SEPTEMBER 4, 2021 – When Ida unleashed her fury on the Northeast earlier in the week (after wreaking havoc over Louisiana), in just one hour over three inches of rain fell in New York City’s Central Park. This was a record. What I found most disturbing about this is that the record it broke had been set only two weeks before.
In typing the date of this post—September 4, 2021—I accidentally hit the three instead of the two, and thus produced (initially) a date 1,010 years in the future. This got me thinking. How will our glorious planet, not to mention the life it sustains, appear in a millennium?
At the rate we’re going, the Eastern Seaboard will be inundated long before the end of the next 1,000 years. Dare I say 100? When I saw videos of water cascading into New York City subway stations, I wondered—how much of The City will be uninhabitable within 10 or 20 years? I’m guessing people in the chain of operational command of the MTA wonder similarly. Will the staggering cost of upgrading infrastructure to withstand what lies ahead lead eventually to wholesale abandonment? Will the frequency and ferocity of storms, coupled with a diminished embrace of the common good, lead coastal populations to leave their homes and scurry to higher ground?
What about the millions of people with the opposite problem, for whom water no longer flows from the tap? Will agriculture in the American Southwest no longer be feasible? What will inhabitants who rely on the Colorado River do? Will they too migrate in droves—from the West and its scorching heat, interminable droughts, and widespread fires? Or duke it out on-site? Will oil pipeline wars be displaced by water pipeline wars—Great Lake states vs. the West?
Will the regular, extreme weather events we’ve seen this summer heighten conflict over water and food production and the flow of eco-refugees world-wide?
Will the world population decline and revert to defensive provincialism?
Centuries from now will scuba-divers find a fallen Liberty looking up through the seawater and bearing a countenance not of hope and determination but of eternal sadness?
As the abandoned skyscrapers of Manhattan splash into the sea will anyone be around to witness the final decline and fall of a once great nation?
What will future generations have to say about us and our reckless disregard for facts and evidence of what we were doing to the earth? How harshly will they judge our arrogance and our ignorance? And what will future anthropologists—if there’s even a place for such in a much down-sized world—make of us? What will they think of our priorities, our failure to put basic survival ahead of our other base instincts?
It’s not as though we’ve lacked the science or the soothsayers, but as our future descendants might or might not learn about us is that we also didn’t lack liars, deniers, resisters, and most disastrous, a complex of consumption too great to dismantle in time.
Or . . . am I simply all wet?
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© 2021 by Eric Nilsson
