If there will be such a thing as 100 years from today, try imagining what historians will be saying about how we lived in 2024. What did and didn’t we do about climate change when the need for immediate and drastic action was apparent?

They might just think we didn’t fully understand radiative equilibrium, that’s why we kept on burning fossil fuels. Will trying to explain our current political interactions sound like a Hatfields and McCoys slumber party? Hopefully we’ll have figured out that there are no winners in the kind of destructive conflicts we are seeing around the world today.

Maybe the big story will be the 50 year concrete shortage due to all the buildings needing complete reconstruction.

Maybe genocide will no longer be a term heard daily on major news channels. By 2124 we will surely have had universal healthcare for at least 90 years so trying to describe our current for-profit system may be difficult. It’s easy to imagine a person saying “What? They let people die, or go bankrupt, when they just needed medicine?” How will future historians describe our criminal justice system, or will they even call it a justice system? How will our current primary and secondary education systems be referred to: as schools, or mandatory cultural indoctrination centers? Historians may want to avoid describing the Standard American Diet (SAD) for fear of being accused of slander. Who would believe we were eating ourselves to death by the millions. and so few of us understood that animals were not just products, but individuals, with complex emotional lives?

V. Michael “Jens” Hoover

Port Townsend