20. Wait, what?
I know what you did last summer
The first reaction upon hearing reports of troops from the billion people-strong nations of China and India engaged in a fatal skirmish in the mountains, two advanced nations deploying rocks, sticks, and earthworks in almost neolithic manner, is to wonder why 2020 seems quite so determined to tick off every prediction in the dystopian futurist’s playbook by the middle of the year. Yet even this incomprehensible flashpoint is but a minor detail in the broader scheme of things.
A month later, China and Japan are facing their worst floods in decades. Two months later, wildfires burn in California and Argentina, and then two months later again, there are unprecedented blazes in Brazil’s tropical wetlands. Two months after that, by September, the wildfires throughout North America’s west have reached continental scale, reaching up to Washington from California, leading to ‘end of days’ headlines. Flora is growing back over Australia’s scorched earth while this happens, but we are now only a few months away from entering bushfire season again. TikTok tiptoes into the metaphorical Berlin Wall for a new kind of Cold War. Or maybe Hong Kong is the new Berlin Wall? Or perhaps Taiwan is? Afghan opium farmers have installed their own version of the Green New Deal, increasing the world supply of heroin, whereas England is transitioning its green…
