The Earth in 50 Years

The Earth is standing still, never thought she would last this long.

We underestimated her although she's still struggling we may be making progress. The trees are starting to grow and the temperatures are cooling some, they say it's gone down two degrees in the last decade. That's better than none I suppose. We may just save the environment.

Heaven knows we didn't do enough to protect it. We let it be stripped of all its coal, gold, and well any other mineral you can think of. We even managed to cut down almost every tree she ever grew to meet our own selfish needs. Only when there was one left did we begin to think about what we were doing. Then the law was passed, no more trees cut until the rainforests re-grew fully. What did we think at that moment?

Saddened that the efforts had to be so extreme we now live with what we did. Water is rationed to all, and air conditioning is no longer allowed. We suffer in the heat, while the water we drink isn't even clean anymore. There are no more bottles of it sold. Plastics in any form are restricted now because they say we abused them, sent too many to landfills.

The next crew goes out next week, the recovering of the recyclables that ended up in the landfill is a job I'm glad I don't have. They're going to bring them here and see if they can manage to melt them down and make them new again. Dreading the trip back to Earth but it'll be nice to get out of this ship for a while. It's amazing that as many of us survived as we did. Now to hope that we managed to save the planet we failed to protect so that we can back and call it home once again.

Learn more about this author, L. Beall.
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