Year : 2023 A.D.

Co2 concentration in the atmosphere: 421 ppm

Remaining Planetary Green cover: 4.06 billion hectares

Hey there.!

This is your ancestor, from the era when single Horned Rhinoceros, big cats, and sparrows were still breathing, the era which saw the Amazon rainforest burning and polar icecaps melting, the era when Mumbai, Amsterdam, and Venice were not submerged.

There's no point in asking how you are because... we know.

We know that It's like an oven out there. The temperature may have breached the levels of the Paleo-Eocene Thermal Maximum. You might be sweltering with extreme heatwaves or probably inundated with frequent tsunamis, overflowing streams, and extreme downpours. You may be struggling to have even basic amenities for survival like breathable oxygen or potable water, because.. we polluted them. You might not have enough green cover. Are there any polar ice caps existing? I highly doubt it. Thanks to our selfishness.

You might be thinking how do I know all of this despite being decades or even centuries sternwards, but let me tell you that we are very good at making predictions; but when it comes to action, I think we failed you.!

You all might be blaming the havoc upon us. You might be thinking about us as the generation that ruined our planet or rather dreaming only if you were born early instead of us.

Honestly, we deserve it.

Because we have our time, we have our chances to save this planet.

But we are busy in our own insignificant clashes, over land, over sea, over political dominance, and some totally imprudent things like race, ethnicity, castes, etc. We are busy fighting over nation-states that may no longer matter in your world amidst grave disaster acting as a "great equalizer" which will spare none while slowly engulfing humanity. We are getting a slight glimpse of the horror here in the 21st century, making us realize that all our technological advances with philosophical Foundations are finite and disaster knows no boundaries.

Furthermore, we are failing to realize that the climate induced apocalypse are not some Hollywood fantasies, but they are slowly turning into reality. Villages in Fiji being lost under the sea, and many small villages of Bangladesh had to migrate to Dhaka slums as their livelihood submerged already. Our smart cities have distinct characteristics of being an Annual Atlantis for monsoon months. And we are simply dissociating them as an "act of god." We sadly are immature enough to accept that no other species since big bang, even as gigantic as dinosaurs or as numerous as bacteria or viruses, ever had an impact on planet, as severely and rapidly as we did. We are responsible for the rise of a whole new epoch, the Anthropocene. You must have gotten stockpiles of fossilized microplastic or plutonium particulate matter from our nuclear toys in your era, and our new epoch dawned here.

It all started with us, we too made vociferous claims to give ourselves a net-zero, Sustainable future and completely switch to Electrical locomotives, to preserve natural resources and to protect all existent life forms in our global forums. You may give us the credit of coining 'much used but less understood' fancy terms like sustainability, climate friendliness, and carbon neural future. But nothing significant concretized in reality!

Our forums are more of the blame game arenas where so-called developed nations are forcing Net Zero targets on developing countries while developing nations blaming them for being unjust and getting rid of their historical responsibilities. As long as the price of the climatic chaos is paid by the poor and vulnerable, by distant countries, or by future generations; the forces of realization and course of corrective actions will likely remain weak.

We know that we are being unfair to you, by not obeying the targets that we ourselves designed for the betterment of you, ..our future, but you know what is worse.?, we are now busy Greenwashing our claims, that we didn't even achieve. The Biggest polluter of plastic globally which produces nearly 120 billion throwaway plastic bottles a year throughout width & depth, is the biggest sponsor of our conference of Parties 27th meet, one of the primus environmental event that we have. Isn't it a sad joke?

The classic dilemma of our century is development versus environment, where we are constantly shifting our goalposts of conservation in order to accelerate developmental scorecards. We are thinking of them as two antagonistic terms without realizing that the sole pivot of this debate is flawed. We failed to understand that development, even skyrocketing to eternity, is nothing without the environment. It's not like we are not aware of the disaster we are heading towards. The researchers and intelligentsia had already warned the worst, but we also have some self-enlightened visionaries who think of them as fools. It's upon you now to decide who were the real fools.

But I'm not portraying that everything is dull and dreadful over here.

There are few ignited and aware individuals, organisations, researchers, and even some policymakers involved in diagnosis, if not the cure of fallacy that we caused. We are trying to move away from single-use plastic, trying to go organic, at least partially, in our farming techniques. We are trying to find more sustainable and renewable energy resources. If you see something worth preserving in your era, it's more or less because of them.

You have all the right to go ballistic upon us, We failed to understand that we haven't inherited this planet from our forefathers, but rather borrowed it from you, Our future generations. We ransacked everything like there is no tomorrow. We failed to take our responsibilities, so we shall not fail to take the blame now. There is a high probability that you might be on the verge of exploring a new planet or at least terraforming one. I just hope that you will not repeat similar mistakes that we made. Because now you are answerable to your future. Remember, the step you take might be the making or breaking point of our species. As nature has its own ways of balancing itself, even among the anthropogenic garbage patches in the Pacific, life finds a way, what matters is, where our species stands in that process.

Yours disgraceful,

An ancestor from the 21st century.

.    .    .