The Redemption of Christopher Columbus

From Pastwatch, a most excellent science fiction work by Orson Scott Card, 1996

Some people called it "the time of undoing"; some, wishing to be more positive, spoke of it as "the replanting" or "the restoring" or even "the resurrection" of the Earth. All these names were accurate. Something had been done, and now it was being undone. Much had died or been broken or killed, and now it was coming back to life.

This was the work of the world in those days: Nutrients were put back in the soil of the great rain forests of the world, so the trees could grow tall again. Grazing was banished from the edges of the great deserts of Africa and Asia, and grass was planted so that steppe and then savanna could slowly reconquer territory they had lost to the stone and sand...In great preserves the surviving animals learned how to live again in the wild. All the nations of the world had an equal claim on food, and no one feared hunger anymore...

It should have been a happy time, with humanity pressing forward into a future in which the world would be healed, in which a comfortable life could be lived without the shame of knowing that it came at someone else's expense. And for many...it was. But many others could not turn their faces from the shadows of the past. Too many creatures were missing, never to be restored. Too many people, too many nations now lay buried in the soil of the past. Once the world had teemed with seven billion human lives. Now a tenth that number tended the gardens of Earth. The survivors could not easily forget the century of war and plaque, of drought and flood and famine, of desperate fury leading to despair. Every step of every living man and woman trod on someone's grave, or so it seemed.

I first read this book when I was 14-15-16ish and think of it often. In that story, though, the world is saved from catastrophic climate change (you know, the one everyone's still afraid of) because some people go back in time and divert the mission of Christopher Columbus just enough to save the indigenous Americans and alter the course of the United States dramatically.

Hey, have I been talking about all of the same things lately? Yes, it is true. I'm chewing my way toward finding something productive to do with my "desperate fury leading to despair." Apologies, maybe, for dragging you through the process with me.