by Merrill Findlay for Imagine The Future
presented at the Altona Sustainable Development Congress
Altona Civic Centre, western Melbourne, July 26, 1994. First published in the Congress Papers, and later adapted for Redreaming the plains.

 

More than a decade before I was born, Europe collapsed into yet another 'tribal' war -- only twenty years after the last 'war to end all wars'. Many of you may still remember Hitler's armies marching into Czechoslovakia and Lithuania, that deal he did with Stalin, the invasion of Poland, Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands and Belgium, and then on into France.

The port city of Rotterdam, like many other cities, towns and villages around the globe, was bombed into a heap of rubble. The Dutch government surrendered and Queen Wilhemina and her ministers fled to Britain. Meanwhile, Dutch patriots took their resistance to the invasion underground. If you weren't there at the time, you've probably at least heard stories about people eating tulip bulbs to survive -- and of course, many didn't. Survive that is. In all, an estimated 50 million people didn't survive this conflagration -- but I only mention it because this was what was happening in Fred Polak's world.

Fred Polak was a sociologist who grew up in Rotterdam and, like many people at the time, he was desperately trying to understand the madness he was experiencing all around him. As part of this journey, he wrote a book called The image of the future. (Around about the time, incidentally, that the North American poet, Archibald MacLeish, was writing the Preamble to Unesco's constitution: Since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defences of peace must be constructed.)

Polak's book, The image of the future, was about how we humans simultaneously live in the present and in that Other Place, the future. About how we imagine that mythic Other Place to explain our present, and how our images of that place, the future, 'act as magnets on our behaviour in the present' to precipitate social change.

The image of the future was translated into English in 1961 by a young scholar called Elise Boulding, the woman who later developed the concept of the 200 year present which Richard Slaughter mentioned at this Congress yesterday. As Elise Boulding explains:

At the macrohistorical level, the rise and fall of images of the future precede or accompany the rise and fall of cultures. The rise and fall effect comes because images of the future are like time-bombs which explode and spend their strength at certain points in history, so that new ones must be created. ....... He (Polak) conceives of certain images as having had unusual potency and containing in fact, triple charges. Each explosion creates a breach in time, a sharp discontinuity, by producing a vision for the particular culture in which the explosion takes place, of a totally new possibility. The society then begins to mobilise its energies for a response to that vision.

Polak sifted through western civilisation's images of the future and found that in most of them, that Other Place was described as somewhere positive where many of the problems of the present had been solved. It was a place for people to look forward to. Polak suggests that these positive visions were what mobilised Europe towards those great periods of social transformation we now call 'the Renaissance', 'the Reformation', 'the Enlightenment'. And in more down to earth terms, such images of a better world mobilised us towards the abolition of slavery and child labour, the emancipation of women, parliamentary democracy, universal suffrage, the eight hour day ... all those milestones that we here now hold sacred, but which were once considered by conservative forces, to be 'impossible'.

Brave new world of the twentieth century

Then came the twentieth century and the future changed. That Other Place we live in simultaneously with the present became Aldous Huxley's Brave new world (published in 1932) or George Orwell's 1984 (published, of course, in 1948). A scientifically rational place, more totalitarian even than Plato's imagined 'Republic'. From the middle of the twentieth century our future, that Other Place we live in, had become a mushroom cloud, a Silent Spring, or Coca Cola consumerism.

Soon we had books like Jonathan Schell's The fate of the earth published in 1982. Just looking at it is enough to get the message: a cover in full funeral black relieved only by the name of the book in small white print. The publisher's blurb says:

At present most if us do nothing. We look away. We remain calm. We are silent. We take refuge in the hope that the holocaust won't happen, and turn back to our individual concerns. We deny the truth that is all around us. Indifferent to the future of our kind, we grow indifferent to one another. We drift apart. We grow cold. We drowse our way toward the end of the world ...

