Every year when I sing in the Toronto City Opera chorus at the Bickford Centre, there comes a time when we go down to the basement and bring up the set pieces and props that are stored down there. The Bickford Centre basement is not for the faint of heart. The place is chaotically strewn with the detritus that accumulates from decades of schooling, with every kind of junk from file folders to obsolete computers. (I think there was a room like that in the Harry Potter books.) It gives me the creeps.
I was thinking, maybe this will be the fate of the world. Modern civilization is a machine that's developed to the point of spewing out junk faster than we can dispose of it, or even put it in order. As the twenty-first century progresses, maybe the junk will overwhelm us all. The earth may end up like that basement, with a million different things to show future archaeologists that we were here.
A few years ago someone wrote a book imagining what the earth would look like if the human race suddenly disappeared all at once. (After a few years the nuclear plants would explode.) Our physical legacy would gradually be eroded, but it would take some time. That's yet another book I want to read someday.
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