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Thoughts on the Future

September 2000

In July 2000 I picked up W. Warren Wagar’s A Short History of the Future at my local Chapters, and spent the next couple of months reading it. I found it really inspiring, since gathered together many futurist trends that I'd been intrigued by since childhood. This was written as a personal essay to articulate some of the thoughts it inspired in me, and so it’s heavy on quotes. The Star Trek part at the end never really came together and remains a fragment. — September 2015

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I was sitting on the floor, upstairs in my room. There were photographs and postcards in front of me. I was thinking once again, trying to bring forth the visions I have into words, trying to create something that speaks of the future landscape which I am enthralled by. There was my favorite book, A Short History of the Future, by W. Warren Waggar.

I was thinking about Halifax, because of the photo above. It looks like a city of the future. In the book Waggar uses letters and other documents of the time to paint the pictures of context. The narrator uses these disposable documents to show the rhythms and the flavors of daily life. This has been partially responsible for awakening within me the interest in post cards.

Des traces et taches, les choses que humanite se laisse d'arriere sois meme. [Traces and marks, the things that humanity leaves of itself behind].

In the Short History, what strikes me with the most eloquence is the nature of the community. The presence of people living and interacting with one another in a town or a city. I am most struck with the diary entries of Eduardo Mistral Ortiz.

Quoted from page 245:

To give you a sense of the rhythms and dilemmas of life in the early days of the new era, here are selections from the private diary of Eduardo Mistral Ortiz, a North American cardiologist and cardiovascular surgeon, whose father (also a physician) emigrated from Buenos Aires to the Department of the Finger Lakes in 2088. Dr. Mistral has practiced in the same community for fifty-five years and was kind enough to send me a copy of his diary for the year 2159. […] The community in which Dr. Mistral serves, Cloudland, was once known as Binghampton. Before the Catastrophe, it was an industrial town noted chiefly for its fine university, the alma mater of Mitchell Greenwald. Not a target of the CSE attack, Binghamton survived the war more or less unscathed, as did a good part of its population.

From there is the series of entries from the early days of July 2159.

The Department of the Finger Lakes is upstate New York, which is just across the lake, those wisps of industrial smoke I sometimes see on a clear day. Binghampton is where the author is from, so its nice to see that he lets his hometown survive the nuclear war of 2044. It is also interesting to see that the university he works at graduated this Mitchell Greenwald character, the author of The Service of Being (2042), the bible of the Commonwealth government that exists between the years 2062-2147.

And so, this entry seems to be a sort of imagined scenario of the author in the future, more personal and less contrived. He is imagining his hometown 170 years ahead (since the book was first published in 1989).

And the entries themselves: I imagine a doctor in his 22^nd Century office. In my imagination there are shades of Star Trek stylin, their versions of 24^th Century domestic fashions. This is characterized by sparseness, a lack of clutter, and natural materials. Behind his desk there is a window which looks out onto the hills. There is the presence in these future narratives of the Rural. Rural rhythms, and rural values, which manifest themselves through all the talk of community.

He is writing this in his diary – and one imagines perhaps that he is typing this all in, that these are computerized files on the computer of the future. When he sends the narrator a copy of his diary for the year 2159, he goes into the hardrive or whatever exists in those days, into those file folder icons, and emails the text document(s) to the historian. Or, the alternate vision is that it is handwritten into a little book, like the diaries of today. The document he sends to the historian resembles something like the photograph by Arnaud Maggs of Atget’s schedule book. A book made with paper, covered in elegant handwriting.

Looking at the photo of Halifax again. Here is a city, which looks futuristic because of the Purdy Towers. And another thing that recontextualizes the city for me: in that intro he says he moved from Buenos Aires to the Dpt. of the Finger Lakes. Throughout the book there is frequent mention of the cities and nations that don’t presently make it onto the map of the world. By this I mean when we talk about the world, and about contemporary civilization, we always hear such talk through the media, and we thus always hear about the cultural stars, the Tokyos, Londons, Paris', and especially New Yorks of the world. Ignored are small cities like Halifax. Yet this is where people are living, and there is the idea that these cities inherit the future away from the big names metropolises of the contemporary age.

