A4 • Backcasting, Mile-stoning, & Developing Future Visions in the Pittsburgh Appalachian bioregion

Team Members: Alexander Polzin, Amanda Sanchez, Jenny Xin, Mihika Bansal, Xiaoran Zhang

Introduction

After analyzing the history of deforestation in assignment #3, our team set out to create a vision of a future in which deforestation has been resolved. Despite tree canopy loss and decline in forest health in the bioregion, present-day Pittsburgh has made significant efforts toward urban forestry and climate resilience compared to other US cities. For example, the city recognizes the legal rights for nature, which effectively banned fracking (Perkins 2017). And to become a Reforestation Hub, the city is working with Cambium Carbon to implement a “circular economy for urban forestry” (Machosky 2021). Understanding that Pittsburgh is already at the forefront of the environmental movement, we sought to amplify these existing efforts in our future vision.

Central to our desired future and transition pathway are themes of Cosmopolitan Localism and Commoning. Cosmopolitan Localism advocates for the “practice of inter-regional and planet-wide networking between place-based communities who share knowledge, technology, and resources” (Kossoff 2019, p. 52). Commoning values efforts in creating systems and communities that manage shared resources (Bollier 2016). We also draw from Giorgos Kallis’ Degrowth Principles in his book Degrowth of an egalitarian society that maintains “equality without equivalence”, and the decommodification of land, labor, and value (2018). We applied these theories and concepts to four ideas that guide our vision for the future and its transition pathway:

• ‘Economics of reciprocity’ at the level of the household, neighborhood and planetary
• Self-sufficient communities & collective forest management
• A system of self-governance & reparations in progress
• Balancing the roles of high and low technology

Final Backcasting & Milestoning Map

Final Future Visioning Map

Our Vision for 2100

In 2100, the Appalachian bioregion has been completely reforested, primarily because people have realized that fostering the health of the bioregion directly ties to bettering their ownhealth. Collectively, people’s mindsets have shifted from “survival of the fittest” to ones centered around collaboration and collective well-being. Back in 2035, the compounding realities of climate change, increasing inequality, and a widespread, palpable sense of ennui paired with solidarity precipitated by a series of global lockdowns and organized social movements laid the ground for Pittburghers to throw hands up collectively in concentric circles expanding out from the center as if to say “enough.” Communities everywhere reexamined their relationships to one another and the world at large.

People realized that our overuse of resources and exploitation of the land was deeply entrenched in our consumerist culture. This reconciliation with the state we reached with ecological health forced a collective shift away from a capitalist society and a new economic system emerged — the economics of reciprocity. People now understand that they should only take from the world what they need, while also giving back to their communities as much as they take. There is a collective understanding that each person has a responsibility to ensure the health of all the living beings around them. This way of living scales through to a planetary level. No country is using another as a dumping ground or leveraging their people and resources for their own gain. Rather each country is on an equal playing field, with each community able to establish their own way of being. The common thread across the globe is the collective understanding that every life, human or flora and fauna, is worth nurturing.

Narrowing back in on the Appalachian area, in 2045, political boundaries were redrawn along naturally occuring boundaries to encompass the bioregion. This shift allowed the natural formation of new self-sustaining communities, and a reinvigorated sense of importance within the household and neighborhood level. Each household is nested with gardens, forming a micro self-sustaining system. The responsibility of the household expands out to the neighborhood level with an increase in cooperatives, forming a system of collective stewardship and mutual aid. In Pittsburgh, areas that were properly reinhabited with native plants post-collapse are now fully grown. Knowledge of how to properly manage those habitats and skill sharing classes happen weekly at community centers. The region is a self-sufficient net producer of food and materials and has produced sustainable surplus for aid and trade. There is a collective shift to use of renewable energy across all scales, with resources put to ensuring that everyone has equal access.

A new governmental system has been established on multiple scales. Firstly, spatial and social scales of governance are all rightfully represented by the communities that have had land taken from them in the past, giving them the agency to guide the manner in which the land is taken care of in the future. Private land ownership has evolved from centering ‘property rights’ to the ‘rights of the property,’ privileging relationships and use over land as an asset class. Socio-cultural and historic relationships with land are prioritized along with communities that protect and steward the needs of themselves and their human and non-human neighbors. Additionally, the city is self-governed by humans and nonhumans, with the rights of all beings being taken into account. Spatial reparations have been implemented for those that have suffered generational injustice, including fostering the growth of native plants.

Looking at today: What we see in the present

Based on the future vision we have, we synthesized the transition matrix to identify the pathway to our preferred future where the issue of deforestation can be resolved. There are four lenses that we looked through:

What needs to transition “out”

As we have seen the growing deforestation for past centuries, we can see how human and industry are gradually taking control of the natural resources and how unsustainably resources are exploited and consumed. Driven by profit, the competitors in the existing market are treating the forestry as money makers, overexploiting whatever resources they can access. This also leads to unsustainable consumption in industry and communities — everyone consumes whatever the market can provide without considering how high the ecological footprint they produce. Even though there is a growing awareness of forest conservation and management against deforestation, a lot of private owners such as companies and residents still do not have enough access to the proper knowledge of forest management. Therefore, the overexploitation, unsustainable consumption and poor tree management education system are the three existing issues we want to transition “out”.

What we should keep

We’ve also seen a series of existing practices that deserve continuing. Pioneers such as government and arborist groups have devoted a lot of efforts to more sustainable ways to manage forestry to ensure the regeneration of the entire habitat. Moreover, existing wood reuse and recycling programs are gradually formed in cities. The Construction Junction in Pittsburgh is a good example of gathering the vast reuse potential of construction materials, which decreases the demand for new production and overconsumption. Moreover, the existing reforestation efforts based on public-private partnerships are contributing efforts to increasing tree canopy and maintaining urban forestry. Even though these efforts have not formed as a stable network, we can see the opportunity to continue and cultivate a more sustainable system based on these pathways.

