6.1 Decolonising Futures
Since the 1970s, futures studies scholars have raised alarm about the field’s propensity to colonize the future. The basic idea is that futures are too often treated as empty temporalities to which actors in the present feel entitled to fill with their own future endeavours. An example of a strongly colonized future is that produced by Karl Rove and his peers who launched the U.S. culture wars approximately 40 years ago which have arguably culminated in the Trump Administration. In other words, the young people of 2018 see the futures they desired and were working toward crushed by old-fashioned, nationalistic, and spiteful policies, values, and ways of acting.
Futures Studies includes an ethical call to ‘decolonize the future’ which means leaving as much of the future to be formed by the people who live in those futures (see Sardar 1993). This principle can be con- fused with a notion of avoiding planning, but such a conclusion is not what it entails. Planning and execution of plans today can be critical to leaving a future decolonized because in many cases a lack of planning can lead very negative consequences for future generations (e.g. poor planning can lead to slums around cities, inadequately educated populations, or war). The longer history of what is now called the Bioeconomy includes actual historical colonization. For instance, various European nations actively colonized the Amer- icas and severely altered what is possible for the descendants of those lands’ original people. As the Bioeconomy develops, it will be essential for existing powers and rising powers to avoid repeating similar ethical offences through their deals to access new lands or new ways to extract or produce value from the biome. We can extend the call for ‘decolonizing the future’ beyond human needs for justice to other forms of life. This so-called post-human perspective is one of great interest to the BioEcoJust project as it is arising as a future signal in the horizon scanning process and is a potential source for surprising futures.
In business and industry, actions intended to ‘colonize the future’ happen frequently. For example, dominating a market in the future is often championed as a key pathway to wealth and prosperity (e.g. see the ‘blue ocean strategy’ proposed by Kim & Mauborgne 2005). In practice, it would be difficult to conduct business without concretized future objectives setting out 5-10-year plans and objectives. Furthermore, technological developments and acquisitions can lead to new socio-technical lock-ins, stranded invest- ments, or ways of doing business. We acknowledge there will always probably be some need for this type of thinking in business, but from a Futures Studies ethical perspective, we encourage business interests to balance such ambitions with a deep consideration of how today’s choices could limit or ‘expand the options for humanity’ (Slaughter and Riedy 2009).
6.2 Open Bio-Futures
From a Futures Studies perspective on ethical thinking, perhaps one of the most obvious issues can be to ask, Are the potential futures open, inclusive and participatory? Or are they closed, only specified for a
select few, where the voices of individuals outside are not heard concerning key decisions about the fu- ture? Furthermore, in Futures Studies we consider many alternative futures rather than one set path, where
there are always choices, and some are preferable futures that reveal sets of values. The closed future we might understand for example as the incumbent fossil industries that many of us might agree considering
climate change, do not have a future. From this thinking we must make efforts to end use of coal and oil and the products derived from them. From these industries we might see them as locked-in and invested- in a limited and finite paradigm. When considering the bioeconomy in this light, we must ask do we see it as open or closed? Certainly, the bioeconomy has great potential to be open, but as it is based on many existing industries with their own locked-in investments, policies and subsidies, it is pertinent to ask to what extent are they in danger of being in a closed future? This concept represents one of the key ways in which the BioEcoJust team are approaching the subject areas of justice, ethics and nature. The important task is to constantly explore Open Bio-Futures.
The current challenges we face due to climate change demand transitions and pathways to meet the Paris Agreement, as one pressing example, however the bioeconomy should be understood as much more than just a mechanism for a linear transition to replace the goods of the fossil industry, this would be in danger of limiting its potential to merely replicate our current consumer habits. Even if it can be acknowl- edged that this is one of the crucial contributions of the bioeconomy has to facilitate this transition and to affect change. However, thinking about a much longer time horizon beyond 100 years it becomes important to understand that there will still come new challenges, new values, and economies and global needs in the future. This line of thought was presented by Amos Taylor at the Koli BioFuture2025 Research Seminar (September 2018) under the title Operating in Open Bio-Futures.