The Truth is Written and With Each Word the Future is Lost | A Societal Problem
Dystopian Speculative Fiction on Future Environmental and Social Conditions. A Thorough Look at Unsustainability and Everyday Life and the Critical Role of Design. An Extended Essay.
Preface
To call this a blog post would be an abuse of the term, as this is the most extended piece published on this blog yet. Instead, it is a researched essay released by the more experimental label NoiseBox, though it transcends that name and moves more toward being “Not on Label.” This essay is the fourth post in the “Cassette Series,” which draws significant influence from music and the spirit of the early underground cassette culture that subverted institutions. This essay may become part of a more substantial outcome, such as a book. The Cassette Series and some older works, including the Deep Chaos post, focus on chapter-length pieces that provide room for significant exploration and relationships. Though this essay may be two chapters worth of writing, it belongs as one. That said, I hope you can find the time to read it in its entirety.
This post follows a speculative dystopian fiction style motivated by the question, “How bad will or could it get fifty years from now in 2074?” The next post in the Cassette Series asks, “How will we act in a world of dwindling and foregone futures?” A critical element of situating oneself in the present narrative is that the crisis of 2074 is already unfolding. French philosopher Morin (1993) writes that when it comes to the word crisis, “Using the term merely allows one to say that something is wrong” (p.231). This is the definition used here.
The central portion of this post’s title, “The Truth is Written and With Each Word the Future is Lost,” derives its meaning from an experimental extreme metal album revealed later. The title’s meaning is scattered among the various sources used as a base from which speculative dystopian fiction grows. The “truth” is present alongside informed and speculative projections, with fiction leveraged to understand what 2074 might be like experientially. As this project progressed, it was clear that with each word typed, the future would continue to worsen, if not disappear altogether, unless society mobilized quickly and collectively. This sentiment is even in the hopeful data-driven book Not the End of the World. Our hope is contingent upon producers, consumers, and governments acting continuously in the interest of the future. The future being in jeopardy is framed as a societal problem, as that is who will be affected and, ideally, who will respond. There is also the assumption that government agencies will not be able to make change in the areas where it is needed most to bring about a different future, such as in design education, current design practices, loudly popularizing new expectations for corporate conduct, mass dispersals from uninhabitable areas, shifting and informing patterns of consumption, and establishing new priorities and understandings of sustainability and unsustainability and inculcating them into everyday discourse. These issues can be recognized as societal, and no one is coming to save society in this fundamental way or safeguard its future. Should all the above fail, there is always constructive and networked outrage.
The aesthetic of this series is essential. Music-related imagery, particularly the cassette tape, will be used here. It exemplifies a specific link the author understands between music and writing and an appreciation for old and new cassette culture. This series continues to celebrate finding inspirational music from early cassette culture worldwide. This series recognizes the value and mystery one can create through limited instruments, including a microphone, a synthesizer, and a few effects. This is equivalent to one person, a computer, and a couple of shelves of books.
Like previous posts, this essay confronts the emotions of pain, suffering, death, deception, and other intense feelings expressed in recent works. While there are pictures, works from Odilon Redon and Käthe Kollwitz and other lithograph and charcoal creations are used. In many ways, this post is experimental in its writing and delivery as a new project for this blog.
Contact: greg@gregoryig.com Use only with permission.
This project is dedicated to… all people in anxious, restless, unstable state of mind, waiting for the total end of our foolish civilized world. This recording is a sonic mental journey through an ordinary series of days in a lost European industrialized town, symbol of the glory and shame, fascination and death of our times” MATTI, Twilight Memory, Piombino, Italy, 1996.
Introduction
Without expansive, decisive, socially generated, and socially driven lasting change in how life is lived and in the economies and structures that support it, a world will continue to arrive where human existence is plagued by significantly more pain and death related to increasingly frequent disasters, and hazard events, scarcity, and a warming planet. Those alive fifty years from now, arguably too many considering the potential environment, will dwell in increasingly hostile environments with near-constant fear, anxiety, and paranoia over the next disaster or disturbance or the possibility of a breakdown in energy, heating, cooling, and electricity systems. The following is written about bad news. If there is any good news to be found, it is that some of the bad news has been revealed.
“Nature alone cannot sustain us: we are too many, we have done too much ecological damage, and we have become too dependent upon the artificial worlds that we have designed, fabricated and occupied” (Fry, 2009, p.3).
This essay focuses on dystopian speculative images of 2074 and beyond. Its account of economics, design, unsustainability, and everyday life focuses on the danger humanity poses to the duration and character of its future. Some producers may have redirected their practices toward sustainability or less unsustainable while following the same economic model. Protecting the future requires much more concerted and committed effort by producers and consumers.
This essay recognizes that civilization is moving in the right sustainable direction in some areas, though fault can be found. In particular, the consensus is acknowledged that the ozone layer will recover to 1980 conditions around 2050 while the hole above Antarctica will persist longer. The recovery and maintenance of ozone may be affected by the population, its energy consumption demands, and the energy sources used to support homes and tech companies. In 2023, 334.9 million people were living in the United States. The U.S. Census Bureau (2023) projected population increases from 2023 to 2100. Within this data set, on the extreme end, “The high-immigration scenario increases every year and is projected to reach 435 million by 2100” (U.S. Census Bureau, 2023, n.p.). A more conservative estimate is that “The U.S. population is projected to reach a high of nearly 370 million in 2080 before edging downward to 366 million in 2100” (U.S. Census Bureau, 2023, n.p.). It is also noted that “By 2100, the total U.S. resident population is projected to increase by only 9.7% from 2022” (U.S. Census Bureau, 2023, n.p.). Johnson, who is a demographer at the U.S. Census Bureau, discusses how elements of population change have shifted.
Some of these, like the increases in mortality caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, are expected to be short-term, while others, including the declines in fertility that have persisted for decades, are likely to continue into the future. Incorporating additional years of data on births, deaths and international migration into our projections process resulted in a slower pace of population growth through 2060 than was previously projected (U.S. Census Bureau, 2023, n.p.).
As this is a dystopian piece, questions about how to sustainably house, feed, and provide transportation, education, jobs, and material items must be raised for an additional 100.1 million people living in the United States. There are no estimates of the patterns in which they will arrive. This number is in flux and could increase as displaced persons from large-scale complex emergencies occur. Complex emergencies unfold due to disaster events, including extreme heat and drought, and scarcity of resources, combined with armed prolonged conflict, making countries, states, and regions unlivable, if not unsurvivable (Keen, 2008). Should the extreme migration projection increase, it will intensify needs across the sectors. If regulations remain in place, the ozone layer may stay protected and in a state of recovery. Suppose the population increases considerably. In that case, and dependent on production processes at the time, there may be growth in greenhouse gas emissions, slowing ozone recovery, contributing to climate change, and eventually increasing hazard risk.
This dystopian speculative fiction proceeds with the assumption that moving into the future, traditional, everyday ways of living will be maintained. The involvement of structures and processes supporting everyday life will be primarily sustained, even if the elements evolve. The dominant mode of existence will conserve core practices, such as mass consumption, foreign manufacturing, and fossil fuel-burning transportation to bring products to markets, style, and pleasure over sustainability and function, and prioritizing the experience of dwelling in a location regardless of the resource commitment necessary to protect it and rebuild it when it is lost. Everyday life is dominantly hedonistic (and unsustainable), overwhelmingly concerned with what can be obtained and consumed for pleasure while being entirely ignorant of the consequences.
The popular mode of everyday life prioritizes maintaining the self as it is and has long been situated on the planet in a particular manner in the space around it. Everyday habituated living will continue to be driven by hedonism and unrecognized unsustainability until it is historically labeled by the right person at the right time as a societal problem needing societal solutions that extend into how the world is understood and acted in (Spinosa, Flores, & Dreyfus, 1999). In this problem, there is a coupling among societal-ecological-technological factors. Ecology in the center is appropriate, as it is being steadily transformed into something artificial and dangerous, something it has not been before, by the continual acceleration, scaling, extracting, consuming, using, discarding, and upgrading activities in the societal and technological elements. As will be discussed, to address what is happening in the ecological realm as it is understood broadly in Maturana’s work, those opposed to the current state of affairs and its trajectory will have to find a way to compel the “societal” and “technological” domains to calm down, look around, reassess, and redirect.
If 2074 and the years after indeed arrive as a warmer, more disaster-prone, less familiar, and more hostile time to be alive, it will be partly due to significant nonlinear time delays between greenhouse gas emissions and their environmental effects. Another delay exists between recognizing a worsening climate, more frequent disruptions and disasters, and a requisite societal response (Sterman, 2000). Looking forward from 2074 through a speculative dystopian fictitious lens, the following decades into the next century may be experienced with a familiar feeling of growing pain and tension from the scarcity of resources and severity of environmental conditions and regular calamity, breakdowns in social processes leading to isolation, suffering, and fear, and community instability (Maturana & Varela, 1992; Maturana & Verden-Zöller, 2008). Looking even further, there is a future that is so dangerous, violent, and barren, featuring overwhelming and quickly damaging heat, major hazard events that will make large areas uninhabitable over time, struggles with water sources and rights, a prioritization of safety and securing essential but difficult to obtain resources over mass consumption, that it will mark the beginning of humanity’s gradual and then sudden extinction.
The story continues in search of death as far as fifty years from 2024 and beyond, hoping to find ways to prevent it.
A War Becoming Unconcealed
A war is being waged around the world. Both sides' combatants likely understand the war's objectives and motivations differently. Still, at its core, it is a conflict over this planet’s dominant way of living, and everything hangs in the balance. The conflict includes what is defined as acceptable and unacceptable infrastructure, public services, service demands and government versus the private sector for providing them, design practices including their capacity to shape, define, and popularize a more valued way of living, energy, and product material sources, the priorities in building dwellings and buildings, transportation, education, occupations and commutes, food sources, manufacturing, industry, and its regulatory environment, economics, and consumption for supporting the primary mode of existence. To draw a clear distinction, one side is fighting for sustainability and protecting the future that lies ahead. Those taking a stand on sustainability manifest as transitioning from unsustainably to sustainably meeting essential needs, including energy, food, transportation, clothing, consumption, occupations, and expectations of designers in everyday and professional life. The unsustainable combatants are concerned with the exact needs of sustainability. However, they are fighting to keep meeting these essential needs and enabling the historically dominant way of living as they have been while continuing to emphasize extractive, scaling economies and mass consumption.
