Toward a History of the Future

The goal is to produce an awareness of the struggles over averting worst-case outcomes of the environmental crisis.   These struggles for a green future are humanity on the cusp, trying to turn at a clear historical turning point.

Historians know of failed turning points. The European revolutions of 1848, for example.  The Russian Revolution of 1905.  What will it take to achieve this new turn? To reach the next historical epoch? and what might that epoch entail?

In an early post, we blogged about the U.C. Berkeley professor, John Harte, and how he claimed that solving the climate crisis was easy.

This perspective of can-do-optimism overlooks the political and cultural facilitators of climate change.  It overlooks the deeply rooted power of the ‘old economy.’  It overlooks as well the spirituality of domination and exploitation, of Adam given dominion over the animals and the earth.

This history of the environmental future places humanity at the center– humanity as agent of change, agent of creativity, and agent of destruction.  The global impact of collective human actions produce environment.

Bill McKibben’s speech at the MacKinac Straits in July 2013 put this issue of the environmental history of the future very clearly.  McKibben told the crowd of 400 gathered to protest the Canadian pipeline company, Enbridge (responsible for a 2010 spill in southwest Michigan), ” I see our movement rising everywhere now. If we manage to stop (global) warming, you will have done the most important thing you could ever possibly do. What happens over the next 10 years will determine what happens to us over the next 10,000.”

That, in brief, is the history of the future: actions in the next ten years that chart a course for the next 10,000.