This-earth, real-people future fiction

Earth’s future looks bleak. Humankind’s future looks bleak. In ecological terms, we’re overshooting the earth’s long-term carrying capacity, which means we’re taking more from the earth than it can replenish. And at the same time, we’re poisoning the earth—with crude oil from the Deepwater Horizon spill and other pollutants dangerous to life.

Why don’t we stop? Perhaps because we haven’t fully realized what conditions our descendants will have to live in if we keep on.

We have a pretty good idea of the conditions our ancestors lived in. Past conditions are richly described in fact-based historiography and vividly portrayed in historical fiction. Future conditions, on the other hand, can only be imagined. But writers of speculative fiction like Margaret Atwood imagine them almost as plausibly and portray them just as vividly as those in historical fiction.

This type of speculative fiction—to distinguish it from other types, let’s call it this-earth, real-people future fiction—often portrays the future world as a dystopia, a grim place for humans. Which it will be, if we don’t stop overshooting the earth’s carrying capacity and poisoning its air, land, and water. But the dystopias portrayed in this fiction aren’t prophecies, they’re warnings. The writers believe we can stop, as some isolated societies in overshoot have done in the past. Jared Diamond tells about them in his book Collapse. He also tells about one society, Easter Island, that failed to stop. It became a grim place indeed.

What if we were to heed these warnings and avert dystopia? What would the world be like then? Well, at the very least, Nature would be recovering and humankind would be getting along fairly well. How could this happen? The answer, of course, is: through various developments, some of which we can imagine today.

The Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess, whose school of thought is known as deep ecology, stimulates the imagination of such developments. A future world inspired by deep ecology could be called an ecotopia.

This-earth, real-people future fiction portrays future worlds that are either dystopias or ecotopias. When we realize that our descendants might be living in a dystopia, we’re warned. When we realize that they could live in an ecotopia, we have something to hope for.