Originally posted on Skoy Enterprises LinkedIn.
Let’s, just for a moment, pretend that our earth’s glass is half-full.
Rather than focusing on all that could go wrong in the next 10, 20, 50 years, let’s imagine what our world would look like should everything go right. Let’s imagine we actually save this planet, rather than destroy it.
Let’s imagine just a few hours in the afternoon in the year 2050.
The air feels a bit humid, a little hotter than decades in the past, but still bearable for a fall day in New York City. Since you’re not in a hurry, you decide to walk to the market rather than take your electric bike.
The streets are primarily for biking and scootering now, cars are rare, even electric ones. Being in the city, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to own a car. Abandoned parking lots have turned into community gardens and parks. Trees are everywhere. Billions were planted in the past 3 decades. They look nice on this early day of fall.
You take a turn into the local market to pick something up for dinner. There are essentially zero single-use plastics to be seen. Plastic tubs have been replaced by glass, aluminum, or plant-based jars. You realize you forgot your reusable bags at home, but there are free, compostable bags to put the fresh spinach you need for a salad in.
Having left it at an ex-boyfriend’s (unfortunately those still exist in the future) apartment, you need to grab a new toothbrush and toothpaste. In the health & beauty aisle, you grab a bamboo toothbrush and a new glass jar of toothpaste tablets. While you’re at it, you scoop two new bars of shampoo and conditioner.
In the next aisle down, colors pop from what used to be a completely white canvas. Rather than dozens of paper towels, paper plates, plastic cups, and plastic cutlery, there are Swedish dishcloths and bamboo/glass/aluminum plates, cups, and silverware. Having just composted yours a week ago, you pick up a new Skoy cloth and Skoy scrub. These will last you months and can be completely composted once they’ve done their job.
Leaving the store, it’s about to rain. So rather than walk or hop on a shared and electric scooter, you hop on the subway. The train itself and overall train system are completely electric—there are not even paper cards to swipe.
For dinner, you make grilled fish and a side salad with tomatoes and onions from the community garden. You haven’t eaten meat in years.
Later that night, you finally book that girl’s trip with friends to Nashville. Since flights are few and far between, and usually take much longer, you book a ticket on the all-electric bullet train. It only takes a couple of hours to get from New York to Nashville on the train.
There are still natural disasters. There’s still war. There’s still heartbreak and death and disease. The glass-half-empty realities of human life are still prevalent. But we are alive. We are able to survive and exist in a world where afternoon walks to the market can still be commonplace. And if that’s the case, the glass will always be half-full.