Future needed

An excellent point is made by Halley Suitt. Quoting a Poptech Conference speaker, she writes:

the generation who came of age in World War II has a new vision of a post-war America and a sense of how they would fill up the fifty years from 1950 to the turn of the century – and in fact, that they had a sense of the year 2000 that let them use it rather like a bracket, a bumper, a retainer wall, a “close parenthesis” which if you look at now – and here comes one – looks like half a happy face – here it is ).

She then goes on to suggest we need a 'real beefy, something-you-can-hang-your-hat-on vision of the future'. Too true.

Whilst musing on time as I penned an introduction to a forthcoming book on time and sustainable development it occured to me that many people alive now will know people who live until 2150. Why, even I may. We really do need, therefore, some compelling visions of the future. Tempting though it may be for someone like me who works in sustainable development to paint only dismal pictures of the future, the need is for the positive yet plausible visions.

Men went to the moon because people dreamt it first. As designer and television presenter Charlie Luxton said recently at an event I organised at the BBC: We have distopias like the film Bladerunner, but where are the visions of a sustainable future?'

It's time to get some. 'Something-you-can-hang-your-hat-on'. I like that.