- All our lives in the year 2020 could be startlingly different
from today, the UK's Environment Agency believes.
-
- Using a fictional family called the Dumills, the agency
describes a Britain where solar power dominates and every loo has a robot
to analyse excrement.
-
- We can look forward to cleaner air, better public transport
and an end to infuriating traffic jams, it suggests.
-
- The portrait of Britain's future is being debated at
the Environment 2003 conference held in London this week.
-
- Forward thinking
-
- The attempt at futurology on the part of the Environment
Agency (EA) is intended to make people think about where we might be headed
if certain polices are adopted - or not.
-
- The agency has invented a family called the Dumills,
who live in South East England in the year 2020, to make its point.
-
- The Dumills inhabit a world that is in some ways "less
modern" - many homes grow their own food because, thanks to soaring
oil prices, imported food is too expensive.
-
- In other ways, however, the Dumills' existence is truly
futuristic, with all human excrement being automatically analysed by a
robot in the loo.
-
- Many children are adopted, including the Dumills' daughter
Britney. Plummeting sperm counts have made natural conception very difficult.
-
- And most workers are immigrants because global warming
has rendered large swathes of the world uninhabitable.
-
- Road pricing
-
- The Dumills, who do not have a genetic predisposition
to disease, are the lucky ones.
-
- But fictional neighbour Marjorie is one of the unfortunates
whose genetic predisposition to a variety of future illnesses means that
to qualify for insurance or a mortgage, she has to live in a sterile equivalent
of a bubble.
-
- But the agency's portrait of life in 2020 is not entirely
negative. The air is cleaner, public transport is better and - thanks to
successful congestion charges - traffic jams are a thing of the past.
-
- Environmentalists and MPs have gathered for the Environment
2003 conference, co-hosted by the EA, to discuss how Britain might build
a more sustainable future.
-
- Speakers were to include the Environment Secretary Margaret
Beckett and Tony Juniper, the head of Friends of the Earth.
-
- Sustainable future
-
- Margaret Beckett and Tony Juniper warn that global warming
might force millions of people to move across the world because of flooding
and droughts.
-
- Along with the international development minister, Hilary
Benn, Ms Beckett has commissioned a new report on water and sanitation.
-
- A taskforce has also been set up to push Britain towards
a more sustainable future. The initiative will encourage every household
to have its own water purification and recycling unit.
-
- But gadgets and technical fixes are only part of the
answer, and a cultural shift in society is needed, according to Barbara
Young, the Environment Agency's chief executive.
-
- The use of resources like power, water and wood needs
to be strictly monitored - and restricted.
-
- However, not everyone believes such dramatic measures
are really necessary.
-
- Prominent global warming sceptic Philip Stott believes
the Environment Agency's vision of the future is alarmist and, he argues,
not supported by science.
-
- "These scenarios are, in one sense, 'utopian', in
that they are about worlds that are unlikely to exist anywhere (even in
Tunbridge Wells), while they stem from a dystopian premise that everything
about the modern age is gloom and doom," said Stott, Professor Emeritus,
University of London.
-
- "Like Eeyore, the EA should be left to ruminate
in a boggy place, while the rest of us enjoy our lives and continue to
develop without being lectured to by these worryworts."
-
- EA VISION - LIFE IN 2020
-
- * High oil prices mean imported foods are no longer affordable
- local produce dominates
-
- * A household windmill and solar panels generate surplus
electricity which is pumped back to the grid, earning the family money
-
- * Homes have their own purification plants
-
- * Toilets automatically analyse samples of family excretions,
and digitally send the information to a computer at the doctor's surgery
-
- * A domestic greenhouse gas allowance is debited automatically
from a smartcard
-
- * Much of the world is uninhabitable - the West Coast
of Ireland is under water, much of central Africa has turned into desert
-
- © BBC MMIII
-
- http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/3220517.stm
|
