All the big cats had gone, the bears too. All the large herbivores except domestic cattle had been hunted to extinction and there was now inadequate grazing and potable water for the cattle which were dying by the tens of thousands. There was no rhino horn to be had for impotent elderly Chinese men and their medicines had to do without tiger bones. Ivory was something only found in museums for there were no elephants left. So much for the dreams of bringing back the woolly mammoth. All the seals, whales, dolphins and the like had been eaten and the large aquatic mammals like the manatees and the dugong had long gone too along with the hippos. All the great apes and most of the monkeys were history. The entire crocodile family had disappeared early, for they had been ridiculously easy to catch, and avians of any size were now such a rarity that a sighting was talked about for weeks - like any other potential meal. Virtually all sharks had gone the same way, on dinner plates along with the rest of the fish too, victims of human hunger or human pollution. The ocean deeps had become as degraded an environment as everywhere else in the insatiable hunger of humans who had simply refused to slow, never mind reverse, their headlong quest to concentrate the entire biomass of the planet into their species.

Even the wolf was about to go, for the few remaining deer were over grazing their depleted habitats so rapidly most would starve to death within a few years and take their predators with them. The dreams of replacing animal protein with mycorrhizoid and algal substitutes had been just that, dreams, for the tanks had not enabled any to live better, they had merely enabled more to survive hungry. The environment was so badly degraded that most crops that any had bothered to plant had failed for years and as a result the human population was plummeting. The deaths were probably evenly split between starvation and human created toxicity. Much of the latter had been created centuries ago, and now the ‘safe’ containers of yore were finally breaking down, the killers of life were emerging as leachates to begin their deadly task. The forest trees and grass lands of the world were just history that none under the age of fifty could remember even ever having seen images of. There weren’t even any carrion eaters left to clear up the corpses.

The dystopian concept of Soylent Green was too high tech for a population that now existed as a no tech society rather than a low tech society. If food were available they ate it even if it were each other. Starving folk no longer had time to worry about discrimination, so they ate each other whatever they were, black, white, LGBT+, whoever. The most successful predator species the planet had ever seen now only had itself to prey on. Meat was just meat and a black, gay, catholic kept you alive just as well as a white, binary, Anglo-Saxon protestant and they all tasted the same.

On the plus side green house gas emissions had been plummeting for a couple of centuries or more, and Gaia was finally managing to deal with historic oil spillages, micro plastics and all other forms of pollution too. The only forms of life that were holding their own, and indeed proliferating, were the tiny floating zoo- and phyto-planktons of the oceans, viruses, bacteria and a few fungi, many of which were evolving rapidly and coping with their new environment. Lake Baikal was near enough potable though there was virtually no life there to drink, and the Aral sea had returned to its former glory, but without the fish and the wildlife. Places like Chernobyl had been reclaimed long since, but looked like deserts with neither plant nor animal life. The life there was mostly primitive unicellular organisms, but volvox like colonial life forms and euglina were evolving rapidly to take advantage of the conditions. Doubtless such places would make a recovery and evolution would start again, but it is unlikely many of the other organisms of Earth would be there to see it. Vertebrates no longer had an advantage. We had none else to blame but ourselves. I have to go now, for we are having some neighbours round for dinner tonight and there is much to prepare.