Before and After: Fragments of Origin

Contextual and Thematic Material

Our world is falling apart quietly. Human civilisation has reduced the plant, a four-million-year-old life form, into three things: food, medicine, and wood. In our relentless and ever-intensifying obsession with obtaining a higher volume, potency, and variety of these three things, we have devastated plant ecology to an extent that millions of years of natural disaster could not. Hope Jahren, Lab Girl

There are different threads that can be explored:

Ancestral Memory / Before

Indigenous peoples’ knowledge of nature. Cultures of working in symbiosis with the natural world in rural cultures that existed before tech and global extraction impacted the balance of the ecosystem. Indigenous peoples who have added the least to the problem, yet in most cases are the most strongly impacted. They are the first to be affected by the clearance of forests for wood and monoculture, the devastation of forest fires, flooding, sea level changes and temperature extremes.

Re-imagining the Future / After

The tipping point has been passed, and climate change is inevitable. What are we going to take with us from current cultures? The modern global economy emerged through systems of colonialism and imperialism that prioritised resource extraction, economic growth, and unequal power relations. If climate change deepens significantly over the next century, daily life would likely change in ways that are both disruptive and adaptive.

Imagine waking up in a city where buildings generate most of their own energy. Your home atomically stores cool nighttime air and minimises daytime heat. Water from yesterday’s shower has already been filtered for non-drinking uses. You check a climate dashboard before planning your day. Outdoor activity is recommended before 10 a.m. because temperatures will exceed 40°C. Life is more constrained by environmental realities than in the early 21st century—but it is also shaped by decades of innovation aimed at living within those realities.

The most likely future is neither a complete collapse nor a seamless technological utopia. It is a world where societies continuously adapt to a changing climate, with some regions managing the transition effectively and others facing much greater challenges. Many coastal areas could become increasingly difficult or expensive to inhabit due to sea-level rise, storm surges, and flooding. Some cities might build massive protective infrastructure, while others could gradually retreat inland. New population centres might emerge in regions that are currently cooler and less densely populated. Some areas that are highly populated today could see significant outmigration due to extreme heat, drought, or water scarcity.

Housing might be designed differently with elevated buildings in flood-prone areas, reflective roofs and walls to reduce heat, integrated water collection systems, community cooling centres, and underground structures in very hot regions. Cities could depend heavily on greywater recycling, seawater desalination, water recycling, and regional water-sharing networks. People may become much more conscious of water consumption than many are now.

Agriculture would undergo major transformation with indoor vertical farms, drought-resistant crops, more local food production to reduce transport, and expanded use of alternative proteins. Seasonal foods could become more important again. A typical grocery store might contain fewer products grown in open fields and more from climate-controlled facilities.

Future cities might be designed as environmental systems rather than collections of buildings, including dense urban forests, artificial shade networks, cooling corridors for airflow, water-retention landscapes, and distributed renewable energy systems. Technology would likely monitor temperature, air quality, water use, and infrastructure stress in real time.

One of the largest social changes may be increased human mobility. Many people could relocate because their region becomes too hot, water supplies become unreliable, coastal flooding becomes frequent, and economic opportunities shift elsewhere. Countries may develop new policies on climate migration, and identities tied strongly to place may evolve as communities move and rebuild.

Climate adaptation wouldn’t only be technological. Values might shift toward repair rather than replacement, resource efficiency, community resilience, local self-sufficiency, and long-term planning. Children might grow up learning climate adaptation skills alongside traditional subjects.

Current considerations

The Global Justice Report just published at the start of June considers that the polycrisis defined by complexity theorists Edgar Morin and Anne Birgitte Kern, manifests as one calamity after another; made up of climate crisis driving levels of migration leading to xenophobia as the economic squeeze exacerbates and emphasises gross inequality and manifests in political and economic instability.

‘Climate change, rising inequality, and the threat of financial crises interact in complex ways that multiply their overall impact’, sociologist and sustainable transitions theorist Mark Swilling.

At the heart of the Global Justice Report is the concept of sufficiency – the idea that people can enjoy a prosperous, healthy life without constantly striving to consume or accumulate more material possessions that degrade the natural world on which all life depends. To achieve this, the authors envisage three steps: more than halving average working time from 2,100 hours a year to 1,000 hours, roughly equivalent to a two-and-a-half-day working week; encouraging people to eat less red meat, which is the main driver of deforestation and ecological destruction; and refocusing the economy toward low-consumption activities by more than doubling education spending to €8,400 (£7,250) a person and healthcare spending to €14,400. (Source Guardian)

The World Inequality Lab has written a report that proposes heavy wealth taxes on billionaires, reducing working hours substantially, change diets to move away from unsustainable farming and shifting investment from environmentally damaging sectors of mining and manufacturing industries to education & health. Although based on well-established metrics for GDP, inequality and climate science, it widens the definition of prosperity and heightens the importance of “sufficiency” to show that quality of life is more valuable than quantity of material goods. This echoes ancient philosophies of a “golden mean”, Indigenous beliefs in the inextricable connection between human and natural wellbeing, as well as experiments in Bhutan of an economy based on “gross national happiness”.