Our forebears had a lot of ideas about where we’d be by now.
Go back just a few years, and you’ll find no end of prophecies about the world we’d inhabit today — tech fantasies of roads filled with self-driving machines, dire visions of critical water sources gone dry, projections of cities and markets growing and shrinking. In The Times of even a decade ago, the year 2020 was considered a rich canvas for visions of the future, “far enough in the distance to dream, yet seemingly within arm’s reach.”
Imagining futures — to pursue, avoid, or merely prepare for — is how we often wrestle with change in the present. Yet our ability to envision — and therefore shape — the future is constantly pressed in by the world we inhabit today.
Few people, even a decade ago, could have imagined how we began 2021: under lockdowns against a deadly virus, with a U.S. president on trial for impeachment, about to undergo a transition of power tainted for the first time in more than a century by violence. Yet despite such explosive change, we’re still stuck on a path to warming the planet beyond what would be livable for humankind. Until a year ago, the fastest vaccine ever developed had taken four years to reach the world; now we’re wondering how much of the world the fastest vaccine ever developed will reach.
We can’t slow down time, but we can widen the span of our attention. So I want to start a conversation with you, and I’m hoping it can last a couple years.
I’m writing to you as the editor...
Read Full Story: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/02/special-series/headway-earth-progress-climate-hindsight.html
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