LIFE EXTINCTION
I started thinking about life extinction yesterday. I’m not talking about my occasional fits of depression when I reflect on the pointlessness of my existence and its inevitable end. No, I’m referring to something much more serious than my own insignificant life. I’m talking about the end of life itself: life extinction, the obliteration of every living creature on the planet we all inhabit.
I don’t often think about nature. I’m a city dweller, so the natural environment seems very distant to me. I’m surrounded every day by tall buildings, congested streets, 
thousands of cars, buses and trains, bright artificial lights, a multitude of electronic devices and the relentless drone of aircraft coming in to land nearby – not a tree, not a field, not a lake, not a river, not an animal in sight – just a concrete techno-industrial city pursuing its own relentless path to destruction. Nature has not just been ignored and neglected in Globopolis. It has been wilfully destroyed and systematically obliterated.
That’s why I was so shocked when by chance I picked up a message on the Lightning Link from the last survivor of Terranona, a planet located somewhere in the Faraway Galaxy. The gaunt expression of the man’s face on the screen will remain with me till the day I die. It was a mixture of despair and disbelief. `How could it have come to this?’ he kept saying. `How was it possible that we allowed this to happen? Despite all the warnings, despite all the scientific evidence, nobody listened. There were always a million plausible and specious arguments not to listen…’
He bitterly explained that he was Ultimox, the last remaining member of the race of Terranonans. Following a series of tsunamis and earthquakes, he’d taken refuge with his family on the high ground in the Traxian mountains in a last-ditch attempt to escape from the rising sea levels all around them – but to no avail. Most of his family had drowned as they had tried to escape. The remainder had died of starvation, disease and rising temperatures exacerbated by the dramatic release of billowing clouds of methane gas from beneath the melting ice caps. Only Ultimox remained to lament the loss of his entire species.
`If anyone’s out there listening to this, don’t be fooled by politicians telling you that the science is false, that there isn’t a problem, that we can survive any amount of destruction we might choose to inflict on our natural environment. Those are just the catchwords and sophisms of people and organisations with vested interests. All they care about is their profit margin.’
Those were the last words that Ultimox uttered. The screen went blank and the transmission was lost. It was the end of life on Terranona. It was life extinction.
That’s what had set me thinking. I felt desperately saddened by the fate of Ultimox and his family because it could have been avoided with more thought, imagination and determination from governments, leaders and citizens at large. Yet, on reflection, it seemed to me that the issue had been analysed back to front. This was not the end of the planet Terranona. Terranona would continue to exist but in a different inorganic state. The planet remained. It had not been blown to smithereens by a passing meteor shower. What had disappeared on the other hand were the inhabitants. They had killed themselves off through their own stupidity.
By failing to control their unbridled appetite to pillage natural resources in a frenzy of material development, they had broken the pact between the planet and its inhabitants. As night follows day, they brought down upon themselves the retribution of wildfires, storms, floods, droughts, heatwaves, deforestation, contagion and disease. It was a reckoning of biblical proportions wreaked through the agency of climate change. After the crime comes the punishment.
This whole episode has had a dramatic impact on me. I have realised that this is the burning issue of our time and that it is not being addressed by the Anticlock authorities. It is barely in their consciousness. I vowed to do everything I could to avert the destruction of the planet. But what would my puny individual contribution amount to? What possible impact could I have in the grand scheme of things? It needs governments to act collectively to avert ecological disaster. My experience of Anticlockwise leads me to the inevitable conclusion that this will not happen.
The future looks bleak. I feel as if I am staring life extinction in the face.
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