11
Aquarian Future
Philip Sutton
http://www.green-innovations.asn.au/
16 February 2004 Version 1.c
About this scenario
This scenario is one of three that were originally written as background to the ‘plastic bubbles installation’ at the Sustainable Living Festival in February 2004. The latest version of this and other scenarios can be found at:
http://www.green-innovations.asn.au/Scenarios.htm
Disclaimer
Some real names might be used where they are in the public eye and they represent archetypes. The story of course is purely fictitious.
Principles/themes
The scenario examines what sort of world and what sort of city emerges if interests and events favour the Aquarian[1] style of future.
Aquarian Future is a cultural reaction against the dominant capitalist system (and also Communist State dictatorships) - it is the antithesis of the dominant system.
The Aquarian future sustains:
- human life
- Nature/other living things
- ways of life that fit best with biologically evolved characteristics of humans.
The dominant themes of this scenario are:
· inclusive altruism - an ethical commitment to care for all people and all of living nature
· a strongly precautionary approach to environmental issues
· a highly anticipatory approach
· a whole-system design approach
· a deep conviction that the current expansionary resource-consuming systems cannot overcome resource and environmental limits using technological fixes - despite their best efforts to do so
· a belief that people need to be freed from the thrall of the consumerist ideology perpetuated by large multi-national companies and the consumer capitalist system in general
· a belief that the modern world is too complicated and too fast for people to exercise control over their own lives and to create optimally satisfying lives.
· a strong belief in the value of direct (face-to-face) democracy
At the start of the scenario period most of the people who play a leading role in articulating the scenario, either publicly or privately, expect that the Aquarian world will remain a sub-culture scorned by the mainstream until society collapses due to environmental crises and other inherent contradictions. However, it is rare that a utopian future arises from the ashes of a society that has broken down - most often it is the warlords, not the meek, who inherit the affected patch of earth! So this scenario has been designed to achieve major transformation without catastrophic social and economic breakdown.
Tendencies
This scenario is the outcome of a series of tendencies that are sometimes in conflict but work cooperatively often enough to make the scenario outcomes possible. The forces or tendencies that dominate in the other scenarios are present in this one although they are less dominant at critical points in this scenario.
The Ecological Modernisers and the Aquarians are the main drivers of this scenario.
But there are other tendencies that have significant influence:
· The Coalition for Unsustainability [2] that gives rise directly to some Breakdown and Fortress Worlds. (The villains of the story! Hiss! Boo!!)
· The Enlightened-Self Interest Elite
· The ‘Red’ Greens - people who have a socialist philosophy and/or a strong tendency to rely heavily on government to actively look after the interests of all people and the forms of life.
Time horizon for the Aquarian Future scenario
In this scenario an ecologically sustainable state is achieved before 2050.
What needs to be done?
To enable the economy to be 100% decoupled from environmental impact and resource depletion to be 100% decoupled from effects on human welfare and the condition of the environment the following things need to be done:
· the economy needs to move as close as possible to 100% closed-cycle for materials
· the economy needs to be radically dematerialised (by Factor 20-50 or more by 2040)
· the economy needs to be redesigned for zero toxicity
· greenhouse emissions to the atmosphere need to fall to zero
· a very large percentage of the current land devoted to agriculture needs to be returned to nature
· activities using natural habitats need to tread ultra-lightly
· human population needs to stabilise, possibly after falling for a while.
To enable people to lead better more authentic lives:
· the machinery driving consumer-fetishism needs to be dismantled and replaced by powerful locally-controlled institutions.
The broad shape of this scenario
This scenario has four very distinct phases:
· the Transformed Mainstream scenario plays itself out for 20 years (to 2020)
· a crisis in world agriculture is predicted via such good models and using such good data that it cannot be denied factually - the crisis conservatively threatens between 1 - 2 billion people with starvation - countries to be badly affected include India and China. The basis of the crisis prediction is as follows:
o lack of investment and inappropriate investments in poor countries means that they reply on land-intensive, water-intensive open systems agriculture
o the concentration of population growth in the poorer countries means that their agricultural systems have been pushed to the limits of their production capacity and the supply of new land for agricultural expansion is reaching physical limits
o very long-run over-pumping of aquifers means that farm productivity must fall sharply in large areas once the available water has been exhausted.
o climate change is likely to create much more extreme weather which will make farm production losses much more common - thereby reducing the average productivity of the system[3]
o global warming will increase the need for water in farm systems due to greater evaporation.
o when all these factors combine they will cap output from conventional agriculture and will lead to significantly reduced output
o food reserves cannot buffer the world against this long-run outcome.
· a five year period follows in which the poor countries plead with the rich world to release huge amounts of capital to fundamentally transform agriculture through a crash program - but the estimated effect on disposable income in the rich countries is so severe that the rich world stalls, only offering token assistance (2020-2025)
· in 2025 a crisis ensues - China and India jointly as leaders of all the world’s poor nations present a Gandhian-style ultimatum - ether help or the governments of the affected countries will transport hundreds of millions of starving citizens to the rich world to settle as refugees. The rich countries are given one year to respond. At the end of the year the rich countries have still not offered more than token assistance. So China and India mobilise their navies and private shipping to amass an armada carrying 1 million people and they sail the armada and anchor half the people off Europe and half off the US. The US issues a warning that force will be used to prevent the people from landing. The armada proceeds and the US sinks 6 large passenger liners killing 6000 people. The armada pulls back and waits. The world news media goes mad. A storm of debate follows. Then the US and Europe both announce that they will institute the world’s largest mobilisation of capital ever to for a crash program to rebuild the agricultural and industrial economies of the world’s poor nations. For a year the governments of the rich world debate the issue with their people using every capacity they have to gain support. Support grow and then it becomes known that the investment program will plunge the rich world into wartime-style austerity because it will mean that for at least 10 years the people of the rich world will have virtually no discretionary income. The argument rages to and fro but gradually the humanitarian need begins to carry people and the program begins. (30 years later when the archives of the time are declassified it is revealed that US and European authorities decided to take action because they thought that large-scale nuclear bombs might have been placed within major cities in the US and Europe prior to the arrival of the people armada. Later it was revealed that this was a pretext invented by the desperate governments of the rich world to carry support for action. Later it was discovered that a faction of the US military struck a deal with a faction in the Chinese and Indian military for the US to destroy the six ships in such a way that there would be no survivors - so that they would have a pretext to give in to the assistance ultimatum […….this extended line of thinking can keep going as far as complexity and paranoia can take one’s imagination!!!!!!])
