Last March For Planet Earth Read online

  Copyright © 2018 by Kell Cowley

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher, addressed “Permissions” at the email address below.

  Attribution Notice: Small verse by William C Hannan, used under Creative Commons licence from Instagram public post.

  Odd Voice Out Publishing

  Chester, UK

  www.oddvoiceout.com

  [email protected]

  Ordering Information:

  Quantity sales. Special discounts are available on quantity purchases by corporations, associations, and others. For details, contact the publisher at the email address above.

  Printed in the United Kingdom.

  Ever since he could remember, Ben had been struggling with the problem of how to save the world.

  When he’d been small, Ben had repeatedly warned his parents of the impending environmental collapse with frantic crayon drawings of the earthquakes, flash floods and bush fires he was always seeing on the news. He’d wave his pictures under their noses and demand to know what his parents were going to do about it. And his dad would always say that it wasn’t any of their God damn concern. He’d say they were leaving it to the experts to fix.

  For a while that’d been enough to reassure him. Ben could sleep at night knowing there were clever people whose job it was to make the bad weather better. But as he grew, he found the problems were only getting worse. He didn’t trust the people put in charge. He didn’t believe their so-called solutions were what the earth needed to heal. Now Ben was tall enough to loom over his parents. As his spine had grown so had his determination to do something…while there was still time left for something to be done.

  But what can one person do? Many of Ben’s friends no longer believed that change could be brought about through peaceful protest. Those Extreme Green friends who his parents didn’t approve of. His friends who had all started out as sensitive hippy types and made it their dreamy duty to save every threatened forest. They would launch petitions and gather long lists of signatures from the local community. Then they would send those names to the forestry commission, letting them know ‘the people have spoken!’ And the forestry commission would regrettably inform them that a big logging company owned the woods and that their workers were obligated to chop down the trees. That’s just how they earned a wage.

  So what does the person who cares about those trees do? They organize, that’s what. They protest. They get all those people together who don’t want the trees to fall and ask them to march in the streets. They ask them to make their voices heard. And maybe they write letters to their local MP. Maybe they write fifty letters and they post them every week. Maybe they even get a court hearing to put their argument across so politely and rationally. But they still lose the appeal and there is nothing more to do.

  Nothing to do but take to the trees, strap their bodies to the bark and make themselves human shields defending the natural world. They might get themselves on TV that way. Might see their picture in the papers. Might put off the evil moment for a day or even a week longer. Till the police come with their cranes and pepper sprays and pull them down. Then they’re locked up in a cell. And there’s nothing to do. Nothing more that can be done.

  Except…there’s that other form of direct action. The kind that comes in the night and burns logging companies to the ground. And maybe that company’s insurance won’t pay out and they’ll have to give up their plans. Maybe in a few dark hours of night one person might achieve a result that months of marching, letter writing and lashing themselves to tree trunks could not.

  They could make it stop.

  It’s not a matter of right or wrong, Ben was realizing. In the bitter end, it’s about what works and what fails. What kind of solution, what kind of saving did the world really need right now?

  The morning of the march, he still couldn’t say.

  Ben arrived in time to see the sunrise over the Thames.

  For now, the sun could still be seen. It still blazed through the pea soup smog, spilling its dozy orange rays over the concrete. This first glimmer of dawn in the Big Smoke could still turn its polluted mists into clouds of magical dust. It really felt like some spell had been cast over the sleepy city. Just gone 6am and it was serenely quiet out on its streets. The only time it would be quiet today.

  Soon the morning fog would clear and the city dwellers would be in for a sweltering afternoon, another spike in the spring heat-wave. Soon the buses would pull up and the marchers would assemble, hopefully in record numbers. Yes, Ben was still hoping for a surprise turnout this April 22nd. This year’s Earth Day.

  Though some were already calling it the last Earth Day.

  Ben stood below the Elizabeth tower with its famous bell that shared his name. The same name that he shared with his father and granddad, making him Benedict Lambert the Third, oldest and only son in a reputable male line of London bankers. The prodigal who’d left the country’s capital, the unsinkable city itself, to take a spot at Manchester University (of all Godforsaken places) studying a degree in Philosophy (of all the useless qualifications). But he hadn’t moved up north for the sake of his education. He’d moved north because the floodwater was deeper there. Because the environmentalist movement was rising up stronger with the swell of the filthy groundwater. The movement was all that mattered to him now.

  Ben knew that if he knocked on his old front door that his mum would still offer him a full English breakfast and a bubble bath just so long as he promised to repent this ‘tree-hugging vegan nonsense’ and ‘wake up to the real world’. Ben and his parents had very different ideas on which parts of reality were important. So he wasn’t planning a home visit for his mum’s cooking or bathtub. He was rummaging in the dustbins. He was unfolding a clump of greasy newspapers that had yet to be picked clean of their cold chips.

  “Looks like another scorcher,” said a voice.