Some years after The fate of the earth was published, I was asked by the organisers of the United Nations pavilion at Brisbane's Expo, to co-judge a children's art competition. To look at hundreds of images, songs and poems by young people about making the world a better place. There was this drawing by a young boy: I can still see it. He'd divided his page in half: a bad world and a better one. The bad one was easy and he drew it in meticulous detail. Explosions, fire, war ships, tanks, destruction. (Or that's how I remember it.) The world he saw each night on TV or down at the pinball parlour or in his comic books. The present-day world of his deepest fears.

On the other half of the page, a better world. His prefered future. A figure sitting alone on the beach. No detail. No content.

I'd read dozens of research papers about children's perceptions of the future, about their feelings of hopelessness and despair, but I must say these images shocked me. There were dozens of them scattered across the table, young people's representations of bad or present worlds, beautifully drawn. Of cities turned to ashes, forests to skeletons, fertile lands to dust, once clear rivers to gutters. And 'better worlds' of lolly water cliches: beaches, rainbows, sunshine, flowers, trees. Cute houses with smoke rising from chimneys. Contented cows grazing in green paddocks.

These kids had searched their culture's collective imagination for that Other Place and found only pretty tourist post cards. Or worse, catastrophes. To my inexperienced eye, they had no hopes, no dreams, it seemed, of a world that was qualitatively better than this, and no tools with which they could think through what that kind of world might look or feel like, let alone the complex changes that are required to make such a world real. If the images of the future they were being exposed to showed a Mad Max dystopia of violence, species extinction and nuclear holocaust what else could you expect? And if Fred Polak's theories about social change were correct, what sort of future were these kids being drawn towards, when the future inside their heads was just more of the present, or worse?

Well, that was the Eighties. But it seems many people in many different places were as concerned as I was about what was happening to our planet, and to our collective imaginings. In every corner of the world, individuals and groups were modestly creating new images of the future, new possibilities to replace the doom and gloom scenarios of the present and the recent past. That's why you and I are here together in this conference room today: to report that despite the evidence from the present all around us still, those old pictures of the end of the world are WRONG. Because inside our heads, we are building a new reality. And we're calling it is a 'sustainable society'.

In our imaginations many of us have already cleaned up all the mess from the last few hundred years. We've protected the habitats of all the other species we share the planet with. We've stabilised our global population. We've redistributed our wealth more equitably. We've designed and built our human communities so each one of us can enjoy a richer and more fulfilling life -- without compromising the ability of future generations to enjoy rich and fulfilling lives too. The mushroom cloud has dissipated. The Silent Spring has burst into song. The Greenhouse is back in nature's hands. The ozone hole has closed. And Mad Max and his mates are growing their own ah, recreational herbs in the community garden down the street and driving cute little hydrogen powered numbers to visit their mums.

These new images of the future are dragging us all -- some of us admittedly still kicking and screaming -- into a new reality. What we're talking about at this Congress, is the process of its becoming. In that process, the image is shifting and evolving, but it still has that magnetic force. The power to transform the present.

Imagining a sustainable Altona

But let's just put a little flesh onto the bones of this future world -- as a kind of summary of what we've been discussing these last few days.

We have up to another million people living west of the Yarra now and this basaltic plain is one of the major production centres of the Pacific Rim -- though if you still think in terms of those old chimney stacks and pipes spewing out 'externalities', you'd never know, because it's all closed system production now. Hardly any emissions. Any 'waste' you create in one manufacturing process, you use as as a raw resource for another. Even our sewage is finally acknowledged as one of our most valuable raw resources.

Of course most of our energy is from renewables in this sustainable future. A range of new technologies and improvements on old ones has been developed like you wouldn't have been able to even conceive in the 1990s. Some are smaller generating units that feed excess energy into the grid, but most are self contained processes designed to power individual communities or buildings. Per capita energy consumption has dropped by over 90% compared to 1990 consumption, in part because of good passive solar design, general energy efficiency, and very importantly, the assistance regional authorities have given in retrofitting older buildings with new insulating materials and energy generating technologies like solar-chlorophyl roofing tiles.

The integrated and consultative approach to planning that was instituted in the mid 1990s has meant that in this region, the waste management, transport, energy, and water systems have been relatively painlessly transformed to serve the needs of the region's people in ways that are more ecologically benign than they ever were in the past. We locals are particularly proud of our rapid mass transit services and our waste collecting, sorting and composting units, for example.

