Artwork by Jim Anderson who also embellished the psychedelic images below.

THE RISE AND FALL
OF FLOWER POWER
Journal of a Futurist, 2 June 2007

Were the hippies right? It is tempting to think so in this age of ecocide and terror. “Remember when we used to hang out and talk to each other”, said a barely remembered friend as our paths merged at airport security. In Bali in '71 she had been Queen of Kuta beach. Both of us are time bankrupts now, like thousands of others who once scoffed at 'the system' and tweaked their lifestyles to the phases of the moon, contemplating Herman Hesse and organic fruit, trailing clouds of pot. We stretched to excess the concept of a misspent youth.

The world moved on and so did we, eventually. Parenthood, credit cards, mortgages, the whole shebang. The despised shopping mall was suddenly convenient. Disposable nappies a godsend. The CD/cupholder equipped Subaru never broke down. Our rage against the consumer society softened to a lullaby. Sure, we still supported Adbusters, Greenpeace and the right to strike, but the society of the spectacle seeped into everyday life and the dream of getting rich quick no longer seemed crass. Anyway, you needed the bread to pay the fares to fly to the conferences to learn how the world was endangered by toxic emissions, made worse by flights to conferences.

Our kitchen equipment got shinier and blood pressures rose, along with the intake of drugs. Boring drugs. Cholesterol reducing statins have zero capacity to intensify music or orgasms. We try to run groovy little businesses and get excited about Office Works, letting the latest novels lie by the bed as we cope with the mountain of paperwork thrust on our desks from the Government, who've turned us into a nation of tax collectors, much to the satisfaction of politicians who spend the loot on lavish TV ads to push their agendas. Numbing us with platitudes and workaholia. Which is probably why my email has lately been bombarded with links to a splendid column in the San Francisco Chronicle, Why the Hippies were Right.

TAKING THE TIE DYED
BANNER TO THE DEVILS LAIR

From where comes “all this hot enthusiasm for healing the planet”, asks Mark Morford, and “eating whole foods and avoiding chemicals and working with nature and developing the self? Came from the hippies. Alternative health? Hippies. Green cotton? Hippies. Reclaimed wood? Recycling? Humane treatment of animals? Medical pot? Alternative energy? Natural childbirth? Non-GMA seeds? It came from the granola types (who, of course, absorbed much of it from ancient cultures), from the alternative worldviews, from the underground and the sidelines and from far off the goddamn grid and it's about time the media, the politicians, the culture as a whole sent out a big, wet, hemp-covered apology.” Not a chance Mark, not in Australia, where the Government still hasn't apologised to the aboriginals for colonising their land in1788 and later acquiring their children by force.

Anyway, the hippies have no need of an apology, as the belated adoption of their ideas is sufficient reward. Also, the legacy of hippiedom is not unblemished. Take another look at celluloid fantasies, like Easy Rider, or Hair: the sexism & self indulgence will make you cringe. Hippies helped loosen up of sexuality, but this too has been pushed by pornographers to a level of brutality unforseen by mellow peaceniks.

Still, in the face of climate fears, unlikely figures are emerging from the closet of hippiedom. At an ideas summit, the father of artificial intelligence, Ray Kurzweil, unburdened himself of his flower power past. Rupert Murdoch is carrying the tie dyed banner into the future, with his embrace of yoga and carbon neutrality. Both the Australian Prime Minister and the leader of the opposition are in a race to sit at the feet of his Holiness, the Dalai Lama. Watch for more hippie re-birthings as the 40th anniversary of 1967's Summer of Love looms into view.

THE ODIOUS OPERATION OF THE MACHINE

The counter culture evolved through three stages: student power, flower power and peoples power. The Free Speech Movement sprang from of the university campus at Berkeley, California in the early sixties, as a result of attempts to stifle political discourse, and it set helped off a spirit protest that re-shaped the West. The Berkeley uprising mysteriously coincided with “anti establishment” protests in London, and again in far away Sydney, where students and academics rose up to eradicate censorship. By the end of the decade, the protest agenda had widened and the 30,000 demonstrators in Berkeley who marched to rescue a community-created park from the jaws of developers, were armed with peace signs, 30,000 daisies and a huge banner: LET A THOUSAND PARKS BLOOM.

