…or, what will your children tell you?
How will you explain the GEAS report to your children? Maybe they hear you talking about it. Maybe one of their friends’ parents maligned it as crackpot alarmism, or another is preparing for the end times. But no matter how it comes up, what are you going to say?
My friend came over to my place this afternoon in a state of bewilderment, asking for help. Her daughter, one of those bright-eyed nine-year-olds going on 30, had come straight home asking about the GEAS report. Her primary science teacher had been watching the videos released today on a break, and ended up showing them to the class. This kid came right home and started asking questions. Hard questions. Was it true? How did they know all that? How do you reinvent things like society, or energy, or health? What does “human extinction” mean?
Every generation of parents have something they need to explain, or justify ignoring. For all you boomers, think about MAD, what you were taught in school, what your parents told you. Think about how those stories were different in Japan. Some of us grew up with the specters of AIDS and hepatitis, while others of my age barely heard word one about them. But the threats GEAS describes are the things that we must now explain to our children, the things in the world that don’t make sense and have to change.
I think my friend came to me, because I have a model for this conversation, which I think is rather unusual. I remember my mother explaining the old Limits of Growth and Club of Rome simulations to me: the old-school doomsday projections, so powerful they influenced China’s One Child Policy. I don’t remember how old I was, or how long it took me to actually comprehend what she was saying to me. She told me that this group of scientists looked at all the factors they could think of (nevermind the shortcomings of precisely how little that ended up being), and tried to figure out how to measure them and project their changes. Then they did a lot of calculations. They figured out that by 2050, we would reach a tipping point, and by 2100, we would reach a total systems collapse. Everything would just stop working: there would be no fish in the sea, the crops would stop growing and the dust would blow far and wide and thick, children would suffer and governments would fall.
“How far away is 2050?” I remember asking. Well, you’ll be 65 years old, my mother answered. By the time you’re as old as grammy is now, the world as we know it will be over. That is, unless we fix it: unless we change the way we do things to make them better. Everyone, in every way they can–from old powerful people set in their ways to precocious nine-year olds–everyone has to help make things better. Well, GEAS has moved up the deadline, but the message is the same. We have to reinvent the way we do things or the world as we know it, and most of the people in it, will die out.
Ten years ago this seemed like a rather strange conversation to have with one’s mother as a child. My friends joked about how this had warped me, set me on the strange long path of futures thinking and world-changing I’m still digging into as I can.
But what is different about 2019, what has changed, is that this can’t be an unusual conversation any more. GEAS has made sure of that. People aren’t ignoring this one. Our children will grow up with a different relationship to the future. Maybe not one like mine, but different from most of us, and different by orders of magnitude than our parents.
My friend’s daughter won’t be the only one asking questions, and parents are struggling with how to tell them what the GEAS report is, what it means. All of you parents: answer them. Answer them honestly and to the best of your ability. Your kids deserve to know, and they deserve to participate. This is not mutually assured destruction. We can change this, together, and we’ll do it only with the help of our children whose lives are in the balance.
