Earth 2100 Page #5

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So, it's looking around for something.

And finally, it looks down,

sucks itself up.

And then, we have a blank screen.

Here we are.

The moral of that story,

by grabbing everything in sight,

we'll end up destroying ourselves.

And by 2050, the population is exploding,

the rainforests are disappearing,

and nine billion of us competing

for ever scarcer resources.

A bad situation made worse by widespread

drought and huge migrations of people.

Life is changing for everyone,

including Lucy.

My parents both got sick

the winter of 2050.

It was a horrible flu that year.

It seemed the viruses were

getting worse each passing season.

I kept them comfortable.

And I'm glad they were at home

and together when they died.

After that, there was

nothing to keep us in San Diego.

Josh and I decided

It was time to leave.

We were excited.

Josh had been offered an amazing job in

New York working on the sea barriers

designed to protect the

cities from the rising seas.

There wasn't much room in the truck.

We took clothes, a few books,

and 50 gallons of water.

Everything else we left behind.

GPS 2100.

Please select your destination.

New York City.

Calculating safest route.

We headed north

across the Mojave Desert.

By dusk, we were on the outskirts of Las Vegas

and greeted by mile after mile

of abandoned suburbs,

and acres of golf courses turned to dust.

The silence was eerie.

Well, by 2050, Lake Mead, one of the

great reservoirs of the Southwest

on the Colorado River has finally gone dry.

There's not enough

water to meet human needs.

People in Las Vegas had

depended on Lake Mead for almost

Las Vegas, I would imagine, is gone.

With a drought like that,

you've got a city in - in the desert.

And it's gonna be really

difficult to live there.

When we got closer to the Strip, we were

lucky to hook up with a convoy headed east.

Las Vegas was a strange sight.

Most of the hotels dark.

All those neon lights gone dead.

Sin City had pretty much folded.

From there, we drove through Arizona.

Daybreak.

Rising out of the desert,

we saw something wonderful.

These huge, new solar plants.

They hadn't been built soon

enough to help Las Vegas,

but one day, they were supposed

to power the whole West Coast.

It was comforting to know.

There's tremendous possibility

there in the desert Southwest.

There's a capacity to produce solar power and,

and move it to where the great population

centers of the United States are.

The safest route headed

east today is Route 40.

I think it would be almost

impossible to do this journey

unless you had some form of intelligence as

to what areas are lawless or dangerous.

I don't think strangers

are gonna be very friendly.

By the time we got on to Route 15,

we were grimy and tired.

The scene in front of us had

jolted us out of our daze.

Hundreds of people packed the road.

All of them streaming out of

the Southwest heading north.

It felt like the Dust Bowl all over again.

Think what it would be like if we

had millions of neighbors to the south

heading north because of, they don't

have food and they don't have water.

They shouted at us as we drove past.

Molly was half out of the window,

catching everything with her camera.

Suddenly, a man grabbed her arm.

He had a gun and

pointed it at Moly's face.

"Get out of the truck

right now," he yelled.

I'd never been so terrified.

But within seconds, two men from

the convoy pulled their own guns

and the man melted back into the crowd.

We knew now just how dangerous

the border regions had become

and how lucky we were to be headed east.

Just as people were migrating, so

too were the bugs.

In Oklahoma, acres and

acres of corn were threatened.

To the degree that all ecosystems are extremely

stressed by 2050, pests will flourish.

There's an arms race between breeding

crops that are resistant to various pests

and the pests themselves, because to the

degree that we simplified our food system,

we've also made it massively vulnerable.

For decades, this had been predicted.

These giant farms, which supplied so much

of the world's food, were easy prey.

People get their seeds from single

or just a few manufacturers,

and they're genetically very, very similar.

So, if in fact an agent were to come onto the

scene that was capable of infecting one,

it would rapidly spread.

Halfway through Kansas,

we split off from the convoy.

They were headed north to Canada.

We went east to Greensburg, Kansas,

leaving the devastation behind.

Welcome to the

Greensburg Visitor Center.

In 2007, a tornado destroyed our town.

Out of the rubble came a dream.

A town that was completely

destroyed by a tornado

is being rebuilt as a global example of how

clean energy can power an entire community,

how it can bring jobs and businesses...

This was a wonderful place,

completely self-sustaining.

They had been one of the first,

and they knew what they were doing.

They got their power from the wind

and sun, their water from the rain,

and they grew everything they ate.

Feeling a lot better,

we hot seated it the rest of the way.

Compared to the Southwest,

the fields were green and fertile.

We saw some

communities like Greensburg.

We wished there were more.

The closer we get to the end of our journey,

the better we felt.

The next day, we hit the outskirts

of New York City.

New York City is engaged in the

greatest urban experiment of our time.

Skyscrapers that grow their own food,

to an all-electric vehicle fleet,

to clean and tranquil parks.

Inspired leaders and creative minds are

working together to create an urban paradise.

I looked across the George Washington

Bridge at the skyline and felt a surge of hope,

but underneath ran a trickle of worry.

With all we had seen,

maybe we had seen nothing yet.

By the middle of the century,

I thought I'd seen it al.

Storms, migrations, and droughts

that had destroyed whole cities.

But I had also seen so much more.

Brilliant people everywhere were working

furiously to change our future.

I had a family,

and together, I thought we might be

equal to whatever came out way,

but I had no idea

of what the future would hold.

It's a new world.

And not a better one, as we catch up

with Lucy, our fictional storyteller.

The year is 2060, past mid-century

and into middle age for Lucy.

At 51, she has grown up in a

world of soaring population,

dwindling resources and intense climate change.

The worst case scenario imagined

by some experts is playing out.

But there are signs of hope.

A growing global movement

led by cities like New York.

New York is probably the most

geographically favored city in America.

Great port.

Rich fisheries around it.

This wonderful river that allows

transport and access to great farmland.

It's a center of the arts.

It's been a center of finance.

I think it will continue to be so.

After what we had been through,

New York was a fresh start.

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