Future Perfect

by Robyn Williams

  As Roychowdhury told us: ‘In the next three decades the population of Asia will increase by one billion, half of whom will live in cities, where automobile dependence is very destructive. For example, in New Delhi, one person dies every hour from pollution. There are 14 million people but only 4 million vehicles, not all of them cars, yet 80 per cent of the city budget is dedicated to road infrastructure.’ Cars are idle for 22 hours a day, yet the land a car occupies is larger than the average home in New Delhi. People are relocated from the cities because there is no space for them, but there is space for cars.

  Given the price of land in the USA and Australia, it is staggering to find that some of our major cities sacrifice 40 per cent of their surface to cars or their requirements. The roads, driveways and freeways; the garages, parking lots and tall concrete monstrosities where they lurk during the day; the showrooms and car marts that line metropolitan streets; the repair yards and dumping sites where dead vehicles stack up. What a colossal waste! Imagine how much could be done with only half of that real estate!

  New Scientist featured one way it could be tackled in a cover story in June 2006 titled ‘Ecopolis: Last hope for the natural world’. We are reminded that 100 years ago London (where I also grew up) was the worlds biggest city, with a population of 6.5 million. In 2006 London isn’t even in the Top 20. Tokyo is up there with 34 million inhabitants-nearly twice the population of Australia. Tokyo is famous (infamous) for four-hour commutes, tiny homes with minuscule rooms, and capsule hotels where you crawl into a coffin-sized modular sleeping unit. ‘Last hope’, indeed.

  China, with even greater population difficulties and horrendous pollution, is now beginning to use its new wealth to experiment with model eco-cities. One is to be a satellite of Shanghai, built on Chongming, an alluvial island in the delta of the Yangtze River. That’s where, as New Scientist’s Fred Pearce observes, low-rise development will begin on the reclaimed mud-a model for the rest of China, with state-of-the-art green technologies, and maybe a model for others as well.

  As the Chinese expect no fewer than 400 million people to move to cities in the next 30 years, they will need all the inventiveness they can muster. I heard China ’s Environment Minister warn ten years ago: ‘We may enjoy our economic miracle, with 12 per cent growth, but we must remember the cost of environmental damage removes 8 per cent from that figure.’ The town of Dongtan, now under construction on Chongming, could be the answer.

  Australia ’s challenges are different. Some of us debate urban consolidation versus suburban renewal. In the west Peter Newman and his colleagues have taken a different tack and, in doing so, have led to Perth ’s stunning revival. Their approach is based on two vital secret ingredients: ask the people what they really want and make sure all sections of government are in the loop. One example is fast transport. Give commuters trains that are faster than their cars and require no expensive parking costs, and they will use them. Perth now offers some free trains and buses that come so often you don’t need a timetable. There has been a spectacular move, as I’ve mentioned, towards railway convenience in Perth at a time when Sydney ’s services explore new depths of antediluvian frustration and 74 per cent insist on commuting by car. Newman’s 1999 book about the future of cities (Sustainability and Cities, written with Jeff Kenworthy) was launched in the White House by then Vice President Al Gore. His enlightened ideas may seem too much for Australians to contemplate right now but, as with recycled water in Toowoomba, harsh realities will soon force us to take on the previously unthinkable.

  Yes, we shall get help from new technologies: intelligent materials regulating pollutants and temperature; fibres carrying daylight as if it were water into every room; waste treatment systems such as Biolytix, recycling 80 per cent of household water by means of living humus full of good bacteria; photovoltaic cells giving home owners near independence from the power grid; computerised vehicles cutting fuel costs in half; and city farms on rooftops growing our daily greens and salads-but, as in Vienna, there will be old-fashioned remedies too. Faced with an urgent need to travel two or three kilometres, I often use a traditional device invented in Africa and refined in Europe -legs. As a boy, I walked to school from the Danube to central Vienna, in snow or sunshine. It was always a delightful trip, fuelled by not much more than a slice of toast. If we design our cities with enough thought, imagination and consultation we could achieve a sublime future: a combination of the best of old and new.

