Solitary life, amid the encroaching doom

It was the last tree on Earth; a misshapen bristlecone pine standing alone on a featureless plain. No birds flitted about its branches, no squirrels scrambled up and down its trunk.

While not sentient, the tree could yet sense the dry wind soughing through its branches, rustling its remaining needles. It could sense its deeps roots tapping into one of the last subsurface aquifers that was the tree’s continuing life line, and it could sense the unrelenting power and heat from the sun that passed through the atmosphere unfiltered, now that the last vestige of an ozone layer had since long burned away.

The landscape of which the tree was a part was desolate and featureless for as far as the eye might see. In the distance, huge mountains loomed, no longer snow-capped. Travelling east or west to the great oceans would bring no relief from this scene of desolation, as the oceans had long since boiled and evaporated away.

The tree had stood for over 4,000 years, and it might yet last longer. Certainly, it had no sense of its own mortality. It could not explain how it had come to be the last of its kind, how, in the end, it had come to be worshipped by the people, or then why the people no longer gathered about its spreading root structure.

The tree could not chronicle the failure of the world’s ecosystem or the loss of life from the inhabitants within.

The tree could not relate as to how the people had contested with one another for unimportant things like boundaries, power, and selfinterests; the people realizing far too late that such preoccupations would ultimately doom them. By the time the people attempted to step back from the abyss, it was already too late.

In the climb of the world’s population to nearly 18 billion people, well surpassing scientists’ expectations for population sustainability, deforestation had become rule of thumb to create space for the burgeoning human population and to harvest building materials to shelter the ever-growing population. In an effort to achieve improved food security, the evolution toward increasing plant-based foods, and away from meat-based foods, also necessitated the removal of the forest to create more arable land.

One concession by the people had been to leave this one tree standing as a symbol of what had been.

With the loss of the oxygenproducing trees and the increased hydrocarbon emissions of industry fueling unchecked consumerism, the protective ozone layer had slowly dwindled away. Damage to biological life accelerated, rendering efforts toward new plant-based harvesting increasingly unproductive. Slowly, the people starved.

Most of the people’s petty partisan squabbles of the day ceased, as they now fought for food resources. Internecine wars broke out with increasingly destructive munitions employed.

With war and unremitting efforts to control food resources at the fore, other institutions such as business, church and education, no longer relevant, disappeared.

The people had long since abandoned the inhospitable surface, and had retreated underground in huge underground caverns they had carved out both to escape the desolation of the surface world and to create huge hydroponics systems to feed their dwindling numbers.

The engineering to create these underground systems was state of the art, the height of technology. Generations passed, and knowledge was lost. When the people could no longer patch up the huge machines that kept them alive in their underground burrows, and now lacking the knowledge to create new machines, the people simply ceased to be.

The tree could not sense that the people were now gone, and that it was quickly becoming the last living thing on the earth. The tree did what it had always done, it endured. Rob Maclellan is an advocate for education

and non-pro t organizations. He can be reached at 902-305-0311 or at rob@nsnon

pro tconsulting.com.