In that sense then, a place like Halifax is the seedbed of the future. Here is where the real future is being born, because it is The Underground. What they wrote about Seattle, seven years ago after all of those rock bands "exploded" out of there: "In Seattle there was no chance of success, and thus no chance of failure" - an attitude that encourages experimentation. It is also why all of those Halifax bands were so good, because they did what they wanted, but of course they all wanted to be rock stars as well. Behind every goddamn good tune was the yearning for the cover of Rolling Stone.

And yet, Rolling Stone was putting Christania Aguliera and Eminem on its cover. In Halifax there is a very basic sense of being ignored, of being ostracized. But since moving to Toronto, there is a feeling that this is all a historicism. Well, of course it is. But there is the sense that in the future what is done here will be seen with a sense of shame. And the future doesn’t even have to be that far away. Like the 1980s shame and embarrassment about disco. The rampant crass commercialism that makes up the fabric of these international cities, of that I am already ashamed.

There is the sense then, that in such underground overlooked cities is where the future will be lived. And I am beginning to feel, that my job as an artist, is to be a part of my community, to educate by example on the "proper" ways to live, that is, by respecting the environment and the people within it. That the revival of such close-nit communities, requires actors to take roles in the society. It was a revelation when I was walking through the streets of Halifax to think that what we consider ancient Greece represents Athens, which at the time was "a city with a small town feel." Off hand I can probably say that its population was less than that of contemporary Halifax. Socrates would go around and harass people. This was written down, and since it was the only place where exciting things like Socrates happened, these writings were copied and spread over Europe. Given something catastrophic like a nuclear war, a small town like Halifax with such characters can easily become an internationally and historically important city, rather than the so-called middle of nowhere.

There is then this idea of belonging to a place, of carving out your existence amidst documents that you leave behind, and being in a center of social webs, the so-called community. There is at present a feeling that I am a Halifax artist, and what that means is what I have been trying to develop here in this essay; that what I am belongs to that place, and it is non transferable to other places in the world. That I am an artist of the Harbor, of the Dartmouth footpaths, from whence that initial photograph was taken, that I am of those streets, because that is the community in which I formed friendships, and spent six years developing my being. What is most important to me is the pedestrian. The places where you walk belong to you. They form the stage of your play. Hence my mind travels often along those tree-lined sidewalks of South Park St. I think I will always miss Halifax, but I could never return to my Halifax. It changes while I am away from it, and as long as I am away, the city grows apart from me, rather than growing and changing along with me.

Reading this, I can’t help but think of the neighborhood where I lived. There was Eva, Jessica and Sara around the corner, and the magazine and the video stores. Ed lived down the street in the other direction. Halifax already displays these qualities. And this is the life my grandmother has lived in Campbelton, New Brunswick.

From page 256 of a Short History:

Not quite a philosophy, but surely a characteristic thought system of our time, is the militant neofeminism of Christine Bergonzi of New Chicago. She has written a trenchant critique of the worldview of the Commonwealth era, The Ideas of Men (2175). Here she attacks the Prometheanism of Commonwealth institutions and beliefs and also the allegedly Promethean character of much contemporary public life. She subjects phrases like the conquest of space and the march of history to neofeminist analysis, arriving at the conclusion that a life-denying stratum exists, indelibly, in the male psyche that renders the whole sex unfit for public service. [written from the vantage point of 2200]

Commentary by me: I must be two hundred years ahead of my time then because this is how I feel. But since I am a man, I disprove that this characteristic is indelible. It is my belief, arrived at partially through observation and self-reflection, that such attitudes are taught to men, through the socio-cultural processes of genderfication. As such they are not indelible ("incapable of being erased or obliterated" Collins English Dictionary 3rd Edition, 1991, 786). If they are learned they can be un-learned.

I am in the process of un-learning such things. This then, is one such example of a set of beliefs I have to refute by providing a living example, that my responsibility to the community, is to do this. Like buying groceries with a cloth bag, I do this as an example of a better and more environmentally healthy way to live.

