Trees 2222 | uncarved blocks

It all went very fast in the end. It had taken roughly two centuries for carbondioxide levels in the atmosphere to peak, from the late 19th century to the second half of the 21st century. After that, it took another two centuries for emissions to return to pre-1870 levels, even if it would take much longer for the amount of carbondioxide that was already in the atmosphere to diminish. That would take thousands of years. 

A curious symmetry became apparent to people living in the saddle time between the old and the new world. It had taken some five thousand years for humanity to cover the earth in cities, from Uruk, the first city ever, which had city walls in the fifth millennium BCE, to the urban conglomerations that spanned the globe in vast, drawn out and interconnected cityscapes that lay like dendrites over the continents and formed a global web in the 22nd Century, stretching out to the remotest corners of the world. It would take another five thousand years for the cities to disappear again. Looking at the history of the planet in fast forward, you would see cities flare up like pimples on the face of the earth and vanish as quickly as they had arisen. 

By 2222 it had become clear that this was the way history would unfold. Scholars re-read Innis' Empire and Communications, reminding them of the importance of communication networks for social organisation and more specifically that the development of cities had been made possible by the invention of the wheel. No city without its hinterland to supply it with food; no market without carts to transport the goods there. The wheel had created both country and city and had put both under the aegis of freedom: freedom of movement, freedom of thought, freedom of speech. It occurred to me as a child that there were no wheels in nature because axis and wheel have to be separate from each other to work. You could never grow a wheel. You could write a history of the city, its growth and disappearance, as a history of the wheel, which made transport possible but also industry and, most of all, the public sphere. 

By the time wheels were turning without churning out more carbon, by the time the smoke began to clear, the public sphere had suffered a long, slow decline. At first remote instant communication seemed to offer untold promises to humanity. And it did; people connected across the planet in ways that were unthinkable before the arrival of the internet, for better and for worse. The readjustment of the boundaries between the public and the private had taken up the better part of the 21st Century. People had to learn what it meant to communicate, live, work with others at a distance, facilitated by constantly available multimedia contact. Many hearts were broken. 

But, over time, people found their way with it and a new sense of publicness arose. They rediscovered truth, they rediscovered the value of evidence and they learned that, in a world in which all have equal access to public communication, all have the responsibility to ensure communicative environments remain sustainable. People became aware of the new balance between community and environment, that required new ways of relating to each other, themselves and the natural world they were part of. The public sphere had become that: a network of sustainable communicative, material, environments, animated by widely shared values of openness, honesty and respect for others (well, on a good day...). People learned to walk in the Dao of communication, with all the carefulness and circumspection, boldness and respect it calls for; a kind of reticence, shyness almost, that stems from an awareness of the momentousness of the event of meeting another person, reminding us of the people who lived before the cities:

The ancient masters were subtle, mysterious, profound, responsive.
The depth of their knowledge is unfathomable.
Because it is unfathomable,
All we can do is describe their appearance.
Watchful, like men crossing a winter stream.
Alert, like men aware of danger.
Courteous, like visiting guests.
Yielding, like ice about to melt.
Simple, like uncarved blocks of wood.
Hollow, like caves.
Opaque, like muddy pools.

(Tao Te Ching, 15, translation: Gia-Fu Feng and Jane English)

The wheels that had brought people into the city, that had created this first incarnation, for the human species, of a built up world that is publicly shared and in which things can happen that are unexpected and new, now took them out of the city. Not into the countryside but into a new world, in which city and country no longer existed as polar opposites. People still had freedom or if they didn't have it, they yearned and fought for it. People still had homes, loves, friends, children, families. People still, or rather again, realised that only face to face contact, physical presence, adequately meets what is fully human in togetherness. They learned to experience and honour the sacrality of it, which had been trampled upon so often and so systematically in history. That factor alone shifted the human ethos fundamentally. And buildings disappeared. Motorways disappeared. The landscape became something never seen before. Country, park, city, town, forest, field, sea: none of these words could fully capture the way the appearance of the world transformed after the carbon peak. It wasn't just humanity that changed. All of nature responded to the arrival of this new time. Animals changed their habits, plants and trees changed their rhythms and their shape to adapt to the new mode Gaia was working out for itself. Technology became so entwined with nature that people could dwell anywhere. The vast cityscapes that had been built up over the centuries, rows and rows of stone, wood, brick, tarmac, asphalt, steel and glass were all replaced over time by open domes and dwellings (nothing like the climate-controlled bubbles engineers imagined during the carbon peak) that merged seamlessly with nature and gave rise to new forms of social relations and new ways of living with nature that are almost unimaginable today. People found their way back to the trees. They found a new sense of purpose and meaning in life, celebrating and bearing witness to everything that exists. They still died, but they had found a way, as a species, of living with the world, rather than exploiting it. They were in it for the long haul now.

Did they miss the shopping streets, the restaurants in busy squares, the public libraries, the rain on the pavement, the tranquillity of a train station on a Sunday morning, afternoons in the park? Those experiences were all still there, only much, much better. 

Inside of us lives the unimaginable possibility, like a darkness of the lived moment out of which our ideas, wishes, actions, imaginations and words spring, a possibility which longs to be brought out into the open. "I am what the forest dreams", Ernst Bloch wrote in 1918. We are only on the brink of imagining all of what that statement yet may mean. It propels us, and the forest, into an unwritten future.