Asked to review what he called a ‘country book’, the late, great green socialist Raymond Williams spotted a problem. Looking back some 50 years, the book’s author lamented the recent loss of the once eternal rural idyll. But Williams, being a well-read literary critic, knew that if you went back 50 years to those supposedly halcyon days, there were people writing then about a lost golden age they’d known 50 years earlier still. More than that, he traced a pattern over centuries: of writers bewailing that things were better in some earlier time, ‘back then’. ‘Is it anything more,’ he asked, ‘than a well-known habit of using the past, the “good old days”, as a stick to beat the present?’

Remembering, then, that paths are made by walking – and not by looking in the rear-view mirror – on New Internationalist’s 50th anniversary, is it possible instead to imagine that the best times could lie ahead? Does that fly in the face of visible chaos and collapse all around, or is there evidence for hope? For that we can look to the present, recent and deeper past to find out. After all, the future will grow from the present, and as the novelist William Faulkner wrote: ‘The past is never dead. It’s not even past.’ What if, 50 years from now, instead of looking back and yearning for how things were in 2023, we find ourselves in a more equal, tolerant, and just society living more harmoniously with the rest of life on earth?

If that sounds laughably optimistic, look down at some of the green shoots of just such a future germinating even in today’s hostile environment.