Unsustainability has the leading edge over sustainability in the conflict over how one should live. These advantages include comfort, familiarity, habits, tradition, and the significant benefit of not changing how one lives. However, the unsustainable must maintain ground, so they must continually enrich the products and services offered, even if that means strategically adding a thin layer of faux sustainability to add perceived value and appeal to a broader market. This strategy supports the illusion the unsustainable is sustainable while continuing to conserve their mandate or desire to maximize profits, even if at the expense of overall organizational well-being and negatively affecting human and ecological communities (Capra & Luisi, 2015; Yáñez & Maturana, 2013). The unsustainable must conserve as much as they can on their side of the line to maintain stability and growth in revenue and market share without losing to sustainability-centered ways of designing and living. Sustainability is the other side of this conflict. It intends toward an envisioned dynamic goal state where an ongoing transition hopes to achieve sustainability through innovations in transportation, working, energy, and meeting essential needs like hydration and food (Fry, 2000).
While the ongoing conflict has not entirely popularized unsustainability and its many imperfections, the regional rise of sustainability has advanced its cause and changed the dynamics of the dispute. Sustainability has drawn attention to alternative ways of meeting transportation needs, including e-scooters and e-bikes, electronic vehicles, and public transportation. Sustainability has also gained ground in energy through renewable sources, including wind, tidal, and solar. In the cases of transportation and energy, the sustainability front has revealed the unsustainability of two central everyday practices and offered still-emerging alternatives that can become part of the new dominant way of living. While sustainability moves forward against broadly damaging unsustainability, some of this activity occurs in the shadows of unsustainable coal-fired power plants that still dot the nation and international airports. The war is starting to become unconcealed, a potentially considerable problem for the frontlines of unsustainability.
The Unsustainable
There is a future, or more realistically, many futures and the exact contents and duration are uncertain. As Morin (2006) points out, “uncertainty must be placed at the heart of reality if we are able to develop a sound understanding of reality” (p.319). Twenty-five to fifty years is a reasonable, but perhaps uncommon, time frame for considering the possibility of marked environmental changes and social responses to them (Fry, 2009). A fifty-year time span also respects the time needed to develop and implement plans to secure the future in the present and the time for that plan to affect 2074 and beyond (Sterman, 2000). Without meaningful and permanent change between now and then, that focuses on how design creates and brings forth a dominant way of living, society will gradually arrive in 2074 in a world with more severe disasters, disruptions, and chronic challenges. However, it is not a linear progression. Moving into the future is instead nonlinear, partly owed to time delays, so estimating what might exist fifty years from now is difficult. Dystopian scenario building, where the driving question is, “How bad could it get?” is a valuable planning tool as the worst possible future states are imagined and can be planned for while the key images can be modified as needed. This is halfway aligned with the broadly used adage, “Plan for the worst, hope for the best.” However, in this case, the “hope for the best” part is eliminated as the emerging situation is unlikely to evolve into a best-case scenario, and hoping for it to do so is misdirected energy.
The objective, recognized or unrecognized, is to continue promoting the dominant way of life built on unsustainability and extractive growth and scaling economies that maximize profits. In other words, the direction is to continue creating a future that cannot be directly conceived of and imagined entirely but has already been colonized by past and present actions by producers and consumers. Whether it can be grasped, measured, or sensed, humans have already negatively affected the future they will one day arrive in (Fry, 1999). The chain of futures that lay ahead has already been damaged, heated, distorted, made barren, and turned to dust. What society collectively sends forward into the future now is of great consequence to the nature of the planet that comes into being later and the experience and cost of living on it.
Time delays are critical when considering associations between the past, the present, and the distant future. In this system dynamics concept, there is a time delay between an event or series of events and their outcome, making the situation dynamic and difficult to anticipate (Sterman, 2000). Time delays can be of any length. As a result of this varying time gap between attributable relationships of cause and effect or similar notions, it is difficult to discern how the present is shaping the future. A consequence of time delays is that a comprehensive and temporally extended understanding of the present and the damage it is causing to a time later than now may not be attainable (or easily so). In other words, it is difficult to tell the severity of the problem associated with the current dominant mode of production and consumption in the present and future.
In discussing securing the future, the focus is often limited to futuring, a consequence of sustainability. Futuring is the return of time to the future previously erased by unsustainability (Fry, 2009).
Futuring has to confront two tasks: slowing the rate of defuturing (because, as indicated, for us humans, the problem adds up to the diminution of the finite time of our collective and total existence) and redirecting us towards far more sustainable modes of planetary habitation (Fry, 2009, p.6).
Sustainability and its outcome of futuring works to prolong the amount of “livable” time humanity has left. A focus on futuring is essential, but it is imperative to be pursued simultaneously as efforts to address unsustainability that takes time away from the future through its consequence of defuturing. Sustainability efforts may be insufficient if defuturing is running away in a reinforcing feedback loop (Meadows, 2008). Defuturing must be addressed head-on to allow futuring to create positive change and add time to the future. Unsustainability must become integrated into sustainability projects. In fact:
Again, we insist that sustain-ability is always posed in relation to, and against, the unsustainable (the latter being comprehended by its product: the defutured). To acquire the ability to sustain requires that the ground of the unsustainable be learnt. Unsustainability, as the condition of the defutured, arrives out of defuturing-in-process (Fry, 2020, p.8).
A quote from Fry (2009) expands on defuturing and further connects it with the narrative of this post.
The still accelerating defuturing condition of unsustainability (which is the essence of any material condition of sustainability as it acts to take futures away from ourselves and other living species). We human beings unwittingly have created this condition through the consequences of our anthropocentric mode of worldly habitation, which has been amplified by the kinds of technologies we have created and our sheer numbers (Fry, 2009, p.1).
In Fry's work, design and the act of designing are critical and framed as responsible for the defuturing that has and will take place. Unsustainability’s outcome of defuturing broadly involves designers motivated by their companies and their well-being, taking time away from the future.
It is not just designers and designing responsible for the ongoing “accelerating defuturing.” Once released into the world, what a designed artifact does may be more meaningful and impactful than the process of bringing it into being. What a designed thing makes possible once it is completed and in the world and does not receive the consideration it merits. A coal-fired power plant brought into being sitting idly is the totality of all the destruction involved in its creation (Fry, 2009). The same coal-fired plant operating is the totality of the destruction and damage caused by producing it, in addition to the pollution it creates locally and regionally by its emissions that ultimately contribute to climate change. What type of world designers can bring into being by design is now clear. The coal-fired power plant example shows how design can bring a warmer and more emergency and disaster-prone world into existence through design. In terms of the coal-fired power plant and its emissions, on a broader spatial scale, there is likely to be a time delay before there are any measurable or observable consequences that could be attributed to a specific power plant or the over two hundred still in operation. In fairness, half of these are scheduled to close in the coming years. Until then, they continue contributing to creating a world by design fraught with disruptions (Fry, 1999; Sterman, 2000).
For another example, the ever-expanding Denver International Airport, which has a reported 1,600 flights a day but a 5,000 flight per day capacity made possible by design, is an unsustainable enterprise with global implications. It is not only the airport but everything it brings into being through its web of relationality, including driving to the airport (including employees), car rental facilities at the destination, and mass consumption within the airport itself and aboard the flight involving single-use plastic bottles and unrecyclable plastic wrappers (Fry, 2009). While the list of the unsustainable that has been designed into existence in relation to the airport could be expanded, the most considerable defuturing concern is the burning of fossil fuels through air travel and associated fossil fuel-burning vehicle travel, the transport of fuel to the airport, fuel tenders, emergency services, maintenance vehicles, and delivering supplies, parts, and equipment to the airport. The airport is unsustainable on its own, but when it is approached with a web of the relationality of components attached to it that makes it possible, it becomes increasingly less sustainable (Fry, 2009).
As discussed earlier, futuring the outcome of sustainability must be able to give time back to the future at a rate faster than unsustainability’s product of defuturing erases it. How many homes would have to switch to renewables and electronic vehicles in how many cities, counties, and states to offset the Denver International Airport for even a short time, just in the United States? To transition from a dominantly unsustainable to a sustainable way of living, some practices must be reduced in frequency or stopped to discontinue their damage to the future. Air travel is an example of a practice that should be significantly reduced in frequency. For instance, the tragic COVID-19 pandemic proved that far fewer flights than were normative were critical. During this period, the daily commute was also abandoned to keep employees safe, indicating that the daily commute and operating in office buildings is unnecessary in some fields. The pandemic indicated that some elements contributing to the unsustainability of the dominant mode of living could be removed or significantly lessened.
According to an article in NASA’s Earth Observatory titled “Feeling the Heat in the Extremes,” the global temperature may increase by 5.4°Fahrenheit to 9°Fahrenheit degrees by 2075, creating a more severe and hazard-prone world with an arid climate. As a warmer and drier climate intensifies and spreads, long-duration extreme weather, more severe hazard events, regular supply chain disruptions, difficulties generating enough renewable power, water rights litigation, and decreasing land suitable for agriculture will all face those alive in 2074 with variably frequency and intensity. Due to biology and massive energy cooling demands, large areas around the globe will become unsustainable for human life. For example, Phoenix, Arizona, in 2024, experienced 113 straight days of temperatures over 100 degrees and saw a record high of 117 degrees towards the end of September, setting a record for the latest 117-degree temperature recorded. September 2024 would be the hottest recorded September in the Phoenix area (Norman, 2024). Adding 5.4 to 9 degrees on top of these numbers will have staggering implications for the Phoenix and the larger Maricopa County Area.
Beyond the United States on Tuesday, May 28th, 2024, Delhi, India, experienced a high of 121.8 degrees due to a heat wave with associated water rationing and 192 heat-related deaths among the homeless population (Mitra & Magramo, 2024). Again, this situation must be considered with or without dystopian imagery projected from global temperature increases. Past decisions’ effects will vary and make places unsustainable for people and practices due to extreme heat, energy and resource demands, and disruptions, including dwelling, spending time outside, agriculture, dairy, and cattle ranching (United States Department of Agriculture, 2013). As a societal and planetary issue, extreme heat and the disaster-related effects of a warming climate affect society and those who will repeatedly be asked to save others, property, and resources while living and operating in the wreckage and discomfort of the same dystopian future.
Unsustainability lies at the heart of the modern prevailing way of life, even within attempts at sustainability. The historical persistence of unsustainability is owed to a generally towering and unrecognized ignorance towards the outputs of the populace’s existence, presently involving heavy reliance on fossil fuels and their continued production (generally out of sight in places like Alaska’s Northern Slope), whether as part of a daily commute or bringing products from overseas to enter the domestic market, energy production including still-surviving archaic coal-fired power plants, travel-heavy lifestyles whether for business or pleasure, and mass consumption including products that encourage the user to make sustainable choices that were either unsustainably transported or made, that may end up in landfills.
What is already unfolding now and may increase in the direction of 2074 can be recognized as a crisis.