In 1973, a sarong-wearing delegate at a huge lifestyle festival in the rural town of Nimbin, Australia, reported he was “on full alert to avoid committing such eco atrocities as soaping myself in the creek or driving a car to the campsite.

Each of us took our rubbish to the depot, sorting it as: glass, metal, compost, or paper. After accidentally tossing an apple-core into the bin marked 'metal', I spent ten minutes feeling guilty, then rummaged within. That's how Nimbin got to you.” But not to everyone. It took another 35 years, a thousand scientists and Al Gore to ram home the message of sustainability. Why? Because the hippies had no power and the politicians had no wisdom.

By the mid seventies it was time for counter culturalists to leave the playpen. The flares and beads went into the attic, babies were raised, jobs conquered. Despite the outlandish episodes of the past, not all the insights fell into disrepute. If anything, ecological passions deepened over the years as the coral turned white and shopping became a religion. Hippies who ascended the corporate ladder often retained their formative inclinations; voting green, eating organic and reducing emissions, even as the Dark Ages dawned. And what Dark Ages they have become, especially in nations that put a match to Iraq: Britain, America and Australia. To steal their oil fields, we created the killing fields.

YOU DON'T NEED KAFTANS

While our complicity in this tragedy is an open book, its impact on the soul of conspirator nations is still unfolding. Blair has fled, Bush is sinking and John Howard remains indifferent to the enormity of his crime - both against Iraq, and against nature. In these final months of his power, it is like living in the land of the dead. Australia still has its literary festivals, fine wine and some spirited dissent but, do I need to spell it out? Howard puts nuclear before renewables and prayer before climate science. We turn a blind eye to torture. We mistreat asylum seekers. We withdraw funds from aid and welfare groups which criticise the Government. We stack our cultural boards with toadies, we deport pacifist radicals, we prosecute whistle blowers … and so on, fostering a culture of dull compliance. When I phoned the literary editor of the Sydney Morning Herald, she seemed delighted when I offered to review a book, until I mentioned the author's name. “Our policy is not to review John Pilger”, came the reply. A little thing to be sure, but as Kitty Kallen so sweetly sang, Little Things Mean a Lot. And now the leader of the opposition, Kevin Rudd, is turning himself into Howard's doppelganger, in the tragic belief it will appeal to the TV addled heartland.

Yet on the whole, Australians are starting to wake up. In the next election there is a fighting chance the Government will be overthrown. The impact of this is hard to predict, but it is unlikely to lead to a Summer of Love.

POST SCRIPT

An extract from the speech delivered by activist Mario Savio to the striking students at Berkeley in 1964: “There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part; you can't even passively take part, and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!” And it was. The machine was wrecked by an uprising of youth, the moral equivalent of an Improvised Explosive Device. Today we suffer a sinister war, restrictions on speech, fundamentalist nuttiness and the defilement of Earth. Tick, tick, tick ….

Footage of Savio's speech is here: http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/VideoTest/msavio.ram

An obituary here: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/1996/11/08/DD46441.DTL

Mario Savio, Berkeley, 1964.

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The Raft of the Medusa, Theodore Gericault

TURNING UP THE HEAT
Journal of a Futurist, 30 April 2007

To a citizen fifty years hence

Greetings stranger, sorry we screwed up your inheritance. Did you make it to another planet or are you still Earthbound, scavenging the waste dumps and fighting over bicycle parts? Hope not. Perhaps the fossil fuel society did collapse and that has gifted you a miracle: a civilization driven by creativity and renewable energy, where every citizen plays a vital role and tanks are tractors. By the time you receive this I am long dead, so why this message?

In case the good guys lose and the bad guys re-write history. The West is now at war with itself and just about everyone else, which is draining our capacity to deal with a range of threats to human survival. Some of these threats have been unfolding for a long time and our leaders have been a long time looking the other way. Forests, water, coal and uranium are hauled from the Earth and sold for peanuts. For a fee of $180, Coca Cola is allowed to siphon 66 million litres of water a year from a pristine aquifer in Mangrove Mountain NSW, bottle it in plastic and ship it afar, while local farmers struggle.

