Tomorrow’s World (10 page)

“Perhaps it's human nature to never be satisfied with what you have. Over the ages this desire for more was a great asset. It drove men to the ends of the earth, firing their imaginations and fuelling their ingenuity, leading them to risk their lives and make great discoveries in the process.

“But, by the end of the twentieth century, people had developed the technology to actually satisfy an unhealthy amount of their desires. You could say they'd gained a great deal of knowledge without acquiring the wisdom or self-restraint that would have made it a blessing rather than a curse. Completely failing to recognize that there's a balance between living standards and quality of life, they single-mindedly strove to improve the former without due thought for the latter.

“Nothing illustrates the folly of this time better than attitudes toward the motor car. It became commonplace for households in the developed world to have two or three—”

The screen filled with an aerial view of a city grid-locked by eight lanes of nose-to-tail traffic, accompanied by a soundtrack of bad-tempered horn-honking.

“And when traffic became unmanageable the ‘solution' adopted was the worst one possible—the building of more roads.

“As with cars, so with other things. Each household had two or three television sets, three or four computers. Technology made consumer goods obsolete within months rather than years, and everyone wanted the latest model, the next big thing.

“And, thanks to the onset of the information age and the power of advertising, people in the underdeveloped world became increasingly aware of what those in the west had, and wanted such things for themselves.”

Her point was made by shots of a hillside favela where every second shanty had a satellite TV dish.

“These growing expectations effectively had a multiplier effect on the environmental footprint left by a global population which was doubling in less than a lifetime, with over a million more mouths to feed every week.

“The inevitable result was the rapid depletion of resources far beyond Earth's ability to replenish them—” An aerial view of an isolated patch of rainforest in a windblown plain of dust flashed across the screen.

“And the pollution of the planet beyond its ability to recover—” A lake filled with scummy water and dead fish made further words unnecessary.

“Mankind was living on borrowed time, lulled into a false sense of security by Earth's amazing resilience and our own extraordinary selfishness and short-sighted—”

“Their
extraordinary selfishness and short-sightedness,” one of the students said.

Annie MacDougall paused and looked in the direction of the bored, know-it-all voice.

I didn't have to do likewise to know the speaker was a Number.

“You said ‘lulled into a false sense of security by
our
own selfishness and short-sightedness',” the student said, as if he was the teacher. “You should have said
their.”

Annie was either very good-natured or simply resigned to dealing with obnoxious smart-asses, because she managed to keep her cool. “You have a point,” she conceded. “However, if I'd said
their,
someone could have told me that I should have said
our.
Perhaps I should have said simply ‘lulled into a false sense of security by selfishness and shortsightedness'.”

“It's more accurate and concise,” the student said snottily.

I'd had enough and was about to turn around and tell the know-it-all to shut up, but Paula covered my mouth with her hand before I could get the words out.

For a moment Annie MacDougall looked like she was going to rebuke the smartass student, but she thought better of it and clicked the tiny audio-visual controller in her good hand to bring up the next image. It showed a city being lashed by a hurricane. Trees were uprooted, roofs ripped off buildings, and cars floated down streets that had been turned into waterways by torrential rain. “There were warning signs that we were doing irreparable damage to—” Annie stopped to correct herself—”that irreparable damage was being done to the planet. But those warnings were initially dismissed as aberrations or arbitrary acts of God.

“As the warning signs increased in frequency and intensity, so they became harder to dismiss. However, efforts to tackle the global warming that lay behind these catastrophes were completely ineffective.”

“Really?” another of those arrogant voices said sarcastically.

“Perhaps you'd like to tell us why they were ineffective,” Annie MacDougall said.

When her offer wasn't taken up, she said, “Then maybe you'll show enough manners to keep quiet while
I tell you.”
A click of the AV controller filled the wallscreen with a picture of a wind farm. “The early efforts to counteract global warming took the form of mainly token gestures in the developed world, where countries struggled merely to reduce the
increase
in harmful greenhouse gas emissions.