Today crisis means lack of decision. It is the moment out of which spring uncertainties as well as disruption.....Using the term merely allows one to say that something is wrong. But that information is provided at the cost of a general obscuring of the notion of crisis. The term if now used for naming that which cannot be named (Morin, 1993, p.231).)
What Morin (1993) attributes to the term crisis is occurring. There must be constant and revised decisions regarding how, who, and what should be done to secure the future. The crisis (as a general definition detached from administrative functions) has been, is, and will continue to cause large-scale disruptions. The unsustainable that is and has altered the environment has long been active in the incidents governments at all levels coordinate. The crisis is not something that will happen. It is something that is happening. In the decades leading up to 2074 and beyond, the unsustainable continues to pump blood through the heart of modern existence.
The Sustainable
Speculating environmental and social conditions fifty years from now if the present mode of living is not corrected is not a prediction, as “We cannot compute what will happen in the course of our living” (Maturana et al., 2016, p.671). The images presented in writing, both sustainable and unsustainable, are instead founded on traces and tendencies of the present, dispositions, chance, and probabilities. As a strategy, speculative dystopian fiction is malleable and easily redirectable as it incorporates new information and changes the images it creates and their possible implications (Di Paolo, 2005; Morin & Kern, 1999). As mentioned above, the dystopian speculative fiction style or practice allows for conjuring the most volatile and painful futures that absolutely have to be considered and inform action taken over the coming decades.
Sustain-ability, first of all should be understood as 'a means to secure and maintain a qualitative condition of being over time'. It is a process (rather than an endpoint) wherein all that supports and extends being exceeds everything that negates it.
Crudely, being (as an existent process) enables everything in being to be futural (future making). Obviously, if there were to be an end of human being, it would not mean the end of being itself (although it can be said it would be the end of any knowledge of being; Fry, 2009, pp.43-44).
Crafting a dystopian image of a future that must be negated sets a direction for engaging proactively in efforts that add time to the future and correct those that take time away from it. Ideally, acting to secure a distant future now will lead to efforts to stop unsustainable practices and initiate sustainable ones in their place. In the State of Colorado, the I-25 corridor runs vertically. At a minimum, the highway is riddled with Teslas, Rivians, Polestars, Nissan LEAFS, busses, and the rare Prius from Denver to Fort Collins. Not visible from the road are the swarms of e-bikes picking up children from schools, going to the grocery store, school, or work. There are recycling and composting programs, the incentivized use of reusable bags, public and private solar panels, and thrift stores. Seasonally, farmers markets along the route provide “local food” and encourage interactions with those providing it. Along the corridor are countless parks that create a space for community building and children to play while providing urban cooling. As seen in the above section, these sustainable practices and creations strive to add time to the future, which is challenging. Sustainability efforts are taking place, but they are not necessarily connected. While a distributed structure is appropriate, the different actors and their projects should not be ignorant or isolated from each other and miss potential intersections.
If unsustainability is the issue, then sustainability should be the solution. Idealistically, purely sustainable production processes that encourage sustainable behaviors and replace unsustainable ones would provide a solution. However, the sustainable front has to address the unsustainable by seeking scaling and time-intensive transitions in the structure, values, and demands of everyday life to minimize unsustainability. Transitions in everyday life can occur concurrently with addressing the institutions of unsustainability themselves.
Data centers are a rising concern for sustainability. The exponential demands of still forthcoming artificial intelligence (AI) data centers that will outpace renewable energy capabilities may require a sudden reversal to nonrenewables, such as natural gas, to enable the enterprises to continue. A recent case study in Artificial Intelligence data centers requiring nonrenewable energy resources is the demands of Microsoft’s AI operations that led to reopening a reactor in the Pennsylvania Three Mile Island nuclear plant (Luscombe, 2024).
In terms of training large language model, each processing unit can consume over 400 watts of power while operating. Typically, you need to consume a similar amount of power for cooling and power management as well. This can lead to up to 10 gigawatt-hour (GWh) power consumption to train a single large language model like ChatGPT-3. This is on average roughly equivalent to the yearly electricity consumption of over 1,000 U.S. households (Moazeni, 2023, n.p.).
AI is incredibly dangerous socially and environmentally by creating challenges for energy production and manufacturing. Concerning AI, this is a threat and condition that design is designing. The companies behind AI data centers may require frequent air and vehicle travel at the expense of the heavy burning of fossil fuels. However, vehicle traffic emissions will be reduced as electric vehicles propagate further. Continued overwhelming unsustainability will drown out conventional sustainability approaches that do not understand and integrate unsustainability and its product of defuturing into their planning (Fry, 2000).
As mentioned earlier, sustainability must first reduce or prevent unsustainability. Virtual or physical interactions of sustainability efforts building awareness and establishing relationships with similar social networks may have a futuring force and ability to redirect defuturing so that more time is added to the future than there is being taken away. This would be a significant and ideal accomplishment. Yet, the still towering amount of unsustainability continues and gnaws at the futuring progress being made in a constant reminder that addressing defuturing would escalate the amount of time left.
A promise of total sustainability is challenging when speaking honestly to consumers, investors, or shareholders. Stanley and Hydro Flask promote the sustainable behavior of replacing single-use plastic bottles with reusable metal containers. By 2025, Stanley hopes to make “at least 50% of [their] stainless steel products from recycled materials” (Stanley, 2024, n.p.). For sustainability, the popularity of the products selected for fifty percent recylced materials matters greatly. In 2025, if fifty percent of recycled materials are used in production, it is safe to assume the other fifty percent will be extracted from the earth, and it is unclear which products this objective applies. Interestingly, Stanley reports that the Quencher H2.0 FlowState Tumbler 14 Ounce is already made from ninety percent stainless steel, an accomplishment in sustainability.
Hydro Flask runs a trade-in program that appears to drive a certain percentage of recycled material in production. Still, no first-hand balance was described between recycled and nonrenewable materials. The company purports to use minimal plastic in shipping, which equates to 13 million single-use plastic bottles, in addition to those the product will save. However, the amount of time or number of shipments it takes to save the plastic of 13 million single-use plastic bottles was not given.
Large vessels burning fossil fuels deliver these products worldwide. However, alternatives such as green ethanol and electric vessels are emerging, especially in the area of vehicle carriers. Stanley and Hydro Flask products achieve varying levels of sustainability through recycled materials yet are simultaneously unsustainable due to the reliance on some extraction of nonrenewable materials, transportation, and mass consumption as these products become status symbols. The entire process, the entire value chain, runs from ore to shelf, and every step in between should be analyzed to understand and evaluate how sustainability and unsustainability truly mix in a single product. The sustainable aspects of a product must also be weighed against unsustainability in the value chain. One might ask, “How many single-use plastic bottles will one Stanley or Hydro Flask need to offset to achieve a degree of sustainability?” Beyond a critique, it might also be asked, “How might both companies increase the sustainability of their value chains?” The clothing company prAna has a slightly similar issue with unsustainability. While their website espouses prAna embraces sustainability in all aspects of their garments, the company manufactures them in China and Vietnam, requiring fossil fuel burning to transport them to distant markets. What level of defuturing must be overcome through these garments before sustainability is reached?
Furthermore, while solar energy is renewable, the panels themselves may not be universally renewable due to the use of nonrenewable elements mined from the earth. Recycling solar panels needs to be economically viable as they are designed for durability and performance, not for reuse. However, a solution may be in progress (Moseman & Tao, 2024).
For one thing, the solar cells are often laminated to the glass and separating them is extremely difficult. If you don’t separate them, the glass is difficult to melt down for reuse: it contains particles of silicon, and silicon has a melting point twice that of glass. “The silicon never melts,” he says. “So you end up with a glass product with these small black particles of silicon inside. Nobody wants that.”
The problem isn’t that solar recycling is impossible, but that the process has yet to reach a financial break-even point. Tao says it simply costs more to recycle panels—about $20—than the $10 or $12 you can get for the recovered materials. As a result, most home solar is landfilled when its life is over. Panels in large-scale solar farms are more likely to be recycled, Tao says, if only because the company is willing to foot the bill for the recycling process to avoid the bad press of throwing renewable energy products into the garbage (Moseman & Tao, 2024, n.p.).
Looking through a fictitious and speculative dystopian lens, there is a potentially unsustainable and problematic approach to solar (and other sustainability-minded “solutions”) that will thrive within extractive, growth, and scaling economies and operate under the guise of total sustainability. Solar energy itself may be sustainable, but its manufacturing, recycling, and approaches to releasing it to market may not be. With technology, a product development and release-to-market model often begins with a percentage of expected total performance, perhaps half, of what the product will someday be able to operate at. In some cases, one hundred percent of a technology’s performance or how to produce it may be initially unknown or is a vision. In other scenarios, it may be already nearly defined and developed with a roadmap, but the technology needed to reach peak performance is not yet available. In the interim, revenue must be generated. To create profits while other efforts focus on developing a new solar panel technology, early versions operating at less than one hundred percent of the final estimates but still higher than the current market leader may be released. Depending on the time leading to the optimized release of the new solar panel, it may be one or two iterative releases of panels offering increased but not total performance.
Finally, after a multiple-year process or longer, a one hundred percent performance version of the innovative solar panel technology is released to everyone. The corporation may have turned these various releases into a service model that includes replacing panels as superior technology becomes available. Whether in 2024 or 2074, the success and ethics of iterative releases based on a service model offering the replacement of expansive areas of solar panels with improved technology hinges on the ability to recycle enormous quantities of outgoing solar panels. Solar recycling will need to develop the enormous capacity to economically meet this model’s needs and redirect solar panels from where they have already been going - landfills (Moseman & Tao, 2024).
Time and money are spent on marketing, business development, and sales to take advantage of having (at the moment) the best solar panel on the planet. This period may last a few years. But the structure of the corporation compels everyone to ask, “What’s next?” and “How can the current technology be developed further?” and lastly, “What is the next stage of this technology?” If the structure of the corporation did not drive its members to ask “What’s next?” society would, for example, still be operating with iPhone 4s, Samsung Flip phones, PalmPilots, Compaq iPAQs, and MP3 players with wrap-around headphones. The corporation, of course, is interested in developing technologies to continue growing revenue. For example, the iPhone5, iPhone5c, iPhone5s, the Six series, Seven, Eight, X, etc. While this will be revisited later, there is a complex relationship between society and technology, forming socio-technical systems (Trist & Bamforth, 1951). There is a complex interplay between espoused needs, anticipated needs, and the capabilities of technology to meet and even define them.