Buying groceries with a cloth bag: In the illustration above, our actors have just returned from the market. We can well imagine that the market from whence they have just come is a very different experience from what we are used to. Perhaps there still are large grocery stores, but I imagine that it is a small maket similar to what we call a "farmer’s market" with individual stalls and friendly retailers. Such a market system fosters relationships amongst the patrons and the retailers. They have come from the market then, and returned with leafy greens and yellow fruit amongst other things. And they have carried them home in a cloth bag, it looks woven and sturdy. Such bags can be used again. Such bags are not the ubiquitous disposable plastic bag that pollutes North America and represents a pure waste of non-renewable resources. This scene is based in New Orleans, in 2372.

The continuance of the quote:

Maleness is summed up, she writes, in the myth of Prometheus, who stole fire from heaven and inspired "the pseudo-heroic trampling of nature and womankind that men call the ’march of history.'" Bergonzi does not condemn technology as such, but she deplores the mentality that attaches the highest value to "productive" labor rather than to nurture and healing. The new worldview has given rise to a bewildering melange of arts, literatures, crafts, and multimedia creative spectacles, even richer than those of the preceding age, but typified by an underlying mystical sensibility in striking contrast to the neorealist trend of Commonwealth art

Commentary: The neo-realist trend in Commonwealth art is an indicator of a sort of communist socialism. The rise of realist propagandistic art in the USSR created distaste for the style, and fueled the rise of the abstract in the United States under the burning fire of the Cold War, between c1950-1991. A subsequent resurrection of the style in the Commonwealth era indicates a thorough rejection of the contemporary value in the United States.

One of the most distinctive products of our aesthetic culture is the all day Geistesfest, a festival of electronic mantras, aleatoric holoplasty, and demonstrations of hypnotrance technique linked to a text in Mandarin, Sanskrit, and classical Greek declaimed by children. The members of the audience wander through the stadium and participate spontaneously in every event. Spontaneity is a critical element in the new arts. Many works are designed to be created in performance. Critics lament the several centuries of "fossil art" that preceded our time, when theatre and music directors struggled to achieve a precisely faithful re-creation of the original writer’s or composer’s intentions, when every word of every text was scrutinized for authenticity, and every painting was deeply analyzed to be certain of its genuiness. Contemporary artists reject most of the products of modernism and early postmodernism in favor of the styles and models of medieval, folk, and primitive art. (Waggar; 257)

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The Coming Neo-Medievalism

Commentary: The arts of the late 22^nd Century reflect a neo-medievalism. Here, the author, Waggar, is presenting trends in current thinking about the direction that our society is heading. That is toward a new medievalism, a second dark ages.²

In recent times, the idea of the neo-medievalism is primarily evidenced with the talk of the return of the city state, the elimination of the nation state (both of which serve the interests of corporations and their agendas, of which Waggar warns us in the descriptions of early 21^st Century society), both of which were hallmarks of the first medivalism. What is supposed to enable this is the internet, according to the proposers of this thinking. However, it is of course not as simple as that. The following is an exchange between myself and Blake Gopnik, the art critic for the Globe and Mail newspaper, conducted in late March of 2000:

In August 2000, a book entitled The Twilight of American Culture by Morris Berman, was discussed on CNN.com.

"The greatest country on Earth, which used to export ideals like life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, now flogs fried chicken and mind numbing sitcoms […] Berman sees [then presidential candidate] Bush as the poster child for America’s collapse, which he likens to the fall of the Roman Empire. "Now," says Berman in the interview, "there is a spiritual apathy and a feeling that regardless of who you elect, the government is corrupt. It’s become materialism for its own sake, as if there were no other purpose in life except to make money." […] America’s malaise is not something that can be remedied with a Band-Aid or even a brilliant president. Things have gone too far for that, Berman believes. He predicts America will fall into a deep economic depression leading to a "dark age" like none before. "Every civilization in the history of the world comes to an end. There are no exceptions," he said. "We are not going to beat the odds, American hubris and optimism aside."

