Popshot Magazine – August 2019

it as a testament to their rightness. They rolled-back protections on once-protected
land; they re-started shuttered oil fields and mines; they levelled wide swathes of
jungle and forest. And the earth grew more resentful.
The sky chided her: “How can man heed your warnings when your warnings are
so unfairly disguised?”
But earth had viewed her lavishness as a gift as well as a warning. And man had
squandered and befouled it. “He is a black hole that can never be filled.”
The first sign that all was not right was in the fruit harvest. Across the world,
apples and coconuts, pomegranates and pears grew to such size that the trees that
bore them began to snap under their weight, leaving fields of fruit rotting on the
ground. Gushing oil fields began to poison underground waters. Insects carrying
diseases known and unknown filled the air so that man was forced to flee indoors,
venturing outside only when necessary. And the earth’s fields and forests grew so
thick with green life that despite the efforts of man’s cutting machines, they began
to swallow up farmland, then villages, until only cities of concrete remained.
“What have we done to deserve this?” was a lamentation heard in many quarters,
in many languages. The earth observed these events without enjoyment, for she
was not without heart and not without pity. She had yet to decide whether none
would live, or some would survive, and whether she could trust any survivors once
they began, at some point and with her grace and protection, to proliferate.
She contemplated this problem as one would try to untangle a knotted spool
of cotton, pulling at first one thread, then another. As she did, once-endangered
creatures began to roam her plains and valleys, and jungle encroached further upon
the few unfallen cities, and man’s number continued to dwindle.
And the earth had never looked so beautiful.
The Farm by Joanne Ramos is published by Bloomsbury (£12.99)