Merrill Findlay, 1993

It was the end of the eighties. I'd been invited to judge an art competition associated with the United Nations pavilion at the World Expo in Brisbane. Asked to look at hundreds of images, songs and poems by young people about making the world a better place, and then, with my fellow judges, decide which ones were 'the best'. (A flawed concept, you might agree!) 

There was this drawing by a young boy. I can still see it. Two options for the future: one bad and one good. The bad one was easy and he drew it in meticulous detail. Explosions, war ships, tanks, a mushroom cloud. Death and destruction. (Or this is how I remember it.) The world of his deepest fears. The world he saw each night on TV. On the other side of the page, he'd drawn a better world; a figure sitting alone on a beach in the sun. No detail. No content.

Dozens of similar images were scattered across the table. Bad worlds, beautifully drawn, of cities turned to ashes, forests to skeletons, once clear rivers to gutters. And 'better worlds' of lolly water. Rainbows, beaches, sunshine, trees and pretty flowers. Cute houses with smoke rising from the chimneys. Cute cows grazing in green paddocks. 

It was as if these kids had searched their imaginations for an image of a world that was better than the present, and found only postcard cliches. They had no dreams it seemed, of a world that was truly better than this. No hope therefore, in the future.

Later
In Washington and Moscow, the Cold War was melting. In Africa, Unesco was hosting yet another conference. This one was called 'Peace in the minds of men' (sic). The title was taken from the Preamble to the Unesco constitution written in 1946 by North American poet, Archibald MacLeish: Since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defences of peace must be constructed. 

The venue was the lavish Fondation Internationale Houphouet-Boigny Pour la Rcherche de la Paix in Yamoussoukro, the new capital of one of the world's poorest nations, the Ivory Coast. The man who had given his name to this institution, the the Ivory Coast's then octogenarian ruler-for-life and multi-billionaire, the late President Felix Houphouet-Boigny, was there in person and so too was Elise Boulding, a feminist scholar and long-time peace activist from Boulder, Colorado. Her voice, amongst others, called for 'visions in which all can have faith' and her words were included in the ritual conference declaration: 'Humans cannot work for a future they cannot imagine'. When I read those words for the first time, they resonated in my own mind.

Later, in the collaborative process that gave birth to Imagine The Future, Elise's 'cannot's were translated into 'can's to answer the 'why' of this emerging organisation: because we humans can only work for a future we can imagine.

A new decade
The 1980s end, the 1990s begin. We cautious optimists meet to talk about the future. The term 'sustainable society' is repeated again and again. A concept that integrates all of what it is to be human, that shatters old boundaries, demands new ways of thinking and unites rather than divides. We meet many times, in different configurations, in different parts of the world. Quietly and conscientiously we work, sometimes together, sometimes alone. No hierarchy in this free association, no money, no power. And no qualifications except that each of us is working towards a world that is qualitatively better than this. 

Slowly, in our corner of the world, consensus emerges. What we want is a future that maximises quality of life for all human beings. A diverse and democratic society based on the values of peace, social justice, human rights and ecological sustainability. We don't quite know what we mean by all this yet - but we have begun the journey - and now we can work to make the vision real. We have a broad philosophy, we have our objectives. We have hopes and plans .... and now we seek mainstream support -- only to be told that we are 'too far ahead of our time'! (We however, are confident that our timing is perfect. Well, a couple of thousand years late, but certainly not 'ahead' of our time.)

Meanwhile my father is dying, because fifty years ago he inhaled some asbestos fibres. A young man then, a naval recruit fighting, he believed, for the future of the world in the Pacific 'theatre'. He is frail and bed ridden. The fibre inhaled in World War II has become his destiny. Our parable.

Too soon he dies. My family and I celebrate his life with friends and neighbours in our village hall and I return to the city. To imagine the future and work for it. A future not like the past, not like my father's. A future that makes you want to be there. 

Copyright: Merrill Findlay 1993
This article is based on one first published in Habitat Australia, Australian Conservation Foundation, May 1993, and adapted later for the anthology Violence to Non-Violence: Individual Perspectives, Communal Voices, edited by William Kelly (Harwood Academic Publishers/ Craftsman House, Melbourne, 1994).