thefuture.net

8am on London’s main shopping junction. Oxford Circus is busy with marketing executives, retail staff ready for work, London’s morning rush hour of people entering the daily grind. The sun is shining over lanes of bus and taxi traffic. Everyone is en route.

Enter The Future. Last Friday the United Nations were meeting in Bonn and somewhere, too low down, on their agenda was a discussion point: ‘how to save the world from climate change’.

As the suits gathered in Bonn to wrangle about our future, a group of young dancers from London gathered around the junction at Oxford Circus. They’re a new element of The Future: The Future Flash Mob.

We wanted to make London stop – just for a moment. We wanted people during their daily rush to ask why the kids are dancing in the midst of traffic; putting their bodies at risk to make people stop and pay attention.

And so we stepped out into the junction – easy as that.  Four of us – in high vis vests and with traffic cones that we’d found nearby – blocked four lanes of traffic. This cleared Oxford Circus for the dancers to enter and dance.  We hit play on a portable sound system and everyone stopped and watched.

As the song drew to a close the dancers picked up their bags and left the junction.  They spoke to the crowd who had gathered.  They gave them this message and told the crowd that in Bonn conversations are going on amongst the most powerful people in the world – conversations that will decide whether or not we will have a future. The crowd was concerned, for a moment, before they carried on to work.

Through our dance we joined a conversation that we have been shut out of.  The conversation about whether our generation will have a future that we can survive.  Through our dance we took Oxford Circus, and for a moment – we chose our future.

“Foodscaping” in Switzerland

1. Capture rain water – water butts are cheap and some councils give them away. Connect them to our home’s guttering to help stop flooding and hold winter rains back for the summer growing season.

2. Make soil – find some outdoor space not far from the kitchen and build a wormery or make a compost heap. If we send our organic kitchen “waste” to landfill it drives climate change. If we transform it ourselves to make compost it enables us to grow things.

3. Grow food – home produce reduces our need to buy from the fossil-fuel-intensive supply chains coming through most shops. The plants soak up rain water and carbon dioxide and create mini ecosystems we can enjoy, reminded we are not separate from nature.

4. Invest in efficiency and renewables – homes that leak heat or need cooling use more fuel and cost more money. Spending now to make them work better makes good sense since fuel bills keep going up. If you can get solar panels on your roof you are lucky. If you can’t, maybe you have some extra cash you can invest with Abundance?

5. Divest from fossil fuels – large institutions stash money with mega fossil fuel corporations in a toxic relationship that has distorted democracy. The solution is to move our money to banks with ethical policies. We can also demand our public-owned organisations put their money where it will not harm human survival prospects. Most importantly – governments must stop subsidising fossil fuel corporations. 

8 Nov 1989 – Margaret Thatcher Speech on Global Environment to United Nations General Assembly

Many people’s first exposure to climate science was when they saw Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. Gore took a topic that was beyond most people’s comprehension and made it easy to understand. Back in 1988, however, it was a different politician who put the science of climate change firmly on the global agenda. Unbeknownst to many, that person was Margaret Thatcher. As a Fellow of the Royal Society, Britain’s national science academy, she presented a series of high profile speeches on the topic of climate change. Armed with a degree in chemistry from Oxford, her scientific expertise enabled her to speak from a position of strength and knowledge about climate-related issues. She used that knowledge to act as a champion for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and personally opened the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research (the UK’s foremost climate change research centre).

Margaret Thatcher and her environment secretary Nicholas Ridley did more than anyone in the last 60 years to put green issues on the national agenda and swell the membership of groups like Friends of the Earth.
“Things really took off during Mrs Thatcher’s short-lived green period. From 1987/1988 when she started to talk about the ozone layer and acid rain and climate change, a lot of people who had said these issues were for the tree- hugging weirdos thought, ‘ooh, it’s Mrs Thatcher saying that, it must be serious’.
“She played a big part in the rise of green ideas by making it more accessible to large numbers of people. Nicholas Ridley was one of the best recruiting sergeants we ever had. He was always on the wrong side of the science and public opinion. We always had a fantastic response every time he talked.”

