The school at which I teach, UVM’s Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources, recently undertook a strategic planning exercise that envisioned four different scenarios for how the world might look in 20 years. We settled on two main axes for distinguishing the scenarios: (1) scarcity versus abundance of resources, and (2) integration versus separation or atomization, where what’s “integrated” is both society (less conflict-ridden, more egalitarian) and its relationship with the natural world (more biocentric in its sensibilities). The resultant four scenarios, named with a little levity, map against the axes like this:
The point of the exercise was to help the school prepare for pursuing its mission in each of the four quadrants. By definition, we are currently at the center of the diagram, so the task is to imagine how we will respond if the world moves in one or another of these four directions.
We all know what’s happened since then. With coronavirus taking its toll on our economies and everyday lives, and with local and national lockdowns being implemented to varying degrees, the result will include businesses closing, people losing work and not being paid, food becoming less available, anxieties and crime spiking, and the global economy contracting. How governments respond is a relevant variable, but at the very least the pandemic portends an overall shift leftward in the diagram. The question is whether we move into the “Rational Rations” scenario, dealing with the scarcity of resources reasonably, justly, and with minimal conflict, or into the “Handmaid’s Tale” scenario, with, as Werner Herzog once put it, “every man for himself and God against all.”
Disasters are never just disastrous; they are also an opportunity. The . . .