I hope this chronicle strikes a chord, for the end was not in the writing of the story, which again, I hope you liked. My writing, and even your reading, was just the beginning. 

Before we leave each other, please allow me to say that I do hope you enjoyed reading this story. That is, I hope that it entertained you on a sheer, visceral story level; that you got a kick out of it; that it was fun. 

But here, we’re going to get serious for a moment (although, whether you know it or not, we’ve been deadly serious for the entirety of this book), because more than being entertained (as if there is anything more important than enjoying a story!), I hope the issue at the heart of this story -- that is, of the destruction of the natural environment that we are facing today -- strikes a chord with you. 

And if it didn’t before, that it does now.

Having been privileged to receive this history of our planet’s future out of the Darchives,[1] where the knowledge of all possibilities is retained after it is first dreamed in the black hole out of which our universe is birthed, I feel emboldened to add a few short words of my own. 

We stand on the brink of a literary revolution: whereas most stories we encounter in our media recount events that have already happened, thanks to the intrepid spelunkers into the Darchives of the neuralnet, in this book, we have been able to glimpse the prehistory of times yet to come in the form of an adventure that not only ignites the imagination but kindles a fire for change.

As you’ve just experienced, The Girl who Rode the Unihorn is a soul-shaking journey into a world devastated by global warming, where the fight for survival intertwines with the majesty of nature. It is not just a novel, but an immersive experience in the reality of our planet’s future.

As such, this prehistory of times to come is a call to action. In the face of climate change, The Girl who Rode the Unihorn provides a disquieting reminder of the consequences of inaction, as it aims not only to entertain but also to inspire change. 

How can a story bring about change? you might ask.

In our times, we are faced with an unprecedented environmental catastrophe. Scientists from many different disciplines continue to add to our knowledge about this subject, but unfortunately, many times human beings are not motivated by facts. We hear and read every day about new scientific studies that predict the end of the natural world, but sometimes, perhaps, those studies, as valid as they are, fail to resonate, fail to make an impact: they’re so dry, so technical, so abstracted and so distant from our daily lives, which is one of the reasons I chose to write this book – to make the absolute disaster facing our planet -- facing the human race, and all other species on earth – real, visceral, and personal. 

Felt, not merely thought about.

Which intention, I hope – at least in some small way – I was able to achieve in the passing on to you of this history of our planet’s future. 

Daily we see in the print and video media scientific forecasts of the devastation being wreaked upon the natural world: droughts, glaciers’ melting, wildlife going extinct, air and water being poisoned, and all combined with and compounded by a rapidly heating planet. 

We have the information, yet we do nothing. The forces of greed and the apathy of a future that is too distant, too abstract unite to encourage our inaction.

It's our conviction that not only do we require information to save the planet, but we require a paradigm shift in our thinking, such as envisioned in this prehistory of times to come.

The world that Ròna and Cuilean inhabit is one that we will be living in if we continue down our current path of inaction on the trends towards environmental destruction. The devastating consequences of what is often called “global warming” are already being felt around the world, and the time is coming when we must take action to prevent further harm, or that harm will not be averted.

The devastating consequences of global warming are already being felt around the world, and the sands in the doomsday hourglass are trickling out. Soon, it will be too late to take action and stave off catastrophe. 

The time is drawing near when the course our world is on hits the environmental tipping point, the point at which the world of the DownBlow and the Wayp become inevitable. A “tipping point” is when a situation suddenly changes. It’s the last-straw that-broke-the-camel’s-back phenomenon. Everything is going just fine with loading the camel with straw, and the camel master decides that one more straw won’t hurt, but the result of adding the weight of that tiny straw to the camel’s load is the point at which the result to the camel (and its back) is totally out of proportion to the weight of the straw: The camel collapses with a broken back under the weight not of the single straw, but of all the straws.

Climate scientists tell us we are nearing our environmental tipping point. Everything seems to be going along hunky-dory, but the time is coming rapidly when the “camel’s back” of our environment is going to break, the signs of which include: 

• Massive, one-in-a-thousand-year storms – year after year. 
• Sudden experience of drainage of the aquifers – as for example, areas in the Southwestern United States are experiencing right now, resulting in communities not being able to provide water for desert cities such as Phoenix, and conflicts over increasingly scarce water resources. It should be added that the shrinkage of water supplies is a world-wide phenomenon, not isolated to a single region in the Americas.
• Poisoning of the oceans, lakes, rivers, as evidenced by the Great Sulphurific Garbage Patch, a continent-large collection of waste and refuge floating in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
• Destabilizing mass-movements of populations who are fleeing suddenly uninhabitable territories. 
• A die-off of species at a rate not seen in thousands, if not millions of years.
• The disappearance of fishing stocks – previously natural sources of wild fish have been shrinking to the point of being practically non-existent.
• Toxification of farm land from overuse of chemical fertilizers and profit-driven dumping of hazardous wastes. 
• Acceleration of species extinction, brought about by the squeezing out of non-human life forms from their natural habitats – either by human crowding or by the transmigration of non-native species because of climate change.
• The intrusion of heretofore unknown diseases as pathogens are enabled by changing climate and human crowding of isolated areas to invade human population zones. 
• The mass destruction of forests, wild areas, wet zones, coral banks, which heretofore have served as the “lungs” of the planet – but which are rapidly being killed off so that our mother earth will no longer have resources to breathe at all.

