I have a new piece of short fiction today on OnlySky. It looks forward to a future where declining birthrates and global warming have become serious problems for the industrialized world, and explores the obvious solution – abolishing borders so that people can move from climate-change-ravaged areas to cooler lands where labor is needed. It imagines what a post-border world might be like for those who live in it, both the positives and the negatives.
Read the excerpt below, then click through to see the full story:
For the first time since the Industrial Revolution, our numbers as a species were declining every year. Capitalist economies premised on the assumption of infinite growth couldn’t cope. Stock markets stagnated, inflation surged out of control. Governments had belatedly tried to address the problem, but every means of encouraging people to have kids—longer parental leave, tax breaks, cash payments, religious scolding—had failed.
Rural villages were emptying out, becoming ghost towns. Grass and weeds pushed up through cracked pavement in silent streets. Abandoned cars decayed on the roadside. Vacant houses were overgrown with vines, dry leaves and birds’ nests. Trees sprouted like the vanguard of an invading army as forests spread and reclaimed the urban areas humanity had ceded.
I don’t know about that. In order for that to work, we’d have to collectively abandon certain forms of tribalism, particularly nationalism. True, your story implies that those future circumstances will have been what triggered that abandonment, but I don’t see that happening unless those will have already been on their way out, it just accelerated an existing trend. (Geez, writing about the past of a speculative future from the perspective of the present makes for some awkward grammar.)
I mean, that gradual decline of tribalism could happen. Borders are currently rather meaningless for communications and some forms of socialization in the age of the internet, and they can sometimes be inconvenient for international travel and trade. And it’s not like culture has ever commonly been discontinuous across borders. But they still very much matter for politics and some people’s identities, and those count for a whole lot.
I suspect that if things did go that way, the EU would have the easiest time of it. Their borders already kind of don’t exist for a lot of purposes – within the Schengen Area, anyway.