396 Enabling Policies and Institutions for Sustainable Agricultural and Food Systems
Not that those are the only options, or even that the global capacity to design
and implement ways for reaching solutions is well developed. There is little reason
to suppose that change really occurs in this way – by top-down management – no
matter what the priorities are. At the very least, this exploration needs to be inter-
active, so that thinking about the future environment and economy is continually
tested against thinking about societal and spiritual aspirations. If the direction and
weight of current discussion fail to match real priorities, this should be acknowl-
edged and corrected.
Visions and a History of the Future
If the preceding line of reasoning has merit, the envisioning of alternative futures
is an urgent priority. Although ‘the concept of alternative futures has become the
linchpin of current future thinking’ (Coates, 1989, p16), much of modern futurist
thought has exhibited a very limited conception of alternative futures.
Modern, formal futurism has a relatively short history. Modernists tend to
assume that, until very recently, basic survival was an all-consuming endeavour, leav-
ing little time for idle speculations, and that past societies were relatively unchanging
and people expected the future to resemble the present and the past. A sense of
human influence over one’s own destiny grew from the late Middle Ages onward
(Polak, 1961, pp1, 33), however, until the positivists, religious and secular repression
kept most Western minds fixed firmly on the past and the present (Adelson, 1989).
The rapid technological advances of the industrial revolution, along with social
changes brought by capitalism and by the revolutions of the late 18th century, raised
obvious questions about the future of society (McHale, 1969), while Darwin and the
geologists were expanding the magnitude of conceivable timescales (Alkon, 1987).
The idea of constant social and material change has been slowly penetrating popular
and official culture since the 1840s. It has influenced American government plan-
ning since World War I, as it influenced the Soviet Plans of the 1920s and 1930s
(McHale, 1969). Forecasting came of age in World War II in the United States, lead-
ing to the development of a formal ‘science’ of futurism.
In his The Image of the Future, Polak (1961) warned depressed, post-war Europe
of the danger of living with no mental horizons beyond the present and of the need
to envision alternate futures. Despite this broad view, modern futurism concen-
trated on narrow post-war military and corporate concerns such as strategic plan-
ning, R&D and marketing (Coates, 1989; Coates and Jarratt, 1989). Governments
and corporations, whose ability to pay and high stakes made them easy clients,
became the main constituencies (Adelson, 1989). In response to this narrow base
of clients, formal futurism has largely abandoned imagery and social imagination
and has embraced the technologies of social forecasting and cross-impact analysis.
As Elise Boulding (1983) puts it: ‘Polak asked for visions. Futurists give blue-
prints.’ We return to some of these issues below.