’s friends is based only on mutual respect, trust and community. The ideals shared here have nothing to do with what advertising has told us to aspire to.
In 2050, we will be a society that is:
Unplugged but switched on.
Truly alive. Safe, beautiful, fun, welcoming. Coommunity.
Independent. Free. Temporary.
Always expressing love as the joyful recognition of each other’s existence,
even on the quieter, harder days.
This is the joyfully cobbled together, temporary, school of thought.
We drink lots of tea.
A sustainable world is a creative world.
This was first posted on Climate Change Perspectives
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