The Ancestors’ Legacy: A Tale of Retribution against the Descendants of those who Denied Climate Change

Climate change. This file is made available under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication. Author: Tommaso.sansone91

by Paul Sheridan and Neil Wollman

A recent news article stated: “With world leaders gathering in Madrid next week …, the latest assessment issued by the United Nations said Tuesday that greenhouse gas emissions are still rising dangerously. ‘The summary findings are bleak.’ Countries have failed to halt the rise of greenhouse gas emissions despite repeated warnings from scientists…. The result… is that “deeper and faster cuts are now required.” (“Bleak U.N. Report on a Planet in Peril Looms Over New Climate Talks,” NY Times, Nov. 26.)

But, as we know, the U.S. and other major polluters are going in the opposite direction. If current trends continue, what might be expected to happen in the coming decades? We present below a hypothetical scenario for the future–a possible dystopian future. It is soon to be a major motion picture perhaps (“Apes of the Planet?”) –or maybe a reality show in years to come…

Early in this century, many promises were made. This Protocol, that Report…Kyoto, Paris, a most important Summit, the Biggest of Conferences. Technologies were available to decarbonize electricity production, to increase buildings’ efficiency, to protect and restore natural ecosystems, to get cropland to absorb more carbon than it releases. The largest emitters declined to step up their commitments in any significant way. And then, time ran out.

First, the great floods and fires of the 2050s, then resulting refugee migrations, next the famine of 2062-67 (enhanced by desertification and loss of most insects), and then the Wars for Water.  The planet’s problems accelerated– epidemics, SARS, Ebola, New AIDS resurgence. Most countries were affected by rising sea levels due to global warming—numerous cities were already gone—Manila, Lagos, Guangzhou, Rotterdam, Hanoi–Osaka’s history, Venice’s heritage, and New York’s riches. The impacts tended to fall disproportionately on the poor and vulnerable, those least responsible for the problems. 

The ancestors of the current elite had said none of this would happen, everything would be fine, it was just a cycle, and if we reacted, it would hurt our economy. Fish depopulation, weather events, fires, shrinking biodiversity, all sorts of extractive mining–these were all just temporary aberrations. Some said a warmer planet would be good, because “Earth will be able to support enormously more people, because a far greater land area will be available to produce food.”  Those in the Administration and Congress had held up needed legislation back in the early 2000s. Those in the oil industry had perpetuated myths.

But starting in the 2050s the descendants of those who didn’t act when they should have paid the price–whether deserved or not–for their ancestors’ betrayal of the environment. Many were killed, some went into hiding.  Others, feeling a great guilt, committed suicide.   Reports on where the descendants lived helped further their demise, with targeted assassinations.  It was pure rage and not rationality that fueled the slaughter; those who killed were desperate, seeing a bleak present and bleaker future. That despair was at its worst in the infamous Women’s Massacres of the 2060s – of women, and by women.  Continually multiplying social inequalities meant the rioters and the gangs had nothing to lose.

 Some offspring were defensive, continuing to embrace their ancestors, saying they knew not what they had done. Others felt shame, changed their names, moved to other continents in the hope of being unnoticed. And some disavowed their ancestors’ misdeeds, and dedicated their own lives to making the best of a hopeless situation, to better the lives of those still surviving. Some descendants contributed their inheritances to the neediest survivors.  They realized their ancestors’ errors and sought mercy in public, but that was not very effective when facing a mob. The 2020’s US Senate leader’s family spoke out publicly, decrying the actions of their ancestors–but they were still among the missing when the rioting intensified, intent on retribution.

For those multitudes who were not descendants and whose lives were not ended abruptly, there was a death of hope instead.  For a while there had been some possibility for survival by colonizing space, but the dreams of a Next Frontier were dashed by the collapse of any research in the technologies needed. There was no escape, no Argentina to disappear to…things would only get worse. It was just a matter of when we would die on this planet, with no way out. The living started to envy the dead, even those who died for their ancestors’ sins. 

This artcle originally appeared in Medium—see link here .

Note from Kathie MM: Pegean says

Get your act together, people!

The crises could pour right into your backyard while you’re still around to pay the price for neglect.

And ye shall inherit the whirlwind (or learn to live in gratitude and grace), Part 1

by Stefan Schindler

Central oval of James Thornhill’s (1714) “Triumph of Peace and Liberty over Tyranny” on the lower hall ceiling of the Painted Hall at the Old Royal Naval College in Greenwich, England; photographed by Roger Stevens in 2009. In the public domain,

It is the best of times. It is the worst of times. Never before has humanity been endowed with such fantastic opportunities. Never before has humanity’s survival been so precarious, the threat of self-extinction looming on the near horizon.

The first step in solving a problem is recognizing that there is one; and though prophets and sages, assassinated statesmen and pacifist activists have long issued warnings about the urgent need for sane and pragmatic reform, their voices have been muted by a perpetual blizzard of epistemological confetti and jingoistic sloganeering aimed at the citizen populace by sophistic politicians and mainstream media technocrats serving the imperial needs of the richest of the rich.

Howard Zinn observed: “The truth is so often the opposite of what we are told that we can no longer turn our heads around far enough to see it.” Noam Chomsky adds the necessary twist: “The problem is not that people don’t know; it’s that they don’t know they don’t know.” Hence the enduring potency of Marx’s maxim: “The demand to abandon illusions about our condition is a demand to abandon the conditions which require illusion.”

America repeats the unlearned lessons of history.  Founded on noble ideals undermined by genocide and slavery, America wraps itself in a cloak of virtue and goes abroad in search of monsters to destroy, not knowing she is destroying herself.  Men at the helm of the ship of state, swollen with greed and skilled at sophistry, steer civilization toward the abyss.  Only the blind can fail to see The Statue of Liberty weeping for another lost chance for human history to be something other than ignorance, violence, and ignoble self-betrayal. With all too few individual exceptions, the difference between the Democratic Party and the Republican Party is the difference between neurotic and psychotic.

Howard Zinn, noting that the problem is not civil disobedience, but, rather, all too pervasive obedience, declared: “Our problem is that people are obedient all over the world, in the face of poverty, starvation, stupidity, war and cruelty.  Our problem is that people are obedient while the jails are full of petty thieves, and all the while the grand thieves are running the country.” 

Albert Einstein said: “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”  He said further: “Money only appeals to selfishness and always irresistibly tempts its owner to abuse it.  Can anyone imagine Moses, Jesus, or Gandhi with the moneybags of Carnegie?”

James Thurber once offered the parable of a man standing on his cabin porch watching a forest being cut down to provide timber for the building of an asylum in which to house people driven insane by the cutting down of forests.

Note from Kathie MM: Pegean says, “The message here is clear: We cannot rely on either mainstream political party to take us back from the abyss. Stay tuned as Stefan expands further on living in the gratitude, grace, integrity, and activism necessary for peace and social justice.