The interview ends with this from Prof. Berman:

“Twilight implies a dawn. So in some ways this book is a clarion call to people to do acts of preservation of the culture and leave a memory trace that then will get picked up maybe 200 years from now in terms of a cultural revival”. But there is a consolation. He does not expect the Dark Age to start until late in this century when, thankfully, most of us will have shuffled off this mortal coil. – Reuters/Cnn.com 3:04pm (est) 25 Augusg 2000

The author of the review in this last paragraph displays the lack of responsibility, the apathy toward community, which characterizes this age. It’s their problem, the future’s, "thankfully" we can live out our disgusting greedy lives and let our great grandchildren deal with our mess.

The fossilization of art today is partially achieved by copyright laws. When thinking of the contemporary world, through the lens of this book, I see a man in a suit behind a desk cluttered with papers…he is in a high rise. The air is thick and hot and smoggy. There is such hustle and bustle, people are scurrying. Flash forward to these quotes, the late 22^nd Century. The sun is shinning, the air is clear. People stroll. People are relaxed, and they enjoy their lives. There are less of them on the planet due to population controls imposed by the Commonwealth. We are thick and heavy; they are light and airy. Measures introduced by the Commonwealth altered human lifespan, towards 200 years. Today you’re lucky to make 100. Humans then will live longer, richer lives. They have rejected the art of our era. We have been swept aside and blown away, our graves are there, those of us that weren’t blasted by the nuclear bombs of 2044.

"A special horror was the problem of the unburied cadavers - of people and also of wild and domesticated animals - that littered the suburbs and the countryside, poisoned the strealfs, bred disease, and putrefied and stank throughout July. […] The Australian demographic team that toured North America in 2047 reported encountering "bone fields", stretches of open country near incinerated cities where thousands of skeletons still lay, partially covered by thick overgrowths of coarse weeds, telling a story of sick and injured refugees overtaken by brush and woodland fires. (131)

[the image of melted skyscrapers, the CN Tower chipped and jagged]

Of course when he writes the word suburb I imagine dead people laying in the yards across the street. I imagine these homes without roofs and collapsed walls. I imagine silence, and all of these boring bourgeois people laying face down dead in their shorts and flip flops.

But no one can truly imagine that horror. ("That first year, from August 2044 to July 2045, was the worst. I cannot tell you how terrible it was. None of us can imagine. I doubt that even people of the twentieth century could have imagined it." Waggar; 129). I see the war of ’44 described in this book as a fiction, but also it is the point at which anger toward the system as it currently exists, ignites with its flash point. After the war, they swear, never again! Never Again will we allow the world to become so damn crappy. They clean up the environment and the economic system. They begin to act intelligently. I would like to believe that we are capable of that now, and that we don’t need a nuclear war, and the death of six billion people, to accomplish that. But then again, listen to Top 40 radio…. What is interesting is that he says, 6 billion people are killed, which is the current world population: which means there will be more. But it is also important to note, to see it as, we are lost we are hopeless, and we are clogging the system. Only our deaths, our complete removal from the scene, allow the sensible to take over. This is one message that seems clear in the narrative. But I don’t believe that really. I don’t believe that we are that hopeless.

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And in the meantime, we begin to act elegantly, bringing beauty to the trivial and the ephemeral. Conscious acts of protest against the acts of the status quo, as such we set the ball rolling down the hill. Such acts are inspired by sparks, and one such spark is the domestic visions of the future we see in the Star Trek shows.

From the film, Bicentennial Man, released in North America in December 1999 (Touchstone Pictures/Hollywood Pictures) the character Little Miss, played by Embeth Davidtz is reading a letter. Sent by the android Andrew, in 2058. She is not reading an email; rather she is reading a letter written on what is obviously handmade paper.

This connotes that in the future, there has developed a certain epistolary aesthetic amongst the well off and the literate. The film’s basis in humanism, and the wealth of its protagonists, tells a story that ignores the proletariat and the poor of the next two centuries. The question is, is this because these classes have been eliminated through humanist principles, so that on an afternoon, people play chess in the park rather than do something else? Or is this another typical example of 20^th century politics, where the finer classes simply ignore the poor and the proletariat?

