Envisioning the Future

It’s 2009 and the world is changing…and fast. I say this not because of the constant infiltration of apocalyptic messages of our current fear-mongering media, but because I can truly feel it. There is just something in the air that tells me so. The conversations around me are changing, and more people are beginning to see the future as a very different world than we live in now. It is hard to pinpoint exactly what the future will entail, but most people agree it will be drastically different. Personal philosophies are becoming more global in scale, and while this could be a product of my post-college age group, I choose to believe that it is more of a shift in global consciousness. The very idea that we live in a finite world is relatively new. I think that it can be traced back to the first image of the Earth as taken from the moon in the 1960s. This image caused a shift in collective consciousness, and people began to think of the Earth as a finite place. Earth really is like a spaceship, the one inhabitable known planet floating in the dark desolate reality of outer space. It is our home, and our survival depends on maintaining and protecting it. The concept is simple: We need the clean air, water, and ecosystem functions, which it provides for us. The problem becomes more convoluted and complex with the great diversity of the human race, and the inability to grasp the immediacy of the problems.
The image of the Earth sparked the environmental movements of the 1960s, but I would argue that collectively we did not grasp a holistic view of the Earth back then. We had the image but we were lacking the critical and immediate global problem. That is until climate change. It is indisputable now and has infiltrated into our consciousness, like a heavy breathing smoker breathing down our backs in a dark movie theatre. It cannot be ignored or shut out any longer. It is becoming impossible to simply “Watch the movie”, or live out our daily life, without coming face-to-face with climate change, and its associated problems.
Climate change is affecting the global consciousness in the idea that we are all citizens of the world, not only of countries, and we are all involved in this problem together. The challenge is that together we simply must create new social and economic systems that both ameliorate and accommodate climate change in an expedient and co-operative manner.
Concepts of earth systems and inter-relatedness of species, once only relevant to ecologists and others studying ecosystems, are now being thought about on a general level. I believe that the global population is beginning to see the underlying inter-connectivity of our social spheres as well as our Earth in general. When one human being buys a T-shirt in San Francisco, there is a corresponding human in China manufacturing that shirt for dismal amounts of money. The very idea that this thought would enter our consciousness before we buying a T-shirt is remarkable. When we are forced to actually think before we buy or do something, when we just take that extra second to realize how our actions influence and are part of the overlying system, we are already changing the world. I envision a future where it becomes almost impossible to do something mindlessly, a world where intellectually people have been conditioned to consider how their daily actions influence the larger systems on a global scale.
I also envision a future where the idea of community becomes once again essential. We simply cannot face these global pressing problems without it. Community means helping out your neighbors and others close-by unconditionally, free of judgments and pre-conceived notions. While community is alive and well in many parts of the world, I feel that it is dead in other areas, superseded by the notion of the successful isolated nuclear family and individual. The point is: we simply need others around us to prosper. It is our human condition. The famous anthropologist Margaret Mead stated that 99% of the time human beings have been on the planet we have lived in tribes or groups. It is only in times of war that the nuclear family prevails, as it is more mobile, promising more survival in times of uncertainty. The isolated individual only feels that he is prospering in times of fear.
To face the problems and changes of our current world we cannot live in fear. Mead states that, “For the full flowering of the human spirit we need groups, tribes”. It is with the support of community that creativity and human innovation will thrive, and these are humanities saving graces. Our capacity for empathy and compassion sets us apart from other species, and will greatly help us in times of change and uncertainty, if we learn to quell the feeling of fear. Instead of relying on institutions like government-provided childcare and welfare food stamps, let us instead develop our own childcare-sharing duties among the neighborhood and community gardens to provide fresh food for those in need. Communities create a lattice, or network, of support, a safety net that pulls us back up when we temporarily fall.

I envision a future where individual prosperity and happiness relies and flourishes on the network of neighbors, family, and friends around you. I envision a future where children are taught the nature of systems thinking in schools, fostering critical thinking and creative innovations to heal the earth. I envision a future where we make decisions based on the collective, not on fleeting feelings of happiness. I envision a future where we are first and foremost global, rather than national, citizens.