A tool you may have used in strategic planning, and which is often used in sustainability planning, is backcasting. You envision the future as you want it, then work backward to determine how to get there.
But what about envisioning the future you don’t want, and trying to figure out how to avoid it?
This summer I read a novel that had me backcasting furiously. Set in Bangkok a couple hundred years from now, The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi painted a picture that felt all too uncomfortably like a future we would never choose, but may be heading smack into. And the book gave plenty to consider about the role of business in shaping that future.
It’s a great read – good characters, compelling plot, intrigue and drama. (It also won five awards and dozens of accolades from respected reviewers, so you don’t have to take my word for it.) The story and characters take precedence over the apocalyptic backdrop; far from preaching, this book leaves you wishing for more detail about the author’s well-imagined future world.
It’s not a pretty one, unfortunately. But it is painfully believable: cheap, plentiful oil is a thing of the distant past. Government-regulated methane is available for high prices with appropriate permits; non-sanctioned methane can be used if you pay the bribes.
Somewhere in the distance, coal wars rage. The most available form of energy is human, either used directly (e.g. “treadle computers”) or transferred into “kink springs” which power everything from boats to ceiling fans to bicycles.
If you have a company with overhead fans to keep people cool, you likely contract a “winding man” to come daily and wind up the spring that keeps it going – a direct transfer of his energy (calories) into your system’s storage spring energy (joules). Improving the efficiency ratio of calories to joules is at the forefront of technological development. (And there is humour; the posse of “ballast men” who repeatedly run back upstairs to counter-weight an elevator in a rich man’s home, for example.)
The time we live in today is understood in the novel as a past era called “the Expansion.” Expansion-era highrise towers have become slums; few wish to climb the miles of stairs, and there is no ability to perform maintenance on such towering monoliths.
There are artifacts left over from the Expansion – a rare diesel car moves through the book at one point, and there are images in a museum of smiling people enjoying easy wealth.
The era that came after the Expansion – “the Contraction” – is also now history. One character recalls how his Contraction-era grandparents would make several days’ journey – with no mechanized transport available – to visit abandoned Expansion suburbs in search of useable materials.
The book is set as some people are envisioning a new Expansion – there are kink spring vehicles, and traversing the world is once again possible by sail and dirigible. Despite the obvious crash during the Contraction – about which, tantalizingly, Bacigalupi only gives glimpses – people are adapting and moving forward.
It is a much-changed world, however, and this is where there are some chilling things for business to consider.
Most of the world’s cities that lay close to today’s sea level have disappeared underwater – New York, Mumbai, New Orleans, Rangoon. Bangkok has protected itself with massive dykes and pumps, as a matter of national pride. Food is mostly produced from single-use seeds engineered to be infertile.
“Calorie companies” are hated, to the point where being suspected of being one of their agents – a “calorie man” – is to be at risk of death at the hands of angry citizens. Exactly why, we are never sure, but horrible plagues have swept the earth, killing both people and crops, and it appears the food companies, in their competitive efforts for supremacy and profit, intentionally released some of them.
Others, it appears, may be spawned by Mother Nature fighting back – unpredictably – against the intense manipulations of the genetic fabric of life. Food is constantly re-engineered; ensuring you have the latest “gene-ripped” product that is resistant to the newest agricultural scourges is part of normal grocery shopping. Fear of contagion is a constant backdrop.
Given this history, two political departments are struggling for power: environment, which has sweeping powers over everything to do with carbon (e.g. methane use), agriculture, public health and more; and trade, which is pressing to open Thailand’s closed borders. The story’s plot plays out as the two clash, with a hidden Thai seedbank – rare authentic genetic material – one of the objects of corporate desire.
The story’s title character, Emiko, is one of the “New People” – herself a genetically modified human, bred for servitude. It is rumoured some New People have 10 arms, created for factory work, and those produced for military service are feared.
Emiko is an administrative model, created to provide services ranging from translation to escort and, above all, to be obedient (it is conjectured that Labrador genes were used to ensure her overriding need to follow orders).
Her place in the story – just one of several compelling characters including an aging Chinese refugee, a Midwestern calorie man working incognito to tap the seedbank, several champions of the Environment Ministry (and thus, Thai nationalism), and some assorted expats – makes us consider elements of what makes us human.
Is our ability to tinker with the building blocks of life itself part of the inevitable story of natural selection and adaptation? Or is it a perversion of that process? And where does private enterprise, and pursuit of profit, fit into this picture as resources shift, government powers react, cheap energy wanes, and the population continues to surge?
The story is fiction, yet wherever you cast your vision of the future, these are real questions we are facing. Read the book. It’s entertaining and, whether you’re a sustainability wonk or not, it lets you leap out of today’s pell-mell rush and ponder a future we could build, despite our best intentions. •
