Monday Essay

The Next Fifty Years:  2 0 6 0

Neither Boom nor Gloom

 

This short essay is not a forecast, nor a prophecy. It’s a reflection of some major world trends and what our planet would need. Some people are very concerned and worried of what might happen in December 2012. No big deal, prophecies are risky business anyway. So we better shut up, and forget about them.  There are lots a evidence --all over the place--, that  we –as humankind --need to change our habits, frames of mind, energy sources, means of production, commerce, finances and so forth for the human specie to survive the  next fifty years. This change is monumental. We are being forced by it, we—as humans—face an unavoidable “choice”;  lets say  an  imposition—mostly of our own making as humankind. We had many warnings and indicators so far, many: global warming, extinction of species and pollution and collapsing financial systems—banks and otherwise-- and institutions. There also well-known social many maladies such as:  poverty, starvation, unequal distribution of income and so forth. Consider   Jonas Salk, Nobel Prize Laureate of medicine and inventor of the Polio vaccine who once said: if the insects –of the earth--would disappear now, humankind would vanish from the face of the earth in 50 years. Reversing this thought—he also mentioned—that if mankind would disappear today from the face of the earth, all species would flourish in 50 years. This is startling and somewhat unsettling.  We would like to believe we have endless time and endless resources. We don’t; most of what we believe “we” have is “given”: sunlight, earth, water, natural resources, land, possessions and friends and families. Of course many countries have printed lots of paper money or coins, but with no real value. Some may thus feel wealth, which is really “paper money”. Green plastics or recyclable ones is an issue at hand. Although plastics are omnipresent in our lives, most of them are hardily green but toxic. Some estimates of recyclable plastics production are that no more than 2% of current productions are degradable. Although this production increases by 8% a year, at this current rate it would take some 12 years to produce a new breed of non toxic plastics.

Therefore the  overwhelming task facing the next generation is to reinvent, innovate the whole means of production: new houses—energy saving ones, buildings, new plastics, cars, trains airplanes, new renewable energy sources, new ways to treat nature, new patters of consumption and waste, in brief, an new world and local  economies. It is a daunting and welcome task for the  far reaching creativity or “thinking and doing outside-the-box.” Our patterns should follow well established earth life patterns over millennia. For some –astonishing--3,000 millions years and millions of “life experiments”, life on earth has demonstrated –beyond any doubt—that Earth itself is the primal scientist, the primal technology, the primal system who we must study and imitate. Otherwise—it is well documented—humankind systems and economies might collapse in decades.

The Earth’s patterns of self-regulation and waste management are superb, far beyond our best technologies. We cannot –any longer for a long time--afford millions of cars running on gasoline, we do need mass transport, we cannot afford schools systems that hardly educate the young. We cannot afford health and hospital systems that are so expensive. So on and so forth. The future has always been and will be open. This certainly is not a blueprint for such changes. There are many proposals going around. One thing is certain—although details might change: we have to live together in a small and wonderful planet. We do not have two. We do face a predicament as humans, but it will neither be a boom nor a gloom. The present is open; the future is still yet open.

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Gustavo Jimenez-Lagos

February 2011