New technology drives sales; sales drive technology; new technologies drive sales; sales drive new technologies. In the process, production is optimized, and costs are lowered, enhancing the opportunity for profit and extracting more from the customer. This business model also looks like this: How many Sony Walkman are in landfills? Sony Discmans? Sony Home Disc Changers? Sony MP3 players? The progression of the Apple iPhone is another excellent example, as they are only temporarily owned and designed for obsolescence every few years through degrading performance and the introduction of new technologies. In 2022, an estimated five billion cell phones found their final resting place in landfills worldwide (Gill, 2022). Everything is working correctly. This process and mode of ownership that design has been instrumentalized in creating can be imagined as an entirely different way of owning. It will be challenging to locate the will and fortitude to disrupt economies and find the designers willing to operate with significant risk and exposure to support and slowly create the individual components of a new way of living that all relate to one another and are popularized with society’s help.
Precious minerals not extracted from waste electronics, such as the copper in wire or the cobalt in rechargeable batteries, have to be mined (Gill, 2022, n.p.).
The imperative of sustainability entails identifying and confronting the unsustainable, constantly improving the sustainability of value chains, and producing sustainable behavior-encouraging products. Both Stanley and Hydro Flask are on the path to doing so as it relates to sourcing materials but have yet to indicate they are exclusively using materials that are already in circulation. Stanley’s goal of using fifty percent recycled material in production in 2025 is a starting point. Still, through relationality, that measure of sustainability decreases when the transportation of fossil fuel-burning vessels, ground transportation, and packaging is considered. The more unsustainability can be removed from business processes, the more sustainable they will become. The glitz and glamour of making something new to create a more sustainable society is enticing yet deceiving. Even if entirely sourced from recycled materials, making something new involves production, packaging, and shipping. Making something new to create sustainability in every aspect of the dominant mode of living is not sustainable, either. Designing a new thing to respond to every identified problem falls backward into a mode of production focused on the mass production and consumption of sustainability solutions and the creation of waste while ignoring the abstract dimension of sustainability. Not everything can be fixed by making something new. The answer lies in making fewer things and finding ways to repurpose and recirculate existing ones. Using already circulating products encourages acting in sustainable ways and discourages unsustainability. Thrift stores are a place of sustainability and cumulatively reduce the need for certain kinds of production. More importantly, the objective is to support changes in how other aspects of daily life are related to and understood. Crucial to creating an increasingly sustainable society is creating useful invitations for creating change in how the virtual and physical worlds that are occupied are related to, understood, and engaged with. This challenging work is the often forgotten “heavy lifting” of creating a sustainable society (Fry, 2009; Maturana et al., 2016; Spinosa, Flores, & Dreyfus, 1999; Verbeek, 2006).
Simply Pawns, Simply Chessboards
In 2074, the war over how one should live was long decided, and the unsustainable was the victor. Sustainable practices persist in areas they have already been in and continue to expand. Still, they remain overwhelmed by the billions invested in maintaining the way of life society is accustomed to. In theory, sustainability exists now as a counter-culture, and futuring outcomes are still produced, though the ongoing unbridled defuturing of unsustainability outmatches them.
In 2024 and the years following, the unsustainable recognized the threat of a growing societal interest in sustainability. With an awareness of the importance of sustainability, alternative practices emerged that were designed to add time to the future. Extractive, scaling, growth economies will always exist at the core of the unsustainable, which is visible in removing non-renewable resources from the earth and transporting them to places to create products, producing with an obsession over efficiency and at scale to reduce costs and increase profits, and finally selling to stores who hire part-time help to move the product its final hundred feet to the shelf.
The extractive principle is alive and well in its consumption of additional time from employees commuting from an office building in Boston to the surrounding bedroom communities that could take hours to complete. It does not matter what one is doing; there are attempts to extract attention, time, emotion, and principally money through planned obsolescence, brilliant advertisements, and sometimes through boredom. There is always a thing attached to an economy that fills the spaces in life that would otherwise be occupied by sitting in silence, listening to the stillness, and taking a necessary respite from the ongoing assault on humans in the form of demands from occupations and opportunities to consume.
The earlier uncovering of alternatives to some aspects of the unsustainability of everyday life made the habituated way of living partially problematic. The unsustainable carefully and strategically unconcealed parts of the war but camouflaged its damaging dynamics by promoting technology-centered sustainability solutions. The technology may be helpful, but the profit model and motivation remain the same. Technology is not solely interested in the ability to sustain life and a planet to live it on. This approach masterfully creates the illusion of sustainability. Still, it is a thin veneer over the same unsustainable economy and practices that have always been present if one cares to look.
Living in What is Left
Much will be lost socially and environmentally by 2074 as changes in global temperature increase by as much as 9 degrees (Voiland, 2022). Communities in hazard-prone and already excessively hot areas in 2024 may quickly become memories by 2074 through punishing heat and more frequent and unmitigable disasters that overwhelm even the most skilled and talented response resources. There will be isolated and withdrawn living seeking comfort, shelter, and security in the extreme and sustained heat with regular disruptions, including disasters, emergencies, and breakdowns in socio-technical systems. Isolation will disconnect social processes, slowing and deteriorating activity in social networks, leading to the loss of community stability, emotional inner coherence, and the resilience needed to overcome disaster (Maturana & Verden-Zöller, 2008). Emotions bridge and mix the gap from concrete biology to abstract social behaviors such as those concerned with sustainability. From one prominent narrative, emotions singularly influence how community members relate to one another and everything around them. Certain emotions or moods can lead to the pursuit of sustainability (Maturana et al., 2016; Maturana & Verden-Zöller, 2008).
Social relations may change as disaster damage and extreme heat significantly reduce physical interactions and are replaced by virtual ones. From a dystopian angle, virtual interactions over the phone, text, video chat, messenger services, and voice messages may keep the community connected. However, virtual reactions are without the value, pleasure, and meaning of being physically near one another. Virtual networks may not be equal to social networks driven by the emotion of acceptance, built primarily through physical interactions within a community, and produce altruistic, cooperative, and protective behaviors (Maturana & Varela, 1992). Social networks engaging in cooperative sustainability behaviors outside may also become rarer as heat increases throughout the year, reducing opportunities for physical labor to take place comfortably and safely. Focusing on security and individual safety further erodes connectivity, relationships with others, and care and concern for the rest of the community and its ability to persist through varying conditions. Instead of a community of people connected through a social process, it devolves into an isolated landscape of dwellings with occupants indifferent towards others who cannot sustain the community as a community and overcome disaster. The demise of the sense of humanness attached to social process will devalue individuals who will be observed or interacted with as “the other,” or “agents,” or some idea of “automata,” but absent will be recognition or concern for the human. (Maturana & Verden-Zöller, 2008). To the extent that this has already happened within the United States, it should be expected to increase exponentially by 2074 and beyond as threats increase by severity and occurrence.
During the war between sustainability and unsustainability, it was surely known, even if by only a few hundred in corporate America, that all that was being distinguished as unsustainable would eventually have profound externalities on economic, physical, social, and natural systems. Of course, not all corporations and businesses are equally complicit in the dystopian future to follow. It is hard to imagine a Chief Executive Officer of a Fortune 20 corporation making physical products comprehensively redirecting in light of new information. Yet, some undoubtedly were informed, recognized the threat to the future of business as usual, and made corrections that would not undo the past but contribute in a small way to the future.
Endpoint
It is imaginable that investors, shareholders, board members, and a handful of the top Fortune companies C-Suites recognized that their business model and practices would long be favorable, but not indefinitely. Evading the planning of many was an undeniable, distant, and dynamic endpoint that would be met when all the value to extract has been extracted due to shifts in society’s consumption and lifestyle priorities, substantial environmental condition changes, the depletion of nonrenewable resources, and the possible beginning of population decline in the United States. In more ways than one, corporations and businesses collectively define the endpoint of their normative practices by destroying the very things that support them.
The endpoint to common practice will remain, even with hundreds of millions living in the United States. Well into the next century, diasporas will continue. There will be increasing heat, intensifying political violence, disasters previously unimaginable occurring with what feels like regular frequency, complex emergencies arising from natural hazard events, and transitioning into violent widespread conflict. Buying water and food involves the heavy presence of armed security guards. At this point in the future, well into the next century, everyday life will change radically for the worse. The sounds of this period have already been recorded, including Night is Coming Forever, Hell is Here, and The Slaughter Tapes. In this future, priorities will shift away from the general pattern of mass consumption of status symbols and hedonistic purchases, upgrading to the latest technology, impulse and planned online shopping, traveling, buying through targeted ads, and begin focusing on security, firearms, ammunition, weapons, maintaining shelter in extreme weather, having a constant supply of lab-grown food, and evading or protecting oneself from the multiplicative of conflicts taking place across the United States. Without assistance, the disadvantaged, the elderly, and those too fearful or unable to defend themselves struggle to secure enough food and water. Hunger is a pervasive issue. Producers may adapt and find consumers by targeting firearms, ammunition, bulletproof vests, security systems, drones, food and water services, and the insurance market. Economically, it will be remarkably different from what it was and be able to support drastically fewer people. The previous system ended in a world where it no longer mattered. The endpoint was reached, like the burning Hindenburg collapsing into the ground.
For the many who still have outrageous wealth in the last half of the next century and desire to have even more, they may see the needs of the surviving (but far from thriving) market and establish a "protection" or "safety" industry they can grow, scale, and extract value from potential consumers who do not know peace or stability but are too familiar with pain and desperation. Innovators will continue anticipating the market’s needs through a barrage of useful, semi-useful, and utterly useless products. They will relentlessly ideate, innovate, and move products to market with speed in an attempt to rebuild even a fraction of what existed decades ago. Successes will be had in the parts of the populated United States affluent enough to take a chance on a new product with slightly added value that may support their daily existence.
Generation after generation was designed into the traditional way of living with unsustainability and hedonism at its core, unaware that they were perpetuating a system that would extract until it could extract no further. The end, if not first redirected and unchecked, would be at the cost of environmental degradation, pollution, waste, loss of social process and a sense of humanity, isolation, digging further into the earth, pushing technology ahead of the ethics and infrastructure to manage it, and the continual concealment of the unsustainable aspects of production and a “thing in use” in favor of the added sustainability components. Those who make the overly designed everyday life possible are not in search of regeneration. They search for or develop needs, extract value from the earth and others involved in production and sales, and finally, those who have the need the product was designed for, as long as this model has markets supporting it. Founded on a habituated and comfortable mode of everyday living, these basic business practices will continue directing operations until they are no longer viable and find a definite end to perpetually extractive, scaling, and growth economies. It should be well known that the current linked system of consumption and production was never meant to last, be sustained, or infinite. This way of living was always in search of death, an unrecognized heading sustained across time driven by industry, economics, and the magnetic pull of a familiar way of life. Its search for death is indicated by the constant degradation of a world brought into being by mass production and consumption. As the disaster severity and commonality associated with climate change and its hazardous force lay desolate to the nation, bonuses will still paid out. At the same time, Americans put it all back together. Paychecks will continue to be deposited before and likely past the bitter end.