  Ben looked up to see a sunburnt homeless lady shuffling towards him, her eyes fixed on the leftovers in his hands. He held out the chips to share and they sat down on the curb, squinting against the sun. The heat wasn’t baking them yet but it soon would be.

  “You know,” Ben began. “If the vote this week goes the way everyone’s expecting, there won’t be dawns like this one anymore. They’ll be blocking those rays with blasts from stratospheric sulphur aerosols. They call it sun dimming.”

  “Sun dimming, eh?” the homeless woman muttered, seeming unconcerned. “So is that the big climate techno-fix that the papers have all been banging on about?”

  “It’s a popular theory. But we’re not allowed to know the exact nature of these technological breakthroughs that they’re asking us all to vote on. They say that their plans have to remain confidential, due to the heightened threat of eco-terrorism.”

  “Those bloody Extreme Greens…”

  Ben nodded, ignoring her use of the slur. “So we’ve got all these experts telling us their solutions will work and that their way is the only way to stabilize global temperatures so that humanity can go on consuming and carbon-burning at our usual rate. Best guess is that they are going to pump an extra layer of pollution into the atmosphere between the sun and the earth to keep the climate from cooking us. Solar radiation management. You can bet good money on that being their preferred method of planet hacking.”

  “Well...if it cools my days down, then
I won’t complain. Why are you moping over them mending the weather?”

  Ben took a breath, warning himself not to rant.

  “Because there may very well be consequences that these experts aren’t telling us about. Nobody on any news channel is talking about the many and varied ways that geoengineering can go wrong. Not anymore.” He wiped the sweat trickling from his brow into his eyes, feeling his temples starting to throb. “So yes, a cloud of sulphuric sunblock might reduce the western world’s heat-waves. But it could also stop rainfall over large parts of Africa and Asia. And maybe those droughts could be fixed with further weather modifications –with cloud seeding or some space sprinkler system that could imitate precipitation. But that could make hurricane seasons wilder and more frequent. All their solutions could just create bigger problems!” he snapped. “And they threw the real solutions out with the recycling! Because as far as our leaders are concerned, there’s no consequence bigger than changing how they do business!!”

  Ben clapped a hand over his mouth.

  He might as well have puked his guts out on the pavement.

  “Nobody likes change,” the homeless lady shrugged.

  Right. Nobody likes change. And that was why this week’s vote was expected to go exactly the way the politicians, the media and the people who lined their pockets wanted it to go. It would be a landslide victory for the Geolution movement if you believed the pollsters. That was why this was expected to be the last Earth Day. Because if they got their way, then they’d be pulling every bit of green funding and handing it all over to their techno-fix teams. The old hippy dream of saving the planet through reducing emissions and living in harmony with nature would be dead. They would kill it.

  The homeless woman wiped the grease from her lips, then rose and retreated up the street. Ben let out a sigh. Their conversation had depressed him, but he’d still needed to sit and talk to someone, if only to clear his head. He had spent the last three days alone on the road. For Ben the march today was the last leg of a very long pilgrimage. He hadn’t been able to take the communal coach trip down to London with his friends since, earlier on that week, he’d been expelled from university and cut off from his student loan.

  So Ben had spent the last three days and nights walking across country to reach this meeting spot in time for the demo. Three days of sweat and sunburn just to walk off his frustrations. It was what Ben had needed. Sure, his husky six foot plus frame was empty and aching after having to sustain himself on berries and nettles picked from the hedgerows. But wasn’t it Thoreau who said that people should walk out in nature at least four hours a day in order to keep themselves sane? That it was a wonder shopkeepers could resist suicide when they were stuck behind tills most of their lives? Ben had to ease his temper or he’d end up doing something equally drastic. And he surely wasn’t the only one marching who felt that way.

  It was the last Earth Day after all.

  Their last resort day.

  Ben’s mum didn’t hold many strong beliefs but she did believe in the family eating up to the dining table. The night before Ben had left home for university it’d been the only way she had been able to get him and his father to face each other.

  “Philosophy,” his dad scoffed, not for the first time. “What kind of career does he expect out of a philosophy degree?”

  Ben raised a shoulder, not rising to the habitual taunt.

  “I want to be a better thinker,” he answered.

  His dad just snorted with another glance to his mother. “And here we were hoping he’d gotten this nonsense of his system with the gap year. Haven’t you wasted enough time with those hippy communes? Those off-grid camps and homeless shelters?”

  Ben bit down hard on the inside of his cheeks. He’d not been wasting his time. During his gap year he had learned how to build a battery and a solar panel. He had learned how to make and mend his own clothes. He had learned how to grow his own vegetables and to forage for wild food from the countryside. He’d found that there were many and varied ways he could live outside a system he didn’t agree with and no longer wished to be a part of.

  But Ben didn’t say any of this.

  He didn’t want to get into another rant.

  “I’m nineteen, dad,” he answered, simply. “I’m a legal adult. Manchester’s already accepted my application and so there’s nothing that you can do to stop me going there.”

