The Beginning

 

This is how it will begin.

Hello, world

A single flower forcing its way through the cracking concrete of an empty building.

The building had been a busy place, full of human life. There is still lots of life - bacteria, moulds, lichens, ants and now, plants. But it is silent life, a truly silent spring. The noise of humanity has gone and the earth can get back to its buzzing, humming and rustling. Peace on earth, at last.

This is the extinction of Extinction Rebellion. The time, possibly not far from now, when humans burn their way through the earth. Gaia reasserts herself and forces a new order on the planet, one without the carbonized remains of humanity. It's an outrageous idea, but one that is getting easier to imagine. A time when our failure to stop the burning releases just enough carbon dioxide into the atmosphere to tip the balance of a major ecosystem. The Arctic melts and the North Atlantic Current breaks down. Or Bangladesh floods as Southern Europe becomes a desert. It does not take much.

The rich will save themselves from the initial shock by moving away from the burn. But justice will prevail and a democratic virus, or a bloody resource war, will wipe them out too.

And then the flowers will spout through the concrete deserts that we have built, and, over time that is no longer recorded and thus is not time, the natural world will eradicate all of our remains. Just a few nuclear dumps – the rotting hulks of the submarines at Faslane - will continue to glow out the message that once, a slightly intelligent ape lived here. Slightly intelligent, but not clever enough.