2074 arrives with far different conditions, meriting new behaviors. As anticipated, the world warmed 9 degrees from 2024 to 2074, though the exciting part is the effect this has on daily life. The forthcoming dystopian image is rooted in Maricopa County, Arizona, where Phoenix is located. Below is a brief inventory of hazards relevant to the community and a picture of everyday dystopian life.
Heat
The changing climate has posed challenges throughout the country, most notably in Western states where temperatures have increased by the extreme projection of 9 degrees. In 2074, the American West continues to experience hazardous events associated with higher temperatures, including extreme heatwaves, drought, wildfires, monsoonal torrential rains, and dust storms. As everyday temperatures have increased, deadly heat waves are far more common and appear in months where they historically have not.
Maricopa County, Arizona, has had a considerable influence on this essay due to its location, hazards, and potential in 2074 to be a challenging and dangerous place to live. Maricopa, and Arizona for that matter, is consistently regarded as hot in the literature:
“There’s no denying it - Arizona is hot. It’s not a coincidence that Arizona boasts more places with the word hell in their names than any other state. There are fifty-five of them, ranging from Hell Hole to Hellgate Mountain, not to mention several different Hell Canyons” (McDaniel & Mead, 2009, p.22).
Wang et al. (2021) report that in Maricopa County, “The daily maximum temperature can reach 120 °F (48.9 °C) with the all-time record highest temperature of 122 °F (50 °C), which occurred on June 26, 1990” (n.p.). The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (2023) reports the hottest days from 1896-2023.
Top 5 Hottest Days:
1. 122 (26 Jun 1990)
2. 121 (28 Jul 1995)
3. 120 (25 Jun 1990)
4. 119 (25 Jul 2023)
119 (20 Jul 2023 and 2 other times; National Weather Service National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, 2023)
Chernikoff (2024) reports on September 3, 2024, that “On Tuesday, [Phoenix] hit its 100th straight day of 100-degree temperatures” (n.p.). To this, in 2074, 9 degrees or more can be added. An impending change of this intensity, even if over fifty years, will increase heat-related deaths, illnesses, wildfires, and other hazards and challenge the sustainability of the grid, both in terms of its ability to sustain the delivery of enough power and do so using sustainable renewable sources. Even if the global temperature increases by only 5 degrees, this would still be an issue for Phoenix, Maricopa County, and, variably, most of the United States. While Phoenix has already experienced 100 straight days over 100 degrees, it can be easily imagined that there would be heatwaves in 2074 of far more consecutive days averaging at least 109 degrees or higher, with sustained peaks of considerably more as Phoenix has already recorded highs around 120 degrees. This is the baseline from late spring into early fall. Temperatures as high as 122 degrees have already been recorded. If the 9-degree global temperature is realized, frequent temperatures around 131 degrees should be expected. Phoenix has and continues to experience the extreme temperatures mentioned above.
Suppose extreme temperatures were to sustain for 100 days as they are now but longer and considerably higher in the depths of summer. As questioned above, would the renewable energy systems attached to most homes and the grid run by a utility or municipality keep up with cooling and power demands? What is the contingency if these systems break down amid a week of 120 to 130-degree days with little reprieve at night? What if the utility has no choice but to shut off power to decrease fire risk immensely? Would the community be safe for hours or days? Could the remaining office buildings and multiplicative data centers (see “The City”) maintain the critically required temperatures? How will human safety be guaranteed? Thankfully, Maricopa County is already homebound during the hotter months, which will expand in 2074. Still, community member survival is linked to the continuous performance of energy systems, air conditioning units, or heat pumps. Assuming cooling technology has kept pace with rising temperatures, how many homeowners replaced old units with new heat-adapted technology? How up-to-date or how antiquated is the collective cooling system throughout the community? What is the total risk of failure and exposure? The failure of an air conditioning unit could, in all likelihood, be fatal to the occupants, who would have no other means to regulate the internal temperature and no social relations with other community members who could take them in. If they have the social process to find another place to go, the group still relies on an appliance that may not be designed for this environment and is now forced to cool more people. In 2074, Maricopa County has become increasingly dangerous and deadly. An article in the MIT Technology Review by bCrownhart (2021) explores the human threshold for heat. Three quotes on the topic are provided below.
30% of the world’s population is exposed to a deadly combination of heat and humidity for at least 20 days each year, that percentage will increase to nearly half by 2100, even with the most drastic reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions.
Problems start when our bodies can’t lose heat fast enough (or lose it too fast in the cold, but let’s focus on heat for now). When your core temperature gets too hot, everything from organs to enzymes can shut down. Extreme heat can lead to major kidney and heart problems, and even brain damage, says Liz Hanna a former public health researcher at the Australian National University, who studies extreme heat.
95 °F, is pretty much the absolute limit of human tolerance, says Zach Schlader a physiologist at Indiana University Bloomington. Above that, your body won’t be able to lose heat to the environment efficiently enough to maintain its core temperature. That doesn’t mean the heat will kill you right away, but if you can’t cool down quickly, brain and organ damage will start (n.p.)
Operating above 95 degrees for extended periods repeatedly is possible experientially. However, considering the above, those critical operations may have been at the expense of minor or temporary damage. This also opens questions about physical fitness relative to heat. Given the above, the dystopian speculative image of extended extreme heatwaves with highs around 130 degrees is not biologically survivable. The excerpt below details recent heat-related fatalities from 2022 to 2023. If the global temperature increases by at least five degrees in 2074, how many lives will be lost to heat-related illnesses then? The future starts to disappear before it is reached.
For eight straight years, Maricopa County has set a record for heat-related deaths. In 2023, there were 645 according to the Maricopa County Department of Public Health’s annual report, obliterating the previous record of 425 in 2022. From 2021 to 2023, thirteen times more people died of heat-related causes than from 2001 to 2003, just two decades before (Smith, Goff, & Kaufman, 2024, n.p.).
The years yet to come should also be considered. What about 2090? 2100? 2120? How will the West survive and afford to do so? With each word, the future is lost.
Dust
Due to heat and, in some areas, the availability of the excessive amount of water needed for irrigation, steadily deteriorating farmland prevailed throughout the West. Fields that were once highly productive and active with workers were now abandoned sources for more dust reaching every corner of Maricopa County, as was the case broadly throughout the West. Even the once-busy streets of Phoenix had a layer of dust on them streaking the windows of buildings. Professional dust filters were added to air conditioning units to prevent bringing it indoors. The dust has been a worsening issue in most states, especially those where agriculture previously had a considerable footprint, though drought conditions and dry soil further added to the problem. The inhospitable conditions for farming caused by the heat described above and the devaluing of the land left behind legions of acres of pale, weightless dirt, void of any moisture, easily swept up by passing diurnal winds and transported elsewhere. Strong winds and gusts passing by can easily create a dust storm, producing a dangerous hazard for those in the path.
The dust has also been created by drought affecting other soil and far-reaching sprinkler bans, leading to the death of the American fetishized lawn. As the heat around the country continued to rise to new highs and sustain for more extended periods, the grass quickly died, revealing the soil that became exposed to the sun and was integrated into passing winds, landing on sidewalks, windows, cars, streets, roofs, animals, and people, including internally as it entered their mouths and dried out the membranes in their noses and injured the lungs of children, adults, and the elderly. Many species of wild tall grass and brush that had, essentially, been holding the dirt in place and playing important ecological roles had thinned out due to heat as an invasive species arrived in hordes, decimating grasses and low-lying shrubs. In 2074, there was hardly an aspect of life that did not involve a concern for dust blowing in faces and entering homes, cars, and businesses. In addition to the heat, dust was another factor that made the outside increasingly hostile and damaging.
Wildfires
In 2074, in Arizona and beyond, fewer people are willing to risk living in the wildland-urban interface despite being captivated by vegetated and scenic areas within the mountains. Heat and dust decreased camping and recreation in public lands, and fewer people living in the wildland-urban interface collectively reduced wildfire ignitions. The erratic monsoon season supports vegetation growth, while wildfire frequency declined sharply. All the while, latent vegetation loads, intensity, severity, and extreme fire behavior increased exponentially, especially during record heat and periods of low relative humidity. A single cloud-to-ground lightning strike could erupt kiln-dried towering, overgrown vegetation into a summer-long campaign fire moving quickly and explosively.
The relationship between rain and wildfire must be understood. In its immediacy, rain is distinguished as a natural occurrence preventing forest fires. Generally unaccounted for is the fact that rain also drives and accelerates vegetation growth, most noticeably brush, which creates a more explosive fire environment through increased fuel presence, continuity, and density. In the wildfire context, periods of rain may exacerbate, rather than diminish, risk.
Before and after monsoon, wildfire risk remains historically high within Maricopa County and neighboring National Forests, including the Prescott, Tonto, Coconino, Sitgreaves, and the Apache-Sitgreaves. Surrounding county and state land have identical problems as described above, producing high-intensity and severe wildfires displaying extreme behavior. A variable sea of gray hues remains after the towering column subsides and the firefighters leave.
Aircraft and heavy equipment support fire suppression during day operations as it is too hot to deploy ground resources. Ground resources attack the fire at night with historically low numbers. When there is a fire, there is no hope of catching it in the initial period. The fire slips right through the hands of first-on-scene resources. It evades control until an indirect fireline constructed by ground crews and possibly bulldozers, supported by aviation and firing operations, can gain an advantage. Still, success is mixed. The variety of wildfires in 2074 is incomparable to those in 2024. Inside and outside Arizona, rates of spread similar to the 2003 Cedar Fire, which reached up to 40,000 acres per hour, are not uncommon in sustained runs due to climate change, prolonged drought conditions, lack of ignitions, growth, and centuries of overly aggressive firefighting. Historically, aggressive direct firefighting, even in situations that did not warrant it, constricted wildfires, causing them to burn less and allowing more significant areas of vegetation to continue growing, leaving more fuel for later fires. The wildfires for 2074 rarely leave anything behind amidst a foot of ash that glints like glass in the sun and produces towering columns of smoke that affect air quality throughout Arizona and the neighboring states.
Massive and valiant prescribed fires were conducted in the years leading up to and including 2074. However, maintaining regrowth in prescribed fire bun areas that can pose a greater fire risk than initially existed is challenging. As a result, prescribed fire burn scars often became more problematic than before. This issue was identical to that observed in National Forests, which slowly became more burn scar than vegetated forests. There were burn areas in multiple stages of recovery, some of which would take generations. In contrast, others that had burned much earlier showed signs of regrowth, increasing fire risk from the beginning that must be managed. Eventually, there will be regrowth, and the wildfire problem will continue, likely in a distant and more conducive environment.
