Shaping our future
The richer a country is, the more despondent its people feel about the future. In every G7 country, most people believe the world will be worse for their children than it has been for them. Is this a natural stage of development, or a sign that human progress has lost its way?
What’s worse, according to a study I co-authored with the University of Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership,1 is that people in rich countries are not just more pessimistic, but also less open to change. Societies that are wealthier, healthier and more capable than they have ever been, are feeling both hopeless about the future and helpless to shape it.
Together, this resistance to change and lack of confidence in the future make us want to hang on to how things are, rather than shape what comes next. Which is particularly unfortunate right now, when the stability we have taken for granted is coming to an abrupt end.
The past few decades have been an oasis of benign stability. Both politics and business have been concerned with fine-tuning and optimization, with relatively few big innovations to challenge the core of how things are. Our political and business leaders were selected for how they operate in this environment.
But in the next decade, a new level of disruptive change is inevitable. It will come in part from artificial intelligence multiplying our productivity; in part from the changing climate and the self-imposed transformations we make to protect ourselves from it; and in part from the changing balance of power and values in our geopolitics. Whichever way, it will come.
These disruptions are not dimensions of a ‘polycrisis’ temporarily disturbing our stability; they are a return to a more dynamic world where the churn of progress is the norm.
‘Crisis’ describes things like Covid: it came, it disrupted, we responded, things largely went back to how they were. We talk about a ‘new normal’ in things like working from home, but mostly we carry on as before. We sit next to people on trains and planes. More people than ever go on cruises. Covid, in a perverse way, has reinforced our sense of permanence.
What we are facing now is different. We need to give ourselves the agency to adapt to a dynamic world and to shape our future, rather than fixate on the illusory goal of freezing the present.
It is tempting to hang on to the present because the futures we are offered are unconvincing in both their plausibility and attractiveness.
In one vision, everything advances. This is the world of techno-optimism. We go all-in on the AI race: we can’t afford not to, in case someone else does, and it offers visions of abundance, eradication of disease, augmented biology. In this souped-up world we further advance human development (in extent and in its breadth across the world) and we restore our declining fertility.
In the opposing vision, everything stops—which turns out to involve just as much change. This is the world of degrowth. We acknowledge the apparent impossibility of ‘infinite growth on a finite planet’, and accept that we are reaching the top of the ‘S-curve’. We are okay with this, because beyond some level of ‘enough’, our needs are satisfied and technology and growth are not making things better anyway—just look at the backlash against social media and Big Tech, or the pollution and congestion from too many cars. Post-growth values will prioritize other things, such as redistribution on a global scale. For many, going back to a world of fewer cars, less stress and louder birdsong definitely feels like progress.
These two totally different visions of the future are actually responses to the same insight: that the problems we face are the collateral damage from the progress we have achieved.2
Progress and damage have always gone hand in hand. For a hundred thousand years we have hunted different mammals to extinction. For ten thousand years we have farmed the biodiversity out of the land. For two hundred years we have transformed our health, wealth and quality of life through fossil fuels and their petrochemical offspring which are devastating the biosphere at a rate that is unprecedented, unsustainable, and accelerating.
The idea behind both of the two visions is that as long as progress and damage are bonded together, we must have both or neither. The techno-optimism answer is to have both, acknowledging the collateral damage as an affordable and worthwhile price to pay in order to benefit from the progress. The de-growth answer is to have neither, sacrificing progress to avoid the collateral damage.
Logically, though, there are two other possible answers. One is to compromise in the middle: we limit our progress goals, and accept some level of damage. The other is to challenge the idea that the two must go hand in hand. We can recognize the historical truth that progress and damage have always gone together, and yet question its inevitability for the future. Yes, it’s always happened that way, but if we do things differently, can we not decouple the two, and achieve the progress without the damage?
These are two fundamentally different solutions. The compromise in the first is incremental, bordering on business as usual. The decoupling in the second is radical: it asks us to do what we have never done before—or only recently, only substantially in terms of carbon emissions rather than the broader extractive economy, and not yet globally or at sufficient pace and scale. Yet the two are often confused. Green growth is a conveniently ambiguous phrase that blurs both ideas, often hiding the practical reality of the first behind the aura of the second.
Decoupling mindsets
Decoupling requires us to move away quickly from what we have been doing throughout human civilization, with defensible confidence that, this time, our progress won’t bring unintended damage. That’s not as implausible as it sounds, because it’s not something we have been failing at; it’s something we mostly haven’t been seriously attempting. (Critics of decoupling sometimes argue that we have, but this is a manifestation of the green-growth blurring of ideas.) But it is undoubtedly challenging.
The obvious and recognized challenges are technological and economic. But a critical and overlooked challenge—and therefore a big step forward, if we can overcome it—is conceptual: how we think about our relationship with the natural world.
Our problems have come about because we have, even if implicitly, long imagined ourselves to be aloof from the natural world: pursuing human progress, extracting and polluting with impunity. That has always been damaging to our planet, but for most of our prehistory and history we did it at a scale we could get away with. It was the recent industrial era, with its exponential growth of both humanity itself and the resource intensity of how we live, that exposed the pretence of our separation from nature. And the natural response, expressed by the United Nations, David Attenborough, and many others, is to emphasize our embeddedness: humanity as a part of nature, not apart from it. We are not aloof; it is very clear, in ways that matter, that human systems and Earth systems work as part of an integrated whole.