Existing innovations & practices

The innovations and practices is an important lens from which we can clearly see the transition. To a reforested future, we see both bottom-up efforts and technology breakthroughs can effectively push forward the transition. We can see growing activism against environmental injustice that makes the voice for equal rights be heard. The emerging resource sharing and exchange practices happen in communities, which gives a huge opportunity to encourage localized economies. In addition, the technology helps renewable energy systems to develop, at the same time give a better track of households consumption level. All these innovations we embrace can support a more equitable and sustainable future.

“Pieces of Our Future Vision” that already exist

Lastly, we have realized that some pieces of our future vision are already existing in the present, which can hopefully lead us to the transition. As there are existing practices on using indigenous ways to manage habitat and living environment, it provides an alternative for us — living along with nature rather than living by consuming nature. Garfield Farm is a practice of permaculture in Pittsburgh that utilizes indigenous growing knowledge to grow food for the community. With a sustainable mindset, today in many cities, people are more willing to consume locally sourced food and resources, which encourages a lifestyle to connect consumption and production closely and build up a more resilient localized economy. Rooted in the local, emerging cooperatives around the world are building up collective responsibility toward the habitats impacted by households and resources used, which corresponds to our future vision of cosmopolitan localism. Therefore, we can see a localized but globally connected human-nature coliving system already beginning to exist.

Backcasting: Key milestones for how this vision comes into being

Considering our north star vision of a future in which the wicked problem of deforestation no longer exists for Pittsburgh and our assessment of where we stand today, we have backcast a speculative trajectory to our preferred future. This backcasting exercise resulted in three ‘milestones’ which attempt to elucidate visions of what this transition could look like.

Milestone 1 (5–15 years out)

An acute economic collapse resulting from rampant speculation in the financial system is compounded by stalemate in government between two factious parties resulting in an inability to bail out the financial institutions deemed “too big to fail.” While Pittsburgh has held safe harbor through some of the worst rampages of the worsening climate catastrophe, its citizens have not turned a blind eye to the flooding of the eastern and southern seaboards and the burning of the west. National energy policy has rapidly shifted toward renewable energy. Closer to home, the low genetic diversity and density of Pittsburgh’s populous maple trees have made them susceptible to change in climate and disease, decimating Pittsburgh’s canopy. In response to this chaos, people are reorganizing around shared visions of the future and the people of the bioregion are focused on planting the literal and metaphorical seeds of the future, rallying around emerging cooperatives and reforestation efforts and native plant nurseries that seek to restlanore native habitat. Themes of indigenous ways of managing habitat and environmental justice have moved from the niche to the regime level though are still developing methods and tools to implement at the landscape level.

Milestone 2 (30–45 years out)

Households have moved toward self-sufficiency (locally sourced food and resources) and community solidarity out of both national scarcity and landscape level understanding of one’s role and responsibility to the earth. This has begun a larger process in which urban Pittsburgh’s political and economic core is morphing into a decentralized network throughout the Appalachian Plateau, dispersing centrally held power and resources. This morphing is also reflected in properties’ changing of hands, as communities take increasing control of the management of forestland. The region’s culture, expertise and capability has been strengthened by influxes of climate refugees that have been brought into the dedicated efforts of rebuilding the region materially and spiritually. The seeds planted thirty years ago have not only borne fruit but are tall enough to start filling the gaps in the canopy.

Milestone 3 (60–75 years out)

Forests have begun to flourish again, bolstered by the resilience of native plant nurseries and planetary resource and information sharing, meshing scientific with indigenous knowledge. It is common for the walls of the city to be green. Building is focused on restoration of existing structures and is bolstered by the sustainable regional production of timber and forest products. Street trees have been planted not for their ability to manage pollution (like the gingkos in Pittsburgh) but for how they can create habitat for humans and non-humans alike. The rights of non-humans are strongly codified in law, which is enforced at the community level.

Notes on Our Approach

We started brainstorming for our future vision by having each member add aspects of the future at each level of scale in everyday life: The Household, The Neighborhood, The City, The Region, and The Planet.

After looking at everyone’s ideas, we discussed the possibility of framing the vision in terms of the stakeholders we identified in assignment #2 or through the STEEP categories from assignment #1 (social, technological, economic, environmental, political). We decided to better visualize these two framings through a second brainstorming exercise, where each row is a STEEP category and each column is a level of everyday scale:

After documenting our ideas based on the two framings, we discussed what our consolidated vision as a team was. When we identified the central themes and values for this future, each of us took a level of scale in everyday life to flesh out on the final map. We also drew connections across scale in order to highlight the relationship between local level communities and larger communities at the regional and planetary levels (which visualizes how Cosmopolitan Localism can be manifested in this future).

With our vision created, we backcasted to create a transition pathway from the present to the future. For this process, we considered what aspects of the present should be kept and what shouldn’t. We used those ideas to later frame the near-term, mid-term, and long-term milestones.

Next Steps

Our team has now analyzed deforestation as a wicked problem across time in its historical, present, and future contexts. Next, we will be incorporating everything we’ve learned into creating systems interventions that will initiate the transition towards our envisioned future, where forests and other native habitats thrive, where local and indigenous practices are amplified, and where communities at different scales can live sustainably. We will also challenge ourselves to create interventions that address both deforestation and related wicked problems. Stay tuned to see what we come up with!