Fifty years ago when Dylan wrote “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” the inspiration for this exhibition, the Cuban missile crisis and the threat of nuclear oblivion hung over the world. Dylan said the lines were all beginnings of other songs he thought he would never live to write.
Today Hard Rain speaks to us not of bombs but of other types of planetary death. And it’s not the future; it’s now. Dylan’s song connects dissimilar, strange things: sad forests, dead oceans, broken tongues, guns and sharp swords. So too today: all our problems, all our solutions, are connected.
You know about water scarcity, dwindling forests, extinctions, acid oceans, overfishing, hunger, poverty and that crossroads of all challenges: climate change…
Now think where those ever-accelerating trends will put the present generation of students in the coming decades. Before 2050, the world population will increase by 2 or 3 billion. Incomes will increase almost threefold; the demand for food and goods and energy and shelter will surge.
Now, put us and nature together, and the tasks ahead become obvious: we have to align human systems and natural systems to create a whole earth.
● Get the carbon out of energy systems while bringing electricity to all.
● Adapt to the climate change and sea-level rise that is already unavoidable.
● Build or rebuild cities to make them super-efficient for the 6–7 billion people who will live in them by 2050.
● Produce twice as much food as today without using any more land or water; doing it in ways that bring dignity to the billions who will still be living on farms and in rural villages.
● Use water efficiently (or by 2050, some 4.5 billion could be living in countries chronically short of water).
● Preserve the ecosystems that make life on earth possible.
● Kick the stuff out of progress: do more with less. People have used as much material (metal, wood, plastic) in the past fifty years as in all previous human history.
● Create the chance of satisfactory jobs or livelihoods for 9+ billion.
● Give everyone the possibility of safe, efficient housing.
● Provide healthcare for all.
● Redefine prosperity. Redefine living well.
● Increase empathy, so that people understand and identify with one another globally.
● Rebuild democracy so that when voters vote for sustainable development it will make a difference.
Now read on…
