A Message from the Future III

 

As I sit and reminisce on the past with my grandchildren, I can’t help but focus on a particular time that most would have never believed would happen before it did. It was in the late part of 2019 when a virus called COVID-19 would be discovered. A few months later in the early part of 2020, the world becomes infected with it. This very contagious virus originated in China and was transmitted throughout the world through travel. Most countries took the situation seriously, however, The United States of America was led by a President that thought he knew it all. In his mind, it was nothing severe nor was it a threat. Eventually, the governing bodies of America decided that masks and social distancing would help slow the spread. What we thought would be a few months of quarantine and mask-wearing turned into nearly a year.  Under this President’s administration, a vaccine was dispensed to those in need in December of 2020. While the COVID-19 pandemic wasn’t the only bizarre thing to happen in 2020, it was one of the most significant.

However, one of the most important things to happen in my lifetime was the world-wide deal to follow the Paris Agreement. This was put into place in May of 2021. Luckily, the United States elected a President in November of 2020 that would take office in January of 2021. He took the climate crisis seriously and put forth the effort to decrease the damage we have created on the planet we inhabit. This accord was revised to project a plan that lowered the use of fossil fuels to .01% of the usage of before it was agreed upon. Without it, the Antarctic ice sheets were going to melt far sooner than anyone would have predicted.   The sea levels would have risen drastically and many states and even countries would have been swallowed whole by the seas. People’s homes, businesses, and the world’s overall way of life would change drastically. With the advanced technology that we have now, we can look back and see that we were so uncomfortably close to the verge of self-destruction with our nonenvironmentally friendly ways.

To allow those of a younger generation to understand just the slightest bit of what we were doing to the planet, I referenced the fire in California was named “The Camp Fire”. It was the most fatal and extreme wildfire the state ever had was in November of 2018. The climate change we were experiencing in this era was linked to warmer, dryer days and caused fires. November is actually supposed to be a rainy time for northern California. At the time, my husband lived about 20 minutes south of where they finally got the fire under control.

                                

 

Through lots of digging and research, I found some old pictures to show my grandkids of what they predicted North America would look like in 2040 if we didn’t change our environmental impacts. That was only 20 years from the time they created the image. They obviously know the cities and states that make up the US and which ones would have been completely wiped out. Also, the snow and ice towards the north pole are nonexistent in this illustration. The polar bears and penguins would have become extinct.

 

I can say, looking back 45 years now, I am so thankful we changed our ways and joined an accord that put the earth and the lives of our future families first. We finally got hard at work, starting in 2021, and created technology that allows us to leave the earth undisturbed. While mt generation might have not been able to do much for the first 20 years of life, we changed direction and it wasn’t too late. My grandchildren tell us all the time how thankful they are they get to experience Disney World in Orlando like I and their parents did. While Disney World is drastically different now, that is just one small example of something we wouldn’t have been able to pass down if the world kept going in the direction we were previously.