Back to the future

Mystic Meg, NASA climatologists, Arthur C Clarke: all share one common interest - predicting the future. Whilst computer models tend to offer more accurate simulations than speculative sci-fi or images in a second-hand crystal ball, it's still very difficult to see far into the future - and harder still to plan for different eventualities. Meanwhile, humanity continues to use up natural resources and degrade ecosystems as if there was no tomorrow: peak oil by 2010, some say; less than 10 years to avert a climate tipping point, warn others. Some have argued that our entire way of life is short-termist. We have to get a longer-term perspective, and fast.

And therein lies the crux of the problem. In the absence of a crystal ball, how do you make good long-term policy? And how do you override the inherent short-termism of our electoral cycles and attention spans? (If you've read this far, then at least there's some hope.)

George Monbiot has recently made an intriguing suggestion to address this very problem. Working with fellow environmental campaigner Matthew Prescott, he's proposed a 100-Year Committee, which would sit in the UK House of Commons and debate the effects of current policy over the coming century. Monbiot states that its "purpose would be to provide a voice for those who have not yet been enfranchised" - a nod towards the concept of intergenerational equity - and that it would help entrench concern for problems not readily addressed by governments with a five-year time horizon.

The idea has drawn a lot of scorn in the forums of Comment is Free (a reaction which is, at least, very predictable). But amidst the rants some criticisms stick: surely our current perspective will be useless to people a century from now? Aren't our predictions nearly always wrong, anyway? Don't we run the risk of entrenching equally misguided policies in the name of long-term thinking?

Before responding to these criticisms, it's worth mentioning that Monbiot's suggestion is pretty tame compared to other proposals out there. If you a think a century's a long time, then you'll balk at the remit of the Long Now Foundation, which was set up in 1996 - or rather 01996, to use their preferred formulation - to "foster long-term thinking and responsibility in the framework of the next 10,000 years." One of their projects is to build a 'ten thousand year clock', which, one of its proponents hopes,"would do for thinking about time what the photographs of Earth from space have done for thinking about the environment. Such icons reframe the way people think." Progress on the clock remains... slow, but let's give them a chance; they've got a while. After all, even the Long Now project pales in comparison with the propositions of environmental writer Colin Tudge, who argues that "we cannot claim to be taking our species and our planet seriously until we acknowledge that a million years is a proper unit of political time." (The Time Before History: 5 million years of human impact, 1996.)

For now, let's stick to the question of a hundred years; a million years might just be stretching things a little too far, noble though the sentiment is. If we can plan for a century, we'll be doing quite well.

To help us look forward, I'd argue that first we need to look backward. The premise of this blog is that the history of the environment, and of environmentalism, are seldom acknowledged. Looking at past instances of 'long-term thinking', we can get some idea of how successful the notion is.

Let's ignore the prophecies of Nostradamus and the innumerable sci-fi visionaries, and focus instead on the environmentalists who have tried to forecast the future. I'll be honest: some have been piss-poor. The C19th population theorist Thomas Malthus and the 1960s Malthusian Paul Ehrlich both managed, in fits of bad luck or simply bad judgement, to time their predictions just before the facts would totally invalidate them. Malthus outlined his theory that population growth, advancing geometrically, would always outpace the merely arithmetic growth of productivity, in the last decade before the industrial revolution really took off in Great Britain - and after which agricultural and industrial productivity would comfortably outpace population. Perhaps we can forgive Malthus for not seeing this coming; but Paul Ehrlich should have had enough evidence in the 1960s to see that his predicted 'population bomb' would be at least partially defused in the 1970s with the onset of the Western 'demographic transition'. Rising living standards, movements for womens' rights and the increasing availability of contraception have since depressed fertility rates around the globe.

But other greens have seen far, and been proved right. Svante Arrhenius, a Swedish chemist, first predicted manmade global warming as far back as 1896 (although he thought that it would be a rather good thing, because more carbon dioxide equals bigger plants, right?). M. King Hubbert, an American geophysicist, predicted in 1956 that US oil production would peak around 1970; he got it spot on. The jury is still out, of course, on the wider application of 'Hubbert's Peak' to global oil production (though even Shell now acknowledges that demand will outstrip supply by 2015 - fifteen years out from Hubbert's own predictions).

But it's one thing to predict something - another to actually act on those predictions, and stop the prophecy from coming true. Have these few far-sighted individuals actually had any effect on society's overuse of planetary resources? Most have been dismissed in their times as doomsayers or fantasists. Others have garnered polite respect, but had their thoughts ignored, because their predictions seemed to lie comfortably far in the future. For example, Monbiot's article cites the issue of phosphorous depletion as being a ticking timebomb threatening future famines. But ecologists have known about the finite nature of phosphorous since at least the 1930s, and still no-one has acted upon their warnings. No less a luminary than HG Wells voiced his fears about phosphorous depletion in his bestseller The Science of Life in 1931. Aldous Huxley, another early green, mentioned the problem in his books Antic Hay and Brave New World; proposing in the latter a novel, if macabre solution - reclaiming lost phosphorous by recycling human corpses. (Perhaps the 100-Year Committee should take note.)

Phosphorous might still be a distant problem, but global warming clearly is not; and we have started to put in place very long-term policies to address this. Within the last week the British Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, Ed Miliband, announced that the UK would commit itself to 80% cuts in greenhouse gases by 2050, and would write this into statutory law. A law that commits future governments, of all stripes, for the next forty-two years, to totally transforming the British economy. That's what I call a long-term vision. It makes the old Soviet five-year plans look practically myopic. But you don't have to be a communist to see that some far-reaching targets and longlasting market certainty are vital to achieve such a fundamental transition. The trick is not being too prescriptive: lay down the overarching goal, and leave the means of getting there to successive generations.

The impression persists, that as a culture and as a species, we just don't seem to be totally cut out to think long-term. Our impulse is to gorge ourselves today, leaving nothing for tomorrow; our political systems are geared to short time horizons; our media outlets flit from crisis to controversy, whilst our fashions are fickle to the extreme. And yet, and yet... society is also replete with individuals who have a knack for thinking beyond the here-and-now. We have historians who act as the 'social memory' of our culture. We have visionaries who try to extrapolate from past and present trends to guesstimate what the future holds. Getting those individuals into positions where they can share their skills with society is the challenge.

For these reasons, I'd like to endorse Monbiot's recommendation for a 100-Year Committee, but with an amendment: that on the committee there should also sit a Historical Advisor. This idea is not my own, but taken from the lobby group History & Policy, which campaigns to improve the recognition of history in policymaking. Leading supporter of the group, David Cannadine, argues that "historians and politicians bring very different perspectives to bear on the contemporary world, and greater dialogue between them would be beneficial to the policy process. Historians can suggest, on the basis of past precedents, what might or might not work and counsel against raising public expectations that policies will be instantly effective." What better application of this skill than to the question of our future existence on the planet?