Bring Back the Future
By Mark & Peter Teague
Mark Teague is one of the the country's leading authors and illustrators of children's books. He is the author eleven picture books and the illustrator of more than twenty others, including the Poppleton series, the First Graders from Mars series, The Great Gracie Chase, and other favorites.
Peter Teague is the Program Director for Environment & Contemplative Practice at the Nathan Cummings Foundation. Peter Teague has extensive experience in the field, having served as senior environmental policy advisor to Congressman Leon Panetta, Senate candidate Diane Feinstein and Senator Barbara Boxer.
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Looking north from 35th Street, from what was the top of a hill in the days before Manhattan was shorn of its topography, you'll see into the yawning concrete pit -- several square blocks of it -- that forms the entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel. The pit was once, believe it or not, a little valley so verdant that the Dutch called it the bloomingdale. Almost no one misses it because almost no one knows it was ever there.
From all accounts, the first Europeans in America encountered natural abundance on a scale that's almost inconceivable today. Our middle class lives are based on this bargain: we trade one form of material abundance -- clear, clean rivers teaming with fish, forests and grasslands that stretch for thousands of uninterrupted miles, perfect little valleys full of flowers - for another -- warm homes, good food, nice cars and children who live into adulthood. We don't remember the bloomingdale - any of the bloomingdales outside of the few we've preserved like butterflies under glass - because to remember would bring us face to face with something we'd rather forget: we'd make the same bargain again, if given the chance.
Middle-class Americans don't just value middle-class lives because we're middle class. The desire for ease and comfort seems to be a widespread if not universal human phenomenon. If we sometimes imagine that we're caged in by the vacuity of the consumerist lifestyle, it seems we're in a zoo that most of the other animals want to get into. The Chinese are intent on moving several hundred million people in this direction, and, like us, are willing to trade their natural inheritance in order to get there. Right now most Chinese would be content with the lifestyle we enjoyed in our college dorms. But not for long - there will soon be more Chinese living the American Dream than there are Americans.
This raises the central question facing humanity: is there any real reason to expect that we won't continue to pursue the bargain and wreck the planet in the process?
The first and most likely answer, based on past performance, is no. We will.
But there is at least one other possibility. We might get really clever, and conjure up a dream more compelling, more liberating and more convincing than the one that animates the rush for more stuff. We might bring nature and agriculture into our cities, make them vastly more energy efficient, power them with the wind and sun and create more ecologically sustainable and higher quality urban experiences than we can now imagine. For the majority of the human population who will live in cities, the bloomingdale might come back to replace some of the concrete.
We don't do future visions like we used to. Remember what it was like as a kid approaching Disneyland? The first thing you'd see, even before you entered the park, was the monorail. As a kid you distrusted it, and rightly so. It was clearly there for the adults: a way to seduce them into the coming fantasy by providing a veneer of hard science and technology. It's not clear why a train on one rail epitomized all that we were striving for as a civilization, but Walt Disney understood Americans better than anyone, and he knew somehow that the monorail was necessary, and he put it right up front.
We need a new monorail. Environmentalists are often scolds and doomsayers. Beyond that, they're abstractionists, talking about alternative energy, carbon footprints, flex fuels, cap and trade. Dull, bureaucratic rhetoric utterly devoid of compelling imagery. Where's the vision? Where's the actual stuff that would pull us into the park? Past generations held world fairs every few years, and the public would flock in to see the new technologies and catch a glimpse of the radiant future. Why did we stop doing this?
So here's our proposal. The next time the nations of the world meet for a Kyoto-type conference on global warming it should be in conjunction with the greatest world's fair of all time. And instead of building a fake future-city diorama, all effort should be made to construct an actual, functioning city using every trick our greatest scientists, engineers, architects, urbanists and artists can scheme up. We could do it in the places most in need of re-imagining, building, in the process, economies that actually work for people, based on the visions and efforts of people left out of the current economy.
If it succeeded, the new world's fair idea could replace the moribund Olympic movement. It's everything humans love: gadgetry, pageantry, showmanship, international competition, commerce, goofiness, monorails. And every four years we could build the newest, greatest city on earth, employing the millions without jobs to do the work. This proposal may be a far step short of the sort of comprehensive change required for global environmental health, not to mention true social and economic justice. And yes, the idea is subject to all the usual corruption. Even so, it would provide us with a chance to unleash the best of our creative energies, and to direct them toward real solutions. That, more than anything else, would be the point of the project: to trade our abstraction for vision, our rhetoric for action. At the very least this new world's fair would strike a blow against an alternative future, the one in which we shuffle off to oblivion in a giant concrete pit, with jargon on our lips.