Those of us now alive may not live to see the utter devastation our choices today wreak upon the world tomorrow. But the morality of my actions does not depend totally on whether those actions hurt me. 

I could leave the glass from my broken beer bottle on the beach, and not care that it cuts the foot of a child I don’t know and will not see. 

I could dump oil into a stream and as long as I don’t drink the water downstream, not care who it poisons. 

These same kinds of choices face us today. Only the “later” is far later, and the “downstream” is downstream in time. 

But just because we perhaps won’t see the results of our actions – or our inaction – doesn’t mean they are justified. 

There are two considerations here: One is that it has been thought that the ultimate morality is to base one’s actions upon considerations of how the results of those actions will reverberate in time; in the case of the situation now facing us, how one’s decisions will affect generations unborn. 

Will a toddler cut her foot on the glass that I litter on the beach?

In a sense, it’s the planting a tree idea. Plant a tree today that you will not live to sit under because we are mindful of the benefit to future generations, to people who come after us. 

We don’t think just of our future, but the far future of the planet we live on that our descendants will live on.

The other idea is that we don’t refrain from polluting or destroying the environment just because how other people will be affected, but because the natural, which is to say, the inhuman, non-human, world has a right to existence in and of itself. 

The recognition of the rights of the natural world is alien to many modes of thought prevalent in our contemporary, industrialized, corporatized world, which is capable of conceiving of the world only in terms of human constructions. (As in, what good is the tree if I can’t cut it down and make a wooden nickel out of it?)

• Recently after a poisonous algae bloom that left the water of Lake Erie unusable for days, the inhabitants of the city of Toledo sought to protect the water on which they depended from the pollution of agricultural run-off. They discovered that this was legally impossible as the lake itself had no rights. Their recourse was to pass a law that gave rights against harm to the lake. However, a United States federal court overturned the law, ruling in effect that nature had no rights or protection against damage, as did neither the human inhabitants whose lives were harmed by the destruction of the environment in which they lived.
• Likewise, when it was suggested that the Brown Thrasher be replaced as the state bird of Georgia, arguments in favor of the much more profitable chicken, around which a major industry in the state was centered, went something to the effect of, “What has the Brown Thrasher ever done for the state of Georgia?” 

In this worldview, nature has no value unless and only to the extent that it can be monetized. 

However, what if we shift that paradigm? What if we come to see that a tree does not validate its existence because somebody comes along, cuts it down, and makes a table or a baseball bat out of its wood? 

What if we come to see that the tree’s existence is validation enough, in and of itself. That the tree doesn’t exist just for us, and that the crime of environmental murder is not just that humans are affected, but that all living things are affected. 

What if we imagine a world where nature is taken seriously – as in the culture of the Wayp in this history of the future? Such considerations are not so distant from our time of the 21st century. 

When indigenous people of non-European traditions seek to protect the land on which they live, they often refer to terminology which seems – to many Westerners – as quaint, backwards, primitive, superstitious, the native peoples often make reference to the spirit of a mountain, say, or the soul of a forest, or even the rights of nature or a part of nature, as a way of expressing the idea that contrary to the long tradition in the West of the dominion of humans over and ownership of natural resources – to laissez faire – to do with as they (we humans) please, nature itself is endowed with -- as stated in the Declaration of Independence of the United States in regards to “all men” – “certain unalienable rights.” Which usually means, in contemporary context, the right to strip mine, to burn the forest, to dump toxic run-off into waterways that people drink from and bathe themselves and their babies in.

When indigenous people of non-European traditions seek to protect the land on which they live, and the nature within which they live, they often employ terminology which seems – to many Westerners – as quaint, backwards, primitive, and superstitious, making reference, for instance, to the spirit of a mountain, say, or to the soul of a forest, or even to the rights of nature or of a part of the natural world, as a way of expressing the idea that contrary to the long tradition in the West of the dominion of humans over and ownership of natural resources – to laissez faire, to do with as they (we humans) please, nature itself is endowed with, as stated in the Declaration of Independence of the United States, “certain unalienable rights.” Which is usually taken to mean in the contemporary West, the right to strip mine, to burn the forest, to dump toxic run-off into waterways that people drink from and bathe in.

In contrast, in Africa, a tribal tribunal punished an entire clan when one of its members was found guilty of killing a mother hyena that was still suckling pups. 

