Collapse, certainty, and contingency. "There are no truths about the future."

I recently posted a quote from Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, head of the Pottsdam Institute on Climate Change, who said "There is a very big risk that we will just end our civilization." In the discussion that followed, I observed that "Nothing's inevitable. There are no truths about the future."

A colleague commented, "that's a pretty glib statement that frankly I've seen you say too many times. All it does is kick-the-can down the road. It does nothing to convey the urgency required just to address what we already know is in the pipeline."

Here's my response:

I'm sad that you find my comment glib, especially since you well know that I'm not a kick-the-can-down-the-road guy. Especially since we're on the same side, and more aligned than a reader might think. But we seem to be missing something in each other's words.

Of course I accept the possibilities, and recognize the potential of the suffering ahead—and the reality of the suffering already upon too many of us. (I'm truly puzzled that you would think otherwise.) What I don't accept is your oft-repeated certainty about the future, and your certainty about the certainty. (I guess I could call that glib too…but I'd rather we have a more generative conversation.)

I'm a futurist who's given up trying to predict the future. I've seen too many unlikely unreasonable, and impossible things actually happen—in my own lifetime, and yours—to fool myself into thinking I know what will or won't happen. I'm more focused on how we'll navigate it.

It's tricky, of course: I've also seen too many things/disasters/catastrophes happen that "no one could have anticipated" that in fact people did anticipate, only to be ignored. So yes, "Preparation requires acceptance of possibilities, especially the most dire, clear and present dangers."

As I said, I'm not contesting the evidence for hellish times ahead. I'm contesting the conclusion that you, or any of us, know how things will play out, at what scale, and at what pace. We have predictions, of course, and we'd be foolish to ignore them…and to pretend to ignore the dread that comes with them.

But I still say "there are no truths about the future."

Futures are "true" only in retrospect. Only after they become the past.

Meaning there are no certainties, only contingencies. Possibilities, probabilities, and surprises. Yes, there are certainties in mechanical systems. But we are not that—not the climate, not people, not human societies. Complex systems, and complex adaptive systems, play by different rules.

So I'm focused on how we can best prepare for the storm, steer the ship, and keep our wits about us as we ride the tumultuous time ahead. On how we can most rapidly slash emissions, reinvent industries, restore soils, regenerate ecosystems, prepare our communities to better handle the onslaught we face, and forge networks of support and action to fight historic battles… and comfort each other in the process.

I'm intrigued, my friend. You rail about certain doom… and yet you do the brilliant things you do to shape a future.

David Graeber and David Wengrow observed (in an admittedly different context in The Dawn of Everything), "…it is always a bit startling to discover there’s nothing inevitable about any of this."

Rebecca Solnit said it better than I ever could. Here's just one of many possible quotes to pull from her wise, profound, and deeply important essay, ‘Hope is an embrace of the unknown’: Rebecca Solnit on living in dark times (https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jul/15/rebecca-solnit-hope-in-the-dark-new-essay-embrace-unknown?CMP=share_btn_tw ):

"We may be living through times of unprecedented change, but in uncertainty lies the power to influence the future. Now is not the time to despair, but to act

"Hope locates itself in the premises that we don’t know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act. When you recognise uncertainty, you recognise that you may be able to influence the outcomes – you alone or you in concert with a few dozen or several million others. Hope is an embrace of the unknown and the unknowable, an alternative to the certainty of both optimists and pessimists. Optimists think it will all be fine without our involvement; pessimists adopt the opposite position; both excuse themselves from acting. It is the belief that what we do matters even though how and when it may matter, who and what it may impact, are not things we can know beforehand. We may not, in fact, know them afterwards either, but they matter all the same, and history is full of people whose influence was most powerful after they were gone."

As Auden Schendler wrote recently following COP28 (https://www.dhirubhai.net/posts/auden-schendler-0542b6_opinion-the-magical-solutions-floating-activity-7140337553739505664-7YZd ), “That is one of the reasons that when I read optimistically pithy social media posts from colleagues visiting a petrostate hosting a climate conference led by an oil executive, I begin to feel the creeping tendrils of despair.“

And yet he’s not giving up.

Neither am I. Neither should you.