In my copious post-coma spare time (I do miss it so) I spent a few fun hours doing what my wife calls a 'writing sprint' - I drew on literally years of future-historical nuggets to start on a high level sketch.
For my imagination, the 21st century is one of the most terrifying and fascinating centuries-to-be there is. It's the one I live in. It will very likely be the one that I die in (and it almost was this past winter).
But one of the most touching stories is the extinction of the Great Panda.. no, they're not really dead... not yet... but I think the world will be truly darkened if they are ever lost.
You will see mention of many future-historical events - the Yellowstone Explosion, the Third World War, the Great Unification, the Indian colonization of the Solar System...this story starts with civil war, and ends on the eve of another.
The history of the Third Millennium is largely a chronicle of the Ecological Holocaust and Humanity’s response to the disaster. Other disasters, among them the Yellowstone Explosion and the long-deferred Third World War, were but punctuation marks to the ruination of Earth as a habitat for life.
We start at the beginning of the dreadful dieback now commonly referred to as the Ecocaust.
In the early years of the 21st century the emphasis of research and debate was on climate change, particularly warming of the atmosphere due to the introduction of carbon dioxide, methane and other greenhouse gases by human activity. However, the Ecocaust was at its heart a consequence of one thing – human overpopulation and overconsumption of resources, crowding out all other species including the very ones that Humanity depended upon.
The connection between ecological devastation and human overpopulation was hardly unnoticed...it was simply anathema to discuss the matter. No government was prepared to compel contraception or the abandoning the goal of raising the largest families possible. Even in technologically developed societies where a ‘large’ family meant 3-5 children rather than 13-15, reproductive politics were contentious and occasionally violent.
Some authoritarian cultures with the power and inclination to impose population controls did make the attempt, among them the People’s Republic of China. However, enforcement of the law was often impractical and the population grew regardless. By 2020, the PRC had a population of 1.4 billion, a level that would dip sharply over the next decade due to famine and civil war then rebound quickly in the aftermath with the abandonment of the one-child policy. Malthus appeared to be correct at last; humans would propagate until the capacity of their habitat to support their numbers, then increase their numbers further, at which point the environment was damaged. Innovations gave societies some reprieve, if the skill and resources to implement them were available, but the final outcome was inevitable; as the Ecocaust went from a debatable event to a fact of everyday life, the ability of the planet to support the population of any species (even Man) weakened.
By 2050 the human population of the planet peaked, far sooner than had been anticipated two generations earlier, but by the middle of the 21st century it was quite clear that the Earth was becoming significantly warmer, its oceans more acidic, its land more toxic and its biodiversity greatly reduced. Many of the iconic species of Africa vanished around this time, creatures such as the lion and the giraffe, the elephant and the rhinoceros, species that had been diligently protected for almost a century. They died out regardless.
Perhaps the most heartbreaking loss was the extinction of the giant panda, a consequence of the Great Unification or, as most countries referred to it, the Second Chinese Civil War. The subsequent Han Federation made the panda the emblem of its new banner, a reminder for all time of what had been lost in the anarchy of those dark times. Perhaps a few pandas in zoos elsewhere in the world might have been sufficient to save the species, but in the years prior to its collapse the Communist Party had confiscated most specimens in spats with other governments, which it accused of conspiring to destroy Chinese unity. What pandas remained outside of China after the war were too infirm, too old and too few to support a viable breeding population.
Why did the pandas die? War, violence enough for any appetite, always has its unintended victims, ones that even the aggressors regret. The remnant pandas were not only unsuited to life in the wild; they were vulnerable to an incapacitation virus developed during the civil war in a way humans were not. Chinese history was peppered with ‘time of troubles’ episodes that racked up immense body counts; the Unification War would come close to matching the Taiping Rebellion in absolute numbers but remain far less severe in terms of percentage of population destroyed. A wide range of non-lethal weapons were utilized, compliments of innovations by the Americans and others from prior decades. One of these was a bacterium that introduced choleric symptoms for 6-18 hours in humans; it was highly contagious but quickly dispatched by natural immune responses. Regardless a distressing number of people were slaughtered by this putatively humane weapon. In time the cause was identified; the demi-cholera bacteria in contact with bamboo shoots in the gut produced a toxin that greatly sickened millions and killed hundreds of thousands before eating habits in eastern and southern Asia changed.
Giant pandas ate virtually nothing but bamboo, and this specific diet would be their doom. They died to the last specimen within months. Worse, the bacteria persisted long after the war; even giant pandas in zoos and preserves on the far side of the planet were slain. Even a century later, panda clones drawn from the GRASP gene banks died within months of decanting. Other species – the American chestnut, the elephant even the passenger pigeon – were in time revived. The panda would never return.
However, Humanity would have its hands full saving itself for centuries to come. By 2060, it would be China leading the effort. The new Federation leaped ahead of the United States in economic and military power, pulling the rest of Asia upward as well; in short order India would surpass the USA as well. Much of the reason was attributable to the lessened burdens of overpopulation, leave both of the new superpowers with still-vast pools of skilled labor. The Americans, reticent as ever to open their gates to the world, could not maintain sufficient edge in technology and training to overcome this basis, this despite having the third largest population on the planet at 420 million. By the time the U.S. Congress was prepared to liberalize immigration policy, the world’s aspiring immigrants were seeking greener pastures elsewhere.
By 2100, the Asian Renaissance had raised the fortunes of Bangladesh, Indonesia and Pakistan as well. Vietnam, Burma (again) and the Philippines were experiencing rapid improvements in their standards of living as well. This transformation was not without peril; traditional ethnic and sectarian divisions were plentiful, especially in South Asia. India continued to be a paradox; a superpower with an advanced space program and permanent presences throughout the Solar System that struggled to keep its diverse population at home from tearing each other’s throats out. Bangladesh and Indonesia, countries acutely threatened by rising sea levels, had their hands full handling the stresses of mass relocation and provisioning of displaced populations that were not always welcome in new areas; for Bangladesh, the Hill Tracts remained a hot spot. In Indonesia, colonization of Irian Jaya (and squatting across the border in Papua New Guinea) sparked what would in time become the Archipelago War and the intervention of many outside powers... but not the United States. The decades of simmering strife there had finally broken out into open civil war. The Americans would not need to shop for war overseas for some time to come.
(to be continued)