from The Ecologist, July 2000
It was when he looked up, halfway across the slope, that it first hit him. An icy blast of wind from the Arctic swirled down the hillside and froze the skin on his face. He grimaced, hunched his shoulders, and trudged on.
Leo had been planning this walk for weeks, and was not about to let a cold breeze put him off. Besides, a bitter wind chill factor was not exactly a surprise in Scottish summers these days. At least, not since the Gulf Stream stopped washing the shores of northern Europe with the warm waters of the Caribbean thirteen years ago.
Leo remembered that year. He was just finishing school and was thinking of studying to be a climate scientist. The first sign was the crocuses that never seemed to bloom, followed by the 24-hour snow storm at the beginning of the summer term. Then the web announcement by some sombre government minister that the melting of the ice at the North Pole had disrupted the complex system of currents that drove the Gulf Stream.
From his studies, Leo later discovered that just such a change had been predicted by a few oceanographers in the late 1990s. They had suggested a drop in the average temperature in northern Europe of about five degrees as a result. According to his hand-held computer assistant, it was only just above freezing now. 'Global warming' they used to call it, he smiled to himself.
As Leo climbed the mountain, he cast his mind back. The dissipation of the Gulf Stream was only one of a series of environmental catastrophes forecast by scientists which still seemed to have taken the world by surprise. The ferocity of 'Hurricane Hilary' in 2006 had frightened the whole eastern seaboard of the United States. The unprecedented floods in northern India during 2010, helped by deforestation, had prompted mass migrations. This had sparked a new conflict between India and Pakistan which led to the nuclear explosions in Kashmir and their terrible aftermath.
Then there had been the devastating famines of 2015 and 2016 which had wiped out millions in East Africa. They had been blamed on soil erosion, prolonged droughts and the failure of 'sorg10' - the genetically engineered crop that the multinational seed companies had promised would feed the world. A fast-adapting new disease had found a way past all the implanted resistance genes.
In South America there had been the genetically modified virus scare. The virus was thought to have escaped from an old potato research centre in the Andes, combined with a natural toxin and then infected monkeys. Despite the usual reassurances to the contrary, it had jumped to humans in 2026 and was now proving lethal. But governments round the world were hopeful that the ultimate death toll would not be as high as in the twenty year 'mad cow' epidemic.
Unfortunately, the search for a cure to the GM virus was proving difficult. The most likely source of an antidote was somewhere amidst the teeming natural diversity of wildlife. But over the last three decades nearly a fifth of the world's ten million plant and animal species had been driven to extinction because their habitats had been destroyed by development, agriculture and pollution.
The hubris of the human race. That was the problem, reasoned Leo as he crested the ridge - along with the complacency of governments, the greed of the multinational companies and the arrogance of some of the scientists. The tragedy was that it had all been so predictable, especially the 'Water Wars' that were now brewing in the Middle East.
The endless UN emergency missions and the repeated promises of desalination aid seemed to Leo to be missing the point. The region had lost the global power it once had because of its oil, and was now deteriorating into a struggle for survival over nature's most precious commodity - fresh water. The only sensible thing to do, as people were beginning to realise, was to move to pastures new.
That, of course, was going to create new strains. The European Commission for Environmental Refugees, established after the scorching Mediterranean summer of 2014, was already under growing pressure from the northern countries to restrict immigration. What with the food shortages, malaria outbreaks and skin cancers, large parts of Greece and southern Italy were becoming uninhabitable.
Britain and Scandinavia were freezing and sought-after, while the eastern Mediterranean was so baked it was being deserted. It was all so ironic, reflected Leo. At 30 one of the rising stars of the European weather prediction unit, he knew that the climatological stresses this generated meant that there could be worse to come. According to one of his unit's models, a tornado over the English Channel was a distinct possibility. He had argued with his boss that the managers of the European nuclear waste dump at La Hague in France should be warned, but he had been overruled.
The trouble was that no-one had done enough when it really mattered, Leo thought. All the world's attempts to curb carbon emissions had amounted to in the end was scores of new nuclear power stations which had never worked as well as expected. The burning of oil and coal hadn't declined fast enough, renewable energies hadn't expanded as they should have and climate chaos had spiralled out of control. No-one had heeded the early warnings about the spread of nuclear weapons, the risks of GM technologies or the loss of biodiversity.
Increasingly of late, Leo had found his sympathies drawn towards what he regarded as the one of the few hopeful signs in a disintegrating world: the Green Cyber Guerrillas. Formed by dissident members of established conservation groups in 2020, they had grown into a powerful, if ragged, international force of protest against environmental degradation. Their last action against GM beef had closed down three banks and a dozen fast food chains with a deceptively simple computer virus christened 'Swampy'.
Rather to his surprise, Leo was seriously considering giving up his job to join them. As well as atoning for his parents, whom he blamed for helping to create the mess the world was in, it might give him a chance to make a real difference. At the top of the mountain, he surveyed the soul-stirring majesty of the last of Europe's wild land, and made a decision. To the west, he could see a big storm approaching. It was time to go down.