People want much more than good public transport, efficient waste management, clean water and power, however. We want to live in communities that guarantee us rich personal lives. This demand for diversity, complexity and intimacy in community life on top of all the environmental and aesthetic concerns presented our older urban planners, architects and engineers with challenges they had never been forced to consider before. But they coped!

Once the new, more environmentally sensitive production processes emerged, the demography of the region changed extraordinarily quickly. We have a highly educated, highly skilled population living in this region now. People are choosing to live here because it provides them with a very high quality of life. They are also choosing to continue their education locally at the various live campuses of Victoria University -- which is now one of the most progressive learning institutions in the world. It achieved this reputation because, unburdened by a long tradition, it was able to innovate rapidly to meet the needs of the new century.

We've also redefined our old ideas of 'work' in the last few decades. It was obvious to anyone who had the eyes to see that people wanted much more from life than a 'job' and 'a wage'. So we've developed systems to redistribute our collective wealth in ways that are more affirming and empowering and equitable. We've cured those old social diseases of 'unemployment' and youth alienation, and our policies to nurture social diversity within larger communities mean that many of the old social tensions have dissipated. Without those our society is now much more socially cohesive, and therefore more sustainable. Our political structures reflect this changed thinking: they are more democratic and more representative of the whole population than they used to be.

Despite the regional population growth and industrial development, we've consciously preserved and enhanced the most significant features in our natural environment. Those once contaminated streams are now freshwater havens for all kinds of indigenous species, for example, and the natural wetlands, thousands of hectares of them, have become, in a sense, the region's soul. You could also say there's been a spiritual renaissance here. Young people from this bioregion are now making pilgrimages to other parts of the world to help heal the damage done to the planet over the last few hundred years -- because they say they feel a spiritual bond with the earth. They feel part of nature not separate from it, and they see themselves as Earth's custodians. It's an identity that transcends old nationalistic, class and religious divisions, and it is a powerful uniting force in the world.

Well, I could go on and on. Some of these things we've talked about at this Congress, some of them have been conspicuously absent from the discussion so far. And of necessity, people are still talking about parts of the picture rather than wholes. But as I've tried to illustrate, the parts do fit together into a bigger, more integrated image.

The future I've just described is of course, very subjective: each of you will, I'm sure, fit the pieces together in different ways according to your own personal biases and knowledge bases. But what's important is that now we have a future that makes you want to be there. An Other Place to live in simultaneously with the present. We can imagine it, we want it, we can discuss it -- and now we can create it. A sustainable society here on this coastal plain between the Yarra River and Geelong, here on this planet Earth.

We all live in Altona

I don't know how many of you are familiar with Percy Shelley, the English Romantic poet. He was born in 1792 just after the French Revolution, and drowned in Italy thirty years later when Europe was beginning to industrialize. (Faraday was experimenting with that hitherto unimaginable contraption called an electric motor, for example.)

In Shelley's life time the great collective dreams were liberalism and nationalism, the social forces that freed much of Europe from despotism, and created the nation state as we know it now. It was the Greeks who were fighting for independence when Shelley was around, and their struggles captured the imagination of young people right across Europe. People like Byron and Victor Hugo, and of course, young Shelley himself. And it was Shelley who articulated what so many people around the western world were feeling: 'We are all Greeks' he said. Over a century later, at the height of the Cold War, John F. Kennedy expressed similar sentiments: Ich bin ein Berliner, Kennedy said -- I am a citizen of Berlin - with a nod to the Roman orator, Cicero.

Well, I'm no Byron or Shelley, Cicero or Kennedy, but to me, what you people are doing here is very important for us all. Sustainability is THE issue for the twenty first century. We need you to make this future you are beginning to imagine, that we're all beginning to imagine -- we need you to make it real. The future of us all depends on it. Because, in the most deeply and globally poetic sense, we are all of us now, citizens of this bioregion. We, all of us, live in Altona. We are all Altonans.

First published on-line 1995. Re-published 2003. Modified 26 July 2004. Revised 8 August, 2007.

Copyright Merrill Findlay 1994