Ideal Expectations

 

“We’ll have the population and feel of the late-1980s, while each consuming as much as people did in 1920.” Maura paused for effect after summarizing the ideal outcome of the transition, and was greeted with confused stares from the crowd attending her public lunchtime lecture. “Oh, come on,” she said with a hint of amusement, “surely most of you have heard this before.” She knew they hadn’t, at least not like this, which was the point of the lecture.

A woman old enough to be her mother raised a hand, and Maura nodded to let her speak. “Sweetie, that makes no sense! My momma grew up in the 20s, and it wasn’t anything like the 80s.”

Maura smiled as she had in her rehearsals when a similar question was asked by her mock audience, namely me. “It’s going to be a new world,” she answered patiently, “where we’ll get to use what we’ve learned in the past century to live better with what people did before that.” It was a gross simplification, as preliminary summaries often are, but as a natural teacher she knew better than to start by taking a deep dive into the details.

“Is it because we’ll be coming out of a depression?” asked a male student I recognized from a summer session at the university.

“The depression happened after 1920,” the woman corrected him.

“We won’t be coming out of this depression,” Maura said solemnly. “The reason is that we’ll be converting much of our artificial economy back into nature’s economy; so other creatures can provide more of what we need, which we can’t safely provide on our own.”

“But we won’t have cars and planes like we did in the 80s, right?” the woman insisted.

“Right. We’ll have to use what we’ve learned to take care of the basics without them and all the pollution that comes with them.” Her answer reminded me of the TBDs in the early strategy draft, which have been turned into goals of creative effort in synergy with other species we’ll hopefully bring back from the brink of extinction.

“It won’t really be like the 80s, then,” the woman said.

“We’ll have a new, better version, where we live as long and are just as happy, and can do so for a long time.”

Al shouted from the rear of the room, “That’s if we can clean up all the waste and stop those nasty time bombs we lit a few years ago!”

“The self-sustained impacts,” Maura clarified, caught by surprise. “Everything depends on that.”

Reality Check

Maura’s description is based on the simulated past back to 1920 and projections out to 2040.