Can We Afford the Future?

[eridani]

http://www.commondreams.org/views/2015/11/18/can-we-afford-future

Some readers may assume that I just got up on the wrong side of the bed, and that this is all just too pessimistic. Surely we will muddle through, with new technology making further progress affordable. I must be cherry-picking a worst-case scenario, right? No, in my view there is no exaggeration here. The evidence as I see it is stacked almost entirely on the side of my thesis: we (as a nation, or as a global civilization, take your pick) really and truly cannot afford much more of the kind of progress—defined in terms of increases in energy and material consumption—that we got used to during the last century.

That means that if we don’t start planning for whatever kind of future we can afford (in both dollar and energy terms), we’ll end up broke, foreclosed, and without much of a future worth living in.

Clearly, the affordable future will be slower, simpler, and less mobile than Futurama daydreams of the 1960s. It will entail living closer to the land and using much less in the way of energy and materials than folks in wealthy industrial nations currently are accustomed to using. If we’re dropped headlong into that future with no preparation, we’re likely to see it as—and turn it into—a dystopian, post-apocalyptic nightmare. However, if we plan and prepare, our affordable future could actually be an improvement over the soul-destroying existence that pervades so much of urban and suburban America these days. Permaculturists, organizations of idealistic young organic farmers, eco-villages like Dancing Rabbit and The Farm, and Transition Initiatives represent what appear currently to be barely visible fringe phenomena. But the folks pursuing these roads-less-traveled deserve our attention and help, because they’re about the only people in the industrialized world who are preparing for the kind of future that’s actually within our means.