20 years

In another 20 years, I wonder if the world would have given up on trying to fight the inevitable or if we would, as a species, still be talking about “emissions reductions” and “sustainability” the way we are today. Gen Z children will have their own by then, and we (I’m a 1994 kid) will have ripened into either cynical grumps or tired zombies. The people currently alive on the planet have no idea what the world was like before industrialisation took place. There are probably very few souls alive who don’t know what petrol smells like, or what smog looks like – the remotest and least ‘globalised’ of our brethren.

In another 20 years, we will have forgotten what the Earth used to be. 200 years since the dawn of “modern society” and with all the environmental degradation, wars and droughts behind us, the ones remaining will not know what needs to be restored. What will we have lost by then? Can we find our way back? Is it even a fair position to place society in, to expect that what is lost must be regained? I reckon we would be more concerned with the then and there rather than the by-gones. “Too little, too late.”

In another 20 years, after all large mammals have been wiped out from the face of this planet, will conservationists still try to save the next rhino, tiger, polar bear, orangutan, or whatever species comes next with a target on its back? Will the children of tomorrow know what it is like to stand under a tree in full bloom and listen to the bees flitting about? We may well be able to capture all of these lived experiences and store them in the meta-verse or some other version of The Matrix by then. I wonder if we will consider that to be a real experience, a smorgasbord of sights, sounds and smells.

In another 20 years, when everyone is tired of politicians still making the same promises and commitments, othering communities and bending social fabrics to satisfy their agenda, will the cynics and zombies have given up or would they still be fighting? I wonder which of our social causes will become lost causes; our revolutionaries either lost to history or gone underground. Will artists still roam free, peppering the canvas of human expression with their wondrous cocktail of experiences, or will they become cogs in the machine?

In another 20 years, if I’m still around, I’d be curious to know – will I be one of ‘them’, othered away, a statistic in a pie chart, a pixel in a global canvas, one among the crowd? Or will I drone on, fighting a cause I sometimes question, asking the questions I often think make no sense, meandering in the dark begging to be found?