Cheryl Hillier's Letter

To everyone in 2022,

Message from the future

You’ll be pleased to hear that we found ways to be self-sustaining when external inputs became unreliable which put us in a good place to cope with change.

How did we do it?

You don’t know it yet, but some of you were able to start community growing projects to bring food security to your areas, many of you planted fruit and nut trees which have in the past few years started giving us enough bounty to share.

All over the world, regenerative farming has taken off; with fuel prices astronomical, artificial inputs were too expensive, we had to find friendlier ways to farm, it turns out that food is much healthier grown that way and we have barely a fraction of the diseases we used to – the hospitals are empty!

The relentless desertification and loss of soil you had back then, started to be corrected within a few years – from space the Earth now looks green again, instead of half of it being brown like it was in your day, and diversity is slowly returning.

Regenerative Agriculture has now sequestered so much carbon that the weather is starting to stabilise, but we still have some way to go on that, flooding is still a problem here in Wales, as are droughts, but having taken so much care with the soil now, it soaks up much more than it used to, and retains it.

We have salmon back in our rivers, because we learned to be more careful with all the chemicals and washing products that were going down our drains – it’s very difficult to buy anything that’s dangerous to wildlife now, or to humans for that matter .

In your day, everyone was pinning their hopes on electric cars, but we found that with community carpooling, and improved public transport, individual car ownership was an expensive luxury that we learned to live without, it’s a great way to get to meet people.

Everyone is much more energy conscious – we don’t waste anything! Our communities are thriving – we have experienced some shortages but sharing brings us together, everything is more equitable. With the global food shortages you were starting to experience back then, we quickly realised how important our local food producers were, food growing and food growers are now really valued. We are not travelling huge distances to work, and our work-life balance is much better than it used to be, we support our local businesses and we support each-other. On the whole, I’d rather be here than experiencing what you were going through in 2022.

We owe you a great debt of gratitude, we couldn’t have done it without you!

Many thanks from the future.