Open Features: Polar Cities
Max Webster is intrigued by the idea that polar cities may save the human race threatened with the prospect of extinction because of the results of global warming.
Read Max’s words on our possible future - then see what polar cities may look like.
I have seen the future, and it's not a pretty picture. Let's just say it's going to be something in between the "Mad Max" movies and Cormac McCarthy's Pulitzer Prize winning novel "The Road". Connect the dots.
We are heading into a Long Emergency, folks, the likes of which this human race has never seen. Oh, the Earth has seen things like this before, sure. The Earth, yes, Mother Earth, she knows all this firsthand. But the human species, us, mankind, humankind -- oh the humanity! -- we are heading into uncharted territory, and the prospects are not exactly ravishing.
I'm not talking about the near future or even the distant future. I am talking about -- to stretch this column a bit from its usual everyday fanfare -- the far distant future. Say 2,500 A.D., and by A.D. I don't mean "Anno Deus" -- praise the Lord -- but "Absolute Disaster". Where is the Lord? I hope you are paying attention.
Don't turn the page yet. Keep reading. Forget about the celebrity hit parade for a few moments and Britney and Paris and Amy Winehouse and Johnny Depp. Just give me a few more moments of your precious time, dear readers...
Now what on Earth am I talking about? Let me say it in just two words: polar cities.
There, you heard it first here. Polar cities for survivors of global
warming in the year 2,500 A.D. or so, if we still believe in God and use those initials for His Year.
I found out about all this when I received an email recently,
completely out of the blue, unsolicited, from a climate activist
named Danny Bloom, who, believe it not, says he's at heart an
optimist. He told me right off the bat that's he's 60 years old, give or take a few years here or there, and that he's very concerned about global warming and the damage it might do later on.
Not now. Everything's okay now, he told me. Everything's hunkey-dory now, he said. But he's concerned that the clock is ticking. He's concerned about the survival of the species. Not tigers or lions or leopards or mice. The human species. He's concerned about us.
So I wrote him back and asked for an explanation. Turns out this Bloom fellow is a very serious guy, and yes, he's way out there in far left field, off the radar even. But I think it's worth paying attention to what he's saying, for whatever it's worth. It might be worth something important. Then again, it might be just a lot of hot air in a media circus of untold proportions.
"I am not prediciting that polar cities will be needed," Bloom told me in an email. "I am just speculating. The concept is getting a lot of interest from bloggers on the Internet, although the mainstream media is keeping my ideas off the news media radar for now. One New York editor for a major wire service told me that 'nobody is interested in reading about polar cities' and that he would never assign a reporter to interview
me."
A reporter from a newspaper in Texas said that unless Bloom could muster some positive support from well-known scientists working in the field of climatology the entire concept of polar cities was not worth reporting on.
So I asked Bloom about this and he told me that James Lovelock, the eminent British scientist, who is at the forefront of the entire debate on global warming, recently emailed him after seeing images of what polar cities might look like. And what did Lovelock say? "It may very well happen and soon," he told Bloom, thanking him for his blogsite with the images posted there.
Well, for my money, if James Lovelock says "it may very well happen and soon" -- in regard to polar cities as sustainable population retreats for survivors of global warming in the future -- then the issue is worth addressing, reporting on, and writing this column on. I hope I haven't frightened any readers by talking about such a topic, but maybe it's time to get serious about global warming and face facts.
So while I don't completely agree with Bloom's vision, I do think his ideas are worth discussing in the mainstream media as well as in the blogosphere, and even more importantly, I think the arresting images he has come up with, through the commissioned computer art created by Cheng-hong Deng, are worth looking at.
Pictures are worth a thousand words. Take a look here.
