Stay Connected, For The Winds Of Change Are Blowing

The year is 2060 and I look out at the beauty of the open field before me. This moment seemed familiar to me, as if I had already experienced it before. The deep green of the forest surrounding the farm, the mist as it settles in the valleys between the mountains, and the quiet feeling of safety the gentle breeze afforded were all I could think about. Then, a pinch on the leg woke me out of my trance and I looked down to see the faces of my great-grandchildren covered in mud. They were smiling at me like little messy piglets waiting for me to react to their new fashion statement and I feigned shock as I jumped backwards and fell to the ground. Then, erupting in laughter, they both pounced on me with their filthy hands and faces, rubbing their tiny and dirty hands in my face like it was the only thing that could ever make them happy.

We wrestled for a while in the grass. I told them how strong they were getting and how they needed to take it easy on this old man, but they weren’t having any of that. “Bet you can’t catch us!” they yelled as they turned to run back to the dome. I stood up, dusted myself off, and gave the kids a twitch implying I was about to chase them. They both took off running towards the dome and it seems they were there before I even had time to blink. “Youth”, I thought, “the little bastards”. I laughed to myself for a moment about the furious joy of childhood and took another opportunity to take in the majestic vistas surrounding my home. “Oh how this world has changed.”

Walking inside the dome I smelled the delicious aroma of a hearth-fired bread loaf baking, cassoulet, and a myriad of other scents filling the air. One by one the people of our community wandered into the dining room from a day of work on our homestead to relax, share a meal, and tell stories to one another. My wife Leatha leaned over to me with a look of concern on her face and said “Drew, some of the little ones found an old box of Time magazines in the barn today and they’re pretty confused. Do you think you could talk with them after dinner? I’d do it but I promised my sister I’d go riding with her.” Here we go again... I've had this talk before.

When dinner was finished and we had all helped straighten up the place I gathered the children in front of the fireplace for story time. “What should our story be about tonight?”, I asked. They looked around at each other knowing there was a collective question they all had on their minds. Sharon, on of the younger ones, looked at me and said “Will you tell us a story about the time when you were a little boy. We found magazines in the barn with strange pictures and my mom told me they were from when you were little. How did we get here?” In that instance my mind shot back fifty years and I was reliving an era that no longer existed.

The year now was 2020. The decade preceding me had been deemed by some to be the largest upheaval of humanity in written history. Beginning in 2010 the international political climate had been getting a temper to it. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, meeting in Copenhagen, had failed to ratify new carbon legislation and the apocalyptic future portrayed by climate scientists had begun to position itself in the global psyche. I was removed from this feeling of hopelessness because at that time I was starting a non-profit. That’s a fairly involved process, and an empowering one, so I didn’t panic as much as others did, however the feeling of impending doom was widespread.

As years passed new technologies were proven effective but never affordable, and the large companies that were being pressured to change their operations knew that implementing these technologies would bankrupt them. Politicians were voted into office under the guise of forcing these changes but the public who voted for them seemed to have forgotten just who it was that financed their campaigns. Public awareness of these conflicts of interest had grown, and one by one, countries began to fall to green revolutions led by environmental leaders. Elements within intelligence agencies had begun posing as black-bloc anarchists, introducing violence to otherwise peaceful, well-meaning social movements.

These revolutions struck fear in the halls of power within western industrialized nations, and soon the general public was made to bear the brunt of industry’s carbon footprint so that industry wouldn’t have to. All types of heavy rationing were implemented to soothe the environmental groups, and soon the standard of living for the lower and middle classes was becoming deplorable (or, if you will, comparable to some "second" and "third" world standards). Cutting off resources people have come to thoughtlessly depend on is a messy business, and in this case it led to black market of energy, creating a larger gang problem and even more violence. People now were not just protesting in the streets for the environment, but for better living conditions, government accountability, and an end to the rationing. As the conditions grew worse, so did the public outcry and the inevitable backlash of the state, and soon the world was nearing chaos.

After a grand announcement broadcast worldwide the leaders of the free world were invited to a private meeting to discuss humanity’s way forward. The populations were somewhat lulled into brief complacency by this but the people were desperate, and the leaders knew that going home without a solution resulting in a massive improvement of living conditions would be a political (and perhaps literal) death sentence. At this meeting they discussed many options, but only one plan (arranged months in advance) seemed to solve “their” problem. They ordered their armed forces to report to remote, well-supplied, reinforced bases and told to await orders. The clock struck midnight.

The next morning the world awoke and it was off. Everything was off. No phones, no internet, no electricity. People who had gasoline in their cars searched for an oasis far and wide (or at least until their tank was empty), and eventually sat angrily behind the wheel of their $45,000 paperweight. People panicked, rioted, looted, anything they could to keep their families alive. The whole interconnected global system had shut off. No more deliveries, no more cheap, easy anything. Within a month millions had died. Within two months over two billion had died. At the six month point, all that was left was rural agriculturalists and political machines backed by their own military forces. But it takes energy to run a military, and soon the world’s resource wars had begun. Not able to effectively support a ground-troop force, this was a game of proxy, and before long the atomic genie had been let out of it’s bottle once again. The cities of the world fell, one by one, and the world was quiet.

As serendipity would have it, a few months before the rationing and the chaos, the non-profit I started with my friends had found adequate funding and bought a farm. We installed dozens of alternative energy systems, enabling us to live completely off the grid. By that point we had optimized greenhouse systems to give us harvests year-round, we were able to turn our waste into reusable energy, we had built accommodations for dozens of volunteers, and thankfully had picked a site that was rural enough to avoid the roaming gangs of looters.

Families would trickle in every few weeks out of the woods, looking tired, hungry, dirty, and confused. Their eyes searched our faces for good news. We took them inside, gave them showers, fed them, and all that we could tell them was “Now we have a chance to get it right”. After a few months that had become our motto, and remembering the images we had all seen of our old world falling apart, we looked towards the future with our own ideas, with our own passions, and with our own myths, hoping to not make the same mistakes again.

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