The brazen optimism of Kathryn Murdoch’s plan to save Earth
Rupert’s liberal-leaning daughter-in-law thinks a doom-and-gloom attitude is thwarting climate action. She and Ari Wallach have a new documentary promoting a brighter future.
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“A Brief History of the Future,” a six-part series that debuted on PBS last week, showcases “some of the people that are working really hard to make it go right,” she said, whether in food production, clean energy, pro-democracy or economics.
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Challenging the status quo is an approach the documentary applauds. In another segment, designer Pupul Bisht says imagining a different future is a “deeply political act … putting a lot of power in the hands of people who are, in the traditional system, left out of the equation.”
It’s a formidable statement. And given that people who have power typically do not volunteer to share it, viewers might understandably be left with a sense of the radical — or even the revolutionary?
“We don’t use those words,” Murdoch said. “If you’re talking of revolution, that means you’re toppling something.”
Wallach allowed that there’s “a role for protesting and external pressure.” But their documentary is more about effecting change from the inside, he said: “How do you make systems work? How do you build alternative systems to complement but not abdicate the current ones, right?”
“Our focus here was on creating something curious, hopeful and inviting regardless of a person’s background or personal politics,” Wallach wrote later in an email. “We see the unfinished work before us as deeply pragmatic for all of us instead of simply ideological.”
Which, to George Monbiot — a British journalist and environmental activist whose riffs on historical movements are featured in the documentary — is disappointing.
Any conversation about the future, he said, demands some straight talk about capitalism. “Capitalism is not the market. It’s an exploitative system laid on top of the market,” he told The Post. “People find it impossible to imagine the end of capitalism, because they don’t know what capitalism is.” And if you don’t confront capitalism, he added, “then the change you can achieve will be very limited.”
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Monbiot, who has not yet seen “Brief History” — given the quantity of interviews he does, he admitted apologetically that he didn’t even remember this one — said it sounds like a well-meaning project. It is essential, he said, to fight against nihilism about our ability to act collectively by imagining radical new possibilities.
But, he said, it’s “not surprising” that a billionaire’s imagined future would leave capitalism intact.
“Those who wield the power always try to convince us that the system we have is the only system we can have,” he said.
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/style/media/2024/04/08/kathryn-murdoch-brief-history-future-ari-wallach/