Strategy 2030

Fiction

by Lucy Jolliff

She sighs as she throws yet another cheap umbrella in the bin. The bent spokes mean it doesn’t unfold all the way anymore - useless. She looks at the options for a new one online, cursor hovering over a black umbrella with a carbon fibre skeleton that promises not to break in a hurricane, but inevitably sliding over to the ‘price: low to high’ button. The small banner proclaiming the promise of ‘the last umbrella you’ll ever buy’ quickly disappears. She buys the first umbrella she sees with a pattern she likes. It’s going to rain again tomorrow.

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He's lived alone for a while now, but he still catches himself turning and starting to speak to someone who isn’t there anymore. His doctor tells him he can’t keep living on frozen food, but that means his fridge fills up with leftovers. He buys things in the smallest portions the supermarket sells them in, but the supermarket apparently hasn’t heard that some people who live alone want to eat more than frozen ready meals. He gets a compost bin for the vegetables. Trying to eat healthily and to eat everything before it goes bad is a never-ending balancing act. It makes him feel like Sisyphus of Greek legend, pushing a boulder up a hill just to have it roll back down again.

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There’s a patch of ground with a metal called lithium below it. It’s beautiful and loved – plants, animals, centuries of human history. But the lithium will make the batteries that power electric cars, and electric cars will save other patches of ground from destruction, and the air from suffocation. Whether it will still be beautiful for much longer is, for now, up in the air. But for everyone to switch to electric cars, the world will need a lot more lithium. The big companies that want to make money from the lithium are probably going to win, though – the centuries of history belong to a small group who have plenty of experience being considered insignificant next to ‘progress’.

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Changing the unsustainable parts of our lives and our world is about the choices we make.
Sometimes, though, what seem like choices between waste and permanence are a lack of choice in disguise.
Even when choices are possible, they are often impossible in their own ways.
Sustainability and social justice often walk hand in hand, but they also come into conflict.
The big choices coming up for us are the most important ones we’ll ever make.

All we can do is to try our hardest to make the right choices, and to create the chance to make choices for everyone.