Fragment from 3025, the archaeologist's notes:
"Today we excavated a layer of concrete, plastic, and energy storage units – so-called batteries. We believe this site to have been a shopping centre, a kind of trading place where people in the twenty-first century seem to have gathered to purchase goods, socialise, and eat meals. We are trying to understand how they lived, and how they managed to produce such vast quantities of waste in such a short time."
Imagine the following scenario. The year is 3025, one thousand years from now. A group of people look back at our civilisation – perhaps one day known as the Age of Consumption. Archaeologists, historians, and intellectual historians sift through our ruins, comb our libraries, and decode our electronic memories.
They trace the lines of history backwards, searching for the roots of what later came to be. They read our newspapers, our books, and our social media archives. They look back on the discovery of fossil energy and the logarithmic acceleration of technological development. Perhaps they reflect on the decisions we made – decisions that gradually dismantled democracy, privacy, and freedom of expression – always, of course, for good reasons, and only because it was so urgent.
You wonder: what do they think of us?
Did we leave behind a flourishing, thriving host planet, where ecosystems recovered, environmental problems were solved, and disease, hunger, and suffering – perhaps even death itself – were abolished?
Or did we pave the way for a nightmare: a world where the last humans wander through ruins in search of clean water and cultivable land?
There is an episode of the Swedish children's series Bamse (no. 16, 2012) in which the greedy character Krösus Sork tries to get his hands on an asteroid containing more gold than all of Earth's gold reserves combined. He orders his scientists to alter the asteroid's trajectory so that it will collide with Earth and land in the Sahara. Krösus intends to become richer than any person has ever been.
Bamse and his friends are alarmed by the death and destruction such a collision would cause, and manage to stop the plan. In the final scene, however, Krösus realises that they have saved him as well. Such an immense influx of gold would have devalued the metal entirely, rendering his own assets worthless.
The episode illustrates a fundamental concept in economic theory: scarcity. The rarer a resource, the higher its value. The smaller the supply of a commodity in relation to demand, the higher its price. When supply and demand are in balance, a market equilibrium emerges, with stable prices.
One consequence of this is that what exists in abundance is valued low. Nature, for example. Gold, platinum, and precious stones – utterly unnecessary for human survival –are valued more highly than air, soil, and water.
It is hard to describe this as anything other than a paradox – a programming error in the human psyche.
What might future historians glean from Bamse? Perhaps more than we think. Scarcity was not invented by our economic system; the phenomenon has always existed. But during the Age of Consumption it became an all-pervasive paradigm – and a weapon. Producers learned to manufacture artificial demand and restrict supply, all in the pursuit of profit. Since everything was valued through the same paradigm, nothing stood in the way of a ruthless exploitation of nature.
They make us short-sighted and irrational. At best, we can think five or ten years ahead – but as soon as we are confronted with longer time horizons, the bugs kick in and we lose our rationality.
This leads to strange consequences: natural resources only acquire value when they are consumed. A tree becomes valuable when it is cut down; a river when it is dammed for power generation. Nature itself – the air we all depend on, the vast oceans, old-growth forests, wetlands, mountain peaks, and fallen trees that harbour billions of tiny creatures – has no intrinsic economic value. Those who pay the highest price are those who do not resist: the trees, the insects, the poorest people – and the quietest of all – beings of the future.
Fragment from 3025, the archaeologist's notes:
"During an excavation we discovered an old data server full of discussions. It seems people frequently spoke of 'future generations' and 'sustainable development'. Yet resources were directed towards entirely different matters. Their ethical framework appears remarkably primitive. Did they feel no responsibility towards us?"
If humanity survives the multiple crises – what some call the metacrisis – we can assume that future humans will vastly outnumber those alive today. We are but a drop in the ocean of human life, yet we take the liberty of constraining the living conditions of the entire sea.
Surely we ought to take future humans into account, precisely because they cannot speak? Should we not, perhaps, resist on their behalf?
What would happen if we thought of ourselves as ancestors, and of those humans in 3025 as our descendants? A thousand years may sound like a long time, but it amounts to roughly thirty-five generations.
The ethnographer Deborah Bird Rose describes, in her studies of Aboriginal communities in Australia, how European cultures tend to see the future as lying "ahead", while the past lies "behind"; something to be mastered and surpassed. The Aboriginal societies she studied saw time in precisely the opposite way. For them, the past lay "ahead" –something they were responsible for stewarding on behalf of those who come after, those who walk behind.
In that orientation, the present is not a thin sliver of time. It becomes a thick layer of reality, containing a complex matrix of relationships: humans, animals, plants, dreams, subsoil, soils, minerals, water, and air.
