If you’re reading this, you’re probably no longer skeptical about the need for Humanity to change its ways hard and fast. I would dare to say that you are one from a rising tide of consciousness, for whom the depth and breadth of our impact on this Earth is starting to sink in. You feel that equally massive changes are required, right now, just so we don’t obliterate ourselves, along with a large proportion of the Biosphere.
Why are we not making any inroads in solving the triple whammy: the threat of annihilation via military means, the threat of cooking ourselves and the biosphere to death, and the threat that comes from having removed ourselves from the functioning ecosystem with which we need to re-connect and nurture if we want to ever claim to be truly sustainable?
Well, forget about the “Why”! Maybe our big brains have given us too many ways to justify the way of life and innovations which we now simply cannot possibly ever do without, despite having managed for 99% of our time on earth, even thrived. No matter how much science and rationality points out that we need to change hard and fast, there are now simply too many dark forces at play to have a “rational” approach to solving this. Also, we simply no longer have time to conjecture about the “Why?”. Wasted time plays in the hands of those dark forces, and ultimately against us all.
This fiction, “History of the World 2025-2200”, is about what the future of the world could be. Unveiled in the first volume “Rajesh”, and now freely available online under a Creative Commons License on www.free-ebooks.net, it is all about the “How”.
How do we really steer the ship back in the right direction? This fiction is not about a politician’s fantasy, the way we would intimately like it to happen, ie without too much trouble, and certainly not by going backwards in our way of life.
When a few hundreds of thousands individuals of one species could extinguish all the top order predators in Europe in the space of a few tens of thousands of years, when colonization of the Pacific then wiped out all mega fauna with a few centuries or thousands of years, when we then managed to wipe out billions of Passenger pigeons within a century or so in America, and when we are now erasing dozens of species every day that goes by and are threatening to erase ourselves, then we know that what is needed to change course is something absolutely monumentally stupendously big.
When it is being drummed into us through an increasingly censored media that we are poisoning ourselves and the biosphere, that there are simply way too many of us consuming way too much, to be sustainable, to even last much longer, yet there is no deviation from the Business as Usual model, jobs and growth… How is that possible? How could we have let ourselves get there without flinching, unless we are simply now in the hands of an autonomous monster that we have allowed to get out of our control?
So forget all notions of ecological transition, forget recycling, composting, using more public transport or tweaking the thermostat. Quickly forget green-washed technological solutions borne out of the deranged minds of self-proclaimed plutocratic semi-gods. We simply need to blast that beast we call “The Economy” into oblivion!
In the first volume of this fiction, “History of the World 2025-2200”, how we get back to the hope of a future for ourselves and what is left of a dying world is by beating to a pulp the economic monster that we have created and that has gone rogue. We jump on top of it, wring its neck and hold tight until it has coughed up its last cent of life.
Only then can we finally loosen our grip, reopen our eyes, look at the damage around us and think about how to do things properly this time around.
It has only been a mistake that has lasted a few thousand years, that will probably have octo-decimated the living world by the time we can finally steer this dominant humanity back on the right track, and it has indeed become very hot and muggy in the space of an eye blink. But it now means that we have a future, that the world has a future, the best it can be given the circumstances. Is it going to be a happy future? Is it going to be a miserable future? That is now a question of mindset, but also of community cohesion or divisiveness, irrespective now of wealth. A happy healthy mind also needs a healthy living body, there are also minor physical constraints like being able to breathe and having something to eat and drink.
This is what the first volume of this fiction is about, available free on www.free-ebooks.net. Just search by Author, I guarantee you there won’t be too many Eric Boglio there, and only one book at the moment. Okay, so in my fiction, advertising no longer exists. But we’re not there yet, are we? The Economy is still very much alive and bashing us in its angry throes, so I’m allowed a bit of advertising… And it’s not as if it’ll cost you anyway!
In this Volume, Rajesh, a bright young Indian slum-dweller, foils a plot by the mega-rich to create an economic revolution that would make them even richer, to the detriment of the rest of the world. This is when two wrongs make a right, when the solution to our addiction to growth is to get rid of not just growth, but to get rid of the World Economy itself. Of course, there is a scientific guiding hand to ensure the best outcome, and a UN regulatory guiding hand just to make sure the overnight transition from functioning world economy to all the money in the world evaporating goes as smoothly as it can for the next few decades at least.
This is the inflection point that was needed, the year is 2025 and the world is set on a new path.
The next volumes in this fiction series will then be about what is possible to do from that point onwards. We have all sat around a campfire, around a table, with friends and/or family, and thought about re-building the world. All of us have indulged in this exercise I’m sure, I hope so anyway.
Well how would you go about it if the base premise was that there was no longer a World Economy, and there was no possibility of it getting off the ground ever again, yet a helping hand was available if needed, as long as you stayed within some very basic but paramount parameters?
You can only grow so much food now, you have to leave some room for the rest of the natural world, and there is still a bit of cleaning up to do. Apart from that, let your imagination run wild, how would you go about it? I’ll have a crack at it, but we can all write our own Volume 2. As a hint, Volume 2 will start in the year 2200, when a pod containing a record of events from 2025 onwards washes up on a distant shore.
Who discovers it? Is he/she living peacefully? Is there actually anyone left to examine the strange object, or will the last of this bellicose naked ape have died long ago once there were no more throats to rip out and feast upon? Will the recordings be a revelation or have the people been able to keep track of events, to maintain History throughout this insignificant blip in time that still changed the world forever? How will History have unfolded in this year 2200??
Maybe there are other ways than the one I imagined, ones that nevertheless model the path through the chaos using unbiased and rigorous scientific checks. We need science to tell us what the limits are, but as long as we accept those restraints and follow logic, we are then only limited by the best tool we have: our imagination! Well please, tell the world if you have imagined plausible solutions, and tell it in less clumsy ways than mine maybe, maybe with fewer clichés and better lyrics, less naivety and childishness, but tell it! By all means, blast my delusions out with a better way, humble and indulge me and the world with your truly revolutionary ideas, we really need it.
In theory it’s all actually quite simple, once we accept the fact that there are too many of us consuming too much, the solution is to be less and consume less. How hard can that be? And if there is still time to do it without killing each other off and limiting the damage we’ve already caused, all the better isn’t it? Unfortunately the devil is in the detail, ie how do we get to that point in a voluntary manner?
Maybe out of the wild outpour of ideas that is sure to follow you reading this, one will catch on and save us? There has to be advantages to having seven Billion brains all consuming the equivalent of countless atom bombs every day, we can’t waste that energy, not now.
Eric Boglio : I am an anonymous middle class white male living in Australia. I trained as a biologist, worked in aquaculture in research and production.
