I 💗 This Story, To.
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A bedtime story, for adults.
“Tell me again what happened after the fires burnt all the forests all over the world and the koala bears all died, Granny.”
“Well, my lovely, it was a turning point, that moment. We woke up to the news that koalas were nearly all gone and something in us snapped. It was bad up to then. Really, really, really bad. All the big forests of the world were on fire. The arctic was melting really fast and it felt like people were at war with everything else on Earth. We didn’t have forests full of deer. You couldn’t drink the water in the rivers. We still had that beautiful bird with the big curved beak, the curlew, here but there were hardly any left. All the birds and insects were dying. In those days, you could pick up a rock and not find a single worm or beetle underneath.
But we were pretending it wasn’t real. People found it really hard to imagine the Earth could really be dying. We were still going to work like we always had and flying around the world in planes that ran on oil. The food in our shops was all flown in from other countries in the south and everything was wrapped in a kind of paper that was made of oil instead of hemp. And the oil was used for everything! The oceans were full of plastic - more plastic than fish. And it was really filthy to move around. It kept spilling and killing all the seabirds and fish. And there were some people who had billions of dollars in money and lots of houses, and others who had to sleep on the street in a sleeping bag.
But we had ‘the government’ making all the important decisions for everyone in the country, instead of all of us making agreements and everyone getting a say. And they were listening to the people who wanted to make lots of money instead of listening to the koalas and the curlews and the ocean-dwelling creatures. They had lost their way.
But that day, when we woke up to the news that the koalas were nearly all burned...that was November 2019...and something changed that day. You know Patrick and Aaron and Leo and Eoin and your auntie Ciara - they were already up to their eyes in the rebellion. All the neighbours here had joined too and your mum and thousands of school kids had been going on strike. There were quite a lot of us around the world already - hundreds of thousands of people - standing up against this knowing destruction and trying to work out how to disrupt the destructive systems. But there weren’t enough of us.
That day in 2019, everybody just snapped. The news sank in. They finally believed we really were killing everything - the whole Earth. They could imagine the end now. They pictured their own children having to live through the death of everyone and everything, and they snapped. Lots of people just sobbed that day. I couldn’t get out of bed, I was sobbing so hard.
And then I decided to write a different story. Lots of us did. We wrote the story of the world with a different ending, the future we wanted to give our children - your mum and your auntie Ciara. We wrote through our tears.
And it worked. Somehow everything started to change that day. Gradually all our friends and family joined us in rebelling, and all their friends and family.
By the middle of 2020, we had more than 150,000 people here doing their bit and working together to disrupt the systems that were stealing our children’s future, their air, their drinking water, their food supply.
And we kind of reached a tipping point. A positive and hopefilled one this time. There were so many of us round the world rebelling against the killing of the Earth, that we became unstoppable. And our culture changed.
Christmas 2019 was a strange one. People weren’t embarassed to talk about how sad they were at how broken our Earth was. They cried in public about it. They got together with their friends and families and talked about the paralysing fear they were feeling, and their terror at what their children and their nieces and nephews might witness, about how much they loved foxes and bees and oak trees and the ocean. They cried together and held eachother. Then they held big brainstorming parties to work out how they could get in the way of the destruction. They joined the rebellion.
That happened all over the world. People just stopped letting the ‘government’ and all the big corporations destroy everything. They took away their support and they got in the way. The governments and corporations fought back, but it was too late. People were willing to do anything to protect the Earth and give the children a future. They were willing to go without everything they had had up to then if it was damaging the world to make it. They were willing to stand up to the people destroying the Earth, to go to where the destruction was happening and to get in the way and say ‘No more!’ Some people were willing to lay down their lives.
By the end of 2020, because there were so many of us now, the people started making the decisions themselves. They looked at how ecovillages had made decisions since the 1980s. Sociocracy - everyone had a voice.
In the new systems we set up, people didn’t buy food, clothes and cars made by slave wages in the south. They bought food from the farmer who lived near them instead and clothes made by their neighbour from wool and linen. People used to have a car each back then and some people had several computers each. We all had a mobile phone each and we carried it around with us. We started sharing all those things instead. It meant that we couldn’t rely on talking to each other on the internet anymore but most people really liked going back to talking to their friends and family face to face.
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A bedtime story, for adults.
“Tell me again what happened after the fires burnt all the forests all over the world and the koala bears all died, Granny.”
“Well, my lovely, it was a turning point, that moment. We woke up to the news that koalas were nearly all gone and something in us snapped. It was bad up to then. Really, really, really bad. All the big forests of the world were on fire. The arctic was melting really fast and it felt like people were at war with everything else on Earth. We didn’t have forests full of deer. You couldn’t drink the water in the rivers. We still had that beautiful bird with the big curved beak, the curlew, here but there were hardly any left. All the birds and insects were dying. In those days, you could pick up a rock and not find a single worm or beetle underneath.
But we were pretending it wasn’t real. People found it really hard to imagine the Earth could really be dying. We were still going to work like we always had and flying around the world in planes that ran on oil. The food in our shops was all flown in from other countries in the south and everything was wrapped in a kind of paper that was made of oil instead of hemp. And the oil was used for everything! The oceans were full of plastic - more plastic than fish. And it was really filthy to move around. It kept spilling and killing all the seabirds and fish. And there were some people who had billions of dollars in money and lots of houses, and others who had to sleep on the street in a sleeping bag.
But we had ‘the government’ making all the important decisions for everyone in the country, instead of all of us making agreements and everyone getting a say. And they were listening to the people who wanted to make lots of money instead of listening to the koalas and the curlews and the ocean-dwelling creatures. They had lost their way.