How might we be affected if we carried that perspective into everything we do? Every decision, every infrastructure project, every extraction scheme, every building project, purchase, and new law. Thirty-five generations. Is that possible?
I have a compost heap in my garden. To be honest, it is rather mediocre. It consists of a few wire panels, wedged on a slope between a bamboo bush and an apple tree. I throw all sorts of things into it – grass clippings, leaves, twigs and dead plants. As a gardener, I am profoundly inept, and since we set it up I have never once used the soil it produces.
Yet I think of it when I read a text by Robin Wall Kimmerer. She writes about becoming a good ancestor. In conversation with an old maple tree, she concludes that her task is to build good soil.
Soil is no passive mass, as one might think without looking closely. It is teeming with life. Insects, roots, fungi, and seeds are at work in there. When conditions are right, something begins to grow. It may be an acorn, a meadow flower, or a sunflower – and it may happen tomorrow, next week, or in five hundred years.
Invasive species can make it difficult for other life to flourish, and in the worst case they can kill off the fragile vegetation required for a healthy ecosystem. For a gardener, few things are worse than a single plant taking over and suffocating everything else.
The moral-imagination activist Phoebe Tickell argues that in a time permeated by complexity and unpredictability, we need pluralism, diversity, and the courage to think in many different ways more than ever. Conversely, it seems to me that what we need least of all is monoculture – neat rows of banana trees, contorta pines and crop plants bred so intensively that they cannot withstand insects.
Voltaire's character Candide concludes that one must cultivate one's garden – il faut cultiver son jardin. The phrase suddenly takes on an entirely new meaning. To prepare the soil for flourishing biodiversity; to let meadow flowers bloom and insects build their nests.
For in our mental wasteland there is only one path: the path of scarcity thinking, while we forget that nature's very foundation is abundance.
Or take a single poppy: it can scatter its tiny seeds and, over time, light up an entire meadow with its blazing red petals.
Sometimes reminders appear. In autumn, the apple trees in my neighbourhood overflow with fruit, yet it is as if we do not know what to do with them – they fall to the ground and rot. All the while, we go to the supermarket and buy apples wrapped in plastic.
And when our mental landscape is characterised by uniformity, the same questions are chewed over day after day. Only one issue fits at a time, and they are never connected. Migration in one box. War and conflict in another. The economy in a third. Climate change and environmental destruction – which clearly accelerate poverty and fuel conflict, which in turn drives migration – sit in an entirely separate box. Overseen by a different minister, a different department. Debated by different commentators.
In his classic article Clio and the Economics of QWERTY (1985), Stanford professor Paul A. David described the concept that came to be known as path dependency. The fact that the QWERTY keyboard became the standard – despite the existence, then and now, of more efficient alternatives – was largely the result of historical contingencies.
So why don't we simply switch?
Because once a solution becomes dominant, lock-in effects arise. We are unwilling to pay to retrain workers who have already learned a system. Workers, in turn, minimise their risk by mastering the dominant system. We are also reluctant to invest in retooling machinery, and unwilling to forgo the economies of scale that come from using the same standard as everyone else. David refers to this as technological dependencies and quasi-irreversibility.
History branches. One branch is chosen. Over time, more and more people gather along the same branch. Eventually, the other branches wither away and disappear. The further we collectively proceed along a particular branch, the harder it becomes to jump to another. What we call the climate transition requires precisely such a leap – from one branch to another.
But things are comfortable on our branch – so why jump now? Shouldn't we wait? We do not know what awaits us on the other branch, but it is surely worse than what we have now. And which branch should we jump to, anyway? Different actors, with different motives, pull in different directions. If everyone jumps to different branches, there will be no order at all. And we must not forget those who have invested everything in staying exactly where we are – for them, the very idea of changing branch is unthinkable.
A hundred years of infrastructure, technological development, and political decisions cannot be replaced overnight.
Changing course is difficult, but it has been done before. A telling example comes from nineteenth-century London. At the time, the city's entire sewage system emptied directly into the Thames. After years of cholera outbreaks and appalling stench, one summer (1858) became unbearable: the Great Stink. Reports tell of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert attempting a boat trip on the river, only to abandon it after a few minutes. Parliament, situated right by the Thames, suffered so badly from the smell that relocating outside London during the summer months was seriously discussed.
Instead, following intense and persistent political effort, a decision was made to invest massively in a modern sewer system.
It is fair to say that the Great Stink – and the subsequent construction of the world's first modern sewer system – laid the foundations for the global city London would later become. Joseph Bazalgette, the engineer who designed the system, is today regarded as one of the city's heroes. But it took a complete breakdown before it became politically possible to carry it through.
