My Worst Nightmare.
My worst nightmare is that we go on as we are. Our numbers steadily increase. Our life expectancy increases. We take more and more of the resources, room, and fertile land. We fill the air, land and sea with our waste. We chop down the forests, pollute the seas, and poison the atmosphere.
We end up with a world that is only full of human beings and the life we tolerate: our pets, gardens and benign wildlife.
There will be no room on our planet for wilderness, wild creatures and anything we term dangerous or a pest. Our rhinos will have all gone to superstitious Chinese medicine. Our elephants will only exist as ivory trinkets. Our dolphins, whales and porpoises will have been cruelly slaughtered for cat food. Our nearest relatives – the primates will have been hunted to extinction for bush-meat.
In my nightmare the forests are all gone. The seas are fished out pools of acidic stagnancy. There are no insects to pollinate the crops. There are no crops or livestock because mycoprotein is cheaper to produce on an industrial scale in humungous vats in factories. People are packed in to their allotted domiciles and the ecosystem is manufactured.
My Best Outcome
We limit our numbers and give half of the planet over to wilderness. We make room for the wild things and protect all the endangered species from becoming extinct. We educate the population not to resort to superstitious quackery, poaching or hunting. We maintain our forests and oceans, reduce our pollution through advanced technology, and conserve our resources.
Surely that cannot be too difficult for an intelligent species? Can it?
The most likely scenario
We continue blindly down the same path of unlimited growth and expansion. We make periodic limited gestures to deal with the various crises that are the direct result of our actions. We build flood barriers to deal with rising sea levels; we develop new farming techniques to produce more food; we introduce industrial food production from waste, we introduce cleaner energy supply; we put in limited conservation programmes and we deal with the wars and conflicts that result from the battle for diminishing resources.
It is an inadequate rearguard action that will have little real effect.
More forest is destroyed, more pollution is produced, the seas become over-fished, the species extinction is rapid, the population continues to expand and we head for the full-blooded nightmare.
A mutated virus (possibly a result of either pollutants or hunters butchering animals previously isolated in inaccessible regions of jungle) creates a global pandemic that totally wipes out human beings.
The Anthropocene concludes.
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