· from 2026 - 2038 the rich countries pour their economic capacity into producing food to stave off starvation in the poor countries an to make the sophisticated inputs required to rebuild agriculture globally on a closed-cycle basis sustainable basis. During this time new non-consumerist ways of living emerge in the rich countries. And importantly - the old institutions of consumerism have declined in activity and influence and new non-consumerist institutions have grown up to take their ‘cultural space’.
· from 2038 onwards discretionary income is gradually ramped up again - but things do not return to the old days of rampant consumer fetishism. A sea change has occurred in the culture and the economy of the rich world.
(So now we have a ‘permanent’ Aquarian future in a setting where average incomes are actually very comfortably high and Aquarian countries are not weak relative to the threats they face around them).
What the economy would look like in…..
…….about 2025
For details have a look at the Transformed Mainstream scenario.
…….between 2026 - 2038
The world economy has been transformed rather like the US economy was transformed in the twelve months following Pearl Harbour[4]. This time it is not war itself but the threat of a tragedy of even greater proportions that has triggered action. In 2026 the rich nations and the rich sections of all countries around the world were forced to dedicate themselves over the subsequent decade to transform the agricultural sector across the globe - converting it from an open system to an intensely productive capital-intensive closed-system. For 10 years the rich everywhere have had to subsist without any appreciable discretionary income - since all available productive capacity above that needed to provide basic needs or good nutrition, health, safety, and education has been devoted to food production and to the transformation of the agricultural sector.
The transformation of the world agricultural system is financed by the governments of the rich countries issuing low interest development bonds and allocating the bonds to the populations of the lending countries in the place of their foregone wages.
To speed up the transformation of the global agricultural sector, rich world countries put a large amount of their investment into engaging the populations and resources of the poor countries in the reconstruction effort. So the investment tends to reduce rather than increase developing countries’ long-term dependence on the rich world. This creates the extra economic capacity needed do the recipient countries can pay back the development bonds.
Ecotaxes are maintained in place in the rich world economies during the transformation decade.
There is effectively no unemployment. And after a year spent converting the production systems to new purposes, the economy has now been running at full capacity globally for the full 11 years from 2027-2038.
During 2026 governments around the world redirected production from luxuries and unnecessary discretionary purchases to the production of food and food production systems.
Food production was boosted as far as possible. Early in the transformation decade food production in the traditional agricultural sector grew as non-food-related agriculture shrank somewhat. Investments in farm productivity growth expanded as government directed resources into this area. Huge amounts of capacity in the manufacturing and services sector were redirected to produce and service the new agricultural sector.
Towards the latter part of the transformation decade, as the capacity of the new closed-cycle agricultural systems built up, the traditional open-cycle farming sector was converted to new functions. Multi-species plantations were established to trap atmospheric CO2. The biomass was processed locally to allow nutrient return - and energy was tapped and the CO2 sequestered in deep saline aquifers. Quite large areas of land were returned to bush. Eco-tourism was boosted (within the limits set by a shortage of capital for non-essentials).
With the lack of discretionary money, people’s focus shifted to the best use of their discretionary time.
Forms of recreation and entertainment that required little in the way of financial resources were favoured by circumstances and by active commercial and government promotion. Maintaining morale during the transformation decade was critical.
Few new films were made during the transformation decade, but video watching was hugely popular (old films on old video/DVD players). The commercial dynamic was to rediscover old gems and relaunch then with the fanfare previously given to new films. New computer games (on old computers) were very popular. The reading of secondhand and library books expanded very significantly.
Direct experience and face-to-face activities also boomed …do-it-yourself hobbies, sport, self-made music, dancing, bushwalking and camping became more popular.
Street cafes boomed but restaurants declined - because of their different socialization to cost ratios. Dinner parties at home became more popular.
Birthrates crept up towards replacement because, although money was short there was a huge sense that life was now going to be more secure and engagement with children and community was a fulfilling way to spend some discretionary time.
Secondhand items of all sorts were in huge demand and services helping to meet this demand did well. Repair and maintenance was a booming industry - devoted to maintaining the stock of consumer goods that existed in 2026. Governments invested heavily in the maintenance of the existing stock of infrastructure and consumer durables because there was so little money available for unnecessary replacements.
One rather unusual ‘entertainment’ that was officially supported and encouraged during this period was to fantasise about how people could live once the food supply crisis was over. People were aware that many other issue beyond food needed fixing so it was not expected that discretionary income would expand to its previous levels for quite a long time after the food mobilisation was over. However everyone knew that people would not tolerate major enforced privation beyond the food crisis period. Ten years was hard enough! But was there a way to avoid the privation/consumerist-binge rebound that occurred in the transition from peace after the Second World War? The computer-based ‘futures game’ that had played a big role in the first decade of the century was redeveloped (with both government and commercial investment money) and was relaunched to provide an entertaining way for people to explore how life could be after the transformation decade.