We find ourselves in a predicament. Humanity has altered the Earth to such an extent that we have changed the very conditions for life. Of the nine planetary boundaries, six have already been crossed (Stockholm Resilience Centre, 2023). Collectively, we suffer from a kind of short-termism, in which those least responsible are hit first and hardest.
Yet in the end, we are all affected. This small sphere drifting through the universe is our host planet – our only possible world. The more we learn about space, the further we look outward, the clearer it becomes: we cannot change planets. It is physically impossible for humans to travel to other star systems. Terraforming Mars into a habitable planet – if it is even possible – would take hundreds, if not thousands, of years. Until then, Mars, like the rest of space, remains a lethal and hostile environment. This does not mean we should not explore space. But we mustn't harbour any illusions. For the foreseeable future, and well beyond it, this is the only planet available to humanity. We are stuck here, as are our children, our grandchildren, and their children.
Despite this, we behave like obstinate teenagers, tossing our jackets on the floor, leaving the dishes unwashed, and crumbling crumbs into the sofa. Instead of taking out the vacuum cleaner and carrying out the overflowing bin, we cram in a little more rubbish and postpone the cleaning. If we wait long enough, surely someone else will come along and take care of it.
But there is no indulgent parent to tidy up after us. The crumbs spread across the sofa, the armchair, and the carpet. The bin overflows, and coats lie strewn across the hallway floor.
If we, as a species, cannot pull ourselves together and halt this trajectory, future generations are condemned to live in very dark times.
Albert Einstein is often attributed with a quote to the effect that problems cannot be solved using the same kind of thinking that created them in the first place. The attribution is almost certainly false – the quote only appeared long after Einstein's death – but there may nonetheless be some truth in it.
At present, the global order rests on an economic system that institutionalises and amplifies human short-termism. As a result, the transition proceeds slowly, laboriously, and in many respects in the wrong direction. Too many forces pull against it – and it should be noted that not all of them are malicious. Brutal economic development can be an effective way of reducing poverty, at least in the short term.
But what if the premise itself is wrong? What if the scarcity thinking on which everything rests is not exactly false, but merely one of many possible ways of thinking? What if it captures only a small fragment of reality, and reality could just as well operate according to a principle of abundance? What you give, you receive many times over, in one way or another. Perhaps abundance lies waiting on one of the other branches. How do we get there? Do we dare to jump? After all, things are quite comfortable where we are. We are not exactly in a crisis – at least not here… And if we wait just a little longer, surely someone else will take out that bin.
So what would the crisis look like – one severe enough to make us change course? Extreme weather, unprecedented wildfires, and snowless winters do not seem to suffice. Nor do dying coral reefs, collapsing ecosystems, and floods.
I return to Kimmerer's image of soil, and to the compost heap in my garden. And I think of Candide's final words: il faut cultiver son jardin.
Fragment from 3025, the archaeologist's notes:
"I sometimes wonder why they clung on for so long. Why did they remain within a system that led straight into a dead end? Did they not see that other, better alternatives existed? Here and there, seeds of hope are visible, but it is as if they lacked the courage to act."
We cannot know what the future will be like. But we do know that our actions lay its foundations. If we think of ourselves as future foremothers and forefathers, what decisions do we then make? Does that help us to see further than the next quarterly report and the next election? Can we lay the groundwork for something new – something larger and better – in the same way that Joseph Bazalgette once laid new pipes beneath the streets of London?
We do not need to wait for an even greater crisis. We need to create space for human creativity, to use our imagination and build worlds that we actually want to live in. And perhaps they will take a thousand different forms, just as small creatures thrive in different habitats.
And perhaps it is not even a matter of sacrifice. Perhaps it is the opposite: a gift – to enrich our present with both the past and what comes after. To sink our hands into the soil and observe the earthworms, the ants, and the fine root threads. To remember the people who, a thousand years ago, tended this place and left behind rich, fertile earth. To plant an acorn that may grow tomorrow, next week, or in five hundred years. To care of the soil so that it can make space for emerging life for a thousand years to come.
Perhaps we can even regard the soil as a medium – a love letter to our descendants.
Fragment from 3025, the archaeologist's notes:
"I am trying to understand our forebears from the twenty-first century. What finally made them change course? In hindsight, it may appear inevitable, but in their time nothing was self-evident. And yet the balance tipped, and that shift laid the foundations for the flourishing we see today. Was it the result of individual, courageous voices? A collective moral indignation? Or simply a seed that suddenly took root and began to grow? We may never receive a definitive answer, but we continue to dig."