Watershed (2016)
“This was my ritual before every assignment, to read one of my grandmother’s letters, though it was hardly needed now. I knew everything she’d written, had committed it to memory, but rituals are important and we all had them. Kind of fatalistic, but reassuring too.
She’d always said it came down to the water: too much one minute, not enough the next. Extreme weather, they’d called it. Climate change. A global catastrophe. And she reckoned that’d been the problem all along, every country so depe...ndent on the next, one big greedy globe, that when the super-cells hit and there was no safe way to get all those Made-in-China’s (made in other places too, she said, most of them gone now) to where they were needed, everything started to fall apart.
Because for all their technology, all those marvellous advances they’d made, all that enlightenment they were so fond of telling themselves they had, not a single one of them could stop the slide. Their computers and modelling systems, their satellites and databases that had predicted the couple of metres of ocean rise so expertly; the desal plants they’d built by the hundreds (close to shore to minimise costs and piping, burning coal and oil faster than they could dig it) that were soon underwater and fucking useless; containers, swamped by tidal waves and sucked into whirlpools, that broke apart and bled black; wind turbines choked by dust storms; wave turbines chewed by the Sea; all those shiny smooth solar grids, too scoured by grit to raise even a spark; the deep – and ever deeper – bores that had drained the water table and dredged up enough salt and toxins to kill the soil: none of it had amounted to shit.MoreLess
She’d always said it came down to the water: too much one minute, not enough the next. Extreme weather, they’d called it. Climate change. A global catastrophe. And she reckoned that’d been the problem all along, every country so depe...ndent on the next, one big greedy globe, that when the super-cells hit and there was no safe way to get all those Made-in-China’s (made in other places too, she said, most of them gone now) to where they were needed, everything started to fall apart.
Because for all their technology, all those marvellous advances they’d made, all that enlightenment they were so fond of telling themselves they had, not a single one of them could stop the slide. Their computers and modelling systems, their satellites and databases that had predicted the couple of metres of ocean rise so expertly; the desal plants they’d built by the hundreds (close to shore to minimise costs and piping, burning coal and oil faster than they could dig it) that were soon underwater and fucking useless; containers, swamped by tidal waves and sucked into whirlpools, that broke apart and bled black; wind turbines choked by dust storms; wave turbines chewed by the Sea; all those shiny smooth solar grids, too scoured by grit to raise even a spark; the deep – and ever deeper – bores that had drained the water table and dredged up enough salt and toxins to kill the soil: none of it had amounted to shit.MoreLess
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