The New Wave of Climate Imagination
The hotter it gets, the harder our imaginations will have to work. Games are powerful tools for climate foresight.
"Imagination rules the world.” - Napoleon Bonaparte
Is it really too late for the planet?
“I’ve never said this before to the media, but it’s too late.” -David Suzuki
There’s been a rash, recently, of public nihilism by climate activists. The most notable is the eminent Canadian environmentalist, David Suzuki, who earlier this month said:
Trump’s election was the dagger in the heart. Trump’s win was the triumph of capitalism and neoliberalism, and he’s going to wreak havoc. There’s nothing we can do about that, except maybe incremental changes. That’s not what we need... what we’ve got to do now is hunker down.”
Suzuki goes on to say how “the units of survival are going to be local communities.” Now, he’s has earned the respect to have his public comments taken with a bit of context — for us to assume the best. We might assume, for example. that he’s not counseling despair and surrender, but responding emotionally to the loss of the possibility of low-warming future within the frames he has, which are apocalyptic survival and radical relocalization. He’s coping.
It’s pretty damn important to note, though, that those ideas are not the only ways to frame the future emerging around us, much less the best. It is not too late. We are not at the end of things. We are, in fact, at the beginning of a new era.
That’s hard to see because, by and large, we haven’t actually imagined this new era, even as it spins up all around us.
Thinking it’s too late is a sign we find what comes next unimaginable.
In my 2010 essay, Putting the Future Back in the Room, I wrote about the problems that stem from a refusal to see the future:
“The planetary crisis is a crisis of vision; we see a growing and darkening void where our future ought to be. The average person, presented with accurate information about the state of the world, can see no way forward at all. The path we’re on appears to end in darkness and a swift, cataclysmic drop. Most folks, entirely understandably, choose not to look.”
We can’t build what we can’t imagine. Failures of imagination, then, are where failures of action take root.
These failures were not an accident. Billions of dollars were spent trying to keep people from imagining the future we now find ourselves in, in a effort to paralyze efforts to avoid it. Predatory delay has always involved a lot of aggressive assertion of the impossibility of change, of the permanence of the unsustainable.
Even today, most people have only the fuzziest understanding of how this crisis is remaking their futures.
Most future-thinking merely extends past experience into the future.
That doesn’t mean no one does climate foresight. Lots of institutions do.
The faster the change around us, the more valuable is the strategic advantage of imagination into future possibilities. Indeed, with accelerating uncertainty, governments, militaries, and transnational corporations are all investing heavily in modeling, simulation and strategic exploration. (A trend that has caused some game designers to question the uses to which analytical gaming is now being put, leading to the somewhat odd demand that we “demilitarize wargames.”)1
The best anticipation projects produce actionable strategic insights that leaders would have been unlikely to arrive at themselves.2 Most paid foresight work, though, is the assemblage of a consensus future. It isn’t so much about pushing strategic awareness into unknown territories as it is about bringing stakeholders into agreement about what known challenges they’ll agree to focus on. This means that problems with long pedigrees — the slowly-emerging and well-studied kind — are easy ones to explore. If someone has recently written a magazine cover story about the topic, it’s likely to surface in a room with some smart people and a decent facilitator. From there, it’s a short hop to a futurist building a scenario around it for a strategy document.3
The planetary crisis, though, is a crisis precisely because it is creating enormous discontinuity in the systems around us. In discontinuity, past expertise and experience lose their power to anticipate and explain future events. Consensus futures are almost all outdated futures.
How do we usefully imagine the unprecedented?
Games are outstanding tools for grasping new realities.
Art, film, literature, foresight studies and scientific predication all offer their own avenues into the unknown and emergent.4 Some of the best cultural works of the last decade wrestle with the disorientation of living in perpetual discontinuity. We are beginning to have the cultural reckoning with the deeply unsettling realities of our day that we have long needed.5
That said, when it comes to building intuitive insight into complex systems that are working in new ways, developing and stretching imagination, nothing beats play.
People have used formal games to understand the world and to think into its possibilities since the first Chess pieces were carved. Play as a form of learning goes all the way back into the distant mist times of our species. Playing at living is fundamentally human, and cognitively powerful.
The planetary crisis has already birthed a new generation of games that attempt to help us understand planetary systems, and imagine how we might successfully change them (or prevent their change). You might check out CO2, Catan New Energies (or Catan Oil Springs), the Climate Action Simulation or even (some argue) Terraforming Mars.6
The rock star of tabletop climate change games, though, would have to be Daybreak.
Daybreak is a fantastic cooperative game about fighting climate change on a deadline. In the game, different groups of interests find common ground and deploy solutions to check climate emissions and help vulnerable communities adapt, until carbon drawdown can be achieved.
That describes what Daybreak is, but it’s doesn’t actually get at the systems the game models. Daybreak lets players game the Orderly Transition.
“The Orderly Transition” describes the claim that large-scale but non-disruptive collective action on sustainability can limit the planetary crisis to an extent that modest and affordable adaptation measures (and some climate justice funding) can then preserve societal continuity.
This is the consensus future of climate action. Unfortunately, the odds an orderly transition working are now somewhere between thin and nil. In that sense, it is too late.
Climate foreight games need to model discontinuity to be useful, now.
We’ve already let climate chaos and ecological collapse get so bad that no combination of adaptation efforts, carbon sequestration schemes or geoengineering gambles will bring our planet back into historic patterns — and we still have decades of solutions deployment ahead of us before the crisis even stops getting worse.
Discontinuity defines our era. Every natural system on Earth has irrevocably changed, and most are far from being finished changing. In 50 years, no ecosystem anywhere will be in evolutionary continuity with its own local past… some argue none are, now.
Human communities (and the systems that serve them) were therefore built for climates and ecologies that no longer exist. We are unready for the present — and that unreadiness will only grow as the increasingly disruptive interplay between natural and human systems drives fresh disturbances for decades to come.
Climate response — acting to build systems that work for us within a context of climate and ecological instability and growing uncertainty — is now the dominant challenge facing humanity. In other words, we’ve let the problems grow big enough that the massive task of decarbonizing society remains no less urgent but is now a subset of a much larger overall climate upheaval.
How do we game all that?
