It has taken us humans roughly ten millennia to develop our civilization from a tribal agricultural society to a global industrial society. Most cultures have lived with an assumption that humanity will continue tens of thousands of years into the future.
Only in the mid-twentieth century have we begun to perceive the threat of human extinction in the near future. We are now rushing at an alarming pace toward no possibility of living ten thousand more years, due to accelerating environmental catastrophes and the spread of ultra-destructive weapons.
We love our children and want them to live long and happy lives. We know that they will want their children to live in the same way. Such a wish for the well-being of future generations has inspired many people over the centuries to take actions that help to preserve society and the environment.
To transmit life and community to coming generations is the utmost responsibility of each generation. Do we not want to fulfill this responsibility? To do so, not with confusion and lack of perspective, but with hope and clarity? However naive or overoptimistic it may appear, don’t we want humanity to live ten thousand or more years?
The future of humanity faces enormous threats. It is humbling to acknowledge the incapability of our generation to solve many of our problems. Participation by all segments of society throughout the world is essential to creating a common vision of a ten-millennium future. We need to listen to the voices of as many citizens as possible. We must integrate the views of specialists, leaders, and young people, and take seriously their recommendations to bring about an extended future.
To make a ten-millennium future possible we ought to shift our primary scope of thought and action from short-term corporate and national interest to the goal of long-term global survival; from human-centered society to a truly sustainable society in partnership with the environment. We must make the present time a turning point for this change.
This is the vision of the Ten Millennium Future, a project that I have conceived. The primary process of the project is to ask the public whether we as humanity want to live for another ten thousand years, and find out how to achieve it.
“Where are we all going?” is the title of some of the painting performances I conduct in the name of this project. Here is an example:
In April 1997, I readied myself to do a painting performance at the opening of my exhibition at the Erlangen Museum of Art in Erlangen, southern Germany. The platform that the museum had prepared was about six feet wide and twenty-two feet long. There were five canvas pieces stretched and primed white on the platform.
I asked the audience to imagine that each canvas represented two thousand years. We had ten thousand years ahead of us. And I asked everyone to develop a positive image in their minds of humanity’s ability to live for such a long time.
Then I poured paint and drew a continuous line from left to right, up and down across the canvas. This line represented my hope for the transformation of human society—from destruction to revitalization. The first panel’s line began red and explosive. In the next panel, the line shifted into blue. And in the following panels, the line became calmer and greener. It was not meant to be proportional to the actual time span. We could not afford to be in the fiery red chaos for two thousand years. If we were to keep exploiting the environment at the current rate, we might cease to exist within a few generations.
In 2000, I created an outdoor performance for the Ditchling Museum in southern England. The village of Ditchling was the birthplace of the Arts and Crafts movement in Europe, which inspired a similar movement in Japan in the early twentieth century. Gandhi also sent a woman here from India to study the crafts of hand spinning and handweaving for his Swadeshi (domestic handcraft) movement that was part of his nonviolent campaign for India’s independence.
I asked Patricia Gidney, an accomplished Ditchling calligrapher, to make niches on a long canvas and put dates underneath—1700, 1800, 1900, 2000, 2100, and 2200.
I explained to the audience that I was going to draw an image of the sustainability of humanity. Sustainability can be defined in many ways. To me it is the potential for humans to live for another ten thousand years. In the past, sustainability was thought to be 100 percent, as people believed the environment would last forever and their offspring would flourish generation after generation. Then in the mid-twentieth century, sustainability started to decline owing to the invention of atom bombs and the nuclear arms race. Now it is declining more so with the destruction of the environment and climate change.
During the Ditchling performance, I took a human-size brush and drew a horizontal green line along the top of the canvas from left to right. Then in between the area of the canvas marked 1900 and 2000, I turned the brush toward the bottom of the canvas. This curve represented the fact that most of us humans are no longer capable of imagining that our species can live for an ultra-long span of time.
I poured some more paint and added a zigzag line, from the end of the downward curve toward the right. My twists represented a series of major social breakthroughs. I then drew a straight line slightly upward, expressing my hope for humanity slowly regaining sustainability.
Creating Where Are We Going?