This is my post for #freewriters prompt no more civilization hosted by
I have been enclosed in this glass house since arriving here 115 years ago it has plenty of room for us, but times have changed since we landed. After keeping us alive for 81 years the AI on our ship did what it was programmed to do, it created and grew humans by taking eggs and sperm.
These humans could survive this planet but AI had not been able to come up with the right formula for the people who came from Earth to survive outside of our glass enclosure, it did give us eternity which I hated until I found I had two granddaughters and they are fascinated by Earth, they are filled with questions and never tire of my stories on how man ruined a pristine river because of money, which is another concept for them to understand.
They knew I was from a place called Florida and it had a housing boom but not enough freshwater to fill the need, so they created algae blooms in the lagoon and blamed the freshwater, with public opinion on their side they stopped freshwater from flowing into a brackish water lagoon, this killed everything down to the good alga that was the start of life in the river.
They visited me every day and would stay with me but I set rules as to how much time we were to be together, I felt they needed to be with the others and play like children used to do when I was a child on Earth. They knew all the stories and how to use her imagination when they could not find anything fun to do. That was something AI could not teach.
Today they visited and as usual they had questions about Earth, they loved to hear me describe what things looked like. AI has shown them pictures but there was something special between us when I said what they looked like and felt like. AI is great but it can never be a grandma or have a personal touch.
One day one of them said, Grandma, what happened to the world you lived in, I know there is no more civilization on Earth but could you tell me in your words what happened and about the trees, the animals, and the flowers that we do not have here on Mars? You brought seeds with you but could only bring the ones that would benefit us.
I told them how I felt it was us/man that destroyed Earth. We thought we could improve Mother Nature, we moved rivers, changed which way they flow, and stopped some from flowing at all. We changed the salinity in lagoons by stopping the freshwater from entering them, and pumped sand on the beaches, this was in Fl. Other places drilled huge holes into Earth and brought up oil, or gases.
We filled in areas along the river that were used as estuaries for young fish to grow in. We filled in swamp land and called it The Highlands where homes were built. The forest was cleared for more homes. The animals were running out of places to live, and when one ventured into a neighborhood that was once their home, someone killed it. Then one day they thought they could stop beach erosion by dumping sand on the beaches, they were taking the sand from quarries and putting it on the beaches but later they pumped it from offshore. They were creating more land for the beach homeowners and the tourists loved the clean beaches.
Does that sound like a good plan to you, granddaughters? Yes, grandmother it does, they both said. That is the same thing that everyone who did not make their living from the beach or the reef thought. What it was doing was covering the reef with sand because you see, every time we got a storm the sand gets washed away, but no one talked about where the sand went. They said, Grandma, where did it go?
Because I am not a scientist, I only had my eyes that told me where the sand was going. The first thing I noticed was the people wading out into the surf were in less than knee deep water, it should have been chest deep where they were standing.
Inside the north jetty at the inlet, there is a sandbar being built, I say being built because it is growing. The inlet has changed as to where the save passage is located, this is from the sand moving in the area.
I always thought it was crazy to pump sand from miles offshore to the beach when they had the sand that came from the beach on the reef, why didn't they pump it back off the reef, unless that is their plan, to build more land? That is what they cared about, not saving a reef. And they did not care about the sealife that lives on the beach, from tiny bugs to sandfleas, aka mole crabs, to ghost crabs and many more that I do not know about.
Each thing they did seemed like a small thing but when you add it up to being done everywhere, it made it a much bigger thing and back then, no one stopped to think about the consequences, and the ones who knew were being paid to be quiet.
There was more to it than that because the disrespect for Mother Nature was going on all across the world and she had had enough, that is when she let them know she was done with them/us. She had been giving us warnings our storms were getting bigger, winters were colder in some places and warmer in others, and tsunamis, earthquakes, volcanos, rain, fire, and some of the worst lightning storms `ever recorded but we kept doing the things that harmed her until the day the prediction came from the weathermen.
We had already had the ship ready and the people who would go but we were not supposed to leave for another 6 months, we were told we had to go within the next week or stay and, you know the rest.
Yes, grandmother, AI has read it to us. When Mother Nature had enough she gave loose with everything she had. Tornados, hurricanes, earthquakes, snow, ice, volcanos, rain, lightning, tsunamis, fires, and wind. When it was over, it was not like the ice age, this was the opposite, the sun heated the entire world, and ice caps melted causing floods worldwide.
Plants to the north first started dying, and as they died people moved south, it was mayhem. One day all of the plants were gone, and with them, the bees died, and the food people had stashed was heavily guarded or stolen from them, they ate anything they could find but in the end, they starved to death.
One of my granddaughters looked at me with a look I had not seen before, it started as a smirk but soon turned to sadness when she said, Grandma have you made the relation to how the people died compared to when the manatees died when they stopped the freshwater from the river and killed their food supply which was seagrass, they ate what you called rolling grass, but AI says it is an alga not a seagrass and manatees should not eat it, but it is all they had, and it blocked their bowels and they starved to death. Is that what you call karma? It came full circle and this time Mother Nature won.
photos are mine