What Will Our Planet Look Like If We Don't Protect It? These Dystopian Travel Posters Show Us

Have you ever wondered what our world will look like if we don’t start taking better care of it? Is it possible that someday we will be sipping mai tais on the coast of Nevada? Or that the Statue of Liberty will be just a torch sticking out of a very deep ocean? Maybe we could all plan a trip to go scuba diving in Washington, DC together?

Sounds scary, but sometimes we have to laugh or else we might curl up in the fetal position on the shores of our soon-to-be (if not already) polluted rivers. And right now, climate change regulations are being demolished, and we are living with an administration that wants to substantially cut the budget of the EPA.

Walden Hyde, an ad agency in Boulder, Colorado, has created a series of posters depicting what travel posters might look like in the future if we choose to ignore climate change. They are dark and sort of funny in a “WTF are we doing?” kind of way. Walden Hyde re-released the posters for the upcoming March for Science, and you can download any of the posters for free.

Scary Mommy spoke with Lucia Robinson, co-founder of Walden Hyde, mom to two young girls and all-around badass, about her company’s motivation for creating the posters. Lucia helped design them with the company’s art director, Stephanie Sizemore.

“As the mom of two girls, it’s important for me to teach them that women can take leadership roles in advocating for the environment. And like many working moms, I’ve had some guilt about working, so I want to put my time and energy into taking a stance for things that matter.”

But do the posters show a ridiculous interpretation of what could happen?

The EPA provides some pretty scary statistics if we don’t slow down our greenhouse gas emissions.

It’s a fact that the Earth is heating up. The EPA website states, “Earth’s average temperature has risen by 1.5°F over the past century, and is projected to rise another 0.5 to 8.6°F over the next hundred years.” By the end of the century, if we don’t make drastic changes, the average temperature in the U.S. is projected to increase by about 3°F to 12°F, and with every 2°F of warming, there is a projected 15% decrease in Arctic sea ice. It’s also possible that our oceans could rise 1 to 4 feet. Here is a map from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration showing what the U.S. would look like if sea levels rose 6 feet. That looks bad.

This is not the time to cut environmental regulations, decrease budgets for the EPA by 31%, and pull out of the Paris Agreement — which is an international pact to fight climate change. It’s time to start taking global warming seriously and make our own personal changes to reduce greenhouse emissions. If we don’t, Walden Hyde’s posters might be a horrifying prediction of our dystopian future.

You can join in on the March for Science, which was created to support scientific research, this Saturday. This planet is the only one we have. Let’s not destroy it before our children have a chance to live on it. And like the March for Science website states, “There is no Planet B.”