If asked to imagine the distant future, our politicians can't think beyond the date of the next election. Until 2007, the Australian Prime Minister dismissed Global Warming as an invention of malcontents. He remains dubious of claims that it's linked to human activity. And yet, as our unsustainable lifestyle starts to fade, a new kind of society struggles to be born. It is the fate of this struggle, dear citizen of the future, that will have defined your destiny.

MELTING INTO THE WOODS

The encroaching web of perils should not have taken us by surprise. Warnings flashed 50 years ago in the 1960's, when I was young and the West was reeling from a social upheaval that ended a colonial war and extended civil liberties. It also exposed the nasty side of capitalism, including its fouling of nature. The mode of the music changed, the walls of the city shook. We marched, shouting slogans, flowers in our hair and smoking cannabis. Then came psychedelics. In this moment of madness we found that consciousness was king. It was a time when everything seemed possible, even a generational mind-shift. We saw a chance to live more lightly on the planet. Then winter came… and they put up a parking lot. With a pink hotel, a boutique, and a swinging hot spot.

deanchamberlain.com

Consumerism was back. Gaia caught a fever. Today, as the fossil fuel era slouches to extinction, a new kind of counter culture is finding its feet. Not everyone is happy.

Our leaders are war crazy. Almost half a decade after the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq, civilians continue to be massacred. On a single day in April, 312 Iraqis were killed and 302 wounded. Four million have been displaced. But still our Prime Minister claims such carnage is “justified by the removal of former dictator Saddam Hussein” - a view rejected by almost every non Kurdish Iraqi. The cruelty of the invaders is boundless: "I don't think you're ever going to get rid of all the car bombs” says General Petraeous. “Iraq is going to have to learn to live with some degree of sensational attacks." Meanwhile, some Iraqis want to re-erect Saddam's statue.

How can our brave Bible-bashing warlords keep spinning tales of freedom & reconstruction, while presiding over scenes of torture and slaughter? All for what? To pillage oil. We are in the throes of a resource war sold as a freedom ride, although 70 percent of children in Baghdad exhibit “trauma-related stress from passing dead bodies in the streets, from witnessing relatives being killed, and from being injured in attacks”. So of course people are starting to rub the sleep from their eyes and to examine more closely the edifice of illusion that for so long has held them spellbound.

NOTHING IS QUITE AS IT SEEMS

Even Donald Trump looked down the barrel of CNN and said the war is a disaster, the President is a disaster and the White House a disseminator of lies. The head of the International Criminal Court, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, has endorsed the “feasibility” of Bush, Blair and Howard being docked at the Hague on charges for war crimes. Investigators from Europe found that 1,254 secret and illegal CIA flights have violated European airspace since 9/11, some carrying kidnapped suspects bound for torture. It was bloggers who blew the whistle, as the mainstream media slept.

We're finding that everything is connected. Corporate media thrills to war, as it is good for business, especially the businesses owned by its advertisers and board members, some of which peddle weapons of mass destruction (Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon. Overall, consumers were fed flag-wrapped tales of rose petal welcomes and falsified heroics, often scripted by the Pentagon.

Over the years we learned a lot about Paris Hilton and little of the Tigris Hilton, soaring to the skies from the rubble of Baghdad, the sole construction project running on schedule. This is the new American Embassy, which features flash restaurants, a state-of-the-art gym, a cinema, tennis courts, and the biggest swimming pool in Iraq. In addition to plush digs for the Ambassador and a deputy, there are six apartments for senior officials, as well as two huge office blocks, where an 8,000 staff of diplomats, soldiers, FBI agents, torturers, spies and spin doctors can meddle in the Middle East.

This diplomatic fortress spreads across an acreage larger than Vatican City and is visible from space. All talk of pulling Americans troops out Iraq has nothing to do with pulling Americans out of Iraq. The Tigris Hilton is a glorified garrison, one of about 738 US bases criss-crossing the globe, some with secret prisons and nuclear missiles.

