What is this “Back to The Future”

Now we’ll have to decide – back to future or back to past or old normal

In the midst of the mood swings due to the pandemic, the Bee Gees’ … the world has lost its glory so .so let’s find a brand new story resonates. The unknown that seems to be not going to leave us until an effective vaccine against all the different variants of the SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) is, easily accessible and obtainable, worldwide, will make us “fall back” to the future .

The thing about going back to the future has never been funny to me – it’s an overused piece of jargon anyway. We hear it so much these days in this funny new normal in which we, we find ourselves! There’s something about this thing that fuels my FOMO because it feels like I’m missing something – how can one, in any case, go back to the future?

What is the future we want to return to? One would think that this meant that we as a species had to evolve faster so that we could create another utopian tomorrow? It may make more sense now, especially in the current time bubble in which we are anxiously trapped and where the future is a bit blurred.

There is now a scrambling to get back on track for that future. We as humans crave and strive for that future. But here’s the catch – the future is going to look completely different according to what hundreds of futurists predict. It’s going to be a different future than forecast (“new normal”) Is Francois van Coke’s latest “Begin van die Einde” perhaps very appropriate in this context

The irony is that just by taking another look at the past, we will be able to open our eyes wide and smartly to the future. It is inevitable that the future of us and the planet will depend on a total green recovery. We must also realize that this “green” is no longer color but an overarching concept of a total way of life restored by EVERYONE on this little “blue ball” in the universe

Why do we go back a bit before we can move forward again? As we socially evolve as humans, we forget about basic ecological processes that make the planet work and that which determine our well-being (survival) as part of this system – rather, we have become entangled in highly sophisticated consumer technologies and associated patterns that is leading to the acceleration of the depletion of resources – our air, water, food shelter and security !

Have we forgotten again what the basis is, now, for the world to be able to maintain itself in the future and for many more millennia? Have we forgotten this BIG question that was formulated even as late as the 1987 in the Brundtland Report and subsequently popularized, namely;

“Can we enter the future on the assumption that we provide for our own natural, social and economic needs without hindering the abilities of future generations to provide for their own natural, social and economic needs?”

If this is not going to happen we will be permanently back in the past! (Old normal) and it’s not a nice place – we all know