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  • What do you want me to say?

  • Or, more importantly, how do you want me to say it?

  • I could stand here and narrate my world to you

  • like it's the opening credits of a disaster movie.

  • This is the setup.

  • 2050, far enough in the future for all this to seem plausible.

  • Climate catastrophe reported as normality, the daily index

  • of maximum time allowed outside in Doha

  • or Austin or Manchester.

  • In all these places, it is over 50 degrees centigrade.

  • If you go outside for more than your allotted hour,

  • then you will die.

  • Some specific new tragedy.

  • Targeted bioweapon takes out Cape Town

  • as the statelets of a collapsed South Africa fight for water.

  • First use of live ammunition to keep the hordes out

  • on the Italian/Swiss border.

  • I could be a newsreader, if we still have those.

  • A citizen journalist, screaming into a phone

  • against the backdrop of burning old growth forest.

  • Ported into your optic nerve through a neural network,

  • a studio improvised in a spare bedroom

  • to half a billion subscribers.

  • But not anything we'd recognise as TV news, or newspapers,

  • obviously.

  • Whatever a newspaper looks like then,

  • we're probably imagining it wrong.

  • Whatever happens, whatever lies look like,

  • whatever truth becomes, it probably won't look like this.

  • This isn't really the future.

  • This is an idea of the future that by the time

  • you're watching it is in the past anyway.

  • This is what the future looked like in our heads in 2019.

  • I'm just here saying, how do you want me to talk to us?

  • Should we talk about dystopia, maybe?

  • But dystopia is weird, isn't it?

  • It feels now like we might have made a mistake about it.

  • Depending on which version of this future world

  • I'm in right now, of course.

  • I mean, maybe we scared ourselves a bit too much.

  • All that footage of rising oceans,

  • and rioting in the cities, and the streets

  • of London underwater, and one filthy

  • polar bear that was all ribs, and hunger, and sadness.

  • All those water wars, desiccated dead

  • piled in the uninhabitable streets, and the rise of idiots

  • feeding on fear with simplistic solutions.

  • A lot of that happened.

  • Or from where you're watching this, a lot of that

  • is going to happen.

  • The processes are in motion.

  • Dengue fever's gearing up for a world tour.

  • Extreme heat's eyeing up more people

  • than just the old or young or sick.

  • People are dying of this stuff right now.

  • But if that's what we tell ourselves,

  • we internalise the end, the idea of it.

  • We lie down in the face of it because it's just too big,

  • and then that is the end.

  • Because we'll put our trust, our need to be saved from all that,

  • in things we can't see yet.

  • We'll take the chance of an off-moment of inspiration

  • over the provable reality.

  • It's just the way we're built.

  • The big discoveries of self-regenerating bodies,

  • and fusion power, and everything quiet, and humming,

  • and electric.

  • Bringing the global temperature down

  • with sulphates or electric cars or some method of clean energy

  • we haven't even thought of yet.

  • Our ability to pull salvation out

  • of the apocalypse hat at the last minute, to carbon

  • capture our way out of this.

  • The idea there's a sole solution that

  • will save us through the power of eureka is seductive.

  • And we're trying all these things.

  • We are.

  • But whatever arrives, if it does,

  • it can't reach back through time to now.

  • We've never really worked out how to talk about this.

  • We probably should have.

  • I mean, it's not as if we didn't know.

  • Even if some of us took comfort in the voices

  • that only told us what we wanted to hear.

  • And then we spent a long time trying to blind ourselves

  • with science, and we're sorry.

  • That didn't necessarily work.

  • Graphs.

  • Graphs, red lines, colours, and concentrations,

  • parts per million, and rises of degrees, and millimetres.

  • And we look around ourselves and think, don't we?

  • These numbers are too small or too large or meaningless.

  • What does 2 degrees mean on a cold day?

  • And what does it mean decades from now?

  • Which of them is easier to feel in our bones

  • and then get on with our lives?

  • If we could have sung scientific facts like pop songs,

  • we'd have got to the chorus sooner, but we didn't.

  • It's not that we could have stopped

  • these things from happening.

  • But we'd have been better prepared to face them

  • in a way that didn't kill so many of us.

  • Maybe we screwed ourselves up with too much

  • speculative fiction.

  • I could be standing at the edge of the sea

  • telling you the future looks like this,

  • that most of the streets you grew up in

  • are behind me in the waves.

  • List the countries that are gone,

  • and the parts of countries, because they're underwater

  • or you just can't go outside in them,

  • where the local biospheres collapsed,

  • show you the normal life that plays out

  • against that backdrop.

  • A kind of warmer, more beige version of now

  • with potholes and soldiers on the streets everywhere,

  • rather than just the poor places.

  • And only three types of toothpaste.

  • Thing is, when you make the argument about lifestyle

  • degrading, you either don't want to believe it

  • because you think you're immune, or you don't care,

  • because you're already living it.

  • But the one thing nobody told us was that everything

  • was going to be all right.

  • Nobody serious, anyway.

  • And if that's what you heard, it wasn't what we were saying.

  • We never found the way to make ourselves do enough,

  • fast enough.

  • I mean, some of us, yes.

  • But doing enough consistently, talking

  • in a way that made this possible to grasp

  • in the quiet parts of life in the times between the times

  • that we all march, no.

  • We needed to make this as everyday as bath time.

  • As graspable as pre-packed sandwiches or your loved

  • one's hand.

  • And we didn't.

  • Every time we tried to make the defining statement,

  • we thought, maybe this is the one.

  • Maybe this is the one that gets through.

  • We didn't need data or heroes.

  • We didn't even need voices pretending

  • to be from the future.

  • We're in the same place.

  • It's not about our children or our grandchildren anymore.

  • The future has come to meet us.

  • Most of the people watching this will be there when it happens.

  • We needed to understand, quietly,

  • every day, that this is the future--

  • now.

  • Every single second.

  • We're not waiting for the future.

  • We're not trying to fend it off.

  • We're living in it.

  • It is now.

  • And it is us.

What do you want me to say?

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