Remembrance of futures past

In one version of the future, my students will walk everywhere; in another, they will swim. Some envision a future that looks like the past (living close to the land, eating what they can hunt, gather, or grow) but with really nifty accessories:  clothes that change color and texture at the touch of a button, pop-up wind turbines and solar panels.

My Concepts of Nature class has just finished reading Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake and we're preparing to watch Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, and in between these dystopian visions of a ravaged natural world, we paid a visit to the future. Several futures, in fact--futures of the past.  We discussed the essay "Back to the Future" by James Howard Kunstler (read it here), who suggests that visions of the future reflect the concerns of the present. For instance, he describes a 1950s vision of the year 2000, "a city of towers cut through with swooping super-duper highways," but, he continues, "The amusing part is that the cars depicted all have giant tail fins--because people were cuckoo for tailfins that year. So, naturally, the future would be all about tail fins."

I told my students about my past future--the future vision of a childhood informed by near-daily viewings of Star Trek reruns. In that future, there would be no more harvest gold or avocado appliances, and human beings would have the ability to travel throughout the galaxy without running up long-distance telephone charges or being tethered to a dial phone that stretched only to the end of that tangled curly cord. Imagine that!

We could imagine personal communicators, but we never imagined Kirk and Spock playing Angry Birds on their communicators or Sulu checking his stock portfolio or Lieutenant Uhura keeping track of stats for her fantasy baseball team. The future was a Very Serious Place where communicators would be used for communication--period. (Except for that one time when Spock took a communicator apart to make some sort of laser. But I digress.)

That was my past future--but what about my students? This morning they worked in groups to examine their current relationships with nature and extrapolate from that a vision of the future. Their results varied, but none of the groups envisioned any major change in the nature of human beings. We might finally eliminate obesity and learn to get along with one another, but in my students' visions of the future, people of the future will be at heart pretty much the same, only with cooler stuff.

We started the semester looking at creation myths and stories of nostalgia for a lost pastoral paradise and we'll end with visions of a post-apocalyptic future in which nature has been subsumed by technology. The past and the future have a great deal in common, both existing primarily as stories that help us make sense of the present--which, when you come right down to it, is a pretty cool place to live.

I know the present is better than some of the futures my students envision, because, frankly, if the only way to get around is by swimming, my last words will be "gurgle gurgle."