The foreshortened future and climate change

Mescal Stephens

‘Short termism’ is used in the business press to describe a range of concerns about the rationale and functionality of political, corporate and individual decision-making in both the public and private sectors. The Business Council of Australia (BCA) states that it refers particularly to an excessive preoccupation with projects, activities and investment designed to deliver improved near term returns and outcomes at the expense of those that could deliver higher returns and outcomes over the long run. The BCA also suggests that it is having significant implications in Australia and is potentially compromising Australia’s ability to sustain economic growth. There is relatively little research on it.

Short term decision making for long term problems is particularly challenging in natural resource management, sustainability and climate change for example.

Why does it occur? It is customary to reach for simple political explanations such as the electoral term of politicians but there are other explanations. Most people are simply not future oriented (Thoms 2004) and find it difficult to envisage a long term perspective. Consequently strategic plans are unused and are seen as irrelevant by the majority and the future oriented view put forward by the minority is watered down or lost.

It is widely acknowledged that the pace of the Western World has speeded up. The current world view devolves around the ‘extended present’ (Nowotny 1996) by which is meant the replacement of a vision of the future provided by the idea of progress for example, to the simultaneity of communications technology and the post modern economy within a future envelope of about 20-25 years. The older notion of the future as the far end point of a metanarrative is declining if not defunct as the end point of the extended present is simply more of the similar, detached from the linear continuum of past, present and future.

Global warming is now causing destruction which could terminate with the end of Western civilization. This is not happening as some far off event but incrementally as a tissue of apparently unconnected happenings such as old people dying from heat exhaustion; reduction of formerly unlimited water supplies in major cities; glacier melt; increased velocity of winds and storm surges; crop failure; and loss of biodiversity.

This ‘catastrophe’ is unable to be dealt with as such because of its ‘uncatastrophic’ subtlety, complexity, and the long duration of some natural cycles which impedes observation. There is no ‘clear and present’ disaster such as 9/11 or Katrina. The problem of the times is how to conceptualise and get it on the agenda against the over-riding concerns of short termism, simultaneity, and conventional response. Thinking on behalf of future generations is most compromised now when it is most needed, unlike previous generations which had posterity in mind.

This paper will further develop the problematique outlined above using two case studies which demonstrate a far more variegated response than is available form the usual assumption that everyone thinks about time in the same way.