  * * * *

  Several years ago I wrote a novel, 2007: A true story waiting to happen. Many of its scenarios have come true, including John Howard’s endurance in the Lodge in Canberra. Now that we have reached my year of reckoning, I am in the position George Orwell, sadly, did not live long enough to enjoy when he wrote 1984- getting ready for my comeuppance. The year 1984, as it approached, held forbidding associations. Nowadays I don’t believe anyone gives it a second thought.

  In my novel, 2007 was the year when animals, large and small, decided that the crunch had come. The environment was in a tailspin and climate change had gone berserk. The animals sensed it, freaked and took over civilisation. Roads were blocked (shitting cows), airports closed (3000 pelicans), whaling ships were sunk (by 40 angry whales) and communication lines severed (by rodents chewing optic cables). Soon the normal business of government and commerce proved impossible. The people got very cross and planned to zap the animals.

  This was, I thought, a reasonable extrapolation from conditions in 2000. Having now got rid of half of the natural world, we might well decide to cut our losses and eliminate the rest. It will soon go anyway. And the benefits seem compelling. Nearly all our plagues come from contact with domesticated animals. Bird flu is the present preoccupation. Other pandemics will emerge as we squeeze nature into corners. Thus AIDS arose from crowding monkeys or apes, and Ebola fever from hemming in the remains of jungle in Africa. Clear it all away and our worries would cease.

  Would we miss animals-pets, birdsong, snuffling dog muzzles, cows in pastures? The Chinese seem to have coped. As for those creatures in the wilderness-the tigers, gorillas and frogs-they are not long for our planet. Some have turned up their paws already. Let’s get real!

  Getting real in 2007 meant first committing universal faunicide, then shutting all the farms (most are failing anyway) and facing the turbulent realities of climate change. What would we eat? Easy! Attach food factories to bigger supermarkets and there manufacture mounds and sheets of protein that can be moulded and flavoured to resemble chicken or beef or prawns. Carbohydrates could come from plant-like GM crops developed by NASA for use on other planets. Both kinds of food are not much of a problem for genetic engineers, who even now have bacteria standing by that are capable of fermenting a fairly decent two-hat meal.

  The problem is energy. It would need lots. But once you have amortised transport costs (none) and the release of real estate (all that farmland), the price of GM-gourmet grub would be much the same as before.

  With new allotments in cities and food virtually on tap, we would then need to think about what we do with the countryside. This decision may be taken from us when Bangladesh goes under the Indian Ocean and 40 million people need somewhere else to go. Australia would be perfect. There are barely a million people in the South Island of New Zealand, half that number in Tasmania. The Bangladeshis might feel a bit cool, but they seem to have coped in England (better than I did!). Both those islands could become one big city, bar the mountains, which look nice anyway. And inland Australia could house the remaining 38 million dispossessed.

  If flooding doesn’t happen, or is mysteriously delayed, the rural remains can be developed, as Chongming has been, as 21st century eco-cities.

  The odd thing about my novel is the date in the title. I wrote it in 2000, in a burst of rage about the way plants and animals-rainforests, coral reefs, apes and tigers-were being wiped off the face of the Earth. It made me feel a little better, but I did not notice much change. Those concerned were still
anxious about what they knew to be an appalling threat to nature, but those in charge did little.

  The switch came at the end of 2006. Now, in 2007, you have to be dim, deprived or George W Bush not to realise we have a mega problem. So my timing (I take no pleasure) was right. Will it be that bad? Is this not yet more exaggeration from what Margaret Thatcher used to call the ‘moaning Minnies’, the ‘elites’ keen to denigrate can-do enterprise?

