If you made it down to SLEX this year and rolled on up to the SLA tent you may have seen the future films scenario exhibit. In short we asked people to take a film ticket and choose which future film, each displayed on large movie posters, that they would see if oil peaked today. Here are the future film scenarios/posters and how many tickets they got from people who thought that movie was the most likely to come true. Click on posters for enlargements, and thanks to Great Transition Initative for text.
BACK TO LOCAL – 58 tickets – This Future Film encompasses the small-is-beautiful visions favoured by some environmental and political subcultures. However, it is difficult to envision how a patchwork of self-sustaining communities could emerge from our increasingly connected world, except perhaps in recovery from collapse. ‘Back to Local’ depicts a transition to a society that preserves natural systems, provides high levels of welfare through material sufficiency and equitable distribution, and enjoys a strong sense of social solidarity. This Eco-Communalism incorporates the green vision of bio-regionalism, localism, face-to-face democracy, small technology and economic autarky.
GREAT TRANSITION – 44 tickets – ‘The Great Transition’ is a world that transcends reform, going on to embrace new values that change the precepts of global development. Population levels are stabilised at moderate levels and material flows through the economy are radically reduced through lower consumerism and massive use of green technologies. This variant shares some of the goals with the Future Film ‘Back to Local’, but would seek to change the character of the urban, industrial situation rather than to replace it, to build a more humane and equitable global civilisation rather than retreat into localism.
BRAND NEW DAY – 28 tickets – This Future Film envisions the global system of the twenty-first century evolving without major surprises, sharp discontinuities or fundamental transformations in the basis for human civilisation. Dominant values spread and developing regions gradually converge toward rich-country patterns of production and consumption. The problem of resolving the social and environmental stress arising from global population and economic growth is left to the self-correcting logic of competitive markets and heavy reliance on technological innovation to reconcile this growth with ecological limits.
MAD SHOX – 24 tickets – This Film Future presents the grim possibility that the social, economic and moral underpinnings of civilization deteriorate, as emerging problems overwhelm the coping capacity of both markets and policy reforms. Barbarization explores the risk of rejecting the need for deeper change. In this scenario, Brand New World strategies are inadequate to address mounting environmental and social stress and problems spiral out of control, leading to a general crisis and the erosion of civilized norms. These forces are unable to counter or even inhibit spreading chaos, waves of disorder ensue, and institutions collapse.
POST CAPITALISMO – 18 tickets – This Future Film features an authoritarian response to the threat of breakdown aka ‘Mad Shox’. Ensconced in protected enclaves, elites safeguard their privilege by controlling an impoverished majority and managing critical natural resources, while outside the fortress there is repression, environmental destruction and misery. In ‘Post Capitalismo’, powerful international forces are able to impose order in the form of an authoritarian system of global apartheid with elites in protected enclaves and an impoverished majority outside.
If you didn’t make it to SLEX, or the SLA tent, or just didn’t give it a go. Here is the online version so you don’t miss out on choosing your d-day peak oil future.
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