If you’re opening this, it’s 2050, and you’re about forty years old now – roughly the age I am now, writing this to you. Isn’t that wild? I wanted to write to you because I love you, and I don’t get to see enough of you or your brother and sister, and I know you love the natural world – you started collecting rocks and bones and feathers when you were so young, and you treasured this collection and always offered to show it to me when I visited. You raised money at your school to help with a rehabilitation project in the Eastern Cape – all the way on the other side of the world from where you are growing up. There are no rhinos or elephants in Connecticut, but you always look so happy and at one with the world when we visit the bush on your holidays in SA.

I’m nervous about where the world is heading and I hope, when you open this, your life is nothing like my fears and much more like my dreams. I do think it’s possible to change course and to build a different kind of world. I think it’s that belief that made me become a writer in the first place. If we can imagine it, we can build it. The problem right now, though, is that we are being held hostage by the imagined future of a few tech billionaires. They want a future of ever-faster, ever-more invasive tech, consciousness uploaded to the cloud, the replacement of all human endeavour with machines, and the complete isolation of each of us. We’ll turn to AI for companionship, and will exist as pure consumers. It’s a horrifying idea, and it’s so far from the kind of life that I find meaningful, it’s difficult to understand the appeal.

Now, in 2025, the fight for climate justice has taken a huge knock. Trump is in office, again, and his platform is vehement in its denial of all kinds of important things – medical science, white privilege, and climate change. Climate protections are being rolled back. “Drill, baby, drill” was in the inaugural address, and frankly, I feel quite hopeless about the world. Perhaps this dark chapter will be short-lived, but we won’t know that until a few years have passed.

In the world I hope you are living in, this dark chapter was a blip. The final paroxysm of an ageing worldview built on domination. Humanity woke up to the danger we are in, and instead of distracting ourselves with our devices, we tore it all down and started again.

I hope half the world is protected wilderness. I hope when you wake up, you hear birdsong from many different species of birds outside your window, that you get annoyed by all the bugs in the summer. I hope all the electricity in the world is from renewables and we don’t need that much of it anyway, because we are free from our screens and our devices. Instead of doomscrolling, you take walks – with your friends, with your partner and kids if you choose to have them – through the parks that cut through every major city. I hope it has stopped getting hotter every year, and that you still have autumn, and the bright red, orange and yellow leaves that make Connecticut so magical at that time of year.

I hope plastic has been banned, and that the fungi they are developing to eat it, which looks promising right now, have been a success and have digested it all out of the food chain. I hope forestry has returned to the ancient methods, and agriculture has returned to the ancient methods (no monoculture) and that if AI should exist, we use it only to monitor the health of various ecosystems so that we can restore balance to them.

I hope everything has slowed down – because what is the rush? What are we racing towards? I hope indigenous knowledge is more prominent, that we see ourselves as custodians of this planet, not the owners of it, and recognise that we are part of the web of life, not above it. Animals, like any other. Like all social species, we want to feel loved, safe, and like we belong. We want the freedom to be playful and maybe create while we’re alive. Everything else is incidental.

I hope you have inherited a world that is recovering from all that we have subjected it to, and that it fills your days with joy.

All my love,
Alistair <3