Video put together for the MSc in Environmental Technology at Imperial College London.

It is possible to draw up extensive scary lists of all the out of control and dangerous natural phenomena happening around the world right now but what is the point? If you want to check the science then these recent papers bring it home in: Scientific American, Nature   and even the World Health Organisation. The main thing to realise is that it is happening and that this changes everything.

When I was still a child twenty years ago, decisive action could have averted dangerous climate change. That window was missed but the things we need to do remain the same. When your lying in the bath and you realise it has suddenly got too hot you don’t say “oh well – I might as well just leave the tap on then” you move fast so you don’t completely stew in your own juices.

The time lag for an understanding of climate science to seep into the mainstream has not applied to an active minority group who have made it their business to become expert in exactly what we should do. The practical safety measures are not rocket science. We need to, for example, mobilise armies to plant millions of trees – these will soak up carbon dioxide as well as reduce flooding. We need to cover every suitable roof in solar panels, insulate all leaky homes and take every other available action to ensure we burn less oil. Top priority is to preserve wild spaces, the ultimate natural buffer against planetary change.

The mission is planetary-scaled but we rise to it like a lunar voyage. Not only can it pull the diverse peoples of the world together at a time of mass disharmony and doubt but it offers vast arrays of new jobs which can lift millions out of poverty and help create a new kind of economy that all of us, not just financiers, are invested in. This is a great historical moment when the human species, recognising it power to change the world, takes on new responsibility as planetary stewards and adjusts its governance, philosophy, ethics and law accordingly. Nation states are required to take bold, coordinated action, united at last by our shared atmosphere and destiny.

As it becomes increasingly obvious, even against the distracting wail of the corporate media, the kinds of things we have to do to respond to dangerous, climate-activated, natural phenomena the actions of this Tory government are perceived on a par with the lackeys on the Titanic who locked the poor people below deck. Not only are they still failing to take action to protect the populace against climate change they are using tax payers’ money to sponsor their friends to frack the English countryside. This isn’t “just politics”, it is inhumane, stupid and grotesque.  It is exactly the wrong thing to do.

The fact that Cameron and Osborne think they can get away with it reveals how out of touch they are. They refuse to aknowledge the simmering anger that is mobilising great swathes of humanity all around the world. They still sing to Margret Thatcher’s hymn sheet while the rest of us have moved on. Of course there is society, we are it and we know what we want – health, happiness and enough environmental stability that we might consider bringing children into the world.

Steadfastly pushing through their grim, selfish ideology of disaster capitalism while trampling on our last chances to make a better world must surely drive the long awaited lurch to the left? By running roughshod over the English countryside the tories finally show to everyone they really do not care about anything other than the concentration of wealth.

Imagine this future scenario. Years from now David and Sam Cameron head out from their town house, defended, not just by police with machine guns – as in the case of the delightful Mr Blair, but also lines of riot cops. The populace will leer and shout – “why didn’t you do anything while we still had a chance!?” David’s callous eyes, as dark as the infinity of space, will never flicker, staring straight out of his grey, sallow face. SamCam, the English Mrs Assad, will lean into his fur-lined coat and shudder, hissing through her collagen-pumped, pursed lips “we did it for the money you idiots.” They have to be stopped, we can’t let this happen.

Q & A with the director – Peter Downey

1. What motivated you to make the film?

Boring and unimaginative but undeniably massively influential. Teaching right-wing Americans science is a tough job… but someones gotta do it!

9. The Day the Earth Stood Still

“If the Earth dies you die. If you die the Earth survives.” An alien visits earth dressed as Keanu Reeves and judges us for harming the species we share the planet with; so far so good. Unfortunately, retribution is inexplicably curtailed by gratuitous sentimentality by two of the offending species.

8. Sky Blue

This beautiful, post-apocalyptic Korean anime took 7 years to make.  It is 2142 and the planet’s atmosphere is destroyed. The elite minority live in high-tech city – Ecoban, served by the rest of humanity who toil beyond in the wasteland. The stage is set for some sexually-charged redistribution of wealth.

