We asked friends of DeSmogBlog to write a letter to their great, great grandchildren about their vision and hopes for their world in 100 years, in the context of global warming. Here’s what novelist Pete McCormack said:

To my lovely great grandchildren,

I hope you’re not still mad. Yes, we didn’t do enough, clearly—after all, you’re probably saving money just to some day travel to Baffin Island Resorts, with their catchy tag line: “Come play in the Sun and the Surf without Burning Instantly.”

Still, it wasn’t that easy for us. We inherited one hell of a mess—and we were taught that the marketplace was God, and God had this unstoppable, giant, invisible hand. And that the world was made better by consuming everything in sight, that every last resource was here to be owned, that fast food was freedom, that as long as you cooked animals, they didn’t matter—nor did they feel any of the pain our pets felt—and that the farther away you lived from your work, the cooler you were.

It was pretty good for a while, actually. We were still pretty cocky around the turn of the century, maybe up to about 2010. Sure, there were some brutal wars over this thing you’ve probably never heard of—called oil—and these wars killed hundreds of thousands of people who were rarely shown on TV.

But the Water Wars…?

Now they got universally ugly. You know that liquidy goo you drink called “Nutritional Supplement/Chemotherapy”? Well, humans used to—get this!—grow that kind of stuff in the ground, under something called top soil.

Weirdest thing.

There was this whole cycle set up by…uh…I can’t remember who set it up—some corporation I think—called the eco-system. And then we had these huge religions that believed in God but didn’t really believe humans were truly a part of this ecosystem. And then there was all this science that disagreed with the religions but still said this ecosystem had no real, inherent intelligence.

So you know what we did? We ignored it! Well, we wrote about the planet, how much damage we were doing to it and all of that, but most of us just didn’t feel it in our bodies, in our hearts. I tried but…I don’t know. It was all so intellectual.

And almost all the people who truly felt for the earth and wept for her and saw her as a real being—I mean a real being like you and I—had been killed long before 2010.

And those who were left could barely be heard, or had lost that gift, or were thought to be crazy.

And then the world got hotter, which was instant death for those people who were already starving and dying, like in Africa and India.

Look, I don’t know what went wrong. We just seemed to not be able to realize that we’re all sisters and brothers, and so temporary—but this view got called neo-something-or-other, and then suddenly it was too late.

Too bad, though. I love you so much, and I loved my time being human, with so many beautiful people.

Always remember that,
Poppa