The nation of Ecuador has incorporated into its constitution recognition of the rights of nature both to exist and to be unharmed by human action. 

In a similar vein, the Swiss Constitution recognizes both the rights of dignity to individual plants, the right of life to a species, and the right of an ecological system to biodiversity.

In the history of the future within these pages, we see two possibilities – one in which nature and humans thrive, and another in which the forces of greed and exploitation win out, and the world dies. This multiverse reality plays out in time as different potentialities manifest in parallel. The world described in these pages does exist, these events have happened, are happening, will happen.

However, a prophesy is not deterministic. There is still time. It is, like the fate of the cat in Schrodinger’s box, only probabilistic, only a possibility. 

If you’re not familiar with this thought experiment by the theoretical physicist Erwin Schrodinger, to explain uncertainty around particle physics: namely, that we cannot know with certainty the location – or state – of a particle until we observe it, not only that, but that the particle actually exists in two states, which he illustrated with the thought experiment known as “Schrodinger’s cat.” 

A cat is placed in a sealed box with a mechanism that contains a poisonous nuclear element. The mechanism might or might not release the poison that would kill the cat. Not only do we not know whether the cat is alive or dead, but more than that, the cat is actually both alive and dead. It’s only when we open the box and observe the cat does the reality (not just our knowledge of it) of the cat occur. 

Of course, Schrodinger’s Cat is a thought experiment, intended to show a difficult-to-understand aspect of the weird world of infinitesimal particle physics, that we think doesn’t play out in our macro world, but actually does, for all these events, and the possibilities of many more in the future, already exist. 

The good news is that the fate of the planet that is foretold in this history of the future is not pre-determined. What if we imagine a living world of the Wayp rather than a dead one of the DownBlow? Through our imaginations and our will, we have the power to create a human society that reveres the living world gifted to us by the Mother of all life. It is up to the readers of this history of the future to determine which cat they find in the box of the world to come – the live one, or the dead.

Before you go further, I have a request.

It is important to bring home the experience of climatic devastation that our Mother Earth is now facing. Which is also why I have made this book free or as low a cost on as many platforms as is possible, for it is my goal to get this book in the hands of as many people as I can. 

What we need to do to avert this foretold history is more than what we are doing. We need to change the entire paradigm by which we operate on this planet, and how we interact with the planet, because the old ways are killing us and killing our Mother earth. 

And you can participate in that change by sharing this story forward, for this is our future history. 

The paradigm shift starts now. 

The shift starts with you. 

Believe it. 

Share it.

Tell it. 

Change it.

Be it.

Okay, but I’m just one person, what can I do?

Remember the proverb of the Wayp -- 

Clann na Màthar ri guaillibh a chèile – 

Children of the Mother, shoulder to shoulder, arm in arm. 

Together we strive, 

together we live, 

together we survive, 

together we thrive.

Become a Guardian of the Forest alongside Ròna in her fight to protect the Mother. Changing the course of our future history is not accomplished individually. No one can effect it alone, separately. We must Link arms with others as a Guardians of the Forest of the Mother. You’ll not just be supporting the continuing telling of this story; you’ll be advocating for environmental awareness, action, and change. Together, we can kindle a spark that ripples beyond the pages of the book, fostering a collective consciousness for the preservation of our natural environment.

First – and this suggestion will seem strange in a world of competitive commerce, where every impulse is towards the realization of glory to the profit! I’m going to ask you not to make a profit; in fact, I’m going to suggest that you …

Share this book forward.

In other words, give it away. 

If you have a hard-copy book, when you have finished reading it, give it to a friend, and ask them to read it, and then to share it forward themselves. 

Or, donate it to a library. 

Or to a thrift store.

If you have a digital copy, point your friend to an Internet site where they can buy an inexpensive copy. (I will attempt to keep the price low, but the online retailers need to be compensated for their expenses of hosting the book.)

Even this is not the end-all and be-all, but hopefully it is the beginning. Let’s intensify the conversation about what we can do to turn aside from the course we are on and to avert the history of the future that has been recorded in these pages. 

How Else You Can Link Arms with Other Heroes:

Leave a review on Amazon, or on another book-retailer’s website, or a social media site such as Goodreads or Facebook will encourage other people whom you don’t even know yet to learn this history of our future. 

You will not just be supporting a story; you’ll become part of a changing the destiny of our Mother Earth. Your participation will shape the destiny of people yet to come, influence their stories, and impact the world. With your support, we'll not only tell an unforgettable story but also contribute to the urgent cause of safeguarding our planet.

Thank you for being a part of this change. Together, let's undertake the writing of a story that transcends fiction, the creation of the epic adventure to save our world, one story at a time.

[1] Darchives -- the dark archives – contained within the neuralnet; the “memory” of the cosmic mind, the source of all being and the repository of all knowledge.