The promise of the future: Voided by our cleverness

When they dig up the bones of people from this era, will they think of us kindly? Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Since time immemorial, the promise of the future has always been that, overall, on a global scale, each generation will be better off than the prior ones. Humans are clever, and they share what they have learned with other humans, so even young humans can access the hard-won knowledge and experience of many generations of prior learning. Moreover, our lives are short but material goods last a long time -- meaning that the wealth of the ages slowly builds up and people enjoy the results of prior generations' efforts that way too.

Earth, the only habitable planet known, is perfectly suited to support human life in relative ease and comfort. Every day, unfathomable riches of solar energy arrive, for free. Reserves of solar energy, concentrated and distilled over millions and millions of years were provided under the ground, for free. Plants and animals in symbiotic relationship maintain the atmosphere at just the right level of oxygen. If used judiciously, those solar energy reserves (known as fossil fuels) can provide all the energy needed to provide an abundance of comfort and decent livelihood for all people.

But alas! Humans are clever, rather than wise.

As a result, we have voided the promise of the future.

Because of the way we use energy, the future for many generations will be much worse than the present.

Worse, our response to this sickening realization -- that we are the first generation in 200 million years of human evolution to leave our posterity with a degraded future prospect at every point on the globe -- is a combination of angry or sullen denial and magical thinking, where we lunge after "solutions" that are really just doing more of what has gotten us into this mess in the first place. Meaning that each generation will not only be worse off than we are, for the foreseeable future, but that the degrading trend will continue, with each generation leaving their own progeny (and the progeny of all other humans alive at the time) with an increasingly unstable climate, in an environment of increasingly scarce energy, with increasingly short food and water supplies.

We cannot avoid some of this. Earth's climate is far too vast to right itself immediately, even if we were to stop pumping millions of years worth of carbon into it entirely in an instant -- the carbon we've already pumped in will continue to make itself increasingly felt for a thousand years.

But we can stop making it worse. But it would require living as if we owed something to the future, rather than only to ourselves. So, while there is little cause for hope, there is something we can do: Transition. Not a guaranteed solution or even a "solution" at all -- but a way of adapting to our predicament and learning to live so that we don't leave our children an even more limited and difficult future life.

Here in Salem, a small group (the Salem Transition Initiative for Relocalization) has begun to meet to organize the necessary transition to a more local, low-energy, low-emissions future, as part of a global network of Transition Towns that is growing every day.

STIR is poised to become Transition Salem and to begin developing strategies for the transition and an energy descent action plan for our region. We are meeting every other Wednesday at Tea Party Bookshop (corner of Liberty and Ferry in downtown Salem) at 7 p.m. with the next meeting on July 1. If you would like to become an active participant in helping with the transition, you are invited to join us.