In short, dear citizen of the future, what we face today is a global empire addicted to oil, armed to the teeth and run by a pinhead.

STRUGGLING FOR ADVANTAGE
OR REVENGE

To escape this eco/geo political mess, the world will need to do more than lower the voltage of lightbulbs. The inevitable transition to a post-carbon economy and the peaking of oil will transform lifestyles, and not everyone looks forward to the adventure. Every week a new kind of policing or military device is unveiled. Neutron weapons, which destroy living organs but not buildings, could be a “weapon of choice … for ethnic cleansing in turbulent world", notes a UK Defence scenario. "Lethal force without human intervention”, we are told, will deliver chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear mayhem.

Major Ralph Peters, a respected military futurist, foresees a world where the “have-nots will hate and strive to attack the haves”. Nations will “struggle for advantage or revenge as their societies boil”, requiring the US to intervene. “We will win militarily whenever we have the guts for it. There will be no peace. At any given moment for the rest of our lifetimes, there will be multiple conflicts in mutating forms around the globe.

The de facto role of the US armed forces will be to keep the world safe for our economy and open to our cultural assault. To those ends, we will do a fair amount of killing. We are building an information-based military to do that killing.

Peter Gric, http://www.gric.at

So there you have it - tomorrow's world - your world?... in a nutshell, as envisaged by the warrior class. Forget about sustainability, except as an eve-of-election double speak. Never mind the hard mathematics of climate control, the need for rich countries to reduce emissions by 90 percent by 2030. Yes, it sounds impossible, but according to George Monbiot, this is what the science dictates. [HEAT: How to Stop the Planet Burning, Penguin Books.] Australia's strategy is to beef up its military, burn more coal and go nuclear, even as our lakes and rivers dry up. No worries! We can drain vast areas of wetlands to supply towns, even if it ruins farmers and crops. Plan B, according to our Prime Minister, is “pray for rain”. Plans are afoot to export uranium to Putin's Russia for “peaceful purposes”.

Okay, where do we go from here? At least public awareness is rising faster than sea levels and TV is starting to promote sustainability in the suburbs. Still, all this is small beer compared to the killing field scenarios trotted out by today's military industrial futurists. Maybe protest power will work again, as in days gone by: universal suffrage, abolition of slavery, civil rights … It will take zero emissions, borderless collaboration, and a spark of illumination. It will also take a global mind shift.

Did it happen, dear citizen of 2057, or are you extinct?

POST SCRIPT:
WEAK SIGNALS OF ENORMOUS CHANGES:

1. “Are psychedelics good for you? It's such a hippie relic of a question that it's almost embarrassing to ask. But a quiet psychedelic renaissance is beginning at the highest levels of American science”.

2. “The people are fed up and as president I will do a 180 and move this country in the opposite direction”. [Uncontrollable cheers from the audience!]

3. “Basra is lost, they are in control now. It's a full-scale riot and the Government are just trying to save face".

4.Citizen Power versus Police State.

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Tuesday, 20 March
The fourth anniversary of the Iraq war.

Click here for Richard's illustrated review
of where the war is heading.

Cans Seurat, 2007 - Digital C print, 72x110"
Depicts 106,000 aluminum cans, the number used in the US every thirty seconds.

CHANGING CLIMATE, CHANGING MINDS
Journal of a Futurist, 6 March 2007

16 reasons to be cheerful:

1. The public has long been ahead of politicians in recognising the danger of toxic emissions and will remain the driving force in rescuing the future. Everyone on Earth can play a role, irrespective of age, income or clout. Such a challenge can be strangely empowering, like the Blitz Spirit. (The wrecking of nature is more of a threat than the Luftwaffe). The outcome will redefine what it means to be human.

2. Shopping will cease to enthral. Buy Nothing Day has evolved to Buy Nothing Month. Recovering shopaholics are exchanging pledges to abstain. Some families refuse to buy anything new until something old is given away. But every so often a bright idea will win hearts, such as this 100% biodegradable, solar powered, I-Pod charging, naturally dyed hemp handbag.

