Liv Kelly

A short story about the climate crisis

The IPCC report warned us this would happen, they gave us cold hard facts, they gave us goals to work towards to make things better, they gave us warnings with scorching urgency but still we did not listen. We were told our house was on fire and yet we did not try to extinguish it, and now time has burned past us and it is too late.

The ember from a forest fire, the only constant in this new world, continued to rise, trying to escape the destruction, rise above the scalding landscape, a familiar landscape we once knew now gone forever, destroyed by greed which infected the past civilisation like an unstoppable plague, ravishing its victims with a claustrophobic fever set on consumption and excess.

Monitus was sat on the last patch of green in the black world. The grass still felt how it used to before the Ruination; but Monitus knew hot betrayal ran through each cell within the blades of grass, whispering in the unmoving wind, a silent army with no ammunition. Human nature was eradicated when nature left.

Monitus remembers when they were given the 1.5 degree rise as a warning, he remembers when the warning became a distant memory and the 1.5 increase seemed like a pleasant dream. Monitus remembers the warnings provided by experts, shouting the true science above the noise of the flaming greed.

They warned of irreversible damage, life that took hundreds of years to establish destroyed in a matter of hours. Monitus remembers climatically determined geographic ranges for life being significantly reduced, at a 2 degree increase 18% of insects lost over half of their homes, now Monitus struggles to remember the sound of a buzzing bee.

Monitus remembers the searing-hot anger each time there was an extinction announcement “are we the next to go? This was all preventable,” he lamented with a raging hot tear pouring down his ash-covered face, carving a line like a knife

This could have been avoided.

Now there is nothing.

Everything is

Burnt

Out.