The future was once uncertain and a long time from now. It still is when we consider science and technology — we can make only the vaguest guesses about our discoveries and concoctions during the next century or so. But the future of nature is already quite evident. The determinants are presently in place, the momentum is set, and it’s mostly a matter of waiting. And, of course, hoping.

Nature is coming under threat from many sources. An exploding human population is displacing it. Unprecedented resource exploitation is consuming it. Toxic wastes are poisoning it. Climate change is stressing it. And we ourselves, thanks to the vast amounts of environmental information now available to us, are simply becoming more aware of our impact on the ecosystems that sustain us. Or, in one particular instance, our concern for nature just happens to be clarified by an anniversary.

Canada’s Maclean’s magazine has been in print for 100 years, an event that has inspired a retrospective of what has happened in this country during the last century, and a consideration of what’s to come in the next. For nature, as we understand it, the future does not look promising. Some ominous hints are provided in the title of one of the magazine’s features, “2075: A Memory of Nature”.

Our experience of nature, like our experience of everything, is based on memory — the frame of reference that imparts meaning to sensation by providing context. So our concept of nature is what existed as we became aware of it. Anything previous is history; anything future is abstract speculation. The way we now experience the Strait of Georgia, for example, is as an inland sea almost entirely devoid of whales. That’s what’s normal to us. But a century ago, it was home to dozens of resident greys and probably 500 humpbacks. Any boat trip anywhere in the Strait would likely have involved whale sightings.

If we had lived ashore on Vancouver Island a century ago, nature was the vast tracts of virgin rainforests that stretched endlessly; mountain after mountain and valley after valley. Now those old forests are logged, except for one valley on the east coast of the island and a half-dozen threatened ones on the west coast. Our sense of the grandeur of great trees now comes from their remnants in Stanley Park or Cathedral Grove. Now, even the vast pine forests of British Columbia could become a memory.

Had we fished from the French settlement of Louisbourg on Cape Breton Island in 1750, the average size of cod we would have caught was 100 pounds, and we would have devised ways of catching smaller ones because they were easier to dry and salt for shipment to France. Today, if we can catch cod at all, the size is 3 or 4 pounds. Fishing in BC’s coastal waters has undergone a comparable transformation since Maclean’s published its first magazine.

“People don’t really know what ‘natural’ is,” says Jeremy Jackson, a marine ecologist from the Scripps Institute of Oceanography in San Diego (Maclean’s, Oct. 10/05). “People think that ‘natural’ is however the world was when they were born. This attitude has a profound effect on our understanding — or lack of understanding — of the environment.”

For a five-year-old child today, 2075 will be a different place. Even in 20 years, predicts Jackson, dead zones of slime will be common in the Baltic Sea, the northern Adriatic, Tokyo harbour, Hong Kong harbour, and Moreton Bay in Australia. The dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, already the size of the state of New Jersey, will continue to expand, as will the scores of others that dot the world’s oceans. Most coral reefs will be grey and lifeless. “This isn’t science fiction,” says Jackson. He contends that “we are watching the death of the oceans.”

“If we look at the history of the land, what’s happened?” Jackson asks. “The first thing we did, we killed all the big animals, either because they were dangerous or because we wanted to eat them. The second thing we did was cut down the forest and plant corn and wheat. The same thing is happening in the ocean. We’ve killed all the big animals pretty much. Then we started on the equivalent of the forest — the coral reefs, the kelp forests, the oyster beds — and we’re killing them, too. And the third thing that is happening is the rise of slime. It’s as if we were going backward half a billion years.”

To these conditions already set in motion, we can add the voracious resource demands of a mushrooming human population of 6.5 billion, likely to peak at an additional 3 billion within a human lifetime. The consumption of fresh water is rising at twice the rate of the population so half the world’s people may be facing shortages by 2025. Higher global temperatures are predicted to cause massive crop failures within 40 years — the increasing levels of climatically disruptive greenhouse gases, at the moment, only seem controllable by nearly shutting down our economic system. The industrial mining of our oceans is now so thorough that they could be empty of fish stocks before today’s five-year-old child reaches early retirement. Melting ice caps and rising oceans will likely be displacing millions of coastal residents within a century.

By 2075, people will have a very different sense of nature, one marked by sparsity, precariousness and unpredictability. Its remnants, coloured by affectionate memories, will be coddled and protected, then bemoaned should any harm befall a surviving plant or animal. But nature’s primal forces, now aroused by our provocations, will have become a harsh, hostile and implacable enemy.

Margaret Somerville, in her 2006 CBC Massey Lecture Series, “The Ethical Imagination”, said that, “Hope has two beautiful daughters: Anger and Courage.” Although we may search for Hope, we are more likely to meet her two daughters.