March 27, 2008

Letter written in the year 2070

I learned about this document quite fortuitously: someone emailed it to me from Colombia just a couple of weeks ago. It was in the form of a PowerPoint slide presentation.

It's a hypothetical letter wrtten by 50 year old a man in 2070, talking about how things used to be when he was a youngster. It's blood-curdling and poignant. You must see this - and, if you have children, show it to them. It's a message we all must see and spread as much as we can.

I was surprised to discover that it was created in 2002, and that, even though it has been circulating all over the web since then, I, constantly in search of material about the environment, had never seen it. I found somewhere a translation to English, obviously one of those horrible machine translations that are nothing but gibberish, and a Portuguese translation.

I have re-created it in Flash so that anyone who has a browser can see it. And you can see the original Spanish, or my English version - just switch to the language you prefer before you click the link below. You can just let the presentation run by itself (each slide shows for 12 seconds), or, if you want to jump to different slides or go faster, you will see some easy-to-use controls on the lower left. Enjoy.

Click here to see the presentation

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