W. Lance Bennett - Communicating the Future

The opportunity to help organize and join a Social Science Research Council working group during 2018 to 2020 on the history of media technology and disinformation taught me a lot about The Disinformation Age , which is the title of the book produced by that group. In particular, I have enjoyed my conversations with Steven Livingston, who helped me clarify the rise of neoliberal economics and associated democratic disruptions discussed in Chapter 3.

To Mary Savigar, my wonderful editor at Polity, I can only say that without you, this book might not exist at all, and surely not in its current form. Mary helped me develop the project, sort out the many ways to write it, and offered the perfect guidance in finding the right tone and approach. Ellen MacDonald-Kramer kept me on track through the process. Thanks also for the excellent suggestions from the two anonymous reviewers.

Finally, I thank my life partner and intellectual companion Sabine Lang for the careful reading and helpful ideas on the final draft of the manuscript. Her insights are informed by knowing what I am trying to write, sometimes even better than I do. Sabine has the rare ability to find, and suggest how to fix, all the places that make an argument stronger.

As I write these words, the world is in the grip of a coronavirus pandemic (named Covid-19 for Coronavirus disease of 2019). It has been challenging to think about the future when the human toll is so immediate, and the economic crisis looms so large. It is ironic that as economies around the world shut down, demand for oil collapsed and industrial pollution eased; many environmental health indicators improved. This book is an expression of hope that we can find ways to organize our economic and political lives in better balance with the life support capacities of the planet. The world seems both far away and terrifyingly close from our small retreat on a peninsula less than two hours from the complexities of Seattle. It is inspiring to be surrounded by islands, trees, mountains, and water. It seems a good omen that a pair of eagles flew by as I wrote these last words.

Longbranch, Washington, May 2020

Thinking about the environment and the future of life on the planet is challenging. The daily news is filled with stories about serious threats on so many fronts. At the same time, there is hope in the uprisings of millions of people, all over the world, who demand political action. A surprising leader of millions of young people who protested around the globe was a sixteen-year-old Swedish girl named Greta Thunberg, who left school to hold a one-person strike for climate change outside the Parliament building in Stockholm in 2018. Her eloquence and ability to focus attention on children concerned about their futures soon won her invitations to speak at the United Nations. She is the girl who took a 32-hour train ride from Sweden to the Alps to address The World Economic Forum, and scolded the world elite for flying in on their private jets. Her courage and eloquence won her a Nobel Peace Prize nomination in 2019. In a speech before the British Parliament, she said this:

My name is Greta Thunberg. I am 16 years old. I come from Sweden. And I speak on behalf of future generations…

I was fortunate to be born in a time and place where everyone told us to dream big … People like me had everything we could ever wish for and yet now we may have nothing…

Now we probably don’t even have a future any more. Because that future was sold so that a small number of people could make unimaginable amounts of money. It was stolen from us every time you said that the sky was the limit, and that you only live once. 1

Students around the world began walking out of school and taking to the streets in a movement they named “Fridays for Future.” Anna Taylor, aged seventeen, helped found the UK student climate network and was soon making eloquent statements of her own to the national press: “Those in power are not only betraying us and taking away our future, but are responsible for the climate crisis that’s unfolding in horrendous ways around the world.” Pointing out that climate change affects those least responsible for the causes, and least able to do anything about it, she also noted that, “It is our duty to not only act for those in the UK and our futures, but for everyone. That’s what climate justice means.” 2

For those who believe the overwhelming scientific evidence, an ecological crisis threatens the current human civilization built on fossil fuels, overconsumption of resources, negligent handling of wastes, and a built-for-obsolescence consumer culture. Many animal species beyond humans are threatened as well. We hear most often about global warming, but there are many other earth system breakdowns caused by the runaway industrialization of nature. Frightening cocktails of toxics are found routinely in air, water, soil, and food. Interactions among different environmental hazards multiply present dangers and bring new ones. Precious water supplies are increasingly contaminated by agricultural chemicals, landfill leakage, industrial and human wastes, hydraulic fracking for natural gas and oil, and dozens of other sources. Supplies of clean water in some regions are further compromised by glacial melting due to global heating. The liquidation of vast ice sheets at the poles and Greenland is causing rising sea levels that threaten massive population migrations from coastal areas. Loss of arable land due to draught, deforestation, and soil deterioration threatens famine and even greater human migrations. There is a sixth great species extinction under way, with cascading effects on food supplies, pest populations, and health. Add X-factors such as the Covid-19 pandemic to this precarious mix, and it begins to be clear how fragile this planetary house of cards has become. For many inhabitants of economically prosperous regions, these multiplying catastrophes once seemed distant and abstract, but now they are hitting closer to home.

There is much magical thinking that technologies such as renewable energy or electric cars will save us, but there is little evidence that they can make enough difference to turn the tide. The hopes placed in Green technologies are understandable, but most of them have hidden resource costs and limited potential to support continued economic growth on a global scale. One way or another, we are near the end of a centuries-long economic binge that has witnessed the harvest and waste of resources well beyond anything that can be renewed and absorbed by planetary capacities. Even before the global economic shock of Covid-19, we were approaching a great moment of truth and choice between staying on the same catastrophic economic path or transitioning to more livable outcomes for people and other species in regions facing different local versions of the crisis.

Rather than hide from the future and suffer the worst-case disasters, perhaps we can imagine futures based on values such as: rebuilding communities, making products with more lasting value, reducing unproductive financial speculation, rewarding socially productive – if less profitable – investment in education, health, and other public services, and creating work that provides decent lives. This will require adjusting obscene inequalities in wealth so that the rich and powerful live closer to the realities inhabited by the rest of us and come to see that we share a common fate. Achieving this best-case scenario requires developing and communicating positive visions of change that motivate political realignment behind a new economics. This is no easy task, but it is possible with a more unified politics and the communication strategies to spread ideas and promote policies.

Millions of protesters around the world have drawn public and political attention to the planetary extinction crisis. After making the environment a more pressing concern, the important political question at this point is: What do we do now? That question is the focus of this book. The answers offered here involve changing how we think, communicate, organize, and act. It may be surprising to learn that this is not as difficult as it sounds, because this is an argument for bringing our communication processes and politics more in line with the nature of the problems we face.