Finding Tomorrow: The Future Starts in Our Imagination
I admit it. It’s hard to imagine the future right now. In the middle of our never ending stay-at-home loops, it is difficult enough to imagine how the next few months will look like. And when it comes to a more distant future, it’s easy to paint a dark picture. Climate Change is knocking at our doors, arriving early to the dinner party — I guess we all thought we would have a few more years. Doomsday, if you can believe the media, is coming in one of two shapes: Either we continue ignoring the climate crisis and accept that we enter decades of rapid environmental changes that will alter the surface of the earth in ways we still fail to fully understand — or we decide to correct our actions now, entering years of economic and societal turmoil caused by decisive actions to limit our carbon emissions dramatically. No meat, no vacation, no jobs.
Maybe we are not doomed after all. The truth is, another future is already in the making. All around the world smart people are working on solutions that will help us overcome climate change. Technology is creating smart climate solutions like advanced batteries for electric cars and concrete that absorbs CO2 from the atmosphere. Alternative, “natural” climate solutions like planting vast forests and rediscovered agricultural practices to sequester carbon into soil are becoming more scalable. Getting to Net Zero carbon emissions is not out of reach. And most importantly these solutions are worth fighting for. Sometimes it’s just hard to imagine a better future with everything that is going on around us.
That’s why I started “Finding Tomorrow”. We live in times where dystopias are many, utopias few and plausible visions for the future rare. If we cannot imagine alternatives to our current way of living, we have a hard time working towards a future that secures and improves the quality of life for current and future generations. To help finding this future, I want to paint a world that can be. A world in which we have implemented the technologies necessary. Finding Tomorrow is a collection of moments, brief windows into a world in which the solutions that are in the making today will be part of everyday life. A glimpse into the future that is better: because we have found a way to overcome without limiting our quality of life.
I am tired of being scared. I am tired of being paralyzed because people who are living in yesterday fail to see tomorrow. If you can’t see that what we are building today is going to be better than anything we had, then there’s no place for you in my future.
Over the course of the next several weeks, I will publish stories which take place all over the world and feature a variety of (mostly food related) technologies. Imagine a world full of forest gardens and lab-grown meat cooking shows. My first story called “Chaac”, however, is set in Mexico and it deals with a topic that marked the starting point of my journey into the future of food before we started growing algae in Brooklyn: the fascinating world of vertical farming and the never-ending tension between technology and nature, between progress and tradition.
This is not a collection of facts or a place for scientific studies, although all of the technologies mentioned have a fair chance of being adopted in the coming years. This is a place to dream up our future. Because our future starts in our imagination. Let’s go and find our tomorrow.
You can find the first story “Chaac” here.
