Columnist – John Sammon
This letter is a formal apology to the generation to come in the year 2060, for the sorry depleted state we left to you of the world.
Our world.
The world we left to you is sadly a much more drab and inhospitable place because we lacked the courage to do what was right and to work together to curb the greenhouse emissions and resultant global warming and damage that you, the generation of 2060, can now see with your own eyes.
You have a right to hate us for what we did, and for what we failed to do.
Entire sections of the earth, what had been verdant areas, became rainless deserts, wastelands seared by heat. Populations migrated from these formerly productive regions and were forced to jam into the fewer remaining habitable, livable locales. This put strains on what little was left for a decent living, adequate housing, food and resources.
The simple joy of eating a peach became a memory. Massive crop failure caused by pollution and destroyed, dried-up water supplies made the growing of fruits untenable. There were no bees left to pollinate them anyway.
You, the generation of 2060, can view what once was the diversity of earth life on your new telepathic lazer lights, and you no doubt despise us for squandering these natural wonders.
For example:
Massive die-offs of entire species of animals took place and the ocean polluted and fished out to the point that all its former creatures became mere memories. You can say a polar bear is such an exotic animal and needs such a wide habitat free of people that like the dinosaur, it couldn’t exist with humans, it had to give way.
We used to justify this by calling it “progress,” in reality exploitation and then destruction.
But as long as such animals lived in the wild, they also existed in our active imaginations. We knew they existed in the wild, that there still was a wild, and that made the world a more wonderful, colorful place. Without color, you have drab. Variety is the spice of life.
Now, by your time, there is mostly nothingness.
By 2060, the world became a gray neither-world of struggling millions competing for the greatly shrunken prize, a livable existence, with a few power elites living in luxury, the very few, attempting to manage and control the restive masses. This started long ago, in my time.
People started killing each other for dwindling food and power resources, in the forms of war, famine and anarchy. In the end, when people are hungry enough, they kill. When people are hopeless, without hope, they kill. When there’s nothing else left to kill, the forests, the oceans, the very air we breathe. Then we finally kill each other, more than ever before.
We dream amid our diminishing world of sailing to more livable planets, or inventing new gadgetry to rescue us.
I apologize to you, the future generation of 2060, for this fiasco.
It was ultimately the inability of nations to work together and the basic concept of borders and nations pursuing their own separate national interests that proved fatal. The United States often meddled in the affairs of other countries and in sometimes extending its energy by picking fights with smaller impoverished countries, ruled the world like a modern Roman Empire. Failing in positive leadership, we in turn did not select leaders of either imagination or idealism. In what could have been a more productive aspect of control and an extension of our power, we failed to use our influence to ask for cooperation and to line up the mostly smaller countries of the world in a concerted effort.
Half of Americans refused to believe in the alarming decline in the earth’s health that became as plain as the nose on their face, and that most scientists had long-agreed was happening and warned about. Some Americans, close-minded and stupid, didn’t want to be bothered. Some were only concerned about riches and short-term pleasures.
There were some who were alarmed.
But no effort based on supreme urgency won bipartisan support. In this case, the rights and freedoms we enjoyed actually worked against us. Since it’s my right to ignore the problem for my own selfish reasons, many of us chose to do so. Until it was too late.
Ingrained in our souls was the need to accumulate riches and possessions over the need to do right.
Third World Countries could hardly be blamed in the same way. They had less and were motivated by the luxury seeking status we had. We set a bad example. They wanted to emulate our increasingly wrong values.
The end result was the same. The East Coast of the U.S. became a hurricane-lashed hell world of erosion and fleeing populace. The expanding Sahara Desert founded a twin in Texas and Oklahoma. Synthetic, fake meat, bread and poultry to replace the natural kind that had been lost produced more cancers in humans.
The Amazon Basin became a parched salt flat depriving the world of billions of its oxygen-generating plants. Islands disappeared under rising seas, coral reefs disappeared. Especially anything that had color, or beauty, disappeared.
Dullness reigned.
We left to you the generation of 2060 a depleted, exhausted planet eking by on the forlorn hope that new technology will replace the damage. But breathable air and drinkable water and fish in the ocean un-caught and un-poisoned by pollution are very hard things to replace with fake living replicas.
Animals disappeared, water disappeared, abundant crops disappeared. Methane gas escaping from a thawing Arctic Circle poisoned the air. It became a multi-national riot of the few haves versus the many have-nots in an inter-continental collision similar to a long-ago but futuristic movie called “Mad Max.”
Life became again like what it once was in the Neolithic Age, a grim struggle for survival and a short miserable life, but without huge areas to expand.
You, the generation of 2060, can view what we bequeathed to you. You must hate us for it.
I can’t say I blame you.
Could it have been different?
I’ll always wonder. I admit I myself have been a part of the problem. Though it is somewhat reassuring to me that I have already lived most of my life, I can however express sorrow for what happened and pity for future generations.
I don’t expect forgiveness.
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” It must have taken days to write.
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