The epistolary aesthetic…that correspondence should not be done through email, rather through handwriting, on "beautiful" paper. Email is still considered too "cold" a medium, not warm and human.

"I don’t use e-mail," writes Pino Luongo in his cookbook, Simply Tuscan, "especially for personal correspondence; instead, I send hand-written letters on beautiful paper that I personally select. "

He continues, "To be Tuscan is to honour all your senses. We love fragrances - colognes, scented candles, and the aroma of wine and food. Our clothing is made of lush velvet, rugged corduroy, and crisp linen. […]We appreciate visual beauty is everything, from the landscapes of Le Crete Senesi, Marema, and Garfagnana to clothing that reflects those landscapes in its earth tones, to architecture that favors flowing spaces and as much natural light and fresh air as possible…"

The book is printed using a font suggestive of an old typewriter using brown ink. It is illustrated with drawings, watercolours and collages depicting Tuscan imagery. The page numbers appear hand-written, using a font similar to Bard.

Being Tuscan, Being Rural

Received on 11 September 2000, a small letter from Edward Deary. The package, handmade, carefully constructed, revealed a small booklet, made of high quality water colour paper, stitched-bound. The handwriting written with a fountain pen.

A letter received in November of 1999. The envelope handmade out of scraps of old wallpaper.

These are only two contempoary examples of what I have called above, an epistolary aesthetic. It seems that here we have an example of the care and attention devoted to the simple, and what others might consider trivial and ephemeral. Here is an example in the early 21^st Century, of quality of life being exercised through attention to detail. I find this to be an example of what Pino Luongo was saying. To be Tuscan is to honour all of your senses.

In the future, there is the sense of participation in the community. And in the future of Star Trek, quality of life is of paramount importance.

Much of what has changed can be chalked up to what the poets of the 24^th Century call “Technology Unchained.” Technical advancement no longer focuses on developing things which are smaller, faster or more powerful than their predecessors, but on improving the quality of life. [emph. added] ⁵

What does quality of life mean? I like this definition by Mr. Luongo:

I believe that quality of life is something you either have or you don’t; it’s not something you compartmentalize or confine to ’Saturday from 3 to 5pm'. And lets be clear: when I say 'Quality of life,' I’m not talking about exercise or counting calories or what vitamins to take. Those things you can schedule. No- I’m talking instead about such intangible pleasures as flavors, senses, emotions, and even laughs. ⁶

Tuscany presents itself as a rustic, stereotypically rural place, in today’s urbanized media mentalscape. It is the birthplace of the Renaissance masters, whose paintings arising as they did during that era’s humanism, infuse our definitions of what is beautiful, sublime, and elegant.

In the Star Trek Deep Space 9 episode, “The Visitor”, we see this scene from a story line based partially in 2387. Paper by this time is an anachronism, or is there a retro trend at work in the 25^th? Perhaps paper isn’t such an anachronism for the common folk, or perhaps this is an example of what artist experience: high quality paper is still manufactured for the use of drawings. Here, a writer has access to it so that he can write his stories with what looks like a fountain pen. Here is an example of what I am talking about…doing things with care, the old way, by-passing the modern technological conveniences so that one can experience something more beautiful. Because such things are uncommon, they have a psychological resonance, one of the "finer things" in life.

The infusion of daily life with some form of high quality artistic practice is already lived by artists today. In the future, such care is extended by all people.

Pino Luongo:

I weave Tuscany into my everyday life right here in the United States.⁷ For example, though I’m a businessman, I never eat lunch or diner at my desk, but always take the time to enjoy a good meal, usually with a bottle of wine, even if it’s going to be a long day or a late night.⁸ When it’s warm outside, I wear loafers in the Tuscan style, with no socks, even with the best suits.

