Can we change the future by reimagining it?

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

ABC Listen, podcasts, radio, news, music and more.

Mark Humphreys (0:07)

Alan Bond, remember that name? The billionaire businessman, America's Cup winner, and his wife, Big Red.

SPEAKER_3 (0:14)

Her hair, I mean, it's that killer amazing shock of red hair.

Mark Humphreys (0:18)

There's something else about Bond. What is it again? Oh yeah, he's a con man.

SPEAKER_4 (0:23)

Bond was at the centre of one of the biggest political scandals in Australian history.

Mark Humphreys (0:28)

I'm Mark Humphreys and I'm telling the full Alan Bond story. Search ABC Rewind on ABC Listen or wherever you get your podcasts.

Clare Nicholls (0:38)

What does the future look like to you?

Clare Marshall (0:40)

I went out and asked the general public, people can imagine beautiful futures. They just don't believe they are possible.

Clare Nicholls (0:47)

Even if we don't believe something is possible, can we better prepare ourselves for what might be on the horizon?

Richard King (0:54)

There's no reason why schools shouldn't be teaching kids how to work on their houses or how to understand local ecologies, how to grow veggies in their garden.

Clare Nicholls (1:04)

And how does what we choose to do today change what will happen tomorrow?

Grace Vegasana (1:09)

For young people, there is a really important role for us to make sure that we are inherently building the futures that we want to see and that we want to grow up in, not just for ourselves, but for future generations to come.

Clare Nicholls (1:21)

Today on Big Ideas, three forward-looking thinkers help you reimagine the future, and our world, as it could be.

It's Clare Nicholls here, bringing you big thinkers at the best live events on ABC Radio National and ABC Listen, while Natasha Mitchell takes a break. And from the Planet Talk series at the Ewa Madelaid Festival on Gaurna Country, you're about to meet Richard King. He's a critic and cultural commentator, and his latest compelling book is Brave New Wild, Can Technology Really Save the Planet? Climate justice organiser and youth advocate Grace Vegasana. She's the National Director of the Australian Youth Climate Coalition, or the AYCC, and she's the co-founder of the People of Colour Climate Network. Futurist Clare Marshall, who was the recent lead of the National Futures Initiative at the Adelaide-based Australian Centre for Social Innovation, and asking the questions is the environmental commentator, TV host, and author of children's books, like How to Save the Whole Stinkin Planet, A Garbological Adventure, it's Lee Constable.

Lee Constable (2:45)

So, Richard, to start us off, your book, Brave New Wild, you bring us to this point where we're at two roads in a wood from Robert Frost's poem.

As humanity, we're at this fork in the road between eco-modernism and eco-humanism. And you have some views about which road we could take. Could you tell us what these two roads are and which one you're banking on?

Richard King (3:12)

Yes, so eco-modernism is probably best explained through the title of the book, which you will have noticed is an allusion to Ordos Huxley's Brave New World. And what Huxley does in that book is to imagine a society deep in the future that's integrated, productive, rational, perfect in every way except that the human beings within it don't appear in their natural state anyway to do terribly well. So rather than change the society such that it engenders happier human beings, what the controllers of the world state, as it's called, decide to do is to change the human beings so that they can fit in to the society they've made. And this is a broad kind of satirical inversion which seems to me to describe quite a lot about the direction we're going in generally but certainly within the environmental space. So in short, having created a system that is in key ways destructive of the world around us, of the environment, non-human nature, we now propose to change not the system, but the environment itself, non-human nature. So eco-modernism, if you like, is a way of looking at climate change and its attendant calamities, that the eco-crisis, let's say, as a technical problem first and foremost demanding technical, technological, technocratic solutions.

So you get stuff like geoengineering, where the idea is to pump sulfates into the Earth's upper atmosphere in a way that mimics the cooling effect of large-scale volcanic eruptions. For example, it's now being taken very seriously. And by the way, when Krakatoa is your proof of concept, you know it's really, really bad, right? So that's eco-modernism. That's one road. The other road is what I call eco-humanism, slightly more original concept on my part. But here I'm arguing for a more holistic approach to the eco-crisis that is not only less arrogant, less hubristic in terms of our approach to non-human nature, but which is also, and this is key, I think, radically attentive to what human beings' irreducible needs are. Creativity, conviviality, all of those things that we used to talk about on the New Left back in the 60s and 70s, well, not me, because I wasn't around, obviously, but you know, back when radicals were in their pomp, all of those things that seem to have gone missing from the conversation need to be brought back into the conversation.