trends and future of sustainable development - TransEco

not preferable. Scenario 4: Transformation for many might be considered preferable but may also beconsidered neither probable nor possible. The lens we choose to apply to these scenarios will determineresponses and reveal to participants their fundamental value orientation: optimist, pessimist, orpragmatist. It is therefore important to consciously pick the lens most appropriate to the context. Itshould be sufficiently grounded to offer practical engagement, sufficiently empowering to offer hope anda pathway to success, sufficiently real to focus attention and sufficiently sobering to demand immediateaction.One final case study: Britain 1800The industrial and political elites of Britain in and around the year 1800 developed a vision for theirpreferable future. This vision required considerable social will and institutional creativity. To develop anindustrial and capitalist system required new laws, new institutions, a rethinking of political structuresand processes, the turning upside down of the settled agricultural world of the majority of Britons, andan extensive and rapacious, but also seductive, Imperial system. This work took place mostly between1750 and 1850 and can be considered completed with the 1851 Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace inLondon, which enshrined the vision and imagination of the new industrial epoch.The social suffering of the majority seemed, in the short term, a small price to pay for the longerterm dividends these elites hoped to receive. This work was certainly both practical and risky. It was alsoa work of great social imagination. The effects were immediate and once unleashed almostuncontrollable. The Luddite rebellion of 1811-1812, the Swing riots of 1830 and the near revolt of 1848all point to the immense unrest that these changes elicited from the British populace. It was in thisperiod that the working class was ‘invented’ along with the factory and the notion of ‘capital’(Hetherington 1997).Practical lesson 5: imagination and willWhat stands out in this historical case study is that imagination needs to be coupled with social will,institutional creativity and empowered leadership if deep and lasting (i.e. sustainable) change is to beachieved. If we frame practical responses in an instrumental and reactive context, the results will onlybuy a sinking ship additional surface time. For deeper transformative and preferable futures to emerge,there needs to be a deep engagement with the imaginative and structural bedrock of our civilisation (seefor examples: Milojević 2005; Eisler 2007). The British case study illustrates how such sustainedproactive social engineering occurs. Without such an engagement, all our work will tend to be reactiveand cosmetic in nature.3. SummaryThe historical case studies and the scenarios they generated have been designed to stimulate reflectionon how best to respond to climate change within the contexts of human settlement and health; energy;agriculture, forestry and fisheries; and biodiversity and ecosystems. These reflections have beensummarised in Table 1 and some practical responses are offered.248