The rural is reflected in the urban phenomenon, of the farmer’s market, mentioned earlier. On the Halifax waterfront, in the Keith’s brewery building, every Saturday morning, people come to buy foodstuffs and browse through crafty commodities. The aura of the rural, the landscape, being of the earth, brought in by truck to the city, on early weekend mornings, providing a activity for the workers of concrete and glass faced buildings.

The presence of Tuscany in the contemporary, with its rustic charms….and what is that appeal, the appeal of the rustic? Why is Frances Mayes Tuscan memoirs best sellers…because they are inhabited by characters, neighbors…when in Tuscany, she is part of a community, and she is able to enjoy a healthy and respected environment, where farming follows traditional proven ways, and is not subject to the partriachcal experiments of pesticides.

The Environment

Technological and sociological changes naturally go hand in hand, each resulting from and causing the other. Many of Earth’s great problems of the 20^th and 21^st Centuries have been solved - including those involving the ecology and human suffering. Earth in the 24^th Century would seem a paradise to the people of the 1980s and 1990s, a world with large protected wilderness areas, grand parks, beautiful cities, and a literate and compassionate population. Many of these changes have resulted from the expansion of mankind into space, freeing the ancestral home planet of the great population burden that once threatened to choke it. – Patrick Daniel O'Neil, Star Trek the Next Generation Magazine, Volume 1, December 1987.

When I was watching the movie Gladiator, I wanted to walk in that field of wheat, and run my hand gently over the top of its stalks, like that opening scene. I wanted to live in that villa on a hill of blowing grass. Maximus describes his family, his home, "Wild ponies come into our house and play with my son. He wants to be one of them…" Throughout the film, these epic landscapes, gives you a feel for an unspoiled environment. And what do I know…pollution. Ruin. I see fields plowed under so that a shopping complex can be built there. Another place for people to "shop". I see homes maxed out with "stuff." There are multiple pairs of shoes by the door. All anybody ever "needs" is one pair. The walls are lined with books that just sit there, gleaming in their plastic protective covers, as decoration.

This began with me seeing a photograph of Halifax, and wanting to once again walk the streets beneath the gleaming Purdy Towers, buildings from the film set of the future.

Last night I watched Star Trek Voyager’s “Non Sequitur”. And on Friday night I had seen “Pathfinder”. Those images of San Francisco skyscrapers in the 24^th Century. In “Non Sequitur”, the Transamerica building in clearly visible.

But what happens in those towers in a time when capitalism is dead? What kind of business takes over? I sometimes think that in the future shopping malls will be converted into apartments. What kind of people work and walk in the Purdy Towers? Of course, I have browsed its hall-ways, have ridden in its elevators. I have walked on the grounds beneath them. But in the photograph, the city is cast in the light of the future, when capitalism is dead, and the people who walk down Barrington Street wear the plain no frills clothing of Star Trek’s future.

This began as I saw Halifax as a city of The Commonwealth, from Waggar’s futurology. Why do I want to live in that time rather than this? For one thing, they have cleaned up the environment. In both futures, Star Trek’s and Waggar’s, the sun shines brightly through clean air.

The World party, too, was both Red and Green. In the 2060s, its attention centered on the elimination of the nation-state system and the capitalist structure of the world economy. But after 2070 its chief concern was to make the planet fit once more for human habitation. The reclamation of the biosphere was not something that could have been achieved on a local or regional basis. The biosphere was a sphere, as round as the earth itself. Its winds and waters flowed wherever the laws of physics decreed. No country could hold them prisoner. Their riches and their poisons flowed with them, indifferent to the angular boundaries contrived by men and women. Restoring the biosphere to good health required rigorous planning by a central world agency that could marshal all the human and technical resources needed for the task.

