I was a teenager when I first became aware of the need to protect our environment, and if you’d asked me then I would have said that after a terrible century the tide was finally turning in favour of the green movement. By 2017 we’d be driving solar-powered cars, the seas would be teeming with humpback whales and the only oil in our homes would be for making stir fry. How wrong I was, with my naive dreams of a windmill outside Pier Road car park.

Almost 15 years have passed since Michael Jackson released Earth Song, and still, we refuse to heed its simple message of respecting the planet, earning the trust of elephants and the idea that MJ might be the second coming of Jesus. The problem has got worse, as MJ has seemingly returned to space and the effects of our reckless consumption are being felt from the smog of Beijing to the droughts of California. Perhaps where Michael went wrong is that his message was too global, too universal, and out of reach for people who just need to start by making a difference in their everyday lives. We need to save the earth, but maybe the best place to start is with ourselves – we need to look at the man in the mirror, and ask him to make a change. If that man in the mirror is you, here are some easily achievable ways you can put yourself on the right path with the planet – perhaps eventually to get those elephants to start taking your calls.

Recyclopathic tendencies: charity shopper

The biggest way you can make a difference to the environment is in changing your patterns of consumption. In simple terms that means buy less stuff, especially new stuff, and make the stuff that somebody has already bought go a bit further. You can learn to repair your clothes by darning socks and patching things with holes in them, for that ‘eighties maths teacher’ vibe. Don’t buy the latest smartphone, proudly use a Nokia. Dump Xbox One for a Super Nintendo, and buy your books, clothes, DVDs and medicine exclusively from Jersey’s massive selection of charity shops. This will mean that you save stacks of money through an entertainment programme made up of the lesser films of Adam Sandler, but also that you will be functionally indistinguishable from a hip art student who’s returned to the island from Brighton. That’s not a problem if you’re in your 20s and like the idea of dating a gender fluid sculptor called “Fox Vortex”, but will be a bit harder to pull off if you work in finance and turn up to the golf course dressed like a broke Russell Brand. Stick with it, because Fox Vortex can do things with a chisel that you wouldn’t believe.

Eat local, buy local: mainly vegetables

When you start reducing your footprint through buying everything at charity shops, you’ll soon accumulate large collections of last year’s fashionable cookbooks. This is fine, as the only difference from this year’s fashionable cookbooks is that the celebrity chefs will have had a little more botox, and you can recreate this effect by rubbing warm lard into the Helmsley sisters. There will always be piles of surplus miracle diets, and those are only worth buying to burn as fuel because the secret to losing weight and saving money boils down to exactly one piece of sensible advice: eat mostly grains and vegetables, and ideally those grown in the parish of St Ouen. You don’t need to juice them or eat them raw either, just cook them in basic recipes (with cream and butter if you want them to taste better) and serve yourself smaller portions. Not complex, and you can live well on about £20 of food a week. £20? I heard that sharp intake of breath. Yes, £20, even in Jersey, because the answer to supplementing your diet is to understand that, with the exception of fresh meat and dairy, sell-by dates are a conspiracy maaaan – so you can save loads by transforming into one of those people who hang out at the supermarket an hour before closing time. You may have a week eating marked-down Muller-rice for every meal, but it will cost you about 50p a day and you’re saving all the fuel needed to ship you something that doesn’t taste like wallpaper glue.

Make love to the land

Well, not literally, but it is worth considering how problems with the global environment are just an extension of bad decisions we make in our own back garden. Most of us work out Jersey is very small by the time we’re old enough to ride our BMX further than the next parish, and it should be obvious that we don’t have infinite space to bury our rubbish. We clearly don’t have any fresh water beyond what falls out of the sky, our roads aren’t going to get any bigger and anything we dump into the streams will end up coming out of our taps or floating around in the beaches we all love so much. Given how obvious this is, you’d think we’d all be natural environmentalists, applying the life lessons from a tiny home to the problems of the entire world. Anybody who’s seen the 8AM traffic can tell you that we fall well short of being an island of eco-warriors, and the soggy green carpet covering St Aubin’s Bay is evidence of our inability to respect our water supplies. But – the change can start with you. Any time you think about binning an object without recycling it, think of that mountain of waste at La Collette, and every time you wash something away try and consider whether you’ll be okay drinking its residue in a few years. I’m not suggesting that anybody form a band of masked vigilantes to deal with dog poop and fly tipping, but I promise I’ll look the other way if you do.

