Our challenge to Summit of the Future attendees: please visualise a future that doesn’t suck

As delegates assemble for the Summit of the Future #summitofthefuture, we all need to accept two important truths:?

• The first: we won’t reach a better future if we limit our vision to dystopias
• The second: the best way to reach a better future is focusing on practical solutions that work – not daydreaming about yet-to-be-discovered magic

Last month for a seminar at Worldcon , I put these two truths into a chart. It focused on the best proxy we have for how people think about the future: how we portray it in popular film and fiction. I included the types of movies, TV series, and best-selling novels that shape our discourse.?

As it turned out, that chart struck a nerve with a lot of people. It became crystal clear that, as of now, almost nobody is imagining an optimistic future that we can actually get to. Look at the upper right quadrant: other than our own book, Fairhaven – A Novel of Climate Optimism , it’s almost empty!

No wonder climate anxiety is so rampant.

We have been great at imagining realistic, painful dystopias … and disappointingly poor at imagining and sharing futures that don't suck.?

Popular film and fiction is of vital importance for futurists because it provides an open forum for testing out new ideas. My co-author Jan Lee (@Genevieve Hilton) and I, when we were writing Fairhaven, tried to imagine what 2050 might look like if things were going well, and then we back-calculated to today to see if we are doing the right things. In short, we used fiction as a modelling tool. Some of the solutions we first visualised in our story are now finding their way to reality in ongoing projects.

But there’s another reason futurists do well to pay attention to fiction: because life imitates art. Over the course of history, major changes have been driven by fiction. Books and films have started wars , changed laws , and influenced the development of major technologies .

If we only create climate doomsday scenarios in our art, people in the real world will inevitably give up hope, and disengage. But if we want a liveable future for the human race, we desperately need real people to be engaged with this topic: to envision a positive future, and to understand and use the practical solutions that will get us there. Not incidentally, believable, relatable stories also make a difference to what projects get financed!

As such, our fiction needs to talk about the reality of moving tonnes of CO2 and other greenhouse gases, to outline a clear shared vision of where we are going and exactly what it will take to get there. And then we need to do it.

It might seem like a daunting task to write a thrilling story about topics like greenhouse gas emissions reduction and certification of carbon offset projects. But it is eminently possible, because the movies and TV shows people like best are about other people. We can create stories about people who are working towards a better future, with persistence, determination, and grit.?

When writing our novel, we showcased relatable people like these, engaged in large-scale, but very doable, solutions. These include coastal protection, ocean restoration and a determined effort to manage the sea ice in the Arctic. These endeavours are already possible with today's technology, as long as they are supported with sufficient funding and effort.

The full name of our book is Fairhaven – A Novel of Climate Optimism . We hope that it will be one of many works of fiction to help futurists like those at #summitofthefuture to imagine, name, aim for, and build a future that doesn't suck.

Genevieve Hilton Sven von Vittorelli Tad Daley Julian Bleecker Al Gosling 公司CEO的极限运动 Lisa Kay Solomon Solitaire Townsend