What the 1970s Can Teach Us about Inventing a New Economy (in News)

A Hawaiian futurist recalls the two years he spent trying to end consumerism in Canada.

Jim Dator in Hawaii: You won't like the future if 'you think continued innovation, a new iPhone every three months is a really great world to live in.'

What does the future hold? Jim Dator has spent his life exploring the question and how posing it can improve the society we presently inhabit. He helped set up North America's first-ever academic program for futures studies in 1972 at the University of Hawaii in Honolulu. And four decades later, he's regarded as an elder statesman of the discipline -- a futurist's futurist, if you will -- lauded by colleagues and students for the "scope, intensity, magnitude, creativity, and importance of [his] work."

Dator is now in his early 80s and in the twilight of a long and globally influential career. But he still has clear memories of the two years he spent in Canada when his career was just getting started. From 1974 to 1976, he travelled all across the country, meeting with school boards, scientists, Royal Commissions, TV producers, policymakers and even the Privy Council of Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, to transform Canada from a society of consumers into a society of "conservers."

This was an era not so unlike the one now we live in. It was a time of global oil shocks. Across the world there was dawning awareness of the ecological limits to growth, and widespread fears that they would be exceeded. Dator's job was to make Canadians aware of those limits, while building an alternative to the prevailing mass consumer lifestyle capable of respecting them. "There was a vast amount of research and public meetings held all over the country," Dator said. "I got to know Canada very well." But the shift away from consumerism he tried to achieve never took off.

Dator's since spent his career exploring four scenarios of what tomorrow's society could be like -- collapse, discipline, singularity or business-as-usual -- to widen our options for fixing today's. Yet when I visited him this July at his office in Honolulu, he lamented that our society has yet to heed the warnings he first began imparting 40 years ago. "If you think continued innovation, a new iPhone every three months is a really great world to live in," he said, "then you're not going to like [the future]."

The Conserver Society

Like today, the 1970s were a time of great uncertainty about the future. OPEC embargos exposed our precarious addiction to oil. The Club of Rome warned of societal collapse unless we could implement "limits to growth." And the first Earth Day created a global environmental movement. In response to these pressures, the now-defunct Science Council of Canada in 1973 called for a "transition from a consumer society preoccupied with resource exploitation to a conserver society."

The Council was of the opinion that our growth-obsessed culture was about to slam into an ecological wall. "Most Canadians have lived through a period when materials seemed plentiful, energy cheap, and growth in size and quantity, whether of cities, automobiles, monuments or lawnmowers, was the natural order of things," the Council argued. Some members urged Canada to embark on a national program of "joyous austerity" that would "question our implicit assumption that 'bigger is better.'"

Few took the call more seriously than TVOntario, which had been created by the Ontario government only several years earlier. While at a 1973 conference in Rome, the educational broadcaster's CEO, Ran Ide, saw some of Dator's "future-oriented multi-media productions." Ide was impressed, and the next year he invited Dator to an intimate meeting of TV producers, educators, futurists, psychiatrists and others at Toronto's Inn-on-the-Park, where for three days they discussed "the role of the media," and particularly TVOntario, in shifting Canada to a "conserver society."

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What the 1970s Can Teach Us about Inventing a New Economy (in News)