Green Futures. How will we live in 2099? With Belinda Kinkead.

What policy, law and funding do we need for land use, energy and transport of the future? … this week a more reflective essay!

Will Prince return to earth to party like it’s 2099?!?

I hope so. Prince is my kind of messiah. But who knows? Life in 2099, or even 2050 is hard to imagine. Forecasting is fraught! Remember the Y2K bug?  I worked on it in the UK. A bit of a fizzer, like ‘conspiracist’ David Meade’s prediction the world would end with The Rapture in 2018. We don’t know the shape of next year, but we need narratives of the future. Desperately. But how do we create those dreams? With the addled state of our societies, habitats and economies. With the short-termism and intellectual poverty of our debates. With the corruption and murkiness of government and business. With the insecurity of work, indifference of the rich and abject dysfunction of our professional political party system whose apparent priority is to perpetuate itself … how do we do that?

I look forward to talking to Belinda Kinkead on Wednesday, about our transition to a post-carbon economy. We have barely begun that process.  Belinda works on reforestation projects to help us get there - in Paraguay and Laos. Belinda, an environmental engineer, knows her stuff and has dedicated her life to this work. I sense that the future lies with the sun and wind. I sense the nuclear power will not so important. But I do not know. I defer to those who do. Like Belinda. I respect knowledge and expertise and know the sharp limits of my knowledge. I find the sometimes the casual dismissal of expertise in our community problematic, by the way. We need to be clearer and more humbler about the limits of our knowledge. Our conversation will use Belinda’s projects as a launch pad for a free-range survey of our Futures.

We will need creativity we cannot imagine right now. Populations have been on the move since before the ice age. Migration and war will cause this country to boost its oddly small population. We are not even Shanghai or even Tokyo, by numbers. The people of the world will keep shifting and swirling. We will build on flood plains but on stilts and use engineering to solve problems. Risks - created by climate chaos - will become ever more unpredictable. Energy will need to become renewable but faster than capitalism wants; so, carbon wars are possible, wars over water are possible - and might be even worse than that old Kevin Costner movie. Transport will electrify but needs to be reclaimed by the public. We know the climate will get even hotter. The global population will keep increasing - it has more than doubled in my life (tho may flatline eventually). The sea will rise. Inequality will get worse, here and around the world. Politics will get shriller, and sillier. Government will first become slower and less responsive, then crack. Our wealthy population will get older. Young people will feel less secure. Mental health will deteriorate. New forms of consolation will be required to deal with it. We may not get The Rapture but we will almost certainly see The Rupture. When? Ask Prince? How? Ask Sheila B?

But do not despair. This achingly brief life is still beautiful and I cherish every day that I live. And … I would much rather be alive today than be a peasant living in 18th century France getting news of the execution of Louis XVI or the disappearance of the great Comte Galoup de La Perouse, or a Victorian era British woman who by law forfeited her property to her husband (until 1870), or a child with polio and tuberculosis in 1916 whose father is fighting in a trench and whose mother will soon die as a nurse in the Influenza epidemic of 1918.  There are more humans than ever, we live far longer, we are wealthy in material terms beyond the fever dreams of the world that saw the bombs fall on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Reflections on one mere life on earth - mine

Allow me the indulgence to consider my 58 years on earth. I was born in 1966, the year decimal currency came in. If I live another 32 years I will die in 2056, the centenary of the Melbourne Olympics. I hope I do, just to see what we achieve as a species in the last third of my life. I was born in 1966. Television was Black & White until 1975. I wrote all my school assignments by hand. We read analog textbooks and photocopied thousands of pages to get through uni. I first used a green screen word processor in 1989. I used the internet at UTS on a research project in 1993. I loved Skype when it came in around 1999. I joined Facebook to spruik a show I did at the Edinburgh fringe in 2007. I got my first iPhone in 2009. My kids struggle with old school maps and live by apps. I was impressed by the slide show of Jungle Book our parents screened on our lounge room wall in 1972.

I see the challenges we face in our climate emergency, our equality emergency and our government emergency as so acute, so structural and profound, that the most challenging and most interesting period of my life is yet to come. The change and seriousness required in the change to come should dwarf anything that has happened in my life so far. It will make the Whitlam government look modest and mundane. The GFC and the Pandemic will seem straightforward and harmonious. The coming change will require locally and globally the effort that saw our species put someone on the moon, that saw us ban CFCs and whaling, and massively reduce heart disease and smoking, that sees us now respect and invest in girls, the disabled and gender identity in a way that was not possible when I was born - not to mention when my grandparents were courting around 100 years ago.

By 2099 what will life on earth be like? 75 years from now. How high will the sea be then? What will the world’s forests be like? Can we breathe in our cities? How will our economy work? Who - or what - will do the work? Will we learn to share better what we have? Is war raging or a thing of the past? Do people live anywhere in space? How many of us are there? What is our vision of being human? Is the individual still a thing? Does art still exist? Is the music any good? Has the notion of a god survived all the change on earth? What is education designed to do in 2099? What is ‘work’ in the age of AI, which has barely begun to transform our lives and the way we communicate and create images and explain ourselves to ourselves?

Back to the theme of the Conversations ...

