Please note:  I have started this project with a talk at UC Santa Barbara's nearly-carbon neutral conference (which I co-organized).  That talk can be viewed at http://ehc.english.ucsb.edu/?p=14938

This talk will take up the effort from where that one left off.

In 2014 Naomi Oreskes and Richard Conway published a much-discussed vision of the world – The Collapse of Western Civilization:  A View from the Future – in which humanity survived into the twenty-fourth century, but at a terrible cost:  billions of climate refugees in the second half of the twenty-first century, 60-70 percent species extinction, the entire populations of the continents of Africa and Australia wiped out.

This “future history,” however, was tone-deaf to the impact that today’s global climate justice movement might make in altering the story for the better, and possibly much for the better.  In other words, the book was not based on fully adequate sociological or humanistic foundations. 

As the next step toward my larger project of writing a cli-fi novella, in this talk I will sketch in detail an alternative story, at once a more hopeful, and hopefully more plausible, history of the future to 2050.

Much hinges on how those of us alive at this critical moment in history respond to these challenges in the next three decades.

Clearly, we must avert the extreme catastrophe likely following from the “business as usual” plans of the fossil fuel corporations and their allies, as well as the more enlightened version contained in the recent “Paris Agreement” by the global political and economic elite.

I will conclude by venturing into the uncharted territory of a post-capitalist world that much of the global climate justice and allied social movements are starting to prefigure.

Please bring your wildest imagination, most caring hearts, and new knowledges of all kinds to the table!

http://ehc.english.ucsb.edu/?p=14938