  Try doing a thought experiment. Take a house or a town designed for a reasonable number of people, then multiply the inhabitants by a thousand. That is what we are doing both to human habitats and to nature itself. I wrote my novel in a fury, thinking of all those apes consumed as bush meat, all that rainforest pulverised for unsustainable farming, all those fat fools tooling around in boys’ toys. It made me feel better, briefly.

  Now the prospects are even more bleak. The worst scenarios offered by sober scientists of good judgement are truly horrifying. But we must assume there is some prospect for putting things right.

  We have a chance, a slim one, as I shall note in the final chapter, to do something about it all. Cities are the key. We have to get the cities right-make them work. We have ten years. A narrow future.

  No one need go broke, either! As my friend Ron Oxburgh exclaims: ‘It’s a prodigious opportunity.’

  * * * *

  The Hunches of Nostradamus

  2008 Minority of world’s population now lives in countryside. Fifty-five per cent of city-dwellers don’t know where meat comes from.

  2009 Tokyo grows to 47 million.

  2010 Adelaide and Brisbane ban flushing urinals. Pee Police set up.

  2011 No one earning less than $180,000 a year can now live in Sydney (unless running drugs).

  2012 Chinese cities, like Singapore, establish ‘city museum’ to show what they once were like (anything old having been covered in concrete).

  2013 New York grows more of its food in rooftop and allotment gardens than it imports.

  2014 Bio-identichips allow only locals to be in prestige cities. Visitors must pay by the hour. Beijing, Birmingham and Brisbane remain free.

  2015 Pets banned in China, unless eaten.

  2016 Intelligent materials, computerised doors and windows installed in London office buildings. Staff die in Stock Exchange when locked in.

  2017 London cuts energy expenditure by factor of ten (March). Barrier on Thames breaks and half of city disappears in flood.

  2018 Baghdad, Jerusalem, Haifa, Damascus, Tehran, Islamabad and Manchester become holes in the ground. UN conference convened.

  2019 Galveston, Texas, and West Palm Beach, Florida, blown away.

  2020 Santa Cruz, California, becomes a no-waste city.

  6. The Future of Sex – And Why We Do It

  Physics is like sex. Sure it may give some practical results, but that’s not why we do it.

  – Richard Feynman, Nobel laureate

  I have taken a vow of celibacy-I got married.

  – Cartoon caption in The Spectator, 6 January 2007

  I am naturally monogamous-except when married. My impression is that most people are the same.

  There is something distinctly anti-aphrodisiacal about the business of household duties: the spousal talk of bills, of broken drains, of electronics gone bung, of catshit on the lino, of mess. Children, too, are off-putting, all of them malevolent disciples of Saffy (the finger-wagging, snarly, termagant-daughter from Absolutely Fabulous); their disapproval, even disgust, at their parents’ clandestine antics must be the biggest sexual downer since bromide. How can any moderately sympathetic, loving, omniscient Creator have thought that sex could survive even a year or two of standard married humdrum, let alone a lifetime?

  Something ought to be done!

  The paradox is profound. Sex is now a commodified, ubiquitous aspect of life: every women’s mag offers advice on blow-job techniques or dogging sites; every newspaper has updates on genital flashing by no-knickers celebs; mainstream movies don’t even simulate sex any more, instead requiring actors actually to fuck. But private life can be a desert. The backdrop is a brothel, yet the bedroom at home is monastic. Not really a surprise when you appreciate the desperation of media facing extinction in a ruthlessly competitive, lucrative and changing market where anything goes. Websites offer your favourite film and pop stars (well, second-favourite) with close-ups of pink bits and every imaginable priapic contortion.

  How are folk supposed to cope with this? When I first went to Israel many years ago, I saw a bus shelter that had been blown up by a bomb planted by the Orthodox Jews, who didn’t like the bikini advert that adorned it. It was madness-but I can understand how they felt. Everywhere you look, bodies are being thrust at you to sell gear. Sensitive types will-must-inevitably be affronted.