In 2074, the management of wildfires reflects one policy failure after another and one missed opportunity after another. The appropriate way to manage fire became an increasingly highly divisive subject, fractioning groups into what appears more as warring religious sects or tribes than fire management professionals. Individuals were acting enthusiastically to redirect wildfire practice in 2024. There were indeed success stories in the decades prior. Still, legal defeats and constraints around culture and practice perpetuated what always was (Juarrero, 2023). Sustainable practice operated, but not at the unsustainable scale, a familiar imbalance still in search of death in the wildfire setting. Something could have been done at any moment if those in key positions in the past had made different decisions, particularly those concerned with the future. While sitting inside in 2074 as the dust blows by, the outside temperature is 128 degrees, and two wildfire smoke columns punch through the troposphere in the distance, there are plenty of reminders that different decisions could have been made a very long time ago that would have created a very different day today.
Monsoon Thunderstorms
Cerveny, Saffell, and Likourinou (n.d.) report that “in 2008, Arizona weather agencies and researchers decided to define the monsoon season as June 15 to September 30.” (n.p.). Random and often brief monsoon thunderstorms affect Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada, Texas, and sometimes California. The critical mechanism of monsoon is a wind shift in Arizona from a flow of westerly winds into the state that maintains dry conditions for most of the year to southerly winds. According to Cerveny, Saffell, and Likourinou, “These southerly winds often transport low-level moisture, triggering summer thunderstorms” (n.d.;n.p.). The same article explains that monsoon thunderstorms and convection are caused by intense surface heating and the subsequent rising of warm air. The temperature range required to generate these thunderstorms ranges from 100 to 108 degrees, with 105 being ideal. Bernardi (2022) discusses a research study and reports, “By analyzing ancient climate data, the scientists suspect that higher temperatures could cause stronger and more widespread summer rainfall across the southwest United States “ (n.p.). If this is the case, the speculated high temperatures of a few degrees above 130 could increase the spread and strength of rainfall. Still, this association is simplistic due to the complexity of weather. Becker (2021) provides further detail: “The impacts of the monsoon go beyond just rainfall amounts. There is also an important relationship between rainfall and temperature: usually, more rain leads to cooler conditions, and less rain leads to hotter conditions”(n.p.).
The heavy rainfall from brief monsoon thunderstorms led to flash floods that claimed the lives of nine people in Phoenix in July 2017. While the conditions of the neighboring National Forests will be considerably worse than in 2017, a recent wildfire that left behind hydrophobic soil and blackened vegetation, in combination with the hardness of the forest’s mountainous land, crested conditions where rain could cascade down slopes absorbing fire debris including the remains of trees and brush, ash, dirt, brush, and trees, in a flow of rainfall that crashes into previously dry river drainage causing problems for adjacent developments for miles and any contact the mix of debris and water has with the urban areas and roads. Existing waterways and roads can swell quickly (Di Liberto, 2017). If monsoon thunderstorms causing flash floods were to increase in intensity and frequency in 2074, related deaths, home damage, and runoff from inside and outside burn areas would worsen, increasing the risk of life in Maricopa County.
Quotidian Existence in a World Created by Design
The focus now turns to the experience of a dystopian future fifty years in the making. What might the experience of life be like in 2074? After this dystopian future arrives, which was slowly created throughout the preceding decades, everyday experiences are dominated by an escape from pain for most of the year in the Maricopa County community of Sunset Estates. Years ago, this community was known for its rolling lawns, children playing in the streets, and neighborhood cookouts, but these are all memories. There are months when outdoor recreation is possible and those where it is somewhat possible, while the rest of the year quickly becomes unwelcoming, dangerous, and even life-threatening.
The experience of daily life is mainly shared. A Sunset Estates resident returns home just after six on a July weekday from work on a required workday in the office in a dust-covered Phoenix. Sometimes, they drive into the office to change scenery and interact with other humans in person. The outdoor temperature reading in their vehicle indicated it was 119 degrees outside. As they pulled up to their home, they saw the sun shades over each window facing West, which were closed as they almost always were. They bought this home with their partner thirty years ago, raised children, and sent them to college. When the house was purchased, temperatures of 110 to 115 degrees were typical and seasonal and could reach as high as 120 degrees for several days. In 2074, this temperature pattern changed, with more than 150 days of temperatures of over 110 degrees. Periodic extreme heatwaves could feature a week or more of temperatures over 120 degrees, with highs regularly cresting over 130. Random days of extreme highs were experienced, and the late spring and early fall saw consistent temperatures ranging from 100 to 110. The sunshades had gone up fifteen years ago as the battle between seeing the outside world and comfort and cooling costs was won.
The Sunset Estates development was forty years old and was an uninformed idea even before it was constructed. It was built facing West. This guaranteed the homes in the community would have maximum sun exposure and face cooling challenges even a year after the first families moved in. The decision was more concerned with lot size, how big the homes could be, and profit. It was an economic decision made without considering the future. Sunset Estates now bakes in the sun most of the day, requiring considerable energy to cool each home. While all have solar tiles and often accessory panels and batteries, these small systems are frequently outstripped and require the grid powered by a mix of renewable and nonrenewable energy from the Palo Verde nuclear power generating station. The county continues to acquire land to build more solar farms.
The homeowner walks out of the garage and across the xeriscaped property they installed after lawns could not be sustained. Walking through immense and oppressive heat with a faint breeze of scorching air as they approached their near industrial-sized air conditioner covered by a canopy staked to the ground. They carried out their evening ritual of listening quickly and confirming the unit was operating correctly as the sweat started to be noticeable. They returned to the garage, closed it, and entered their home, where their air conditioning unit struggled to keep it below 76 in a room with no natural sunlight. They had considered selling multiple times. When selling was possible, the homeowners would still have suffered a loss due to the undesirable environment, the costs of cooling the home most of the year, the emptying of Phoenix, and a massive decrease in prospective home buyers in many Western states. At this point, no one was buying, and the homeowners still there were awake in a nightmare they could not escape.
Over half of the giant development of Sunset Estates was empty. Some former homeowners read the situation early and decided to sell, even if that meant taking a loss, as they wanted to avoid living there any longer and have their homes lose even more value. Those who had the means paid off their homes and left them vacant. Some escaped to states with cooler months or left the United States altogether to move to the Lapland countries that enjoyed darkness for less than half the year. More than one global pandemic in fifty years decreased the population, leaving a few houses in places like Sunset Estates abandoned with cars still parked in the driveway. With no next of kin due to the decision to not procreate, it became the bank’s problem.
Living in Sunset Estates and being a part of the larger county was significantly departed from the experience it once was. Pain, frustration, isolation, indifference, and suspicion were now the dominant emotions. Most of the year, residents of Sunset Estates and neighboring communities were homebound, exercising in their basements, bedrooms, or gyms. Couples and families spend most of their time living in ignorance, isolation, and indifference to one another. As a result, social-relational processes critical to community-building and resilience have been lost, and an essential component of existence dies in the process. The material elements that support a difficult existence are owned or are attainable, though it is still a life hiding from the sun, dust, and smoke and living in processed air. In the future, many will exist, and most will live with far more significant physical and mental discomfort than in 2074. The soundtrack of 2074, as presented here, has already been recorded across titles, including The DeathShow, You Will Never Survive This Nightmare, The Death of the World, and The Arrival of the Dull Triumphant Death.
The Children
In a rural town in Maricopa County, there is a regional middle school. The schoolyard is frequented by small cyclones swirling with dust. The permanent water ban on sprinklers has made maintaining a lawn impractical, and budget cuts have made turf unreachable. Due to the heat, students learn behind blackout curtains under LED lighting for heat safety. It is all artificial. Long indoor physical education classes supplement the traditional outdoor recess time. In the parts of the year where being outside in the morning is feasible, teachers let the children spend time in the fresh air. Throughout the year, children have little contact with the world, and if they do, it is limited to playing on an old jungle gym in a dirt field. Teachers who remember a more livable environment keep watch of the temperature and the time, ensuring it does not exceed the threshold of 90. An extra fifteen or thirty minutes is deserved when it can be managed. Teachers and students alike benefit from the time spent outdoors.
The context children grow in is critical to how they develop. Internally, this context plays a considerable, but not a direct factor, in the correlations between the nervous system’s sensor and effector surfaces, changing how children sense their surroundings and react to them through motion. The expression of genes, or the attempted expression of genes, occurs in the same context where specific chronic pressures and disruptions prevent certain expressions (Juarrero, 2023; Maturana & Varela, 1992; Maturana et al., 2016). Due to the children’s extreme, unpredictable, variable, and dangerous context, filled with their worry and constant anticipation of the subsequent adverse event, the concern of the adults around them, and emotionally and optically overwhelming events, children grow up nervous, anxious, scared, and in increasing emotional pain. The frontline treatment is new-generation benzodiazepines, which have fewer side effects and are easier to stop and then start taking again than older generations of the same class of drug. The children carry these emotions that become amplified over time as they enter their youth and adulthood. The level of uncertainty that permeates the children’s lives and the uneasiness that it creates leads to the development of future coping mechanisms, including over-exercising indoors, alcohol and drug abuse, and rising cases of suicide during the high school years.
These children and youths are very different from those who existed before the 2040s. They know how to navigate streets, not in the woods. They take vitamin D and sit in front of sunlamps. They had a few months of being able to recreate outside here and there, but their existence was primarily indoors. By the fall, after graduating high school in Maricopa County, all the students had generally already left for colleges and universities that were far, far away. They carry memories of life indoors, running from dust storms, wildfires, and flash floods, hardly as much as seeing the outdoors during extreme heat season. This is the world design (Fry, 1999).
Recreation
Children, youth, and adults exercise indoors at 100 degrees or hotter. Massive indoor gyms with weights, stationary bikes, spin classes, running tracks, rock climbing and climbing walls, trampolines, swimming pools, gymnastics equipment, indoor mountain bike parks, and indoor road track cycling velodromes have all become exceedingly popular. While cooling these places is challenging, patrons happily pay the requisite price. These gyms give children of all ages and adults a place to be active without worrying about dehydration, heat exhaustion, heat stroke, or rhabdomyolysis. It is also a place to be social and maintain and strengthen relationships in a part of the country that is disappearing. Social-relational processes are critical to overcoming repeat and tremendous adversity. However, socializing is becoming more and more lost with each generation.
