A message from a time traveler
As you may or may not know, the Royal Borough of Windsor & Maidenhead was recently visited by a time traveler from the year 2056 and sadly, the future it not looking good.
I will let you read what they had to say…
Dear 2026….
Greetings from 2056, We are writing to you from the Maidenhead thirty years into the future, and we thought you may find it interesting to see how things panned out over the intervening years – particularly regarding climate change and biodiversity.
It won’t surprise you to hear that we have had an incredibly rough ride.
The experts who were saying that humans were destroying the planet were not being dramatic. The heatwaves and storms started to raise awareness, but it was the widely predicted “bug-mageddon” – disappearance of insects – and its catastrophic effect on the food chain which created worldwide panic in the 2030s.
At the same time, climate change drove huge population movements. Millions of people were forced to leave their homes, and the pressure on wealthier countries became impossible to ignore, which forced governments to take definitive action at the international level in the 2040s.
There have been some surprises. The development of nuclear fusion has meant we have been able to reduce our pollution levels dramatically. However, despite the many billions invested, carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology turned out to be a failure on all counts – insecure, inefficient, ineffective. Renewable energy has proved to be a game-changer, but only once we learned how to harness its power in a way that the grid could manage.
Money still makes the world go round of course, and we have the same old arguments about the best way to spend it. The difference now is that the GER (Global Environmental Repair) has turned out to be the biggest item in every national budget. It is expensive and slow, but it is working. The planet is stabilising and biodiversity is recovering, and many of the rich and varied forms of life on Earth are now living in a more sustainable eco-system.
So, our message from 2056 is: don’t wait for someone else to fix things or assume “they” will sort it out. Start to take these issues more seriously, sooner, and more personally as everyday choices add up.
See you in 30 years.