7. The Age of Stupid

Bold, punchy, non-compromising and powerful, Pete Postlethwaite stars as the last human stranded on a ravaged planet in 2055. He has access to servers from now and whiles away his time pulling up pertinent footage and asking the question on everyone’s lips - why didn’t we stop climate change when we had the chance? This film is remarkable for how it was made and what it achieved. It was crowdfunded, pioneered a new distribution system, changed millions of minds and spawned the now global 10:10 climate campaign.

6. Moon

Moon is weird, disturbing and brilliant. Sam Rockwell is stranded alone on a remote mining outpost clocking in to his corporate overlords when he starts really freaking out. He is not alone. The ecological theme is not explicit but director Duncan Jones (Zowie Bowie) shines a fierce light on corporate appropriation of the individual. His bigger-budget follow up (Source Code) wrestles with the same themes. Ingenious and thrilling and seriously makes you long to get back to the nourishing embrace of a living biosphere.

5. The End of the Line

If footage came out of hunters with giant machines going on safari and rounding up every living thing on the savannah – elephant, deer, hippos, lions, cheetah, warthogs and killing everything – we would be horrified and demand they stopped. Yet this is what happens every single day on our oceans. Giant, industrial fishing fleets are going out and killing EVERYTHING. Don’t sit placid in front of another hollywood film with a heterosexual white guy running around with a gun shooting people before winning some docile girl. You are better than that. Watch this instead. The Real Story is corporations killing the natural world. This film is your invitation to get mad. Don’t kid yourself that individually buying less fish will make any difference. We need to get organised and stop these boats, the corporations doing this sick shit and the governments pumping them tax dollars. The film ends on a remarkably positive note. This is one problem we know how to fix. Saving the oceans requires us to make a global network of marine protected areas. Properly policed this would cost about $15 billion a year and create hundreds of thousands of jobs. The global fishing industry is currently subsidised by exactly that amount. What we need is political pressure to shift the subsidies from extraction to preservation. The oceans are ours. The time is now. Lets do this!

4. Wall E

Imagine the early pitch to hollywood producers: “we are going to make a children’s film about a robot left alone to clear up earth after it has been ransacked by humans that have now grown so fat they sit in floating chairs on a spaceship plugged into digital devices .”  A lengthy pause might have been followed with the question: “how are you going to make that enjoyable” The answer is with beauty and grace.

3. Samsara

Spearheading a new genre of cinema called Planet Porn the makers of Baraka have raised the bar again with this extraordinary visual feast. If you need reminding our home planet is where it is at – this ones for you.

2. The Cove

Yeah – it made me weep but not just because I love dolphins. It is clear humans will wreak havoc on the world in appalling and barbarous ways. Worst of all is institutionalised barbarism defended by bureaucrats. Slaughtering whales and dolphins is unpopular in Japan and the meat is dangerously high in mercury yet the government subsidises it and its partly funded by the ticket prices of animal lovers wanting a dolphin experience. A complex knot binds down the horror. This sort of madness and cruelty cannot be combatted with logic and reason. It takes the passionate intervention of determined people to create change in the world. This may be a totemic issue, not least because of the immense intelligence and sensitivity of our close cousins but we gain insight into other monstrous stupidities like European fisherman paid to toss fish overboard, the destruction of rainforest and the relentless acidification of oceans. One protagonist says “you are either an activist or you are inactive.” This film urges us to make a choice.

1. Avatar

Cameron creates a remarkable and vast alien world in which we can study ourselves. His genius subversion was to make a US-marine-like army in the pay of extractive mining corporations the baddy and indigenous, tribal people, who connect to the living fabric of their world, the heroes. That the film was watched by billions worldwide is perhaps the greatest push yet received for Gaia-consciousness. Who could bear to see the mighty tree fall at the hands of the vicious and greedy, militarised corporate forces and who could fail to see the same thing happening on our world? Eco, short for ecology, is about the connection of living things, to each other and to the planet. The last wild places on our planet are about to get torn apart by the machine. Watching films is fine but the time has come to take action.