But that day, when we woke up to the news that the koalas were nearly all burned...that was November 2019...and something changed that day. You know Patrick and Aaron and Leo and Eoin and your auntie Ciara - they were already up to their eyes in the rebellion. All the neighbours here had joined too and your mum and thousands of school kids had been going on strike. There were quite a lot of us around the world already - hundreds of thousands of people - standing up against this knowing destruction and trying to work out how to disrupt the destructive systems. But there weren’t enough of us.
That day in 2019, everybody just snapped. The news sank in. They finally believed we really were killing everything - the whole Earth. They could imagine the end now. They pictured their own children having to live through the death of everyone and everything, and they snapped. Lots of people just sobbed that day. I couldn’t get out of bed, I was sobbing so hard.
And then I decided to write a different story. Lots of us did. We wrote the story of the world with a different ending, the future we wanted to give our children - your mum and your auntie Ciara. We wrote through our tears.
And it worked. Somehow everything started to change that day. Gradually all our friends and family joined us in rebelling, and all their friends and family.
By the middle of 2020, we had more than 150,000 people here doing their bit and working together to disrupt the systems that were stealing our children’s future, their air, their drinking water, their food supply.
And we kind of reached a tipping point. A positive and hopefilled one this time. There were so many of us round the world rebelling against the killing of the Earth, that we became unstoppable. And our culture changed.
Christmas 2019 was a strange one. People weren’t embarassed to talk about how sad they were at how broken our Earth was. They cried in public about it. They got together with their friends and families and talked about the paralysing fear they were feeling, and their terror at what their children and their nieces and nephews might witness, about how much they loved foxes and bees and oak trees and the ocean. They cried together and held eachother. Then they held big brainstorming parties to work out how they could get in the way of the destruction. They joined the rebellion.
That happened all over the world. People just stopped letting the ‘government’ and all the big corporations destroy everything. They took away their support and they got in the way. The governments and corporations fought back, but it was too late. People were willing to do anything to protect the Earth and give the children a future. They were willing to go without everything they had had up to then if it was damaging the world to make it. They were willing to stand up to the people destroying the Earth, to go to where the destruction was happening and to get in the way and say ‘No more!’ Some people were willing to lay down their lives.
By the end of 2020, because there were so many of us now, the people started making the decisions themselves. They looked at how ecovillages had made decisions since the 1980s. Sociocracy - everyone had a voice.
In the new systems we set up, people didn’t buy food, clothes and cars made by slave wages in the south. They bought food from the farmer who lived near them instead and clothes made by their neighbour from wool and linen. People used to have a car each back then and some people had several computers each. We all had a mobile phone each and we carried it around with us. We started sharing all those things instead. It meant that we couldn’t rely on talking to each other on the internet anymore but most people really liked going back to talking to their friends and family face to face.
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The people in the south of the Earth had no money and even less power in the old system but they had really strong community they could rely on because of that. People up here in the north learned a lot from them about how to support one another in smaller communities. That was when we stopped letting people be hungry or homeless just because they didn’t have enough money. In the old days, people used to buy whatever they needed in a shop. But you couldn’t depend on money anymore after the banks and corporations and governments collapsed - it wasn’t the big important thing it had been and people started sharing whatever they had, knowing they needed their neighbours now.
And nature started to recover as soon as the big oil and coal corporations were gone. Without oil there were no chemicals to kill wild plants and insects, and much less acid rain and greenhouse gases. They didn’t have fuel to run the big destructive machines that they used to chop down rainforests and catch every single fish in the ocean. The forests started to rewild where corporations abandoned them and tribes could move back in. The coral reefs had been turning white and dying up to then because of the acid in the ocean, but with so much of the ocean being left alone to rewild, everything found a balance again.
People had kind of lost faith in the religions they’d had. They were mostly worshipping money in those days. Christmas and birthdays were about what you bought. But when money got really scarce, most people realised they still believed in nature and they could still feel awe watching a sunset, at the birth of a baby, at forest waterfalls, at murmurations of starlings. We started to live our lives around nature and protect it as a sacred thing.
And that’s why we have this world today, my lovely granddaughter who I never thought I’d see! That’s the story of how we got in the way of the destructive people and out of the way of nature. And that’s why you can see whales and dolphins in the ocean when we go to Trá Bhán for our holidays. That’s why we have curlews on the lake, deer in the woods, and kestrels and owls in the trees round the farm. It’s the story of how the rainforests slowly recovered and a third of the world rewilded. It’s why we have you.”
And nature started to recover as soon as the big oil and coal corporations were gone. Without oil there were no chemicals to kill wild plants and insects, and much less acid rain and greenhouse gases. They didn’t have fuel to run the big destructive machines that they used to chop down rainforests and catch every single fish in the ocean. The forests started to rewild where corporations abandoned them and tribes could move back in. The coral reefs had been turning white and dying up to then because of the acid in the ocean, but with so much of the ocean being left alone to rewild, everything found a balance again.
People had kind of lost faith in the religions they’d had. They were mostly worshipping money in those days. Christmas and birthdays were about what you bought. But when money got really scarce, most people realised they still believed in nature and they could still feel awe watching a sunset, at the birth of a baby, at forest waterfalls, at murmurations of starlings. We started to live our lives around nature and protect it as a sacred thing.
And that’s why we have this world today, my lovely granddaughter who I never thought I’d see! That’s the story of how we got in the way of the destructive people and out of the way of nature. And that’s why you can see whales and dolphins in the ocean when we go to Trá Bhán for our holidays. That’s why we have curlews on the lake, deer in the woods, and kestrels and owls in the trees round the farm. It’s the story of how the rainforests slowly recovered and a third of the world rewilded. It’s why we have you.”
