Where Is the Vision of A Better Future?

How can we be motivated to act unless we can see a world worth fighting for?

Photo by Robert Collins on Unsplash

The climate struggle, the effort to survive the human folly of destroying our common home, cannot be won as merely an effort to avoid the worst. We need a positive vision. We need to see, at the other end, something wonderful.

I sometimes see a vision of a better world coming from techno optimists. But never from climate activists, from scientists, or even from politicians and ideologues.

Nearly everyone is focused on who they hate and fear. And, as for the future, mere survival is the best that activists seem to offer.

We need to do better. We need to provide a vision of an exciting yet achievable future. We can.

A Joyful World

I don’t mean to diminish the crisis we face and the inevitable suffering. We are too far down the road of climate destruction to avoid it.

And we’ve had this before. We’ve had a Holocaust. We’ve had two World Wars. We’ve had all kinds of mass suffering in the past, yet joy and beauty and love never died. There was life (for the survivors) after death.

If we stabilize the climate (no small task) and repair what we can, our next world can and should be much, much better than the one it…