While there is no organized and generally safe or recommendable summertime recreation in 2074 in Maricopa, it is often possible in the winter to early spring months, which were still sometimes as much as almost ten degrees warmer than in 2024. Although recreation is possible, dust-swept roads, lonely trails, and an absent sense of community detracted from the experience. During the depths of the winter months, hikers traversed dusty trails lined by unwelcoming heat-adapted vegetation. They even covered their airways and hiked through the ash of burn scars to get to the few remaining vegetated drainages, canyons, and ridgelines. Rock climbers, boulderers, cyclists, runners, and outdoor enthusiasts of all varieties took advantage of the window to exercise outside, having been training indoors all year. Promoters across the sports compressed as many formal events as possible and continued doing so until it was unsafe to proceed. The participants then retreated inside—those who venture outdoors after this window risk quick onset dehydration, heat sicknesses, and rhabdomyolysis. The number of rhabdomyolysis cases continues to soar in the county as those desperate to be outdoors become overpowered by the emotion of passion for their sport, and they quickly lose rationality and overextend themselves, even in the evening hours.
The dystopian future of a dominantly indoor existence defies the memories of those who live in 2024. Those in their thirties and later in 2024 remember riding bikes around the neighborhood, the days of competing in summertime sports, playing in the neighbor’s pool, cookouts, climbing trees, catching bugs, fourth of July fireworks, popsicles on the porch, playing basketball in the driveway, building forts in the woods, and family trips to National Parks and Forests. Fifty years from now, these scenarios will rarely exist, considering rapid onset hazards, hydration challenges, and a deteriorating understanding of the value of social relations. While the way of living in 2074 remains dominantly unsustainable, the way society orbits around the same ideals of mass consumption has changed since 2074. As mentioned earlier, a minor ongoing shift in priorities is observable fifty years from now. Consumption is not exclusively driven by hedonism and ownership but by safety, security, and robustness spread across their lives. Society is beginning to be contorted into a form representing fear and uncertainty and redefining the ability to protect one’s family. This contortion was described in much more severe terms earlier with the corresponding rise of the “survival industry.”
Local Agriculture
There is an old empty agriculture field between two old roads that was likely paved at one point with rows of towering junipers on the other side. The junipers are neither entirely dead nor fully alive, though the farm is void of life. Its role now is to be a source of dust. This is the case for farm after farm. Farms that had held on the longest invested heavily in various irrigation technologies used at night to decrease evaporation. Still, even then, the evaporation rate was too fast to irrigate crops cost-effectively and was impossible during the day. In addition to night irrigation, there was occasional day watering, but it was inefficient and ineffective; many felt there was no other choice. Costs quickly increased to water the crops and became unreasonable by 2050. In 2074, attempting traditional agriculture in the county no longer made economic sense.
The USDA (2022) Census of Agriculture County Profile County Profile for Maricopa County, Arizona, lists the following crops:
Grains, oilseeds, dry beans, dry peas
Tobacco
Cotton and cottonseed
Vegetables, melons, potatoes, sweet potatoes
Fruits, tree nuts, berries
Nursery, greenhouse, floriculture, sod
Cultivated Christmas trees, short rotation woody crops
Other crops and hay (USDA, 2022, p.2)
A document prepared by the University of Arizona Cooperative Extension in 2020 stated:
Though small relative to total economic activity in the county, agriculture in Maricopa County plays a prominent role in the state’s production of agricultural commodities. The county’s fertile river valley land has been farmed for centuries by indigenous peoples. Today, a variety of crops are grown, including cotton, vegetables and melons, hay, and grains, however, county production is dominated by livestock, specifically milk production (p.2; italics added).
While milk production is mentioned, the University of Arizona and the Arizona Cattle Grower’s Association also mention beef cattle, and the USDA (2022) mentions hogs and pigs.
Decades before 2074, farmers were still functioning in an extractive economy, recuperating slowly rising costs by passing them on to distributors, who passed them on to stores and, ultimately, customers. Over time, each entity in this chain started charging the next person more and more to offset the increasing costs at the farm. At the same time, labor costs had increased at the source to correspond with the challenges of working in sustained punishing heat and finding individuals who wanted to work in the related industries. To the most recent generation, it felt normal. Distributors in the same extractive economic model sought to regain higher costs by charging grocery stores more. In turn, grocery stores must recuperate higher costs by reducing the cost of a part-timer displaying and maintaining the products and, finally, by raising the customers' prices. Everybody won, except for the part-timers and, of course, the customer.
In 2050, farmers in Maricopa County were still attempting to run massive farms in the summer heat in regular temperatures as hot as 115 degrees with days over 120. Gradually, like grains of sand added to a pile, a critical threshold broke the extractive economy, making farms in the county, or anywhere else, possible. Business with Maricopa County farms was no longer viable for distributors. Distributors could not afford Maricopa prices driven by sustained overnight irrigation and labor costs. They could also not charge stores a high enough price to turn the expected profit. This was not an issue isolated to Maricopa County or even Arizona. Farmers were forced to spend far more than they could ever hope to extract from the economy to keep farms running. This was an issue of labor, climate, hazard events, and what the customer would pay for any agricultural products from Maricopa County. Upper consumer spending limits were soon reached, and items sat on shelves.
The loss was felt as every last farm and ranch closed down in Maricopa County due to the impossibility of keeping them operating. Looking beyond the county at farming nationwide in the same climate, agricultural outputs and products made with these products started to become in short supply. Major grocers turned further toward South America, which was, of course, having the very same problem. Shelves started to look as barren as the farmer’s fields. All options were on the table as grocers struggled to develop a strategy to restore offerings. By the early 2050s, farming was definitively over in Maricopa and across the West, while agriculture was alive in many eastern and midwestern states. Vacant farmland in Maricopa County was not an attractive location for agricultural innovations. Still, many empty fields elsewhere eventually became home to indoor technologies to regrow what would subsequently be lost across the country by 2074. Until these approaches can reliably scale, non-lab gown agricultural products are a rare and expensive addition to any meal.
Farmland void of life in the county now sits empty in 2074 as the owners have minimal options that are far from guaranteed, including selling the land for solar or wind farms, indoor agriculture, and technology companies. Looking at an impossible situation, owners understood they had held onto the land for too long and that it would likely be worth nothing. Not even the developers wanted it, as no one was likely to move to the area. The top few inches of the soil had been scorched and taken on an uneven consistency. Chronic long-duration stretches of temperatures between 120 degrees and the low to mid 130 degrees damaged the soil, leaving the top layer hydrophobic, causing water to run off the mounded rows of plants instead of being absorbed by the crops.
Cattle
A rising tide lifts all boats, and century-high temperatures oppress, disrupt, and complicate all activity. In addition to the crops mentioned above, cattle for beef and milk are a component of total agriculture activity in the county.
Ideal conditions for beef and dairy cattle include a temperature range between 41° and 77° F. Higher temperatures begin to cause stress in cattle, depending on environmental factors such as shade, access to water, relative humidity, diet, surrounding vegetation, and terrain. More significant amounts of fat in heavier cattle cause them to suffer from heat stress more and, similarly, lactating cattle have more internal heat to dissipate than non-lactating animals (USDA, 2013, n.p.).
This ideal temperature range is already exceeded for much of 2024, and these conditions will not exist in 2074 in Maricopa County. To maintain the ideal range presented by the USDA (2013) in 2074, cattle must be moved into expansive indoor artificial environments with water and food availability and constant cooling. Compared to water troughs, other water sources, and open ranges, the cost of safely raising cattle will increase astronomically. The Maricopa County milk and beef industries will try to cover their investment by raising prices but soon discover a limit to what consumers will pay for their products.
The City
Miles from the school is the city of Phoenix. It has apartments, office buildings, and a few operating restaurants. Like the apartments, many office buildings lost their tenants floor by floor and now sit empty. In many office buildings, businesses could not pay enough to attract workers to move to the area and eventually gave in to remote work. Businesses now operate as a vast network of laptops in air-conditioned homes. As the years inched closer to 2074, blackout sunshades and centralized air conditioning were insufficient to keep the buildings at a temperature where the occupants were comfortable and performing. The building owners refused to replace the air conditioning unit uniformly, citing price as the primary obstacle. Price became an increasingly valid excuse as floors were vacated. Property owners who started to lose money quickly joined others and sold the building for its data center capacity. Owners took a loss on the leases of the remaining occupants. They threw caution to the wind with any legal obstacles as they would make significantly more leasing to technology companies who wanted space for storage and artificial intelligence.
Legal difficulties never came. Previous tenants who had been put on the street finally had the freedom to leave the nightmare of Maricopa County as multi-year leases were suddenly defunct. By the end of 2074, most of the vacant office buildings will be converted into data centers. Due to their number and demands, data centers rely on a mixture of energy sources but presently rely heavily on nonrenewable energy sources. The companies that stayed in Phoenix had a local workforce with additional remote workers and occupied part or the entirety of one of the few office buildings left in the city that had not gone the way of a data center. Maintaining an office presence was clinging to a tradition that had long lost almost all of its utility aside from supporting fleeting social processes.
As mentioned earlier, Arizona is hot. In 2074, Phoenix and Maricopa County are unsurvivably hot during extreme temperatures. The city was hotter at night than the surrounding communities. In Phoenix, the office buildings, roofs, walkways, and streets heat up early during the day, storing and emitting heat. These surfaces continue to release heat in the evening and throughout much of the night. At night, a few restaurants opened, although they charged exorbitant prices due partly to the difficulty of obtaining real ingredients such as produce and proteins. Two bars remained. Both bars and restaurants benefitted the socialness left in Maricopa County.
As it currently exists in 2024, Maricopa County's image, similar to Las Vegas's, is a picture of something that should not exist, and this will become increasingly evident by 2074. For Maricopa, water may not be an issue now or in the future due to its prevalence in the Salt and Verde Rivers, ground and reclaimed water, and access to the Colorado River. Higher evaporation rates due to blistering heat in 2074 may reduce water availability only slightly. The county’s population reduction and the abandonment of agriculture in 2050 have reduced water demands significantly and will support the county in 2074 and further, with a dependency on how other locations use water.
Retrospectively, building cities and associated towns and bedroom communities in the desert needs more awareness, understanding, and forethought. While it may not have been an issue when concrete was first poured, this is where dystopian speculative fiction shines. It opens a vast space for generating possible futures, some based on available data, some based on observations over time, and some based on emotion (Thompson, 2007). What arises are several different futures that should be avoided and some that should be pursued. While unlikely, this exercise may have introduced awareness of the enormous problem being constructed that would appear in time as it has in 2074. The decades to follow will be exceedingly less kind to populations living in areas such as Maricopa County, where humanity has long overstayed its welcome.