  Passive resistance. This had always been Ben’s best tactic of protesting against his father’s attempts to bully him into being a different kind of son. The sort of son who wanted to go into the family banking business. A son who’d finally accept the lavish gift of the range rover still sitting in their garage because Ben had vowed to always use public transport and not add more exhaust fumes to the air. His dad knew only too well that Ben would not shift his ideals. But it didn’t stop him from ridiculing them.

  “What’s happened to your manners?” his dad muttered. “Our first family dinner in…I don’t know how long. And you sit there unshaven in your scruff. You talk to us in that absurd mockney accent that I’m guessing you picked up in a soup kitchen. And you’re still determined to disrespect your mother’s cooking, I see?”

  He gestured from Ben’s dinner of dry potatoes and vegetables to the centre plate of roast beef swimming in gravy.

  “We can’t force feed him,” his mum reasoned. She had always been the peacemaker of the Lambert family. If he got his temper from his dad, then his patience came entirely from her. “Ben, you know I only worry over your diet because you can’t be getting enough protein for a boy of your build. But let’s not fight over it.” She winced. “Not when it’s your last night here at home.”

  “Who’s fighting?” his dad objected. “This is just a little healthy debate, this is. The philosopher here should be able to handle that. Like he said…he’s an adult now. What’s more he’s voting age. He’s got a big decision to make next spring. We all have. Just eight months till the referendum. Now is the time when the whole world’s picking sides and I don’t want our family ending up on opposing ones. We’re running out of time to change his mind.”

  “I don’t want you changing my mind.”

  “Maybe not now,” his dad returned. “But we can wait. We’ve got twenty years of waiting before the time of the Geolution. Your mother and I will be in our retirement years before the god-awful weather gets fixed. We’ll just be hoping to spend a little of our pensions on a nice holiday aboard, without having to worry over tidal waves or erupting volcanos and the like. It’s your generation that’s really going to benefit from this vote. You and the children coming after you. Try thinking of them when you’re going to the ballot box. I’ll be voting for a planet renewed for my grandkids!”

  Ben decided to shift from passive resistance to the plain old silent treatment. He hadn’t told his parents yet that he planned to remain childless. There was no greater contributor to the collective carbon footprint than overpopulation. Ben found that he already felt sorry for those kids who could well be born into a world where this decision to forcibly control the climate had already been made. The children of tomorrow wouldn’t even get a say or a chance to stop it. They’d be the ones who’d just have to live with it.

  “I know that this is a little premature…” his mother began. “But I want you to know that your father and I are already seeking planning permission for our own hibernation bunker. They say that when this Geolution comes to pass – if enough people vote for it, that is – that there’ll have to be this sheltering period where everyone in the world lives underground.” His mum smiled, going all bright-eyed, as though government enforced confinement was just a lovely excuse for home improvements. “I want you to know that however much you disagree with us now, you can always come home. I’d hate to think of you out in the storms, becoming one of those Extreme Greens. The hippies back in our day, they were just smelly drug addicts who were too lazy to get a job. These days they’re terrorists.”

  His mum
said this last word in a whisper, like she expected Ben to blow up over it. He stuck to his silence, counting the peas on his plate and clenching his fists beneath the table.

  “He’ll be back,” his dad sneered. “When he’s starving, unwashed and unemployable, he’ll come crawling back to us. Just you wait. He can’t stay on a bloody gap year forever. He’s not been brought up to be without his modern comforts. When the Geolution comes, he’ll be pushing forty. Let’s pray he’ll have grown up by then. That he’ll have finally woken up to the way the world works. And when you do come back to us, son...” His dad waved a chunk of meat on the spokes of his fork. “…best have an apology on your lips.”

  The first of the coaches began to park up. The protestors spilled off the buses and formed ranks on the road with wary looks towards the police presence marshalling on the pavements, standing by to guard them through their lap of London. Whether the police planned to shield the marchers from city pedestrians or protect the public from the Extreme Greens wasn’t yet clear. It seemed like they just wanted to keep their procession contained.

  On past Earth Days there’d been no need for hefty security. The marches that Ben had watched as a kid had been carnivals of colour, parades of bright bold banners and hippy optimism. Now protestors were lining up like a silent army in the street, an army already expecting to be shot down. Most of them had dressed uniformly in black or in dark shades of green. Some of them wore pollution masks or respirators to hide their faces, preserving their anonymity. And not without good reason. Those who held jobs were liable to lose them if they were seen or photographed here today.

  Ben wanted to feel solidarity with everyone who had come to the march, but he couldn’t. Now that that he was here – aching, sweating and starved, his brain boiling over – he couldn’t even stand to look at them. These weekend activists. These hobby revolutionaries who wouldn’t protest without their safety nets, who wouldn’t risk their nine to fives, even at the end of the world. And didn’t they realize that this could be the beginning of that end?