Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Acting with malice takes a toll on both perpetrator and victim. In our case, the victim is the planet and she’s turning the tables on us, on her own schedule, whether we see it coming or not. Heads up!
“The Future” is a sales pitch designed to keep us locked into existing institutions and power relationships. It has nothing to do with solving our real problems or liberating us from the increasing power of corporations and the governments they have captured. It is, in fact, an elitist vision of a future entirely run by wealthy technologists who find politics and environmental disruption inconvenient.
A few days from now, 2016 will have passed into the history books. I know a fair number of people who won’t mourn its departure, but it’s pretty much a given that the New Year celebrations here in the United States, at least, will demonstrate a marked shortage of enthusiasm for the arrival of 2017.
Economists make forecasts about what is going to happen in the world of that great God – money.
The new year now upon us has brought out the usual quota of predictions about what 2016 has in store, and I propose as usual to make my own contribution to that theme.
Just past the trees, where I’d expected to see cabs waiting for passengers in a cloud of exhaust, horses stood placidly in front of brightly colored—buggies? Carriages?
From the window beside me, the Steubenville station looked like a scene out of an old Bogart vid.
This is the first of a series of posts using the tools of narrative fiction to explore an alternative shape for the future. A hint to readers who haven’t been with The Archdruid Report for long: don’t expect all your questions to be answered right away.
As I look back from the year 2033, I would like to be able to tell you that the transition to our low-carbon society was smooth and rational. I would like to be able to tell you that, as a democracy, we shaped our nation with sensible, evidence-based decisions, and built a just and sustainable world through intelligent planning and bold leadership.
Earlier this week, I was trying to think of ways to talk about the gap between notions about the future we’ve all absorbed from the last three hundred years of fossil-fueled progress, on the one hand, and the ways of thinking about what’s ahead that might actually help us make sense of our predicament and the postpetroleum, post-progress world ahead, on the other.
I’d like to suggest that from now on, any claim about the future needs to be confronted up front by the two hard questions…
Since 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.
