Why I didn’t make predictions

January 4, 2013

NOTE: Images in this archived article have been removed.

Image RemovedSince 2006, I’ve been making annual predictions about what would happen in the coming year, and well, this year, I didn’t. Part of it was because I spent a week travelling and had limited time and internet access, but if I’d really wanted to, I could have made it happen. The project of prediction, however, has come to make me a little queasy, particularly watching the degree of anxiety brought up for some people by empty-headed projections like the Mayan apocalypse.

I’ve always prefaced any predictions that I make with the fact that you should remember what you are paying for my opinion and judge it accordingly. Some years I’ve been astonishingly (especially to me) on-target. Some years I’ve been much further off. It never mattered much, because I know I’m guessing and reading trends about as well as anyone does. But ultimately, I thought about it and decided that even slightly-tongue-in-cheek crystal ball gazing just isn’t the most interesting thing I can do, and I think for the environmental movement generally, it is probably destructive.

Since I began seriously writing about peak oil and climate change, I’ve seen a lot of people make predictions – some of them very specific predictions, and often, been very wrong. Every time someone is wrong about one of these specific predictions, it erodes credibility, and it fixates people on a specific time, rather than on the general trends, which are very, very clear. I don’t actually care which year we slide off the oil plateau that much, nor which year it becomes impossible to ignore climate change – we know both those things are going to happen. I’ve come to think that trying to time them shifts the focus to the timing, not to the process – because, of course, for peak oil, climate change, our economic crisis and the world food security crisis, we’re not talking about things that are going to happen, but that are in various stages of already-ness. We’re here.

So I’m giving up my end-of-year predictions to focus on what is, and where that leads us. When we get there is anyone’s guess. Where we are going is much clearer territory.

Sharon

Sharon Astyk

Sharon Astyk is a Science Writer, Farmer, Parent of Many, writing about our weird life right now. She is the author of four books: Depletion and Abundance: Life on the New Home Front, which explores the impact that energy depletion, climate change and our financial instability are likely to have on our future, and what we can do about it. Depletion and Abundance won a Bronze Medal at the Independent Publishers Awards. A Nation of Farmers: Defeating the Food Crisis on American Soil co-authored with Aaron Newton, which considers what will be necessary for viable food system on a national and world scale in the coming decades, and argues that at its root, any such system needs a greater degree of participation from all of us; Independence Days: A Guide to Sustainable Food Preservation and Storage which makes the case for food storage and preservation as integral parts of an ethical, local, healthy food system and tells readers how to begin putting food by, and the newly published Making Home: Adapting our Homes and Our Lives to Settle in Place, which "shows readers how to turn the challenge of living with less into settling for more".

Tags: future predictions