The Vision Thing (Part I)

"The best way to predict the future is to design it." –Buckminster Fuller

For some time now I have been proposing a national vision project – a conversation among the American people about the positive future we can create if we put our minds to it. That idea may have gained some momentum his month in a converted barn on the Rockefeller estate outside New York City.

With the help of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and the Rockefeller Foundation, we convened 30 people – a yeasty mix of communications wizards, sustainable development experts and philanthropists – to determine if they are interested in working together to launch that national discussion. They are.

I don’t yet know what shape this initiative will take, but I know why it’s necessary. As Paul Ray and Sherry Ruth Anderson put it in their book, The Cultural Creatives: How 50 Million People Are Changing the World:

Today, as we are besieged by planetary problems, the risk is that we will deal with them in a pessimistic and unproductive style. …Transfixed by an image of our own future decline, we could actually bring it about.

Have we reached the point that Ray and Anderson warn us about, helpless and depressed, immobilized like deer in the headlights by the frequent damage reports from climate scientists and apocalyptic images of civilization’s collapse?

You be the judge. If you have a few minutes, go to these links and watch:

The Day After Tomorrow

Six Degrees Could Change the World

Eleventh Hour

The Day the Earth Stood Still

Similar dark images of the future have appeared in books and on television specials. Even Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, the climate movement’s cinematic equivalent of the cerebral A Dinner with Andre, starts with a dread-invoking dose of disaster.

These days, we don’t have to rely on fiction to imagine civilization under siege. The images show up regularly in the news as the effects of climate change manifest in the United States and elsewhere, much earlier than we thought just a few years ago.

Go to these links for examples from the past 12 months, compliments of the Boston Globe: Wildfires, Hurricanes, Floods, More Floods.

For whatever reason – perhaps there’s something in our psychology that makes destruction more entertaining than construction – we are being exposed to many more apocalyptic images than images of a post-carbon world that can be positive and prosperous, even as we deal with the impacts of climate change that already are inevitable.

If Ray and Anderson are correct, the lack of balance between positive and negative visions could be our undoing.

For contrast, we might look at what previous generations have done in times of overwhelming challenge. The poster campaigns of World War II were calls to action rather than invitations to despair.