Inventing our future

December 28, 2001 - At the beginning of every new year, people tend to reflect on the events of the past 12 months and make plans and promises for the coming year. But are we looking ahead far enough?

Not even close, according to Richard Slaughter, new president of the World Futures Studies Federation. In a recent edition of New Scientist magazine, Mr. Slaughter points out that most of us still operate on very short time frames and think of the future as something abstract and incomprehensible. The discipline of futures studies, however, looks at the future as very much a sum of the collective decisions we make every day and examines ways to make those decisions more accountable.

According to Mr. Slaughter, the rate at which we are currently consuming the earth's resources means that the most likely futures we are heading towards are not very pleasant ones. But the future is not set. We invent our future every day. And if we change the way we make decisions, we can invent a future that will allow coming generations to prosper as we have.

Most people don't often think about it, but we all make hundreds of small decisions every day - even before we get to work in the morning. Not just what and how much to eat for breakfast and what to wear that day, but also our choices of transportation, the route taken and even whether or not to go. And then there are the tiny unconscious decisions we make, like crossing the street between vehicles and avoiding bumping into other pedestrians on the sidewalk.

All of these decisions change our future. Some of them, like crossing the street carefully, help ensure our survival. Mr. Slaughter calls the act of making these decisions "scanning" as we constantly assess our surroundings and make rapid decisions to guide us through life.

Unfortunately, this scanning process only considers our future in the short term. In general, our society is not set up to consider longer-term issues. Most businesses, for example, exist for the purpose of maximizing profit for the owners or shareholders. They operate under certain assumptions - that natural resources are inexhaustible and that economic growth can continue forever, for instance - that suffice on a daily basis, but ignore future consequences.

To guide long-term goals and decisions, we need a broader form of "environmental scanning" that examines these consequences. This is vital, because humans have become one of the dominant forces influencing the world. From obvious and visible land-use changes due to agriculture and urbanization, to less visible but extremely significant changes to the nitrogen and carbon cycles, human activities are changing the global environment at all levels.

If the resulting problems simply increased incrementally, they would be relatively easy to track and change before they became overwhelming. Unfortunately, the world doesn't work that way. Instead, the earth's systems are all interconnected. Small changes to a particular area or system can seem to have little initial impact, but over time can add up to have profound and surprising consequences.

For example, at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco earlier this month researchers explained how human activities, particularly increasing the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, could suddenly "trip the switch" and cause rapid, and potentially devastating changes to the climate. Such changes could occur over just a few years or decades and cause terrible storms and floods, and severely alter regional temperatures.

That's not a desirable future, but like all futures, it's not set in stone. We have options. We can reinvent our future, but we have to look beyond our immediate goals and desires. Ultimately, protecting our air, water and soil is just as important to our survival as looking both ways before we cross the street.

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