“Policy-makers and populations at large either regarded the people who issued warnings as scaremongers, or thought the problems belonged to the far distant future. Researchers who said a point of no return was being reached were dismissed as cranks and lunatics. People preferred to listen to the mouthpieces of vested interests who said things they wanted to hear, rather than heed warnings that the end was nigh unless they accepted major lifestyle changes.
“In the end, something had to give: Earth or Man. Since people were too selfish and short-sighted to limit their lifestyles, it was the Earth that gave. A tipping point was reached, a point of no return. Can anyone tell me what provided the final push?”
Looking around, I had no difficulty picking out Names from Numbers despite the dim lighting: the Names either sank down in their seats, trying to make themselves as inconspicuous as possible because they were shy or didn’t know the answer, or else they had their hands raised as high as they’d go and waved them about, eager to impress and hungry for a word of praise in a world where they were constantly made to feel slow and dumb and second-best.
Before Annie MacDougall could pick out a pupil, the know-it-all who’d corrected her earlier said, “The Hydrocarbon Holocaust.”
It had to be a Pareto. I turned around to see if I was right. Sure enough, I found myself looking at a younger version of the smug face that had sneered at me as I got off the exercise bike in the gym the night before. A few desks away was another face just like it, displaying an identical sneer. I don’t know if it’s my imagination, but there seem to be more Paretos than there used to be. My heart went out to Annie MacDougall—two in one class.
When I turned back to Annie, she was nodding. “Can anyone explain how the Hydrocarbon Holocaust came about?” This time, before either of the Paretos could answer, she looked at a small boy in the front row who’d been begging to answer the previous question, and said, “Frankie, would you like to try?”
He nodded. Although I was looking at the back of his head I could picture his face. It would be a mask of concentration. The silence stretched out long enough to become awkward, and then embarrassing. It was filled by a snigger. I imagined the boy’s face turning bright red. Finally he said, “It was the bomb in the beefburger place and the Americans getting mad at the Muslims and the Muslims getting their own back and…” the words dried up.
More sniggers, then one of the Paretos piped up: “What he’s trying to say is that tensions between Christians and Muslims over the treatment of the Palestinians and the terrorism it spawned were worsened by the policies of a US government which was increasingly a puppet for multinational companies who manipulated it for their own ends, principally to meet their growing demand for increasingly scarce resources, especially oil.”
I shook my head in disbelief. The Pareto was no more than fourteen years old, and yet talked like an adult. And history is their weakest subject.
He wasn’t finished yet. “United by a sense of injustice and double standards, a Muslim Coalition was formed. The first thing it did was increase oil prices. This caused great hardship in the developed countries, especially the US, and ratcheted up racial and religious tensions even further.”
“Thank you, Paul, or is it Mark?” the teacher said sweetly.
Someone sniggered. It was me. I was sniggering because I knew Annie was having a dig at the Pareto’s lack of individuality. Although I’d laughed, it wasn’t really all that funny. I’d seen enough of Annie MacDougall to know that, like her father, she was as good as people get—yet even she’d been driven to launch an attack across the genetic divide.
“I’ll take it from here, because I’ve got some more pictures to show you,” she said. With her good hand she clicked the audio-visual control, and the wall behind her became a city of skyscrapers seen from ground level. All the shop windows were blown out, and a cloud of smoke hung heavily just above the debris-strewn street. People emerged coughing and choking from the dust, their clothes torn and bloodstained. Some held handkerchiefs to their mouths, many looked like they didn’t know where they were. A few people, mostly wearing fire and police and paramedic uniforms, rushed toward the cloud to help those who came staggering out of it, but they had to fight their way through panicked crowds pouring from the surrounding buildings. The classroom around me was filled with the screams of pain, fear and panic of long-dead people, and the wailing of a hundred sirens. I’d seen the footage many times before but it hadn’t lost its power to shock me, and I found myself caught up in the heroism and sheer terror of the events portrayed. I stole a glance at Paula. She only looked mildly interested, as if she was watching an old Hollywood movie rather than a turning point in history.
Annie MacDougall froze the image. The dust cloud appeared to billow out of the wall. A mother carrying a baby was emerging from its midst. She’d tripped over a briefcase dropped by some fleeing businessman. She was about to fall, and her face was frozen in helplessness and horror.
Annie stared at that face. I saw how much she was moved by the mother’s plight, and heard it in her voice when she said, “Things came to a head with the dirty bomb attack in a fast-food restaurant in Lower Manhattan. The blast was blamed on Muslim fundamentalists, but one theory is that the bomb was planted by the government to provide an excuse for what was to follow. It’s unlikely the truth will ever be known, and it’s academic, anyway. What matters is the incident led to the Third Gulf War.”
Now the screen was filled with a succession of striking images:
A squadron of bat-like stealth bombers streaking across a dusky sky.
Fireballs erupting in a city of minarets.
A desert highway littered with burnt-out tanks.