“Meanwhile there were vast increases in such emissions from the developing world, especially China and India.

“Remedial action was hindered by the impossibility of producing a definitive model to predict the threat being faced; global warming is a complex function of an almost infinite amount of interlinked variables, each of them responding with different sensitivity, and each affecting all the others. As a result, the early models ranged from the idea that big increases in greenhouses gases had a small effect as the Earth would find ways to compensate, to the notion of an unknown threshold—a point beyond which drastic changes would take place. People tended to believe the former as it was what they wanted to believe, and because the latter prospect was so frightening.

“Policy-makers and populations at large either regarded the people who issued warnings as scaremongers, or thought the problems belonged to the far distant future. Researchers who said a point of no return was being reached were dismissed as cranks and lunatics. People preferred to listen to the mouthpieces of vested interests who said things they wanted to hear, rather than heed warnings that the end was nigh unless they accepted major lifestyle changes.

“In the end, something had to give: Earth or Man. Since people were too selfish and short-sighted to limit their lifestyles, it was the Earth that gave. A tipping point was reached, a point of no return. Can anyone tell me what provided the final push?”

Looking around, I had no difficulty picking out Names from Numbers despite the dim lighting: the Names either sank down in their seats, trying to make themselves as inconspicuous as possible because they were shy or didn't know the answer, or else they had their hands raised as high as they'd go and waved them about, eager to impress and hungry for a word of praise in a world where they were constantly made to feel slow and dumb and second-best.

Before Annie MacDougall could pick out a pupil, the know-it-all who'd corrected her earlier said, “The Hydrocarbon Holocaust.”

It had to be a Pareto. I turned around to see if I was right. Sure enough, I found myself looking at a younger version of the smug face that had sneered at me as I got off the exercise bike in the gym the night before. A few desks away was another face just like it, displaying an identical sneer. I don't know if it's my imagination, but there seem to be more Paretos than there used to be. My heart went out to Annie MacDougall—two in one class.

When I turned back to Annie, she was nodding. “Can anyone explain how the Hydrocarbon Holocaust came about?” This time, before either of the Paretos could answer, she looked at a small boy in the front row who'd been begging to answer the previous question, and said, “Frankie, would you like to try?”

He nodded. Although I was looking at the back of his head I could picture his face. It would be a mask of concentration. The silence stretched out long enough to become awkward, and then embarrassing. It was filled by a snigger. I imagined the boy's face turning bright red. Finally he said, “It was the bomb in the beefburger place and the Americans getting mad at the Muslims and the Muslims getting their own back and…” the words dried up.

More sniggers, then one of the Paretos piped up: “What he's trying to say is that tensions between Christians and Muslims over the treatment of the Palestinians and the terrorism it spawned were worsened by the policies of a US government which was increasingly a puppet for multinational companies who manipulated it for their own ends, principally to meet their growing demand for increasingly scarce resources, especially oil.”

I shook my head in disbelief. The Pareto was no more than fourteen years old, and yet talked like an adult. And history is their
weakest
subject.

He wasn't finished yet. “United by a sense of injustice and double standards, a Muslim Coalition was formed. The first thing it did was increase oil prices. This caused great hardship in the developed countries, especially the US, and ratcheted up racial and religious tensions even further.”

“Thank you, Paul, or is it Mark?” the teacher said sweetly.

Someone sniggered. It was me. I was sniggering because I knew Annie was having a dig at the Pareto's lack of individuality. Although I'd laughed, it wasn't really all that funny. I'd seen enough of Annie MacDougall to know that, like her father, she was as good as people get—yet even she'd been driven to launch an attack across the genetic divide.

