What the 1970s Can Teach Us about Inventing a New Economy

[Oscar]

DEMBICKI: What the 1970s Can Teach Us about Inventing a New Economy

[ http://thetyee.ca/News/2014/10/27/What_ ... ign=271014 ]

A Hawaiian futurist recalls the two years he spent trying to end consumerism in Canada.

By Geoff Dembicki, TheTyee.ca October 27, 2014

What does the future hold? Jim Dator has spent his life exploring the question and how posing it can improve the society we presently inhabit. He helped set up North America's first-ever academic program for futures studies in 1972 at the University of Hawaii in Honolulu. And four decades later, he's regarded as an elder statesman of the discipline -- a futurist's futurist, if you will -- lauded by colleagues and students for the "scope, intensity, magnitude, creativity, and importance of [his] work."

Dator is now in his early 80s and in the twilight of a long and globally influential career. But he still has clear memories of the two years he spent in Canada when his career was just getting started. From 1974 to 1976, he travelled all across the country, meeting with school boards, scientists, Royal Commissions, TV producers, policymakers and even the Privy Council of Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, to transform Canada from a society of consumers into a society of "conservers."

This was an era not so unlike the one now we live in. It was a time of global oil shocks. Across the world there was dawning awareness of the ecological limits to growth, and widespread fears that they would be exceeded. Dator's job was to make Canadians aware of those limits, while building an alternative to the prevailing mass consumer lifestyle capable of respecting them. "There was a vast amount of research and public meetings held all over the country," Dator said. "I got to know Canada very well."

But the shift away from consumerism he tried to achieve never took off.

Dator's since spent his career exploring four scenarios of what tomorrow's society could be like -- collapse, discipline, singularity or business-as-usual -- to widen our options for fixing today's.

Yet when I visited him this July at his office in Honolulu, he lamented that our society has yet to heed the warnings he first began imparting 40 years ago.

"If you think continued innovation, a new iPhone every three months is a really great world to live in," he said, "then you're not going to like [the future]."

MORE:

[ http://thetyee.ca/News/2014/10/27/What_ ... ign=271014 ]