In July 2009 there was a TV program on US television called Earth 2100. The essence of this program was a business-as-usual worst-case scenario of what might happen if we do not make any major decision about changing our westernized consumer lifestyles in the very near future. Rather than the doom and gloom scenario given in this program, I want to propose a different scenario. It’s one I used in my textbook as a sidebar within each chapter of how that chapter’s theme could happen. This story is one of how sustainable Living could come about. I will tell this story through a series of posts through the fictional experiences of a woman who was born in 2012 and speaks through her journal about what led up to a sustainable world in 2112.
My name is Esperanza. My father named me for the Spanish word Hope. People call me Espe. My father always told me that I was the quintessential American since our immediate family tree stretched back to two indentured servants (a Scottish brother and sister) who came to America in the early 1700’s and today includes more than a dozen ethnic heritages of various European lineages (Scots, English, Irish, German, Norwegian, Spanish, Dutch, and Polish), Native American, African American and a couple of Asian members (Chinese and Japanese) on the tree. I tell you this to emphasize that getting trapped with some old notion of ethnic tribalism is a thing of the past. Today we not only accept diversity but thoroughly seek it and welcome it. It’s what makes us resilient and successful as modern Homo Sapien Sapien here in 2112.
It is my hundredth birthday today. It’s hard to show how life is so different from that time when I was born in 2012. Back then, being a centenarian was rare, but now is more common. I can fully expect to live to 120 with a vibrant, still active life. Obviously, we haven’t yet got to remaining ‘young’ forever but I still have full mobility and fully contribute to my community and the neighboring ones. The decades of wear and tear on my old body are there, especially on wet and cold days when I can feel my joints more, but the healers tell me I have a physical age of a healthy 60-year young. But, we don’t dwell on age. Globally, wherever we live, we all now respect elders as the wisdom keepers. Our experience of life is held in high esteem, much like I recall indigenous peoples and some Far-east cultures always did in past ages.
My father, an eternal optimist, was a western U.S. college professor that taught sustainability. He spent most of his adult life preaching that we need to save the humans for then we would save everything. He always believed that given the right information people would make a better decision to how they live their lives. One of the common environmental mantras of the time was ‘Save the Earth.’ He said that the planet was resilient enough to survive whatever major problems we might heap upon it. The planet had gone through many catastrophic changes already in its long geological history and would easily rebound from whatever we might do to it. Yet there were multiple environmental problems that seemed to be plaguing humankind. It seemed to everybody on the planet with many diverging opinions coupled with the economic realities of that time that we were doomed to follow a path of environmental destruction ultimately leading to our own socio-cultural destruction.
One issue that was driving the draconian policies of the early 21st century was called Climate Catastrophe. While climatic issues were certainly a problem, there was a global propaganda drive to get everyone to believe the problem was completely human driven. There certainly was some human contribution, but few scientists back then really understood how climate fully worked. For instance, in 2013, there was an ‘Intergovernmental Panel on climate Change (IPCC)’ that concluded “It is extremely likely that human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century.” At the same time, the IPCC said that 97% of scientists agreed with this conclusion.
Now in hindsight, we see the truth, but at that time it was obfuscated by the Mainstream Media and others with a vested interest in having a catastrophe narrative. The reality was much different. In that 2013 IPCC panel analysis of 11,944 scientific papers about climate change, only the summary paragraph was used to categorize the papers. There were 3896 papers (32%) that agreed humans were the main cause, 7930 papers (66%) having no opinion, 70 papers that rejected human involvement, and 40 papers were completely undecided one way or the other. The panel removed the 7930 no opinion papers to finally conclude that scientists agreed 97% with only 3% disagreeing on human involvement in climate change. Far from being a settled fact as was emphasized by environmentalists and the media at that time, it was still debatable.
In 2014 my father marched with all the other environmentalists pushing for climate action, until he looked at the IPCC reports more closely and recognized the sleight of hand as he called it to push an agenda that wasn’t supported by the data. He found himself unpopular for calling attention to this situation, especially so by most people that really didn’t know or understand the science or technology in their lives. They simply believed the hierarchy and Mass Media because it supported their beliefs. My father thought this the worse situation. Ill-founded beliefs and Ignorance running political and economic policy using catastrophe as a driving narrative. He particularly campaigned against Corporate Take-over with most aspects of our lives. My father believed deeply in rational discussion and was always appalled by dogmatic approaches and an unwillingness to listen to alternative perspectives that also had good data weigh up their conclusions.
One of the guru’s of science and technology from 1985 was Carl Sagan who said it well: “We’ve arranged a global civilization in which most crucial elements—transportation, communications, and all other industries; agriculture, medicine, education, entertainment, protecting the environment; and even the key democratic institution of voting—profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.” And it almost did blow up in our faces. We kept listening to ‘experts’ who were given ‘airtime’ but as we later found were merely puppets of big corporate systems.
I look back over the decades and feel blessed to have been able to see humanity work through its problems that plagued the Industrial Blight Era (IBE) with its greed and indifference. One of the greatest problems back in the early 21st century was how science and technology controlled all our lives but how few people truly understood the big picture. That story of how we transformed ourselves is a revealing one about humanity itself.
As an 18-year-old in 2030, I still recall that feeling of comfort in recognizing what might have happened had humanity not chosen, just a few years earlier, the transformative path that would eventually lead to true sustainability. If there was a pivotal point that began the transformation of humanity to become what it is today, that would be the Covid era as we simply refer to it. It was a series of draconian actions over a few years. These agendas were pushed onto people by ever increasingly totalitarian governments, corporate systems, and monied hierarchies that finally spurred mass civil disobedience all around the world. Of course, the corrupt systems literally collapsed under their own inability to cope with everything that was happening worldwide. But that story for another entry.
To Be Continued ………………
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