I'm going to offend a lot of sensibilities, and maybe cause a few people to pause for thought, by suggesting everyone should read "A Friend of the Earth" by noted humorist, very black humorist, T. Coraghessan Boyle, available from Viking. This novel details living conditions in the year 2025 along the "highest probability curve" as currently predicted. The characters in the story are environmental radicals from the turn of the millennium, who "fought the good fight, and lost". Readers gradually come to realize that the motives and understanding of all of us, radical environmentalist or DAR republican, currently living, are so convoluted and blinded by short term self interest that we wouldn't recognize Armageddon if it were held tomorrow. And Armageddon, when described by such an illustrious author, is way worse than we suppose.
I'm not referring to the deaths of tens of millions from civil unrest and climate change in impoverished countries at sea level, because that happens early on, is happening, and nobody among the privileged of North America really gives a damn. These places are depopulated by 2025. I'm talking about irritating shortages, lousy weather, plumbing that won't work from endless rain and rising water, food that won't grow, and transportation that breaks down when the energy runs out. The West Coast is sinking into rising muddy water, very slowly, and the Midwest is a dust bowl of baking heat and desert climate. This all comes true as predicted, by 2025, and the baby boomers, who continue in control because of more effective geriatric drugs and a drastically lower birth rate, are still around to howl that the government doesn't do enough.
I'm going to share a quote about food options. This passage comes after we learn the only fish remaining after the oceans died are tilapia, crappie, carp and catfish - all pond raised. The favorite sushi is a crappy roll, which I presume is a double entendre. "...the kind of gut you used to see a lot more of around the turn of the century, when junk food was a staple. Now people crave meat and fish and broccoli, sweet potatoes, chard, wheat germ, the things they can't get the way they used to, and forget the Ho-Ho's and Pop Tarts and Doritos Extra-Spicy Meat-Flavored Tortilla Chips - that crap they can't give away."
You see, it turns out they can make that stuff from recycled chemicals, yeast raised in tanks, or any food that happens along. So the shelves remain well stocked, even in famine. And the things that require sunshine (or rain) or other moderate weather, and then have to be transported, are what "only computer scientists and rock stars can afford".
The thing I most admire about this book is that the author, as all good satirists do, defends all points of view. Even as the loggers beat up the protesters, while the police stand idly by, you get an explanation of points of view. These are so rationally revealed that they leave no doubt that the future is sealed, and it's way too late to change anything. The protesters march in vain, the politicians argue and blame in vain, and the rural laborers of the California north woods protect their vanishing jobs in vain. The end, science tells us, is inevitable.
This book is doubly gloomy because it not only has a convincing ring of truth, as though the author has actually been to the future and is reporting back, but because it leaves no way out. Few of the characters in a Boyle novel do more than float with the stream, perhaps because the author really doesn't see much hope in struggle. But is this masochistic view so really far off the mark? I read yesterday that the North Polar Cap has it's thinnest ice cover in six thousand years. If the trend continues, the pole will be ice free in five years. This revised the estimates of global warming again, and now it appears we passed some sort of threshold where the process feeds on itself and accelerates. The most annoying thing about science fiction is that it has tended to anticipate science fact. Better check on your umbrella and find the galoshes.
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