3. No longer master of the universe, the “economy” will be its servant. Today's hi-flyers in Ferraris will get mud on their Armani's, as they plant acres of fruit trees and turn weeds into diesel. A new economics promotes the “good life without money stress, overwork and joyless consumption.” The bean counters will lose their status, unless the beans are certified organic and fairly traded. You will be able to discuss communes, creativity and consciousness with you bank manager.

THINKERS, DREAMERS, INVENTORS

Partial Zoom of the cans, Chris Jordan

4. To think and act both locally and globally will become second nature. Already there is a push for a Global Marshall Plan to restore the environment and to close the poverty gap. In the face of an array of threats, people are asking what can we do for our planet … and for our own community (growers markets are more fun than supermarkets). Today's passive spectators are tomorrow's activists.

5. Failing to own a house with a water view is no longer a matter of regret.

6. The urgency of global repair will unleash a boom of innovation and imagination that will dwarf the Renaissance. Tomorrow is about connecting, collaborating, creating. Solutions depend less on finding a Leonardo or an Einstein than on motivating millions of thinkers, dreamers, inventors.

7. Wind surfers will achieve terrifying speeds.

Actual size

8. The quest for carbon neutrality will transform the built environment. Architects have abolished the need for air conditioning by copying the airflows of termitaries. How did train manufacturers in Japan put an end to the sonic booms caused by engines when entering tunnels? By imitating the design of a Kingfisher's beak. Bio-mimicry is more profitable than bio-rape.

9. New kinds of leaders will emerge. The left/right dichotomy will be transcended by a global mind shift, incorporating intellectual fluidity, empathy, adaptability, foresight. Farewell to actor-politicians mouthing platitudes while secretly colluding with lobbyists. (And Farewell to so-called “intellectuals” who write about global warming but never have time to sort their own garbage - Mrs Neville. RN: Rubbish!).

THE FIRST EARTH BATTALION

Prison Uniforms, 2007
Archival inkjet, 11x23 feet in six vertical panels
Depicts PARTIAL ZOOM of 2.3 million folded prison uniforms, equal
to the number of Americans incarcerated in 2005

10. The boom in renewable energy will ease the West's addiction to oil and its need to pillage the Middle East. When the human and environmental cost of war is fully revealed, there will be widespread revulsion. Politicians who promote invasions will be run out of town. Tanks will be turned into ploughshares and the only valid mission of tomorrow's military will be to repair the ecosystem.

11. Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib , Bagram, etc, will be re-tooled as renewable energy factories, the labour provided by former war criminals.

12. Fast food will slow down. Vegetarianism will globalise. Obesity will decline.

13. In the race against Global Warming, youth will be the key participants, driven by the knowledge that the future lies in their hands and the joy of Making a Difference. The age of apathy is over.

Actual Size

14. Mass media will play a role in bringing climate change issues home to huge audiences. Instead of entertaining us all to death, they can save species from the brink of extinction. Old warlords are changing their tune. Rupert Murdoch's media empire has long equated environmentalists with reds under the beds, but its editors have been ordered to back flip. News Corp has switched from a state of denial to a state of confusion, which is progress. Murdoch's sons are carbon neutral and the patriarch is learning yoga.

15. Involvement with a cause greater than oneself eliminates depression.

16. Countless uplifting initiatives are happening beyond the orbit of Governments. The change of climate is changing the workplace. Corporate foresight is stretching beyond quarterly reports and limited electoral cycles. People are taking into their workplace what they're discussing at home, such is mapping out a new role for business. Even in toxic industries like cement and waste management, there is a determination to be emissions free. No more greenwashing. Despondency is giving way to resilience, daring and a shared sense of purpose. Blitz Spirit 2.

Finally, a goal for humanity beyond getting rich quick by despoiling our environment - both physical and mental - and calling it income.

Plastic Bags, 2007 - Digital C print, 72x86"
Depicts 60,000 plastic bags, the number used in the US every five seconds.
http://www.chrisjordan.com

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Send comments and suggestions to: futurist@richardneville.com.au