Earth 2100

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In my life, I've seen

New York City under full quarantine.

The Midwest, overrun,

devastated by pests.

Plagues sweep across California.

And then what happened next was

something none of us saw coming.

It became a race against time

to save our future,

to even have a future.

It's the year 2100 and I survived.

To change the future,

first you have to imagine it.

'Earth 2100"

starts now.

The idea that within this century,

perhaps in your lifetime,

our civilization could lie in ruins

seems unbelievable.

But according to some of

the world's leading minds,

that's not just a worst-case scenario,

it's a real possibility.

Good evening, I'm Bob Woodruff.

Over the next two hours,

we'll take you on a journey into a world

that could await us and our children.

And we've taken the liberty

of creating one more,

a fictional character we're calling Lucy,

who will be our guide through this century.

Her life story is not a prediction

about what will happen,

but what might happen.

This once glorious city,

whose lights at night could be seen for miles,

empty now.

It's towering skyscrapers,

once a testament to our ingenuity,

now stand as crumbling monuments

to our demise.

Maybe only artists can grasp what that

kind off future really holds for us.

It's perhaps in the area that we

think of today as science fiction,

but that could be a very real

future for the planet.

A hundred years from now,

if New York is abandoned,

I can imagine some advanced creatures,

maybe humans, maybe extraterrestrials,

looking at New York and saying,

those ignorant people, how on Earth could

they have ever expected to survive?

I can ask myself what happened,

but where do I begin?

With the droughts,

the famines, the plague?

It began long before all that.

I lived through it al.

My story is everyone's story,

the story of the last century.

I was born June 2nd, 2009.

Civilization was at a crossroads.

We were in a race for our future.

Today, I say to you that the

challenges we face are real.

They are serious and they are many.

The temperature is

expected to keep going up.

The stock market plunged.

Douglas County will

run out of drinking water.

They will not be met easily

or in a short span of time.

Sixth grader came down with

suspected swine flu on Wednesday.

Energy, climate, food,

population, economic pressures,

any one of these challenges might

be very serious in itself.

But because they're happening

all simultaneously,

it's going to be very difficult

for our governments to cope.

When I look at the next century,

I feel it's up for grabs.

- Raising sea levels...

- Catastrophic weather.

- Ten-year drought...

- it's scary.

These are things that are happening today.

The time for action is now.

The world had never

known such uncertainty.

We were used to having what we

wanted and doling what we wanted.

The analogy that I would draw is

someone looking at their bank account

and week after week, they're withdrawing

money and they're enjoying the good life.

If they would bother to read the statements,

they would see that the bank account

is dropping $900, $800, $700, $600.

And at that rate you know that

another six months of the good life

is not gonna be a good life anymore.

We've acted as though we were

independent of the environment.

We burned fossil fuels.

We've overused our renewable resources

in the belief that we could do that forever.

People are complaining about the

economic crisis we have right now.

You haven't seen nothing yet.

You know, if we continue down this

suicidal pathway that we're on,

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