Message from the Future III

  I remember 2020 like it was yesterday.  The Covid-19 pandemic created an unprecedented experience for our generation. We were on the cusp of global disaster with storms like hurricane, Laura, or tropical storm, Marco, and fires spreading across western America happening all too often. It seemed like the world itself created the pandemic to put us in time out for the impacts we had made on our climate. 

The COVID-19 pandemic forced humanity to just sit back at home, alone, and to look at the world we had been destroying for years. It also brought back hope and beauty. We were working from home and would go out less which in turn taught us how humanity could live more efficiently and eco friendly. Italy even saw wild life like dolphins and fish fill the once human infested canals of Venice.  Do not get me wrong, staying home and watching the canals fill with wildlife and not going out did not fix our climate problem, but it did teach us what life could be like if humanity looked at climate change like how they looked at the pandemic. 

We were staring straight into the pandemic and saw hope to save our world, but that did not last.  Many countries feared what the pandemic could do to their economy so they allowed more dangerous industrial measures to be taken. For example, President Trump allowed companies to bypass environmental measures that had previously been taken when building infrastructure like highways or pipelines to regrow America’s economy towards the end of his time in office. 

America tried to fight back by electing a president who, at the bare minimum, believed the science of climate change, President Joe Biden. He had a plan to combat our effects on the climate that could have worked, but it was too late. The country was already so divided from the previous years that it did not matter we were facing a global threat worse than the COVID-19 pandemic. What mattered was right versus left and even if either side tried to present a plan to save our world it would never be accepted by its opposition. The only way to save ourselves was to work together, but it could have never happened at that time. 

Sarah Frostenson / Vox

It was not until the year 2052 when much of Florida was consumed by the ocean that we realized we needed to band together and fight the effects created by our ancestors. And we succeeded. We efficiently relocated the population that lost their homes to the waters. We finally started listening to the science and created more efficient forms of transportation, work, and energy.  We, Americans, realized that life is much better and easier to coexist if we helped each other against a common threat. Now, by 2060 we are still facing effects from climate change, but we are fighting together for each other and its my belief that nothing can stop us from surviving this global threat.