Commerce
Having already replaced the United States Postal Service as part of Amazon’s neoliberal fantasy, the ongoing diaspora from areas experiencing extreme and deadly heat rendered much of Amazon’s western infrastructure without purpose, and no one to buy it. By 2074, Amazon’s relevancy was diminishing in sparsely populated regions, if not entire states, as it would continue to do into the next century. Amazon would withdraw from areas where it was not likely to generate profits. The corporation cut its losses and followed the population.
Amazon’s ongoing retreat from formerly densely populated areas that have become undesirable places to live due to hazard events, weather, and diminished opportunities provided an opening for a deluge of startups, each determined to revive twenty-four-hour shipping in these now sparsely populated areas - and turn a profit. Each startup thought they knew the challenges of this enterprise and promised investors they could solve the problem of the West, its dispersed population, and shopping needs. Startups promised it was possible due to new technology in drones and drone aviation, innovative robotic packaging, newly efficient route planning technology, and a fleet of electric supervised self-driving semi-trucks. These were, of course, nearly impossible promises to keep. A new comparable marketplace would need to be developed. One is in creation in 2074 to replace Amazon, which abandoned much of the West but will take years to develop and popularize for merchants and consumers.
Transition
Some may react to the speculative situation in Maricopa County in 2074 with ideas of climate adaptation. Adapt to which environmental conditions? How far into the future can we adapt before new conditions must be adapted? What is the personal and public investment? Regardless of when the question is asked, the amount of mental, emotional, cognitive, physical, diplomatic, negotiating, communication, and political energy needed to actualize the needed adaptation is considerable. Adaptations might be implemented in 2060 or still actively in 2074, but across the West, the environment remains, at the very least, hostile and, at times, damaging to the human body if not altogether fatal. In 2074, and in fact, decades earlier, Maricopa County was decisively not a reasonable place to live, and it will become less so each year. Adaptations to infrastructure only encourage staying in a dangerous place where resources may have to protect those who remain repeatedly and at great personal risk. There may also be high costs associated with recovery in a place that should already be empty.
A more prudent and appropriate response in 2074 to the current threatening landscape and environment is a citizen-facilitated diaspora to less dangerous and sustainable areas (for now) where humanity's existence is not so severely and continuously threatened and where the populace can be outside without risk of internal damage caused by heat for more of the year. In 2074, every corner of the nation will have extreme and prolonged heat waves, but not to the extent and temperature Arizona experiences. Relocation to less inhospitable environments would reduce the anxiety felt by those who live in the county regarding their safety and the safety of their family and what hazard event will occur next. The pain of living a life barred from the outdoors for so many months alone is a reason to seek relocation. There is no shortage of signs it is time to leave a place so disinterested in sustaining human life.
With many societal issues now appearing too big to fix in 2074, In 2074, what appear to be impossible societal problems, it would be productive to ask how the problem is being distinguished, what the focus is, what is currently considered external, and what other issues are related. This process helps change the questions being asked about these enormous problems, and through it, a newly rotated and understood problem or set of problems may emerge. The parts of society still intact and full of social processes may have the variety needed to generate societal solutions. Restoring social processes is critical to creating groups focused on addressing unsustainability and building sustainability within their communities and across the nation as locally-based social networks connect with other social networks to amplify their collective voices, knowledge, skills, and abilities. Social process is foundational to the altruism, cooperation, reciprocity, and engagement needed to face unsustainability and engage further with sustainability, involving key stakeholders, including corporations, utilities, technology companies, governance, and the media (Maturana & Varela, 1992).
It is important to remember that the environment in Maricopa County in 2074 was not unforeseen, given the data that is available right now and a fictitious dystopian approach to living in the projected future. It was not just academics and government agencies who saw 2074 arriving the way it did if everything stayed the same; it was also the producers. Given the prevalence of climate change awareness, there was indeed knowledge of the detriment “business as usual” was causing worldwide. Considering the climate deniers, there were seldom a few in the boardrooms of the Fortune Twenty seeking more sustainable practices to avoid catastrophe. Knowing that if this was the case and climate change was acknowledged, it did not permeate or redirect toward sustainability in all business practices. This is not to say initiatives were not made, but if 2074 arrives as expected, they were wholly insufficient. It is easy to place all of the blame on the industry and production side. Doing so ignores the consumer component, consumers who prioritize pleasure, ownership, travel, and consumption made possible by businesses and corporations, which drive the dominant way of living through design. Repeating a sentiment from earlier, through production and consumption, inaction and action, ignorance and understanding, a system that continuously negates humanity’s time on earth has been created and sustained. With opportunities for change diminishing as the decades march on, the inevitable approaches.
The point has already been made: the entities that enable, support, design, and direct the dominant way of life while extracting as much value as possible and continuing to grow profits will keep doing so until this approach can no longer support itself. It will all be abandoned by investors, shareholders, board members, and the C-Suite jumping over the ship’s edge with pockets full when the system crashes into the end. It was never meant to last; it was meant to generate revenue. Some time into the next century, the endpoint may arrive when the conditions surpass a threshold where extractive growth economies would no longer produce profits. For example, the dominant way of life became more interested in the primordial need for survival, safety, and sustainable shelter in a country experiencing regular extreme weather, disasters, and food and water shortages with a historically low police presence and complex humanitarian emergencies with violent conflicts (Keen, 2008). There was no longer a consumer base or a consumer base that could support how things had been for the producers. The end had been reached, entangled with disastrous climate change.
A Societal Response
Due to the economic model pervasive in the United States and either uninformed or akratic decision-making, there is unlikely ever to be a singular grand national effort to save the future. Those who still have something to gain from how living has been carried out historically and currently will create sustainability-based solutions to emerging problems while maintaining the same motivations. Unsustainable, extractive economies, industries, and companies are driven by a reinforcing, amplifying feedback loop: the more they have, the more they want, and the larger they become (Meadows, 2008).
Likely the case throughout the United States, Maricopa County is focused on the next emergency and lacks a plan that could be implemented today to make the county as sustainable as possible and prevent the 2074 nightmare from happening. Any such plan must connect with public, private, and societal entities across the State and region. At the same time, the county might look at historical climate data and related loss of life to hazards to date, look at the projections, and consider whether it is worth taking a stand in Maricopa or saving those funds and energy for inevitable relocation. A societal-driven diaspora of internally displaced persons (whether officially or not) during or before 2074 avoids a more painful, contorting future and more deaths from heat and flash floods. It makes more sense to leave than to stay. The only thing a societal mass relocation needs from the government is funds, perhaps to buy the remaining house debt. Levels of government may even come out ahead with fewer expenditures related to preparing for, mitigating, responding to, and recovering from emergencies and disasters. There are ghost towns scattered across the West that came to the end of their useful life. Perhaps ghost towns were always a pattern doomed to repeat itself. Has 2074 not presented a set of conditions where towns and cities have reached the end of their practical life? Those alive in 2074 and beyond may live to see ghost counties and ghost cities as the dust, fire, and flood consume what was left behind.
Everything in this world is in the process of becoming. What is observed throughout a specific time may appear stable and not in process, but that merely reflects how long the present is studied and at what distance. Process is everywhere. 2024 is a picture of a continually changing present in the process of moving toward 2074 if all remains closely the same. There are fifty years between the present and 2074, and “right now” will always be the ideal time to continue disclosing the dangerous and unsustainable elements of historical and contemporary living and replacing them with increasingly sustainable ones at scale while making the work part of everyday discourse (Holland, 1992).
A societal issue merits a societal response. For example, the writing above on Maricopa County could apply to areas across the West. The recognition that the crisis of 2074 and far beyond is already underway in 2024 must become common knowledge. This crisis will affect the decades leading up to fifty years from now in varying intensities. As part of this post's dystopian speculative fiction style, 2074 was established as a year where humanity will encounter an environment heavily colonized by the outcomes of past, present, and future defuturing activities. The following decades will worsen and then worsen more. The focus on sustainability must be matched by a focus on controlling the unsustainable, even as it is found in the production of the sustainable. A societal focus on unsustainability will add another angle to ensure the future of 2074 evoked here does not arrive. Time delays in futuring and defuturing strategies and experiencing their benefits may, at a certain point, involve more time than the human species has left. Time delays embedded in unsustainable activities allow for an enjoyable existence in 2024. The effects of today’s defuturing on the ozone, crop yields, the climate, and sports industries dependent on certain climate conditions will all be problematic in the future(s). In the decades beyond 2074 and its general dull, painful existence, limited food supply, evaporating water sources, and collapsing industries, there is a life of survival and scarcity among the ruins of a world passed.
Society must be conscious of the likelihood that a future like the dystopian one envisioned here will be realized unless defuturing is addressed with the same vigor of sustainability. The forces involved in this future are active today, albeit to a lesser degree than in the preceding centuries, though their activities have still been consequential. Again, for sustainability to be effective, the work performed to correct, ban, and replace the unsustainable must be exceedingly effective to allow sustainability the space and opportunity to start adding time back to the future.
In planning to secure the future, coordinated and collaborative efforts and conversations must be carried out against defuturing and for futuring to add time to the future in 2074 and beyond. It is not just time, but time that is supportive and not threatening to humanity. As strategies are developed, a primary objective of managing this crisis will be to mitigate the unsustainable that presently exists or might exist to prevent any more defuturing. Society’s unique and diverse voices focused on regulating and replacing unsustainable activities, technologies, structures, and lifestyle practices will be critical. To be most effective while continuing to protect the future, society members will likely need to assemble a transdisciplinary team, including legal experts, climate scientists, energy experts, businesses, media partners, transition designers, design philosophers, developers and builders, resilience and sustainability offices, bankers, insurers, administrators, related researchers including disaster studies, and politicians.
As the climate changes, the unsustainable lies at the center, perpetuated by designers who continue bringing it into being and making the unsustainable lifestyle ready at hand - it is totally transparent. It should be remembered that the true damaging force of climate change in any snapshot that may be taken of the present is not visible. The outputs of the unsustainable are ahead of society, colonizing years like 2074 in an irreversible way Fry (1999). What has already been sent into and colonized in 2074 is still being determined, though one might speculate that it will not be for the best.
As stated earlier, climate and hazard trends will not be linear; they may be variable moving into 2074, 2030, and beyond. This means they will likely not increase all at once, giving a lucid signal of climate change. Still, signals are visible, and the unsustainable lies at their source. Although it is just tangible in 2024, protecting life, children’s health, experiences, property, and resources in the distant future is taking steps against premature extinction. Perhaps before the turn of the century, or by 2160, it will be the end times, on our own designed terms, “and they gnawed their tongues for pain."
Yours,
Gregory Vigneaux, M.S.
A letter from the DeathShow.
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