“Intent on tackling terrorism and securing oil supplies, the west invaded much of the Middle East,” Annie said. “It created the secular United States of Arabia puppet regime, outraging Muslim fundamentalists. Unable to match the military might of what they saw as corrupt infidel invaders, the fundamentalists struck back by targeting oil production at all stages—”
The screen showed thick clouds of smoke belching into the air from a hundred burning oil wells; then a massive oil tanker, its back broken, sinking below the surface of an ocean darkened by a spreading slick.
“Weren’t the fundamentalists spiting themselves by doing that?” The question, in a naïve voice, came from a young Name to my left.
Annie MacDougall turned from the screen to the teenager and said, “Indeed they were, but they reasoned—and I use the term loosely—that if they couldn’t benefit from the oil, they could at least deny it to their sworn enemy and burden them with the crippling costs of cleaning up the mess.
“Of course the mess wasn’t so easily cleaned up, and the resulting environmental catastrophe came to be known as the Hydrocarbon Holocaust.”
There were more images of burning oil fields and dense black smoke blotting out the sun.
“In a way the entire planet came to resemble a battlefield, as if a no-holds-barred war was being waged against Mother Nature. While that wasn’t the intention, it was the result—the catastrophic ‘collateral damage’ that comes from overdevelopment, strident nationalism and religious strife. The planet was under attack from all sides: from the Hydrocarbon Holocaust in the Middle East to the smogs of the great conurbations of the west; from a holed ozone layer to melting polar ice caps; from oceans overfished to the point of extinction, to rainforests being slashed and burned beyond regeneration. Pollution increased at the same time as the ability of the planet to cope with it was diminishing and, as a consequence, the problems worsened exponentially. The so-called tipping point had been reached.”
“What exactly does that mean?” Frankie asked.
The question was greeted by sniggering from the Numbers, which made me wonder how many questions went unasked for fear of ridicule. A lot of people favored segregation in classes, but I hadn’t been one of them. Now I was having second thoughts.
Annie MacDougall ignored
the sniggering. No doubt she’d had plenty practice, even before becoming a teacher. “Imagine you have something balanced on your outstretched finger,” she said. “A food bar, say. If you give it a gentle push it’ll rock up and down but return to its resting point. If you push it too far, however, it’ll fall right off your finger.”
She looked from Frankie around the rest of the class and said, “A good way to understand what was happening is to look at the polar regions. As the climate warmed and the icecaps began to melt, so less heat was reflected—vegetation and bare rock absorb a lot more of the sun’s energy than snow and ice—and the pace of melting increased. The melting of the ice created its own terrible momentum. Self-accelerating processes like that were going on all over the planet.
“Take the tundra: methane which had been trapped in frozen organic matter was released as the permafrost thawed. It’s a much more harmful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, so the more of it that was released, the warmer things got—melting more permafrost and releasing yet more methane.
“Likewise with the forests: as they were cut down and burned, more carbon dioxide was released—and of course there were fewer trees to help with its absorption.
“Then there were the oceans: vast and powerful, yet deceptively sensitive to changes in temperature.”
“In what way?” a Name asked.
“The warming of the surface shut off the circulation that brought nutrients up from the depths. Without those nutrients, the algae that absorb carbon dioxide from the air died off. It was a double disaster: the dying algae released methane and carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, and at the same time reduced the ability of the ocean to soak it up.”
“What date was the tipping point reached?” Frankie asked, to more sniggers.
Annie allowed herself a not unkind smile at the naiveté of the question. “It’s not something we can put an exact date on, because we’re dealing with continuous processes, and a great deal of them,” she explained patiently. “But it’s generally agreed the point of no return was passed in the mid-2020s. Before then the consequences of man’s abuse of the environment were just beginning to impact on everyday life, but they were felt as irritations and minor inconveniences. There was only the occasional catastrophic event, like Hurricane Katrina.”
“The one that flattened New York?” Frankie said.
“Wrong!” one of the Paretos crowed.
Annie ignored the Pareto, and said, “It was Hurricane Zena that devastated New York. Katrina hit New Orleans. They were both warning signs—and perhaps if they’d been heeded, it wouldn’t have been too late.
“But people chose to treat the symptoms rather consider the root causes, and by the early 2030s the symptoms were too severe to treat—and so was the cause.”
“What sort of things do you mean when you talk about irritations and symptoms?” a student somewhere behind me asked. I guessed it was a Name: we love the details that give color; Numbers are just interested in facts and figures.
Annie said, “I’m talking about things like how breathing unfiltered air began to result in respiratory problems; how exposure to even modest amounts of sunlight, washing in untreated water, or getting caught in showers of rain started causing skin problems. Not to mention the long-term health concerns associated with drinking untreated water and eating unprocessed, unpurified food. The lifespan and fertility of people, plants and animals markedly declined, while the incidence of mutations increased.”
“Things like your arm,” one of the Paretos said with undisguised mockery. I could quite happily have choked him for his callousness. Worryingly, I could quite happily have choked the other Pareto, too.
Annie evinced no such malice. “Yes,” she said quietly. “Like my arm.”
“Why don’t you get a graft?” a Number sitting a couple of desks along from me asked.