Don’t go anywhere unless you can get there on foot

Carbon-neutral personal transport is a pipe dream for most places, but in Jersey it really is possible. Any able-bodied adult could technically cycle or walk to work – even if they live in L’Etacq and work in Gorey, and doing that every day would save you time and money from going to the gym. If you’re pining for arm day just do your bike commute carrying a couple of bags of (eco-friendly) cement. The wonders of the internet mean you don’t actually need to leave the house at all if you don’t feel like it, although you musn’t cheat and get all your shopping delivered by a stinky big diesel van. Use your environmental conscience as an excuse to skip useless social engagements and family gatherings, and you’ll further reduce your footprint by not needing to buy birthday presents because you’ve become a bearded shut-in. You won’t wear shoes, will read only third-hand paperbacks and eat Muller-rice in a hovel decorated with old pictures of Nigella, warmed by a pile of animal skins harvested from irresponsible Chihuahuas and their owners. I guarantee that if you pursue this policy for a year, you’ll save enough carbon to enjoy a relatively guilt-free flight to the exotic paradise known as Alderney. Michael Jackson might even collect you from the airport.

The people behind Gallery are responsible, so the articles in this earth-themed issue are likely to give the readers a gentle prod in a slightly more sustainable direction. We all know we should recycle more, consume less and generally take better care of our planet – because it’s the only one we’ve got.

Those who disagree regard our planetary home as an infinite well of resources that must be exploited for maximum profit; they shrug off the evidence of our impact on the globe as questionable, biased or just “alternative facts”. In an age of melting glaciers and dying forests those people are starting to look very stupid indeed, but they’re in control of the world, and even as we battle them a third viewpoint has emerged. It is held by a faction who definitely agree that our species is ruining the planet, but their preferred solution is that we keep burning up resources, industrialise at a faster rate, and work together for a common goal – not to save our planet, but to leave it behind and find a new one.

Moonbase Amazon and the MMyspace from Mars

Colonising new worlds has been a dream of humanity for centuries, a goal expressed eloquently by utopian thinkers who thought that the human race was capable of coming together as one and making a new home amongst the stars. The likes of Arthur C Clarke gazed upwards to the heavens in hope, but today’s proponents of interplanetary travel are less socially idealistic. They are predominately drawn from the ranks of the super-rich, specifically California’s high-technology billionaires, and are attracted to space travel because they either can’t be bothered or lack the capacity to solve any problem on Earth that can’t be addressed with an app. These people certainly aren’t short on belief in their own abilities, but the only hitch is that establishing an off-world colony is, to put it mildly, somewhat more challenging than arranging to dodge tax on 24-hour delivery of a Sherlock box set. I too want to live on a planet with breathable air, so on the assumption that they are monitoring my email I’ve listed some roadblocks that our saviours will need to overcome. 

Challenge 1: the massive level of resources required to leave Earth’s orbit

There’s a reason that nobody has been to the moon recently, which is that the trip is incredibly dangerous, requires a highly-trained crew and expends gigantic quantities of fuel just to push a small rocket into orbit. Even once you’re in space the moon is still three days away, through a vacuum dotted with radiation and flying rocks – the AA don’t offer breakdown coverage out there. The International Space Station is a wonderful achievement, but in space colony terms it’s the planetary equivalent of camping at the Minquiers and telling people you live in the ocean. Russian technology is currently the only way to ride, and nobody wants to put all our space eggs in the basket called “Offworld Aeroflot”. So, the dotcom billionaires are first going to need to work out a safe, cost-effective way of lifting millions of tonnes of stuff into orbit without any of it blowing up or falling back down, and then assembling it into the interplanetary equivalent of Virgin Atlantic, Heathrow Airport and those little buses that carry your suitcase. I assume the inventor of Uber is on the job, but they haven’t even worked out how to operate in Jersey, let alone deep space.

