The Future of Goodness

As William Law once wrote, “perpetual inspiration is as necessary to the life of goodness, holiness and happiness as perpetual respiration is necessary to animal life”.

While everyone celebrated the New Year, our Australian fellows were busy with the consequences of a massive flood washed away their lives and plans just at the beginning of 2011. Any kind of condolence offered to our futurist colleagues (especially those residing in New South Wales) wouldn’t fix the problem, but it might show a feeling of sympathy to those guys whose efforts were brilliant and well-known in the advancement of futures studies.

You know that critical futures studies arose decades ago as a response to the crisis that came to face human civilization during the 20th century. Many people, even some of the futurists didn’t take it so seriously at that time and amused themselves with other topics such as globalization. The globalization embraced our civilization as the natural impact of human’s scientific and technological development, while real global challenges such as climate change revolutionized our environmental conditions in an undesired manner.

Regardless of who is really responsible for such a disastrous situation, the reality is that the consequences are threatening all, both the killers and the victims. In fact, we’re all responsible for what is happening to our planet. The challenge is to grasp our destiny on this small planet and to work toward consciously chosen futures, rather than drift further into crisis and devastation. Why did we reach here? Why the environmentalists couldn’t realize their dreams? And why our world seems so doomed? We usually seek for the answers in unknown and known aspects of industrialization, but it has other origins—reasons and causes rooted in deepest layers of our humanity. It’s simple: we’ve missed our goodness.

Think about those days when we had cleaner cities and countries. We might not be as advanced as today, but we had more good fellows who had kind hearts for each other and the planet they were living in. Don’t make a mistake. I’m not talking about utopian or dystopian cities or civilizations. I’m neither talking about religious or spiritual values. I’m just reminding the value of goodness for us, the animals and other creatures that have a shared environment: the Earth.

What do I exactly mean by “goodness”? In my point of view, goodness is a natural code of practice in living and benefiting from the planet without imposing any harm regardless of ethical or religious beliefs we may have. As far as we go on with current way of life (spoiling the planet by producing CO2 and other pollutants) there will be no way out of this crisis.

Shouldn’t we purchase a new future? Is our image of the future based on the goodness I mentioned above? Or is it unconsciously directed in the same old ways? When we look at our cities, we see that they tend to follow the same pattern of urban development that cities did decades ago. And yet many, if not most, now believe that they were mistaken. Instead of spending billions on uncontrolled growth, we should focus now on creating livable communities.

Is there a future (hope) for the goodness? Surely, there is. We should invest on our green public spaces rather than our skyscrapers. We may understand that our image of preferable environmental futures depends on less wastes, CO2 and pollution. We may have forgotten the goodness we had sometime in the past, but we should remember our contemporary conditions where our cities and lives are exposed to the direct dangers of climate change.

Now we must find ways to create new futures, or continue to go along with a future discarded some decades ago. This discarded future has led us to a global crisis of climate change. The easiest thing that we can do at personal level is producing less waste and spoiling less water. It’s time for a new future: the future of goodness.