  I am nearly always against censorship. It doesn’t work, least of all online. Yet you have to wonder at the sheer quantity of smut. The US alone spends $US10 billion a year on porn, more than Hollywood does on feature films; and the figure is expected to grow, according to Bill Asher, president of Vivid Entertainment Group, by 500 per cent every year as Internet videos improve. Why do so many citizens of a largely devout Christian nation, led by a born-again fundamentalist, need to watch so many strangers bonk? This is an industry, don’t ever forget, that rivals armaments in its global reach and impact. We are not talking about an occasional peccadillo, a rare sticky indulgence most of us might smile at. The World Is Awash.

  What am I missing? I have never seen actual contemporary porn. I did, on your behalf just now, try to put key words or terms into Google; but I instantly got demands for credit card numbers (you’d be insane to comply) or infinite nonsensical reroutes. So I gave up.

  I wanted to see how producers manage to get any variety beyond the yelping and the humping. Twenty positions or combinations, yes, but thousands’? What do they all do?

  My enquiry (research, officer!) is strictly ethnological, of course. There may be, you see, an educational function to watching others having sex. I once had a long and thoughtful discussion with John Williams, the brilliant Australian guitarist, about his father Leonard’s studies of woolly monkeys. These charming creatures need to see adults copulating to know how it’s done. If kept innocent they are incapable, wrote Leonard Williams, of reproducing. Other monkey species may be similar in this.

  This may be the clue. Porn is educational! These days we in the West no longer occupy forest dwellings, where once bucolic bonkers could be observed and notes taken; nor are we still bundled together in houses where, even as late as the eighteenth century, so many were crammed together that you’d be inches away from a loud coupling whether you liked it or not. Now we are all in sepulchral isolation and only the thin wall of the kit home can bring us close to the secrets of real sex. Even then it sounds more like suppressed asthma than conjugal delight.

  (Porn may indeed have a role in education, but the real question is why it is such big business. Every posh hotel with exquisitely courteous, swooning staff has rooms replete with Hot Adult Filth on the TV. Does the manager, Sir Humphrey Appleby personified, actually vet this stuff?)

  What do you know about sex if no one tells you? I worked out some of it by the age of eight. I knew that somehow willies were involved and was impressed at the size of babies. I thought hard on this and came up with the answer: testicles are the new life forms, and to get things going you had to place one or two testicles inside the mother’s belly. I’d seen enough inflated women to know that part, though how you got such an egg-sized bollock in there through her navel was the real mystery. And why would you want to? Must hurt men horribly, and she wouldn’t fancy it much either!

  Yet there were children, so someone must have been facing up to the task. One of life’s endurance tests, I thought to my young self-like the prospect of death. My musings were not much improved by talking with kids at school (this was my volkschule in Vienna), all of whom provided their own appalling variations on a sex theme of Ho
garthian squalor that would have sent most sensible girls screaming to nunneries and boys to the eternal distractions of mountain climbing, slalom practice and invading Poland.

  Did our ancestors know what made babies? You have to wonder. The sex writer Shere Hite convened a meeting of anthropologists at the American Association of Science conference a few years ago and the consensus was that the hominids and their modern human successors did not know much. But life was so relatively restricted (governed, as David Attenborough once observed, by the three Fs: feeding, fighting… and the other one) that sex had to have been something a little more than just an evening’s entertainment. But whether they did or not, all those thousands of years ago, there must have been plenty to observe-and to learn from.

  Porn, in this analysis, must therefore be seen as a modern cry for help. It is not necessarily something dirty or vile but an avenue for learning. Young people need to know what their parts are for and what the fuss is about. Grown-ups need to build ways out of routine and repetition. (Most pornography is crude, even brutal, just as teenage sex is appallingly unsophisicated and positively unhealthy. Porn is to good sex as Blazing Saddles is to animal husbandry.) Sex skills and pornography therefore need to be-isn’t this obvious?-on the high school curriculum and part of tertiary courses.