A clear expression of this reality is the concept of harmony, conceived and promoted by King Charles III. Harmony recognizes the interdependent relationship between humanity and nature. Its approach to fostering that relationship is to emphasize how humanity is ‘a part of Nature herself’ and to ask us to take a ‘“whole-istic” view’ of nature and humanity as one. The logic is compelling, and the intent is ambitious: the first line of the King’s book is a ‘call for revolution’. Yet the image of harmony—aligned, balanced, non-conflicting—hides the tensions that we need to manage to make that happen.
Organic farming illustrates the sort of tension we need to engage with. An organic farm showcases harmony: humans prosper, with taste and nutrition superior to most intensive farming; and nature is tended, and biodiversity fostered, preserving the long-term health of the soil rather than degrading it with the chemical run-off from fertilizers and pesticides. Humanity and nature appear aligned. Except that the yield is lower than for intensive farming, which means that to feed the same number of people we need to farm more land—land that could otherwise be wild. Harmony within the farm comes with a hidden trade-off beyond it. Farming that is better for nature per acre can be worse for nature overall, because it requires more acres. And nature needs space, more than it needs kindness within human-dominated land.
This hiding of critical tensions is not unique to harmony. Green growth. Techno-optimism. De-growth. Abundance. Regenerative. Social justice. This is the culture of how we communicate today, in both politics and business: with clear, simple ideas that leave no room for nuance. That way, the ideas can ‘cut through’ the layers of journalists, middle managers and other intermediaries they have to navigate on the way to their audience. The result is that our leadership thinking gets reduced to single-minded ideas.
Decoupling is inherently not a single-minded idea. Gaining from progress while avoiding the collateral damage means resolving a tension, not picking a side. Ideas like green growth are designed to hide the tension and put on a show of unity that people can get behind. But how can we resolve the tension if we don’t speak its name? We need to be explicit that we have a dual goal, not a single one. We need to advance human progress, while preserving the dynamic stability of nature, to keep the Earth systems we depend on within the narrow bounds that have made human civilization possible. Human progress, stable nature.
Expressing this duality is not to separate humanity from nature. The tension comes precisely because of the relationship and interdependence between the two. Far from denying that connection, the point is to draw attention to it. Because within the integrated system, we need to think with two different mindsets, with different time horizons, about the human world and the natural world: a pursuit of progress for humanity, and of stability for nature.
To see why, it helps to look through the lens of the Holocene. In the natural world of Earth systems, the Holocene is the 12,000-year-long period (so far) since the most recent Ice Age, in which the Earth has had an unusually stable climate system which is now under threat. While the planet had copious climate instabilities before the Holocene, the whole of human development and civilization has happened within this stable period. The sort of climate changes that we are now at risk of triggering, such as a collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), would quickly take us beyond the range of that stability. Because that sort of change is so unprecedented, we can model it theoretically, but we don’t have the data to quantify its likelihood with much realism. And we can’t wait until we have better data; the damage would be catastrophic and irreversible. Sustaining the Holocene—stable nature—is an absolute that warrants the most precautionary of precautionary principles.
In human systems, the situation is rather the opposite. As we saw at the start of this essay, we have been enjoying a period of remarkable social and economic stability, arguably since the 1970s and convincingly since the ‘End of History’ period of the early 1990s. But this apparent ‘mini-Holocene’ was a brief period of uncharacteristic stability which we can’t expect to last and which therefore provides an unhelpful (because unachievable) base case. We can’t sustain it. Instead, we need to embrace the dynamism that has been the normal way of things for centuries, recognize disruptions as part of the process of creative destruction, take risks, be protagonists not victims, and shape a desirable future: human progress.
The stability mindset needed for the natural world would be disastrous if applied to the human world. And the dynamic, progress mindset needed for the human world would be disastrous if applied to nature.
Embracing duality
Fortunately, there is no reason why we can’t have both these mindsets at once, if we recognize their domains. The two are not fundamentally opposed; they are, appropriately, in harmony. But they are hard to achieve if we choose to see the system of humanity and nature as one homogeneous whole. Harmony, after all, is the ‘combination or adaptation of parts, elements, or related things, so as to form a consistent and orderly whole’.3 It is not sameness.
We don’t need to accept one-dimensional simplicity. Other traditions have developed memorable, compact formulations whose purpose is precisely to preserve duality rather than remove it. The Confucian goal of ‘harmony without uniformity’ is a particularly apt example.4
If we can tolerate the duality of the idea, and avoid a single-minded simplification, we will have greater clarity about how to approach our future—and the licence to approach each part of the challenge with the right mindset. We may even get techno-optimists and degrowthers to see the good in each other’s worldviews.
University of Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership (CISL). (2026). Restoring Human Progress: Winning citizens’ support for actions on climate and nature. https://www.cisl.cam.ac.uk/news-and-resources/publications/restoring-human-progress-winning-citizens-support-actions-climate
The Consilience Project. (2024). Development in Progress. https://consilienceproject.org/development-in-progress/
Oxford English Dictionary.
From The Analects of Confucius.