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 artist, designer and writer Racheblue said:
Dearest Children of the Future,
This is your Great… Granny Racheblue writing to let you know what life was like back here towards the start of the 21st Century and to wish you all the best for your future. I trust that the decisions we made and the actions we took have helped provide you with a happy, safe life where you can learn and grow from our mistakes as well as your own.
You see we were recently at a point in history where all that mattered to those who controlled the rest of us was money! I hope you’ll find that hard to believe and the pursuit of financial gain seems such an antiquated notion to your generation. Coupled with the fact that our planet seemed to be heating up at an alarming rate – partly due to the aforementioned greed things did not look good for us and it seemed that your generation wouldn’t even get a chance!
It wasn’t that long ago that we all worked as hard as we could simply to earn as much money as we could and then spent as much of it as we could on things we didn’t need. We got into serious debt with banks (financial institutions) and the banks who had loaned us the money in the first place made us pay them more money for our debts (they called it interest and charges). So we worked harder at our jobs to earn more money and when that wasn’t enough we sold the crap we’d previously bought to pay off our debts. And, then, we went and repeated the cycle – what crazy fools we were, some of us still are!
The reason we lived such pointless lives (as I’m sure you’ve read about in your history lessons) was because our whole society was run by power hungry people who wanted to make as much money as they could because it made them feel important and so that they could control us.
These people – the Corporate Bullies – used advertising and media to make us think we needed lots of stuff in order to lead a ‘good’ life. Our governments wanted money too so let the Corporate Bullies bribe them and allowed them to get away with almost anything they liked.
It took a long while for us to realize that this money chasing cycle was preventing us from evolving as people and making the changes necessary to support our poor ailing planet. I’m sure you know all about this but I have to emphasize what a strange and disheartening way to live it was. Most of us took it for granted that we could do nothing about it for a very long time.
And then the change happened. Slowly, as people from all over the world began to talk to each other and share information (the internet was still relatively new then) we realized that we did have the power to stop this crazy cycle we called ‘life’ and make a difference to the planet!
So, we got together and worked out ways of fighting back against the Corporate Bullies, the climate change skeptics and their governments (we finally realized that the governments weren’t ours at all but belonged to the Corporate Bullies (CBs).
We continue to form our own organizations that do not rely on making money. We have stopped buying all the crap from the big corporations and instead buy what we need either from those who need our business most (back when money was all that mattered we used to call them ‘developing’ countries – how stupid were we!) or from local suppliers that we know and we have started making a lot of things for ourselves. We swap and barter trades and supplies.
We opened our eyes to see there is actually a lot of the ‘stuff’ we need already available in the world, so we’ve started to re-use what we already have instead of buying new things from the CBs. We have discovered that we are all a lot more creative than we’d been led to believe and can make amazing useful tools and beautiful objects out of what we’d thought of as ‘rubbish’. We have started to grow our own food again. Boy! That was a shock for the supermarkets! Do you still have supermarkets I wonder? I hope not.
Many of us have even stopped relying on fossil fuels by ‘going off the grid’ (do you know that expression I wonder?), developing the bio-fuels you perhaps still use today and demanding more efficient public transport (which was shockingly bad even in some of the world’s biggest cities). And, we got off our backsides and started cycling and walking! You would not believe how little we used do this, taking our huge cars on the shortest journeys sometime with only a driver in!
Instead of waiting for governments to make changes we made our own and formed local eco-community groups to support each other and the planet on a local and global scale. We stopped chopping down trees just because we wanted new garden furniture every summer or more paper to print out useless information on (can you believe there was a time when we actually thought that was okay?!).
It is taking a long time for the CBs to give in completely but eventually they will have little choice in the matter. We aren’t buying their rubbish anymore or buying into their false view of how we should live. We are giving them the boot and claiming back our lives. The simple and content lives that I trust you continue to enjoy today.
There are still too many CBs and their cronies out there trying to scrap back a semblance of the power they once had and rally greedy or gullible supporters with lies and promises of a return to decadence. They don’t realise that we already have all we need and the earth will continue to provide for us if we take care of her.
We don’t pretend that life has reached any kind of perfection (yet) but we have reason to be hopeful and trust that love and freedom will outlast hatred and greed. CBs will never regain power unless you let them. Please don’t let them!
Don’t take any of your freedoms for granted like we did. Be thankful for every small blessing and live your life to the full, grasping every moment to share the love and understanding that keeps our world beautiful.
I wish you much happiness and knowledge of true joy; a little shadow so that you will always know the sun & all the love in the world for the world. You are the world. Grow with it!
With love,
Grandma Rache xx xx