“I'll take it from here, because I've got some more pictures to show you,” she said. With her good hand she clicked the audio-visual control, and the wall behind her became a city of skyscrapers seen from ground level. All the shop windows were blown out, and a cloud of smoke hung heavily just above the debris-strewn street. People emerged coughing and choking from the dust, their clothes torn and bloodstained. Some held handkerchiefs to their mouths, many looked like they didn't know where they were. A few people, mostly wearing fire and police and paramedic uniforms, rushed toward the cloud to help those who came staggering out of it, but they had to fight their way through panicked crowds pouring from the surrounding buildings. The classroom around me was filled with the screams of pain, fear and panic of long-dead people, and the wailing of a hundred sirens. I'd seen the footage many times before but it hadn't lost its power to shock me, and I found myself caught up in the heroism and sheer terror of the events portrayed. I stole a glance at Paula. She only looked mildly interested, as if she was watching an old Hollywood movie rather than a turning point in history.

Annie MacDougall froze the image. The dust cloud appeared to billow out of the wall. A mother carrying a baby was emerging from its midst. She'd tripped over a briefcase dropped by some fleeing businessman. She was about to fall, and her face was frozen in helplessness and horror.

Annie stared at that face. I saw how much she was moved by the mother's plight, and heard it in her voice when she said, “Things came to a head with the dirty bomb attack in a fast-food restaurant in Lower Manhattan. The blast was blamed on Muslim fundamentalists, but one theory is that the bomb was planted by the government to provide an excuse for what was to follow. It's unlikely the truth will ever be known, and it's academic, anyway. What matters is the incident led to the Third Gulf War.”

Now the screen was filled with a succession of striking images:

A squadron of bat-like stealth bombers streaking across a dusky sky.

Fireballs erupting in a city of minarets.

A desert highway littered with burnt-out tanks.

“Intent on tackling terrorism and securing oil supplies, the west invaded much of the Middle East,” Annie said. “It created the secular United States of Arabia puppet regime, outraging Muslim fundamentalists. Unable to match the military might of what they saw as corrupt infidel invaders, the fundamentalists struck back by targeting oil production at all stages—”

The screen showed thick clouds of smoke belching into the air from a hundred burning oil wells; then a massive oil tanker, its back broken, sinking below the surface of an ocean darkened by a spreading slick.

“Weren't the fundamentalists spiting themselves by doing that?” The question, in a naïve voice, came from a young Name to my left.

Annie MacDougall turned from the screen to the teenager and said, “Indeed they were, but they reasoned—and I use the term loosely—that if they couldn't benefit from the oil, they could at least deny it to their sworn enemy and burden them with the crippling costs of cleaning up the mess.

“Of course the mess wasn't so easily cleaned up, and the resulting environmental catastrophe came to be known as the Hydrocarbon Holocaust.”

There were more images of burning oil fields and dense black smoke blotting out the sun.

“In a way the entire planet came to resemble a battlefield, as if a no-holds-barred war was being waged against Mother Nature. While that wasn't the intention, it was the result—the catastrophic ‘collateral damage' that comes from overdevelopment, strident nationalism and religious strife. The planet was under attack from all sides: from the Hydrocarbon Holocaust in the Middle East to the smogs of the great conurbations of the west; from a holed ozone layer to melting polar ice caps; from oceans overfished to the point of extinction, to rainforests being slashed and burned beyond regeneration. Pollution increased at the same time as the ability of the planet to cope with it was diminishing and, as a consequence, the problems worsened exponentially. The so-called tipping point had been reached.”

“What exactly does that mean?” Frankie asked.

The question was greeted by sniggering from the Numbers, which made me wonder how many questions went unasked for fear of ridicule. A lot of people favored segregation in classes, but I hadn't been one of them. Now I was having second thoughts.

Annie MacDougall ignored the sniggering. No doubt she'd had plenty practice, even before becoming a teacher. “Imagine you have something balanced on your outstretched finger,” she said. “A food bar, say. If you give it a gentle push it'll rock up and down but return to its resting point. If you push it too far, however, it'll fall right off your finger.”