Fixated on the Future

Issue Four: The Understory

“The grain under his fingers swings in uneven bands—thick light, thin dark. It shocks him to realize, after a lifetime of looking at wood: He’s staring at the seasons, the year’s pendulum, the burst of spring and the enfolding of fall, the beat of a two-four song recorded here, in a medium that the piece itself created. The grain wanders like ridges and ravines on a topo map. Pale rush forward, darker holding back. For a moment, the rings resolve from out of the angled cut. He can map them, project their histories into the wood’s plane. And still, he’s illiterate. Wide in the good years—sure—and narrow in the bad. But nothing more.”

In this opening to the second section of The Overstory, Richard Powers enables us to hang on to his words like trees track time. To see a bit of ourselves in another human whose illiteracy is in the inability to read and translate a rich past that is laid out before him by nature. Someone whose present is within a literal prison where seasons do not change and neither does the weather.

Throughout the book, Powers returns to the distinction between natural and human time often. While scientists estimate that humans began walking the earth around six million years ago,  the planet pre-dates us by nearly four billion years. Tree rings document time from germination to the moment the sample is extracted. There is no future concept in the time of trees. 

Human life is precarious and short, notes E.O. Wilson, as is our attention on those people and places closest to us. We think backwards and forwards by only a few years, maxing out at one or two generations. Wilson notes that humans with this short-term thinking had a Darwinian edge. While this shortened capacity for space and time might have helped us better survive, it may also threaten our well being and that of the planet.

In Issue Three I talked about feeling overwhelmed in a 24/7 world that seems to constantly be accelerating. The rate of change creates a continuous uncertainty in our lives, which is further exacerbated by shocks such as pandemics, fires, floods, and the like. For many of us, we cope with this feeling of overwhelm by saturating ourselves with information both about what is happening and what the long-term effects may be (just think how many coronavirus articles you have read in the past three months). We flock to predictions in our media, data, and leaders like moths to a flame. In doing so we often further our anxieties by attaching our future to a particular outcome. We also dedicate disproportionate cognitive space towards creating models that can predict the future and reading the “insights” of others who can shed light on that future.  

In this issue, I highlight how our cultural obsession with greater future certainty through predictions, scenarios, models, and algorithms is harmful to the well-being of ourselves and our organizations, as well as for galvanizing action around the living planet. I hope to help you embrace not knowing and uncertainty. Or, at a minimum, inspire you to dedicate some of the energies you invest in personal well-being through fasting/dieting to do the same from the barrage of predictive headlines, books, and speeches that displace our ability to live, work, and act in our present moment.

Avoiding the Next Horizon

The climate change movement has long staked its narrative on the capitalist obsession with the future, whether it is about the next generations or the escalation of cataclysmic events resulting from temperature rises. Browse the climate change bookshelves and you will find titles such as The Future We Choose, The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming, The Ends of the World, and Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (all worth reading BTW). While this future-oriented narrative perhaps made sense as a framing device for the Club of Rome in the early 70s or the research by James Hansen and others as it was emerging later that decade, this continuous orientation forward has left many to think of climate change as forever over the horizon. What we often fail to acknowledge is the deleterious effects this future orientation can have to our present moment.

The Understory is not a newsletter because I didn’t think we needed another one. Just over the past few days alone, we’ve seen headlines about giant plumes of Saharan dust engulfing part of the southern U.S., swarms of locusts in New Delhi, and Siberia reaching 38 degrees Celsius. We don’t need news of the ongoing destructive effects of climate change to prove its existence or level of threat in the way that we perhaps did decades before. Climate change has become a part of our lives, and the deeper questions about who we will be now and what we will do for ourselves, our communities, and the planet are the more interesting and complex ones to consider.

Franz Kafka, notorious for his writings demonstrating alienation from the world, shared his unease not only in works of fiction but also in published Diaries: 1910—1923. In this entry from October 19, 1921, he offers words of courage to try and see the world as it is in our present moment, despite its potential bleakness, as that is where we can find enduring hope:

“Anyone who cannot cope with life while he is alive needs one hand to ward off a little his despair over his fate...but with his other hand he can jot down what he sees among the ruins, for he sees different and more things than the others; after all, he is dead in his own lifetime and the real survivor.”

We have two hands and should use them both. Kafka tells us to use the one hand to push away despair brought on by a fated future, while using the other hand to transcribe, contemplate, and articulate our present.

Age seventeen in the year of Kafka’s death, Rachel Carson became one of the greatest environmental writers because of her ability to use both hands. Carson’s resonance was not just as a conveyor of the wonder of our natural world, but a writer who deeply connected with the present moment and helped millions of others do the same. With titles that always spoke within a frame of the present (Under the Sea Wind, The Sea Around Us, Silent Spring), Carson ignited an environmental movement by awakening people to the natural world that they otherwise took for granted, and then encouraging them to protect it from the destructive elements that she documented such as DDT. Carson focused on the present moment, realizing that it was the ability to experience our natural world as it was now, not over a future horizon, that was worthy of both celebration and protection.