After several false starts, the Congress created the Planetary Restoration Authority (PRA) in the summer of 2073. By the time the PRA began its labors, some of the most serious problems had solved themselves, or nearly so. Radioactive contaminants from the nuclear explosions had decayed and lost their toxicity. No longer drained by overpopulated cities or agribusiness, major aquifers regained twentieth-century water levels. Largely stripped away by the blasts, the ozone layer over the Northern Hemisphere returned in fewer than ten years. While the ozone was depleted, ultraviolet radiation struck the unprotected surface of the earth in massive doses, damaging plant life, causing skin cancer, and injuring eyes, but by 2052 the amount of hard solar radiation slicing through the atmosphere had returned to prewar values. Most important of all, the decline of world industrial production by over 90 percent in the first two decades after the Catastrophe sharply reduced the consumption of fossil fuels, which in turn slowed the progress of the greenhouse effect.

To prevent a recurrence of the woes of modern industrialism, the PRA recommended, and Congress legislated, a phased worldwide ban on the combustion of fossil fuels. A variety of alternative energy technologies, some new, some old, were available. For the most part, the transition occurred effortlessly, although energy costs did rise by as much as 50 percent in some parts of the world.

The highest priority of the PRA was reforestation. Prewar developers had already eliminated most of the earth’s tropical rain forests. The synergy of sunlight, air, and bare soil leached of its minerals by heavy rains transformed many deforested areas in the tropics into "hard" deserts, with surfaces like brick, from which only the scrubbiest plants could wring sustenance. The temperate forests of the Northern Hemisphere had suffered losses almost equally severe, compounded by the raging fires of the Catastrophe, which destroyed millions of hectares of woodland.

The PRA fielded an army of foresters and went to work. Years of intensive land reclamation were followed by years of seeding and transplanting. Tropical plants grown from specimens found in greenhouses and botanical gardens in the Southern Hemisphere replaced many of the species wiped out by prewar developers. Hardy new varieties of trees created by plant geneticists also helped in the rebuilding of both tropical and temperate forests. It took thirty years, but, by 2105, the world had as much forested land as it did in 2000, and not a single tree was under attack from acid rain.

The PRA set as its next target the restoration of the forests and wetlands lost between 1900 and 2000, which it achieved in still another thirty years. The most devastated areas of the Northern temperate zone were transformed into permanent wilderness areas, reserved for wildlife and recreation. In some ways a visitor from the 19^th century would have felt more at home in the early 22^nd century than in the early 21^st. In 2135, for example, at the close of the PRAs second Thirty-Year Project, the population of the former United States stood at only forty million. No city had more than 250,000 inhabitants⁹, and the ratio of agricultural land and wilderness to "developed" land was approximately what it had been in 1880.

Another major task of the PRA was the recovery of shores and lowlands lost to rising sea levels in the middle decades of the twenty- first century. The destruction of so many trees and phytoplankton (which metabolize carbon dioxide and excrete oxygen), combined with the injection of large quantities of carbon and nitrogen oxides into the atmosphere during the war itself, acted to keep ambient temperatures quite high throughout the rest of the twenty-first century. They began a slow descent in the 2080s, but, as late as 2100, the world was still measurably hotter than it had been at any time in the twentieth century, and sea levels had dropped by only one meter.

Adapting techniques once used by Dutch engineers to build polders in the Zuider Zee, the PRA first reclaimed most of the flooded areas of Florida, a task completed in 2079. Work continued in other parts of the world for many years, ending with the draining and full restoration of the rich delta lands of the former Bangladesh in 2091.

Other PRA teams restocked the new tropical rain forests with fauna bred from zoo animals, dredged the bottoms of lakes to remove billions of tons of pollutants, and, in war-devastated areas not converted to wilderness, constructed deep concrete landfill systems to entomb the wastes and rubble of the Catastrophe.

A favorable report on the progress of the PRA by a panel of independent scientists appointed by the Congress was made public on 15 September 2099. It found the earth clean, green, and safe at last. Forests, oceans, and lakes were in excellent health. Air quality was higher and freshwater supplies purer than they had been since the dawn of industrialism. Concentrations of all the major greenhouse gases were falling steadily. Desertification had been arrested worldwide, the fertility of topsoils had been renewed, and every useful square meter of land lost to rising seas had been reclaimed. Congress commemorated the occasion by declaring 15 September a world holiday, popularly known as Earth Festival Day, which we have celebrated ever since. –Waggar, p. 156-158, emph. added

The streetscapes of the Earth in the future…one of the reasons they seems so clean and unclutered in because of the lack of advertising. There are no billboards, or crass advertising. The un-crowding of the visual landscape frees up space, and makes the environment seem grander.