Our visions of the future need work. We need to get dreaming, to respond together … by imagining The Future, by restoring constructive and collaborative Government - responsive to the people, powered by a vision of Universal Human Rights. You have to - we all have to - see yourself, see ourselves - as the same kind of thing as the woman in Bougainville who still walks for hours to find clean water, or to go to the shops. The president of the RSL - we must all agree - is ‘in themselves’ - the same kind of person with the same value and rights and meaning as the winner of Ru Paul’s Drag Race. That is the test. If we cannot do that, then we will be lost. Our investment in insisting on difference between each other is a terrible act of vandalism. Be unique - please - but in politics focus on one thing - the highest common denominator, our irreducible shared humanity, our vulnerability and brevity. To me, everything flows from that perspective which feeds into universal human rights as the basis of all policy. If mindfulness means anything it is not as a technique to make life bearable but as a way to create a new way of being - to be mindful of the fundamental lack of material difference between any of us. Girl, boy, asexual, polyamorist, Sikh, Amish, quantity surveyor, or aardvark enclosure manager.

Environmental as anything ...

Perhaps I have a slightly unconventional view of environmentalism - the battle to save and enrich biodiversity in the face of incalculable threats. I frame environmentalism in my mind and heart as a human rights issue. Why? We are human beings. We are - probably - a passing phase in the evolution of the universe that holds us. But we are what we are. Our interest in the planet is selfish. It is our home. We should keep this extraordinary dwelling of ours - for which we obtained no council approval - going for our own sake. The sake of the planet as an end in itself is not our problem - that belongs to the universe itself. In the end human beings - or what we become - will probably see the harsh teeth of the indifference of our planet and the universe to us and our existence. We may for all our beauties, all our love, all our superannuation, our wondrous cuisine and design, end up as a curious kind of geological-footnote. We might be written up by historians of the planet as the next blip of ‘apparent significance’ that came after the dinosaurs. In the beginning was the big bang. Followed by much bubbling of gas and cracking of granite. Then we had the dinosaurs for a bit. Then came the meteorite Chicxalub which killed them off and plunged the planet into darkness. Then we had more bubbling and cracking of gas and granite. Then an ice age. Sabre tooth tigers. The diprodoton.  Among other improbable megafauna. Then us. You, me and Janis Joplin. The species that brought us Pride and Prejudice and Kate Bush. Franz Beckenbauer and Radiohead. Frido Kahlo and regular sanitation, collected in the right colours bins to a regular schedule once a week. Anti trust law and the unspeakable - and routinely denied - horrors on every continent of racist colonialisation. Yes - us - the human thing. Your kids, their kids and Boz Scaggs.

I wonder sometimes if environmentalism in wanting to save the planet - for its own sake - is a form of self loathing. We should save ourselves - and our home. We need a ceasefire in our attack on the planet, for our own sake. Perhaps that is key to what we need to change. A shift in thinking about the great ‘green’ goal. Beating climate change is about human life on earth - or that is a message that might stick better as we struggle to achieve the speed of change we so desperately need. Taking refuge in nature makes sense of course - so many of us are exhausted by our kind, our silliness and greed. More than fair enough. Since Covid we reach for our dogs and cats more than ever, and maybe we reach for our forests and rivers our wilderness in a spirit of poignant succour, seeking comfort because we - the humans - have fucked up. I sense that perhaps many of us do that.

I feel - with no certainty and not much clarity - that environmentalism has barely begun and needs to change if it is to succeed. Just as feminism is an ongoing project that has only started to made its modest progress, given the entrenched power of patriarchy and dead hand of dumb ideas of how to be a man, maybe environmentalism is still learning. In my life we have seen its birth in the 60s, its infancy through the 70s, and we are now maybe in its adolescence. Environmentalism might need to shift a little to reach maturity - to earn the right to vote, drive and marry - to move from protest to connecting with the whole of the species - everyone alive and struggling to be human - and to do the business and practical arts of government. The transition might be as tricky as the one we are making to renewable energy. No one group or party owns the challenge, that is for sure and certain.

To recap, I think we need to want to save the planet for our sake. This is not an act of biodiverse altruism. The planet will survive our vandalism and self destructive impulses. The indifference of our physical systems will be immense. The silence of our end could well be resounding - the spheres will make no complaints to Council about noise levels then. The last bush doof at the end of time will attract no comment from the Sea of Tranquility. No one will care. We care for our wondrous planet because we care about ourselves, as we should. We are humans. What we truly risk with climate catastrophe is our existence. The life forms of this planet will evolve. New forms may replace us. Looking after our home is a human rights issue. It is common sense. It is good housekeeping.

Love. Yep, Love!  I choose to 'go there'.

Human rights are an expression of love. Why does our politics - across the world - speak so awkwardly - if at all - about love? Love is all that matters to most of us, if we can be that vulnerable for a moment. Why is our politics so querulous? So stupid. We need Love in any of our visions of The Future.  If we are serious. We need - everyone alive and yet to be born - a life powered by Nessun Dorma, by Billie Holliday singing Strange Fruit - a song written by a white Jewish male about the lynching of black men the survivors of slaves in the USA - or by Mary Magdalene and the eleventh commandment that we all remember and make fun of but cannot deny. Love one another. Because whatever the technology we create, whatever the failures of our social organisation, whatever our intellectual achievement, whatever our damaged public goods turn out to be, it is the power of love that will prove the only renewable resource worth focussing on. The Power of Love underwrites the human story. It is the dramaturg of our narrative, it is our theme and our subtext. A universal love of one another. That is all that can say - in this time of horror and war, of wanton waste and idiotic, demonic destruction. That is the basis for hope - that it is possible to express this idea and for it to make sense. Hope is, as Seamus Heaney says, knowing the work that is worth doing. Love is the only show in town. The only sensible approach to the practical challenge of government in the face of almost terminal crises in climate, equality and governance.

Love, that’s all I’ve got. It’s all we’ve got.

Mark Swivel

28 May 2024