It was the eighties, and I was in my twenties when the talk of the town wasn’t climate change, but the ozone layer.
Remember that? Scientists warned us that a hole was opening above Antarctica. It was growing because of gases from our aerosol cans and refrigerators. The message was dire: our skin would burn, icecaps would melt, crops would fail, and the planet would be ruined if we didn’t act NOW. One type of gas was banned and replaced with another, which we accepted. The nineties came, and then—silence. The ozone hole, once our great existential crisis, dropped out of the headlines.
Did we fix the hole? Did the hole slow down, stop, or go away? I really don’t know the outcome of all that work!
I’ve lived through a handful of these alarmist events. In the seventies, we were told oil would run out, and people were urged to drive sparingly. That didn’t happen. There’s as much oil now as there’s ever been.
In the late nineties, the world braced itself for the Y2K bug. Computer systems were going to collapse at midnight. Banks would fail, electricity would stop, and planes would fall from the sky. I stocked up on candles and filled my bathtub with water just in case—but when the clocks ticked over, nothing happened. Not a single glitch occured. It was the greatest non-event of all.
These historical moments leave me sceptical about the present ones. We poured protests, money, and anxiety into the past ones, only to see them fade into obscurity. Nothing happened. No one said, “Thanks to change, we made a difference and solved the problem of the century.”
No one cared to.
Now, the modern rallying cries are “renewable energy” and “sustainability,” just as “fixing the ozone”, “fixing the Y2K bug”, and “fixing the fuel crisis” once were. And while I understand the impulse to protect our future, I can’t help feeling cautious. If the ozone vanished from conversation, if Y2K turned into a non-event, and fuel shortages never became issues, why should I believe that those who say electric cars will save the world will do that?
We’re not changing the energy type or reducing it; we’ve simply added another step to the process.
Maybe I’ve grown wary from living through false alarms. Or maybe, just maybe, some of these “fixes” actually worked—and no one bothered to say so.
–Michael (Dark fiction. Author of SEETHINGS (the first book), free for a limited time)
Love, lust, and lies collide on land and water. A temptress, a faithful wife, and a photographer haunted by shadows drift into a world of seduction, betrayal, and control.
Marriages unravel, secrets surface, and civility dissolves into primal instinct. Nothing is safe. No one is innocent.
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SEETHINGS (first in the series) is downloadable and free for a limited time, here.
Discover more from Michael Forman – Author of Dark Fiction & Drama
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