Appendix A: Star Trek (Life)Styling

What does a lack of clutter mean? The lack of clutter in these shots indicated to me that consumerism is dead, it is a historicism. Notice the sparseness, the cleanliness, the immaculate nature of the environment. Also notice the use of natural materials, the wooden bookshelves, though they are empty at the time. There only appears to be functional things. There is only a functional spacious environment. They appear to "value use over possession."

When watching these videos, styled in an aesthetic that ranges from the 23^rd Century to the 24^th Century, and when watching films set in the 19^th and early 20^th Century, there is a similarity in their style. That is, pop culture is absent, and people have surrounded themselves with fine and elegabnt things, which they use. In the film, Star Trek Generations, Picard’s ideal world is a 19^th Century Chrismas celebration. There is a library in these scenes, which has an 19^th century ink stand on the desk.

This ink stand was seen previously in Star Trek VI The Undiscovered Country, on the President’s desk in late 23^rd Century Paris.

It seems apparent that by the time of Star Trek’s 24^th Century, what we know as capitalism, has become a thing of the past. The following is once again from A Short History.

In the Commonwealth, personal vehicles were made available by transport cooperatives for rental, but the sale of anything larger than a battery-powered cart big enough to seat two persons was prohibited by law. Almost all travel, local or otherwise, took place on state-operated urban rail systems, supersonic magnetic floater trains, or air and spacecraft.

Public transport networks were so dense that a traveler could reach any chosen destination, no matter how near or far, at no matter what hour, without inconvenience or delay. The unavailability of personally owned means of rapid transport also helped reinforce the public philosophy of the Commonwealth, which valued use above possession. Capitalism had cultivated in consumers an insatiable hunger for personal ownership of whatever they could afford to buy, and more. Those who acquired one private vehicle wanted two. Those who had two wanted three. It was impossible to have too many. "Collectors" gloried in the hoarding of vast numbers of books or paintings or clothes or houses or guns, whatever caught their fancy. "Shoppers" took an almost sexual pleasure in browsing through displays of merchandise and buying as much as they could carry home. Men and women sought identity, respect, and status not in what they did but in what they owned. In the days of the Commonwealth, such behavior was diagnosed as sociopathic. It soon disappeared almost entirely. Increasingly, people opted for collective ownership of many kinds of durable goods. Neighborhoods established "goods pools," in which five or ten families joined to purchase appliances, cameras, tools, recreational equipment, and the like. Another popular institution was the consumers' cooperative, which functioned along similar lines and made it possible for members to have the use of many more goods than ever before at far less cost to each individual household. –Waggar p.162-163, emph.added

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From Deep Space 9’s episode, “The Visitor”, we see Jake writing with the PADD (Personal Access Display Device). This is how Text is composed in 2372. This episode was first aired in the autumn of 1995. Contrast that with the introduction of the Palm Pilot PDAs (Personal Digital assistants) in 1997.

From the Star Trek Deep Space 9 episode, “The Visitor”: bookbinding in the late 24^th Century. There is an impression that these are simply PAADs with elegant covers, like the Palm PDA device above.

I can’t talk about Star Trek’s styling or the lifestyle is promotes, without talking about technology. Technology is the great rescuer. The line recurrent in Star Trek production notes is that technology frees people from wants. They have reached a point where everything is possible, anything you could possibly want can be beamed into being using their replicator technology.

Gene Rodenberry interview : Earth is into a time of material plenty, and we’ve learned that out of the things we have invented. Humans are no longer interested in, for example, jewels. The reason being that through the transporter, you can replicate any kind of jewel. So, it has led us away from being a greedy race. But now what our race is striving for is knowledge, and quality of life." - Star Trek the Next Generation magazine, volume 1, December 1987.

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Bibliography