"Visit of the Librarians..."

Year 1215 PGB


Part I

The Chronicle Begins

The day after New Years was a dark, gray day in the year 1215 AGB (after GWB). But virtually every day was like that after the switch to the burning of toxic coal as the fuel de jour.

Glotus looked out the porthole and coughed up again. He looked at his log book and his notes wondering if he would live long enough get through them.


His mind started to wander after the first transaction and by the time of the second, he already had a feeling he knew where things were.

He started to write again about how he imagined it had happened based on his library research that had taken him most of the week before. His enthusiasm for the project was boundless and he was looking forward to completing it in the time allocated by the project’s leader, Prometheus, senior historian at the great library…

He picked up his pen and felt a kind of power surging through his fingers as he started to write… In some respects, he felt like a new age Dickens shining a spotlight that countered the false truths subscribed to by the government before reality set it…

“ Never before had people been able to taste the air or wipe it on their dungarees as they emerged from their sullen black holes to begin a day that began in the dark and ended the same way, each day a stunning day of sameness trudging off to perform some pedestrian task that gave boredom a new definition. This was the result of the Bushian siege of the environment, a siege that left no winners except those consumed by avarice. It was the notion of Midas infecting their minds all over again!

“ Yes, now we had fuel but we lacked virtually everything else. In the beginning, diversity of species had early on triggered concern. But nobody believed that thousands upon thousands of species could ultimately disappear. It began with the fish and spread mercilessly. In the beginning, the fishermen complained about over-fishing and the Russian and Japanese trawlers that had scooped everything from the seas without thinking about what the future might hold. At the same time, government’s cut down their ancient growths to satisfy demands for burnished woods…. Animal species were directly affected by the growing abuse. Fish, frogs, birds, fox, wolves and other more exotic species once so very common had simply disappeared. Species were fast becoming the mythology of the future to be described to youngsters who would never see a wildebeest or a buffalo or a Yak…

“Yet, the remaining government institutions attacked the rest of us for becoming alarmist and not realizing that there was no such thing as over use of natural resources. God had planned for this as part of the pattern of intelligent design. Interestingly, and a positive by-product of the apparent loss of species, was the attendant loss of these spokesmen who are willing to say anything to hold onto their jobs. They seem to be vanishing too and that was part of the positive irony of all of this…