(image: Mad Max – drinking water)
Fiction can positively or negatively shape our narratives of the design of nature’s future because fiction is able to make abstract, convoluted visions of the future into something, usually a story, that everyone can understand. Imagining a future earth that is radically different from the current earth is very difficult to understand because that experience does not exist. For example, it is hard to imagine the life experience of what it would be like living in a world where powerful natural disasters occur on a frequent basis (even though now people in Houston may know what that is like.) An author can explain this life experience through their narrative, however.
It is well understood that an era’s arts are a representation of the ideas and emotions of that era. When our beliefs take on a tangible form, this artistic representation can then influence us. We are living in one of the most tumultuous times in human history and a large reason is because we are uncertain of nature’s future. The most popular TV shows, movies, books are about post-apocalyptic worlds. Hunger Games, Interstellar, Mad Max all force us to experience what life would be like in a world that has limited resources or even what it is like to have to leave Earth. There is a large difference between saying there will be water wars (something that no one in the US has ever dealt with) and a two-hour film in which drinkable water gives the owner the ability to be war lord. I like to believe that these negative narratives of the future are able to scare us so that we do positive things to avoid these futures or at the very least force us to think about these futures.
image from: https://sustainabilityatspu.wordpress.com/2016/02/22/sustainability-film-mad-max-and-water-wars/