Annie looked him straight in the eye and said, “If you don’t know, nothing I can say will make you understand.”
I sensed the Number’s quiet seething. Even at that age they hate to feel there’s anything they don’t know or are incapable of learning.
“Anyway,” Annie carried on, “as I suggested, the initial response to the mounting problems was superficial and cosmetic—” The screen was filled with a shot of a busy high street where every shopper wore a crude face mask.
“The prophylactics were marketed as fashion accessories—”
The next shot showed three pretty women, each in a differently colored ensemble with a matching shade of mask.
“The protective measures people had to take to go outside became increasingly extreme—higher-factor UV creams, face masks with primitive filters in them. Even then, they weren’t enough to stop people feeling unwell if they were outside for any length of time.
“By the end of the 2020s, anyone who worked outside had to wear a full eco-hazard suit.” The screen displayed footage of a construction site, with a squad of bricklayers wearing bright orange coveralls, and hard hats that incorporated UV visors and heavy-duty filter-masks.
“You won’t believe this next shot,” Annie said. “I had to go back to 2010 to find it. It shows how the world had changed in those two decades; how attitudes changed. It shows how building sites used to be—”
There were gasps all around when the image appeared: it showed a construction site where the workers wore only shorts, revealing bodies not only heavily muscled but deeply tanned.
“And if you think that’s wild, how about this shot—” the teacher said.
This time there were exclamations of disbelief—even, I suspect, from the Numbers: the wallscreen displayed a beach full of people wearing trunks and bikinis, lying out in the sun.
“The Outside used to be viewed as healthy,” Annie said by way of explanation. “There were phrases like ‘The Great Outdoors,’ and people went walking for the sake of it, to enjoy ‘fresh air, the sun on their back, the wind in their hair’.”
That was greeted with more expressions of derision and disbelief.
“But by the early decades of the 21st century the world was such a different, damaged place that the Outside was coming to be viewed as we regard it now: poisoned and poisonous.
“If things were bad in the west, imagine how awful it was in the developing world—”
“Surely pollution wasn’t quite as bad there, because by definition development wasn’t so intense,” a young Number at the back of the hall said.
“The trouble is that the damage done to the environment had passed the point where its consequences were localized,” Annie told him. “The very cycles of nature had been altered and contaminated—and they operate on a global scale.
“In addition, while development was less intense in the third world, it also happened to be even less-environ-mentally friendly. In the rush to secure the same living standards as the west there was no time or money to abide by even the inadequate token environmental safeguards adopted in more affluent countries. The pressure for development was overwhelming, fuelled by aspirations raised by multinationals and fed by offers of investment from those same companies; offers which the governments of poor countries could not afford to turn down. As markets became saturated and regulations were slowly tightened in the developed world—albeit too little and too late—the third world became increasingly attractive to multinationals. Take automobiles: the third world became a dumping ground for vehicles that failed to meet the steadily tightening emission standards in the west.
“To make matters worse, people in those poorer countries couldn’t afford the prophylactics that became commonplace in the west—the expensive UV creams and filters, the treated water and processed foods.
“As a result of all this, the trends I referred to regarding life expectancy, fertility and mutations which were becoming apparent in the west were of a different order of magnitude in the poorer countries of the world.”
There were gasps of shock and revulsion all around me as the screen was filled with the image o
f an ill-equipped hospital ward full of pathetic children with hideously deformed or missing limbs.
“Previously rare conditions such as anencephaly—when babies are born with parts of their brain missing—became increasingly commonplace.
“There was horror in the west at pictures like these: not just out of empathy at the suffering, but due to fear that a similar fate awaited the rest of the world.
“Unsurprisingly there was a backlash against the multinationals—”
A quick succession of images showed mass protests in London, Paris and New York.
“The increasing support for mainstream Green movements, which made their point by peaceful means such as mass marches and boycotting companies and products, was accompanied by a growth in what came to be known as Green Brigades—eco-terrorists who violently targeted cars and other signs of conspicuous consumption. Things previously regarded as status symbols came to be viewed as badges of shame; objects of desire became the focus of disgust—”
The picture now was of Park Avenue in Manhattan, showing blazing cars and boutiques with windows either broken or covered in graffiti.
“Unable to control the disorder, governments dug in and hoped it would die out.
“However, the Green movement went from strength to strength, until it was effectively setting the agenda. Mainstream political party manifestoes suddenly espoused measures which would have been electoral suicide a generation earlier: things like hefty eco taxes on cars and gasoline to tackle the consequences of pollution and provide investment in eco-friendly public transport.
“But as the environmental situation deteriorated—as it became apparent that even the most radical mainstream party manifestoes were inadequate for tackling such profound difficulties, that national boundaries and vested interests must inevitably lead to a fragmentary approach that couldn’t hope to tackle problems of a global nature—so the feeling grew that existing political and economic systems were part of the problem and incapable of providing a solution.
“It was in this climate of fear and despair that the Ecosystem emerged—”
Tomorrow’s World Page 8