{"id":58894,"date":"2021-08-05T06:44:00","date_gmt":"2021-08-05T11:44:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=58894"},"modified":"2021-08-05T06:44:00","modified_gmt":"2021-08-05T11:44:00","slug":"the-future-is-a-landscape","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=58894","title":{"rendered":"The Future is a Landscape"},"content":{"rendered":"<header class=\"entry-header\">\n<h3 class=\"entry-title\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.ecosophia.net\/the-future-is-a-landscape\/?fbclid=IwAR0IFKf1qGJ1KXjN5iPtOiaCms9MuUKVKknrY3lYGFq3A5Hnr6CaPQhEJGQ\">The Future is a Landscape<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/header>\n<div class=\"entry-content\">\n<p>I\u2019ve been reflecting of late about the way that our habitual expectations about change blind us to the way that change actually happens. One of the most important of these is the frankly weird but pervasive notion that the future is a single place, where only one kind of thing happens. It\u2019s always \u201cThe Future,\u201d very much in the singular.\u00a0 To most people these days, of course, \u201cThe Future\u201d is either progress as usual or it\u2019s instant apocalypse, and I\u2019ve discussed that before, but let\u2019s look at the broader pattern for a moment.<\/p>\n<p>In both of these cases and far too many others as well, the future is all the same, and it\u2019s all the same forever. It\u2019s never one kind of future here and a different kind there, or a glossy Tomorrowland here and something more realistic there, or apocalypse here and everywhere else people just pick themselves up and get on with their lives. Nor is the society of the future generally allowed to peak and decline, as societies do in the real world, nor will the big loud catastrophe fade into memory and leave the survivors to go on to do other things, as disasters do in the real world. Missing here is the crucial realization that history doesn\u2019t stop with us, and change will continue to unfold into the far future the way it has all through the past.<\/p>\n<p>Another conversation along these lines is more than usually timely, because that durable 1972 study <em>The Limits to Growth<\/em>\u00a0is back in the news again. There\u2019s good reason for that, of course.\u00a0<em>The Limits to Growth<\/em> showed that economic growth on a planetary scale is subject to the law of diminishing returns; pursue growth far enough, and the costs of growth rise faster than the benefits and eventually force growth itself to its knees&#8230;<\/p>\n<figure id=\"attachment_1806\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-1806\"><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-1806\" class=\"wp-caption-text\"><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Future is a Landscape I\u2019ve been reflecting of late about the way that our habitual expectations about change blind us to the way that change actually happens. One of the most important of these is the frankly weird but pervasive notion that the future is a single place, where only one kind of thing [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,3,4,7],"tags":[15417,341,1758,485,2725],"class_list":["post-58894","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-energy-2","category-environment","category-survival-2","tag-ecosophia","tag-future","tag-john-michael-greer","tag-limits-to-growth","tag-predictions"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58894","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=58894"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58894\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":58895,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58894\/revisions\/58895"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=58894"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=58894"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=58894"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}