Tomorrow’s World by Davie Henderson Page A

history.
    Annie MacDougall froze the image. The dust cloud appeared to billow out of the wall. A mother carrying a baby was emerging from its midst. She’d tripped over a briefcase dropped by some fleeing businessman. She was about to fall, and her face was frozen in helplessness and horror.
    Annie stared at that face. I saw how much she was moved by the mother’s plight, and heard it in her voice when she said, “Things came to a head with the dirty bomb attack in a fast-food restaurant in Lower Manhattan. The blast was blamed on Muslim fundamentalists, but one theory is that the bomb was planted by the government to provide an excuse for what was to follow. It’s unlikely the truth will ever be known, and it’s academic, anyway. What matters is the incident led to the Third Gulf War.”
    Now the screen was filled with a succession of striking images:
    A squadron of bat-like stealth bombers streaking across a dusky sky.
    Fireballs erupting in a city of minarets.
    A desert highway littered with burnt-out tanks.
    â€œIntent on tackling terrorism and securing oil supplies, the west invaded much of the Middle East,” Annie said. “It created the secular United States of Arabia puppet regime, outraging Muslim fundamentalists. Unable to match the military might of what they saw as corrupt infidel invaders, the fundamentalists struck back by targeting oil production at all stages—”
    The screen showed thick clouds of smoke belching into the air from a hundred burning oil wells; then a massive oil tanker, its back broken, sinking below the surface of an ocean darkened by a spreading slick.
    â€œWeren’t the fundamentalists spiting themselves by doing that?” The question, in a naïve voice, came from a young Name to my left.
    Annie MacDougall turned from the screen to the teenager and said, “Indeed they were, but they reasoned—and I use the term loosely—that if they couldn’t benefit from the oil, they could at least deny it to their sworn enemy and burden them with the crippling costs of cleaning up the mess.
    â€œOf course the mess wasn’t so easily cleaned up, and the resulting environmental catastrophe came to be known as the Hydrocarbon Holocaust.”
    There were more images of burning oil fields and dense black smoke blotting out the sun.
    â€œIn a way the entire planet came to resemble a battlefield, as if a no-holds-barred war was being waged against Mother Nature. While that wasn’t the intention, it was the result—the catastrophic ‘collateral damage’ that comes from overdevelopment, strident nationalism and religious strife. The planet was under attack from all sides: from the Hydrocarbon Holocaust in the Middle East to the smogs of the great conurbations of the west; from a holed ozone layer to melting polar ice caps; from oceans overfished to the point of extinction, to rainforests being slashed and burned beyond regeneration. Pollution increased at the same time as the ability of the planet to cope with it was diminishing and, as a consequence, the problems worsened exponentially. The so-called tipping point had been reached.”
    â€œWhat exactly does that mean?” Frankie asked.
    The question was greeted by sniggering from the Numbers, which made me wonder how many questions went unasked for fear of ridicule. A lot of people favored segregation in classes, but I hadn’t been one of them. Now I was having second thoughts.
    Annie MacDougall ignored the sniggering. No doubt she’d had plenty practice, even before becoming a teacher. “Imagine you have something balanced on your outstretched finger,” she said. “A food bar, say. If you give it a gentle push it’ll rock up and down but return to its resting point. If you push it too far, however, it’ll fall right off your finger.”
    She looked from Frankie around the rest of the class and said, “A good way to understand what was