Letter from the Editors: A Dream of Things to Come
Christopher Bernard
I am wandering, thirsty and exhausted, through a dead forest. I have not slept in days. The tall oaks, sumacs, hickories are leafless, the bark skinned from the trunks, the leaves covering the ground in piles like shorn hair. No brush, flowers, grass, weeds grow in the dry rocky soil. No sounds, except my breathing and footfalls. The sun directly above, like a drone. A sky without clouds, endless and claustrophobic. I tell myself it is winter. But the sweat is running down my back; the shirt sticks to my skin. It must be summer, it must be spring, it must be fall. But where are the insects? Where are the birds?
I keep walking, looking for a way out of the wood. Just past a pine, its needles a heap of colorless husks at the base of what looks like an enormous bottle washer pruned to a cone, the ground drops away, and a vast city stretches – a carefully designed hatchboard of streets, buildings, patches of parks and open squares, a stadium, an expressway – to a distant palisade of high rises, a Gothic spire, a classical dome, a lone pencil tower, gleaming in the sun, and I grab a limb of the pine just before falling to the streets hundreds of feet below. A rush of euphoria runs
through my blood. “Saved, not lost after all,” someone says (but no one else is there). All I have to do is get down there! And I look eagerly for a secure descent.
But there is something strange about the city. From it rises no sound: no traffic hum, car horns, sirens. The streets seem empty. Nothing flies above them: no planes, no birds. No flags waving, careless and free. No sign of any movement, of any life. Then I notice an odd light coming from the streets, sparkling in the sun. The city is entirely under water.
I turn back into the forest and, despite my exhaustion, try to run through the dead trees. I’m panicking, though I’m not sure why. Some terrible natural disaster has happened, but there must be a way out, to some safety somewhere. Of course there must be, I just need to find it. And so I run. Despite an overwhelming sense of weakness, powered by fear I run.
Until I suddenly find myself at the edge of a road. The landscape has changed: I am in a desert at the edge of an ocean, the waves monotonously crashing, my chest heaving. The road goes on in both directions along the beach straight as a ruler of white cement to an empty horizon. On the road are endless lines of abandoned vehicles – many gutted, all rusty, battered so much I can’t tell the makes of most of them. They look like a vast car dump strung out for miles, an ancient abandoned caravan or an enormous traffic jam from decades ago that finally locked, ineluctably, in place. I go up to the nearest car – a make I recognize under the corroded wreck it is now: a sky-blue Plymouth from the fifties, with lazy-eyed double headlights, a modest face, a protective interior; so much like the one we rode in, so many years ago, for long family outings between the farmland and the sea – and I look inside through windows long smashed . . .
And wake drenched in sweat, my heart pounding, and crying uncontrollably. I wake up before realizing what I saw inside the car.
But I know what I saw.
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The respected zoologist and environmentalist, Dr. David Suzuki, has stated that, if the average global temperature rises four degrees Celsius or higher, the human race will become extinct. The
recent report from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change stated that we are well on our way to a two-degree rise by the middle of this century if we do not take drastic action within the next eleven years. Dr. Suzuki also stated that many climatologists believe we have a 10 percent chance of reaching a four-degree rise by 2100; we have only a five percent chance of keeping the rise to two degrees or below.
As Greta Thunberg stated to corporate and government leaders meeting at Davos this winter: “I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic.”
―Christopher Bernard
Interview with Dr. David Suzuki, “Why it’s time to think about human extinction”
Christopher Bernard is the co-editor of Caveat Lector. His novel Voyage to a Phantom City appeared last year. His newest book—the poetry collection Chien Lunatique—is available on Amazon.
Image: Greta Thunberg (Photograph by Anders Hellberg)