The sustainable future is in your head
As part of a continuous CASI project's effort to promote stakeholders’ mobilization and mutual learning we have asked Professor Ian Miles to share his views about ‘sustainable futures’ so as to inspire a wide-range of stakeholders (including citizens, experts and enthusiasts). Professor Ian Miles is an expert in Technological Innovation and Social Change at the Manchester Institute of Innovation Research (MIoIR) of The University of Manchester. His job often involves thinking about the future. We asked him to help us understand what ‘the future’ actually is and how to look at ‘sustainable futures’. And hang on, because he says we have many futures and alternative futures. While what we talk about is all in our heads, what we want for it is in our hearts, and what it will become is in our hands.
What is ‘the future’?
“When we talk about or plan for the future, it is obvious that we are talking and thinking about an ‘imaginative construct’ (meaning something that we simply imagine). The future is not here now in any tangible sense, though we may detect what people sometimes call seeds or symptoms of the future – which means these are things that may grow, or that tell us about some bigger phenomenon that may become important.
And there are seeds today of futures that will not come into being; they may not flourish, or they may be actively suppressed. Some efforts to create social change that we see today are reminiscent of approaches that have been tried often before – they may run into the inertia of large organised systems that are resistant to change. Some things may remain forever on the margins, while others may come to the fore.
People often talk as if there is just one future – the future – and as if this is more than just an ‘imaginative construct’. But, even then, when we imagine our responses to and experience of that particular envisioned future, there is a range of possible futures being considered. When we imagine our responses to and experience of that particular envisioned future, we are positing alternative ways we might cope with or act upon that world. Often we will be thinking of just one aspect of the future, too, and suspending our thinking about other aspects.
Often a vision is only partly realised, and very often we find that the things that have been the focus look very different when they have been brought into being.
Different people have different ‘imaginative constructs’ of possible futures. This reflects their knowledge – and all of us have only partial knowledge. People also have different viewpoints because of different interests and values. The futures that concern us most if we are focusing on (for example) healthy living or space exploration are likely to be quite different.“
And how to look at ‘sustainable futures’?
“Sustainability is most often used in the context of environmental sustainability, where we are in a situation of unprecedented strain on ecosystems through climate change, through habitat destruction, through pollution and resource use of various kinds. We may well be facing major challenges to the survivability of our civilization, if we cannot confront and cope with these quite immediate problems.
The good news is that innovations oriented toward greater sustainability – renewable energy and energy conservation, waste minimisation, and many more – are typically innovations that can help us create more employment, more local economic linkages, and greater resilience against the vulnerabilities of large centralised systems. Thus ‘imaginative constructions’ of sustainable futures can involve a great deal more use and widespread implementation of tools and practices that are already available. They can also involve technological breakthroughs that might yield more efficiency in renewable energy or water purification (for example applications of nanotechnology, batteries, and water filtration).
Often the new high-tech responses to the grand challenges of sustainability attract a great deal more attention than the responses that are already available. This has a great deal to do with what I previously and rather lazily termed ‘inertia’. The problem is that we live and work within highly complex systems, where changing one part of the system may yield little benefit unless we can change other parts in alignment with this. There may need to be protracted learning processes as we understand the interdependence of different parts of the system, and we need to learn from experiences elsewhere.
Despite the damage we have been inflicting on ecosystems over the last few centuries, in particular, there is still plenty of scope for the human race to live and prosper on this finite – but so rich and diverse – planet. Sustainable futures require ‘imaginative construction’ of the frameworks for new systems that can allow us to do so. We need powerful appraisals of such future possibilities that can convince people that there is indeed reason for hope – and need for action.”
A compilation of 50 visions on sustainable futures produced by CASI citizen panels in 12 European countries is available here.
