Linfen, China; photo by sheilaz413 (Flickr Creative Commons)

When I was a little kid in the 1970s, my brother had a poster on his wall depicting an artist’s renderings of three possible future environments with the headline, ‘Which future would you choose?’

One showed a future in which man had chosen to live in harmony with nature and developed eco-friendly technology. A thriving green landscape dotted with white globes and pods while happy future-people tended vegetable gardens in the fresh air and had scintillating conversations about what great choices their predecessors had made. Ahhh…

The second was a highly urbanized future featuring a glowing red sunset that backlit a shiny metropolis with people walking though tubes and bullet trains zipping above canals filled with unsavory-looking water. Humanity had clearly chosen industry and economic growth over nature. It was a future in which happiness and comfort relied on technology rather than the natural world. Admittedly, it looked pretty cool.

The third option was a darkened, smog-choked nightmare where a few red lights shone through the blackness, barely illuminating a lifeless industrial wasteland. Both nature and humanity had been sacrificed on the altar of industry. I could only imagine what twisted wretches toiled inside those blackened factory walls. If anyone has driven north up the I95 to New York City at nighttime, you can pretty much imagine what the world in the picture looks – and smells – like.

I’ve always remembered this poster, provided to my brother via the Maryland public school system, and I still consider its message both relevant and prescient. The debate, of course, is between the first two options, with the third being the logical failure of the second. Though most industries and governments would probably claim that they are pursuing the first, environmentally friendly option, they are obviously headed down the road of the second, possibly or indeed eventually ending up with the ecocide of the third.

In 2010 we’ve sort of achieved examples of each of the three possible futures. If this poster were to be made today and concerned cities of the present, how would it look?

‘Which would you choose: Linfen, China; Malmö, Sweden or inside an eco-pod somewhere in the Costa Rican rainforest?’

Graham Land

Additional resources:

Time Magazine – The World’s Most Polluted Places

Grist – 15 Green Cities

SF Site book review – Future Primitive: The New Ecotopias