Finding utopia: how a lack of imagination is impairing the sustainability discourse

Writing science fiction is about responsibly extrapolating from current events and technology into new and intriguing scenarios that shed light on the human condition decades or even centuries from now. It’s also deciding whether the alien name you've created has three or four consecutive “r”s.

- John Scalzi, New York Times bestselling author

The 2°C world

This is an article about the future and how we communicate about it. If we want to make it a promising future, we must first acknowledge that bad things will happen. This is not a contradiction but intended to help us forge a vision worth fighting for.

One of the worst things to happen is that we are headed for a 2°C world. Looking at the global carbon budget, the models predict that we can emit another 250 billion tonnes of CO2 to have an 80 % chance of limiting global warming to 1.5°C. We currently emit between 40-42 billion tonnes per year with no sign of slowing down, leaving us with around six years to achieve complete global decarbonization across all industries and sectors. Considering the need for specialized firms, equipment, production capacity, and workforce, achieving global net zero in the early 2030s is logistically impossible, even if unlimited funding was available to drive such a radical transition.

We got our first taste of the 1.5° world last year. The temperatures will keep climbing, and we will likely lose many species and ecosystems along the way. This leaves us with an almost existential question: How can we possibly look forward to this kind of future?

Daily doomsday digest

Considering our daily avalanche of bad news, many people no longer seem to consider such an opportunity. For as long as I can remember, the sustainability collective (thought leaders, news outlets, businesses, NGOs, and other institutions) has been repeating an undoubtedly accurate narrative, but one that hasn’t changed in over thirty years of climate change dialogue. 

1. “We keep destroying our planet”

2. “Progress is too slow”

3. “We need to act”

The reason behind the overabundance of dystopia is simple and often monetary: bad news sells better, is easier to craft (considering the negative scientific baseline), and gets more attention. People respond more strongly to negative thoughts, which is the primary source of social-media-induced depression. Consequently, we are suffering from a lack of positive imagination.

Hivemind

It has been scientifically proven that if enough people believe in an idea, it will likely become a reality. The collective unconscious is a concept I first encountered in Control, a work by brilliant Finnish video game writer Sam Lake. Initially developed by renowned psychologist Carl Jung, the term describes mental concepts shared unconsciously by humans. Often connected to ideology, the idea seeks to explain how similar societal themes are shared across the mythology and history of human cultures.

Transferring the collective unconscious to the sustainability discourse, the vast overabundance of dystopian messaging has begun to alter, both consciously and unconsciously, our imagination and ability to develop and assess solutions to this crisis. The constant exposure to dystopia feeds a collective, unconscious sense of despair, resulting in resignation among scientists, thought leaders, and the broader populace.

As a writer, I have found pop culture to be a reliable mirror of our collective unconscious. In August 2024, I moderated an expert panel at the Glasgow WorldCon, the annual gathering of the World Science Fiction Society, where we discussed the depiction of climate change in the media. Steve Willis, co-author of "Fairhaven", was among the panelists and brought along the following terrifying chart (that we have updated for this article).

This is an assessment of science fiction franchises in film, TV, books, and video games by the type of their scenario (dystopia vs. utopia) while also checking their plausibility. We found that most intellectual properties (IPs) we investigated are plausible dystopias—environmental and societal endgames in which conflict, climate change, and biodiversity loss have run their course. In some of these IPs, the world is in shambles, such as the wastelands of Mad Max and Judge Dredd. In others, the world is still on its way toward ruin, like in Interstellar, where an event called the Blight imperils global crop production. 

The imagined utopian settings, however, are almost all not plausible within our current technological paradigm, such as Star Trek’s Federation, whose utopia is based on an invention called the replicator, which magically transforms matter into valuable materials and food. We have found only a handful of plausible utopian settings to date. One example is the world of Horizon - Zero Dawn, where, granted, the Earth had undergone a cataclysmic event, but humans have bonded in primitive yet stable and in their majority benevolent communities. In Fairhaven, we follow a group of individuals who are bringing innovative climate solutions to the world and providing a hopeful outlook.

The collective dystopia

A dangerous consequence of a dystopia taking hold in the collective unconscious is altering human thought processes, resulting in ignorance and dismissing novel ideas that could otherwise create real change and energize the sustainability discourse. To give a personal example, I talked with climate finance experts from various respectable universities and organizations at a conference earlier this year. I intended to endorse the Global Carbon Reward—a novel economic theory designed to close about 50 % of the global climate funding gap. The theory, developed by Dr. Delton Chen, is gaining traction even among the more conservative sustainability experts and organizations. It was most prominently featured as the “Carbon Coin” in Kim Stanley Robinson’s groundbreaking novel, The Ministry for the Future.