Connecting on Present Values

In the opening of his book, Don’t Even Think About It: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change, George Marshall asks difficult questions about why the human brain has evolved to put aside things that seem too painful to accept, with a failure to act on immediate rather than future dangers:

“What explains our ability to separate what we know from what we believe, to put aside the things that seem too painful to accept? How is it possible, when presented with overwhelming evidence, even the evidence of our own eyes, that we can deliberately ignore something—while being entirely aware that this is what we are doing?”

Marshall determined that the challenges in mitigating climate change are not scientific in terms of evidence or technical in terms of solutions, but rather psychological. In his research Marshall found that experts and non-experts alike convert climate change into stories that encapsulate their values, assumptions, and prejudices. So whenever we are confronted with a present reality, we analyze it against our values and apply the requisite biases to make sense of what we observe. This is why extreme weather events for some are evidence of climate change, and for others represent an occasional rhythm of cataclysm while having nothing to do with climate change more generally. Marshall put this into context in his article for The Guardian:

“And herein lies the real challenge. Climate change can be anything you want it to be. It can be here or there, in the present or the future, certain and uncertain. It seems that we see climate change as a threat—and are therefore able to harness that innate reaction to an external enemy—only once it is poured it [sic] into the mould of our familiar stories, with their heroes and villains...There is no outsider to blame. We are just living our lives: driving the kids to school, heating our homes, putting food on the table. Only once we accept the threat of climate change do these neutral acts become poisoned with intention—so we readily reject that knowledge, or react to it with anger and resentment.”

Marshall concludes that accepting the threat of climate change requires conviction—the ability to overcome the distance, uncertainty, villainizing, and incomprehensibility that leave us paralyzed and separated from our present actions and values. With the bandwidth we use to provide evidence of an escalating climate emergency whose effects will be most dramatically felt in the future, we could instead turn our attention to creating and reading stories that resonate within specific values spectrums to inspire intentionality in the present. 

When reconnecting with values, we can find a conviction for the bold actions needed, whether in public institutions, corporations, or private life. In responding to the effects of COVID-19 on her thinking as a leader, Sally Capp, Lord Mayor of Melbourne, recently told the BBC, “I was so worried about the dangers of going too far. I have become much more resolute about my values, prioritizing humanity and protecting the environment, so they can play a larger role in driving my agenda.” Values, as researched by Marshall and discussed at length in Issue Three, undergird courageous actions. Values can also provide the resilience needed to be effective in a VUCA (vulnerable, uncertain, complex, ambiguous) world.

Walk Backwards Into the Future

Within indigenous Pacific Island communities such as the Maori, there is a concept called Ka mua, Ka muri. It suggests a relationship to time and to those who came before us in radical contrast to the capitalist orientation to the future. As described by Tongan academic Hūfanga ‘Okusitino Māhina in the 1994 Contemporary Pacific article “Our Sea of Islands”:

“People are thought to walk forward into the past and walk backward into the future, both taking place in the present, where the past and the future are constantly mediated in the ever-transforming present.”

Our present moment is made through walking forward and backward in time with people, landscapes, values, and stories. Ka mua, Ka muri inverts our hierarchy of the future being the destination—instead turning our focus to an ever-transforming present. Through bringing forward our past we can arrive at the more fully realized present George Marshall and others describe as being imperative to mitigating climate change. 

I had to sit with this concept of forward into the past and backwards into the future quite a bit, as it required a bit of personal rewiring. When I stumbled upon this talk, Walking Backwards Into the Future by Larry Littlebird, his journey of walking backwards helped me to understand what a life looks and sounds like that is inextricably linked to its past. For Larry Littlebird, the path to watching the future become present is made possible through listening, coming back to a topic I wrote about in Issue One. Who and what we choose to listen to can have profound effects on our personal version of the present.

Conclusion

Our inability to tend to our ever-transforming present is a construct of our own making. We can turn a blind eye to the large percentage of media headlines and stories attempting to capture our attention through future predictions, which further distract us from presence and deeper questions. We can realize that our sense of overwhelm only becomes exacerbated by attempting to predict an uncertain future rather than embracing it. We can reconnect with the stories, people, and places of our past to surface and explore more deeply the values that we hold dear. As research from the likes of George Marshall and writings of scientists like Rachel Carson help us to see, living in our present moment provides us with all the conviction we need to live our values for our well-being and that of the planet we cherish.

Go forth and make a difference in the week ahead. 

Adam