The Future We Choose summary

Now imagine a different future. You wake up on an average day in 2050 and walk outside to breathe in the fresh, moist air. Your city is covered in trees, there are gardens on every rooftop, and every formerly vacant lot has been converted into a shady grove or play area for children.

Globally, forest cover is at 50 percent. There aren’t very many wide open plains left, and new electric railways mean cities are more connected than ever. In the United States, the days of flying from the east to the west coast are long gone – now, you can travel from New York City to Los Angeles in a high-speed bullet train.

Are you an optimist or a pessimist? The truth is, your answer might not matter much. That’s because, according to psychology, you can change your attitude to the future by challenging your current thought patterns and building better ones.

All of which means that even if you feel like a pessimist right now, you can talk yourself into becoming an optimist! And in order to face the climate crisis and take on the challenges it presents, we all need a heavy dose of optimism. 

Picture yourself on any given weekday morning. You’re waiting for your bus or train to arrive to take you to work. Finally, it sidles up, and you rush to board the crowded vehicle. How do you feel?

You probably experience a sense of urgency – you must nab the best seat, and it doesn’t matter what you have to do to get it! 

The instinct to strive for more has been a part of human society for centuries. As a species, we’re accustomed to constantly taking – from the land, from the sea, and from the indigenous populations that have been colonized over the years, to name just a few examples.

But many of our planet’s resources are finite, and we’re approaching a point where just taking will no longer be possible. 

The year is 2015, and the negotiations leading up to the Paris Agreement are nearly at an end. The authors are in their office, working on the final arrangements. Suddenly there’s a knock at the door and in walks the head of UN Security. He announces the unthinkable: a bomb has been found at Le Bourget subway station, the closest stop to the conference.

In that moment, the authors faced a choice: to go ahead despite the risk that another bomb might be planted, or call everything off and potentially destroy their best chance of reaching an international agreement on climate change.

Nature and technology don’t normally go hand in hand, yet technological advances could prove an excellent tool in the fight against climate change. 

Take self-driving electric cars. They produce lower emissions than traditional cars and may end up reducing private ownership since you could simply call one up like an Uber – just without the driver. Or take plant-based and lab-grown meat alternatives. By switching production from the land to the laboratory, you could greatly reduce the impact of agriculture on global emissions. 

Consumerism is running rampant. Products and brands are designed so that buying them is what marks you out as part of a tribe of like-minded people. Year after year, your identity and the products you consume become more and more entwined.

In particular, the fashion industry is a problem because of its enormous carbon footprint – second only to the oil industry. Textile production adds more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere than all international flights and maritime shipping combined! 

It’s no secret that the internet is rife with misinformation, and social media isn’t helping to correct the problem. In fact, a recent MIT analysis of Twitter concluded that – on average – lies spread six times faster than the truth.

Some people have gone so far as to name our current world a post-truth era. And that does seem to hold some weight because, even though our political leaders freely spread lies and deny science, we still choose to believe them.