Most people I talked to dismissed the concept without reading a single page. Among them were those who advocated “the need for a new economic policy,” yet when presented with one, they dismissed it. The primary reason was that “it sounded too good to be true.”

I must stress that every person I know who read the entire policy was mind-blown and said, “Oh my god, this could work.” However, thought leaders and finance experts dismissing a theory that could dramatically alter the sustainability discourse without reading it because “this sounds too good to be true” is problematic. I am concerned that humanity’s dystopian outlook on the future has altered our ability to accept novel solutions while actively rejecting opinions and visions that may provide hope. 

Bad storytelling

If the thought leaders struggle to open their hearts to a positive outlook on the future and hope, so will the rest of the global population. Given the dystopian overabundance, we are also fighting an uphill battle. The core challenge is that we know too much about the dystopia that awaits us while struggling to imagine a utopia we can all aspire to. To escape this thought pattern, I encourage everyone to consider that the global sustainability community may be caught in a vicious cycle of bad storytelling. 

Numerous examples exist. One is the private sector's lack of truthfulness and disconnection from their clients. Businesses tend to overbid each other on sustainability successes, often inflating incremental performance improvements or claiming to be major polluters. Some paint themselves as the leaders of the global energy transition, while behind closed doors, they lobby against tighter environmental standards and aggressively drive fossil exploration. 

I know that anything other than communicating “We are better than everyone else” usually goes against the standard corporate playbook. However, following the flawed principle of infinite growth in a finite world doesn’t work anymore if the limits of such a system are now in sight. The rules have changed, and less is becoming more.

Transparency and honesty are the key ingredients of authentic sustainability leadership. Such leadership must go beyond Ecovadis and sustainability reporting metrics. It is about creating a narrative, a true story of dignity and integrity, that can inspire people to participate in a collective vision. A client choosing his favorite sustainable company is one thing. Still, they need to fully understand why a business is taking them on such a journey and how they directly benefit from it in their daily lives, whether through the consumption of sustainable products or the company directly contributing to improving their lives and health.

There is also elitism. To most people, sustainability is a luxury they cannot afford. They are confronted with fundamental questions such as financial survival in Berlin, a city where the cost of living is skyrocketing. If we want to get these people on board instead of pushing them into the arms of the extremist parties, we need to make them a very compelling offer. I am saying this with tremendous respect to Sir David Attenborough, and alike.

Lessons in people chemistry

Consequently, a vision for the future needs to include a monetary component and be built on strengthening and fostering the local resilience of communities. If people and businesses invest their time, energy, and money into sustainability, they want to know their gains, not in fifty years, but today and tomorrow. This is a fundamental requirement of the human condition, and without incentives, a vision will not work. To craft a vision that works, and I know this is the last place many people in my sphere would willingly dive into, there is something we can learn from populist media and politics.

Populists, too, warn about grim dystopias, attracting voters by using a century-old classic: raising fears. However, there is one distinct difference when comparing populist messaging with the dystopias created by the sustainability discourse: Populists provide a way out, a vision people can aspire to.

Of course, most of the proposed populist solutions to achieve such a vision are preposterous, but that doesn’t matter because as soon as their audience understands and accepts them, the senders create a vision that people fall behind: “Our country has problem x, but we propose the easy solution y, and if we follow it through, we will create a brighter future z not in fifty years, but tomorrow.” 

In other words, if an individual accepts such a solution, it expects a gain for their immediate, personal future. The more people accept this, the more the collective unconscious transforms, creating a utopian vision for their societal future: Make America great again.

Finding utopia

To be clear, I am not proposing short-sighted action to solve climate change or succumbing to lies, fear-mongering, or other manipulative ideas to capture an audience. I am just pointing out the fundamental challenges in the sustainability discourse: 

1. We are too focused on the far future

2. We struggle to find a positive vision

3. We fail to capture the benefits for an individual’s immediate future

Our current sustainability vision can be summarized as, “If we don’t act now, bad things will happen in a few decades.” This is not compelling. We must acknowledge what is still possible, such as limiting global warming to 2°C. Given our civilization’s bumpy road, this would still be a tremendous achievement, not a collective failure.

It is truthful to prepare humanity for the challenges of a 2°C-world, but trying to change the narrative into something positive is neither cheating nor illegitimate. We already understand what people of different income levels, social backgrounds, and cultures can contribute: anything from buying locally to decarbonizing an entire steel production. Once we connect these actions with a narrative around the benefits for our individual futures, we are only one step away from finding utopia.

illuminem Voices is a democratic space presenting the thoughts and opinions of leading Sustainability & Energy writers, their opinions do not necessarily represent those of illuminem.