Challenge 2: the immense difficulty of long distance space travel

At currently achievable speeds, a journey to our nearest potentially inhabitable neighbour (Mars) would take between seven months and a year. This trip would already be several orders of magnitude more dangerous than any journey undertaken by a human crew, and would need to be conducted in a vehicle that could contain all of the necessities for habitation, ship repair and eventual long-term survival on a planet with an average temperature of -55°C. When you consider that the vehicle would also need enough space for a large crew to move around, exercise and interact without killing each other you’re going to end up with a space rocket at the very least the size of a nuclear submarine, which drastically increases both the fuel requirement and the danger from space debris. There is a possibility that a colony waypoint could be constructed in Mars orbit by robots, and get everything ready for a much smaller human-crewed vehicle, but if we’re being lead by Californian techies we’ll be expecting this to be done safely by a community who can’t even stop Russian teenagers from hacking your fridge.

Challenge 3: the unprecedented task of creating a habitable environment

If challenges #1 and #2 are difficult, but ultimately achievable, engineering tasks, then this one is a whole different ball game. Remember, we are talking about a species that couldn’t work out how to safely manage the ecosystem on the one planet perfect to support it, and is nonetheless expecting to develop technology to wholly adapt a hostile foreign environment to its incredibly precise needs. Humans struggle when there’s too much pollen in the atmosphere, but colonising space will require us to create a breathable environment and produce food on an entire alien world. What if we get to Mars and discover it’s covered in space gluten? We’d be dooming our descendants to bloating, tiredness and bad skin. That’s a silly example, but reality holds a million unknown dangers – evolved human germs, unknown Martian bacteria, new toxins. The scientific community can’t even agree on whether butter is bad for you, so personally I’m not taking their best guess on whether my descendants can live on Mars without recreating the pyramid scene from Total Recall.

Challenge 4: recreating human society on a foreign world 

Based on our history, the biggest challenge to extra-planetary colonisation won’t be space travel or the science required to settle a new planet, it will be the part of our brains that has barely evolved from our vicious monkey ancestors. If it’s possible that humanity can somehow scrape together enough resources to escape Earth, the prevailing scientific dream has been that this effort will be lead by the best and brightest among us, the selfless elite who see through petty squabbles and work in service of our shared humanity. The problem is that these people will need to bring the rest of us with them, and the likelihood is that the colonists to our new home will be chosen by President Donald Trump and some billionaire sociopaths from San Francisco. If we assume that even a barely functioning Mars colony might take 10 to 30 years for them to build, can you imagine what kind of a place will greet new arrivals once those people have finished work? A freezing, potentially poisonous mass of dead rock, adapted for humanity by the hand-picked servants of a sweet potato fascist and people who spy on their staff during toilet breaks. The Total Recall comparison was supposed to be a joke, but it might not be too far from the truth. We will have ruined a perfectly good planet, travelled across the solar system at the cost of many lives, and the only thing we’ll have to show for it is self-driving cars, psychic mutants and a radioactive hooker with three boobs.

I like to think of myself as a rational person, and would normally shy away from ascribing world events to anything other than randomness combined with human stupidity. I’ve always believed we are alone in the universe, have no higher purpose, and that civilisation is a barely-functioning birthday party that only manages not to destroy itself through sheer luck. I’ve never believed in fate, or gods, or hidden conspiracies – and then 2016 happened.

Yes, there have been worse years for humanity, and yes there have been worse years for me personally, but there was something about 2016 that wormed its way beneath my psychic armour and made me believe that some powerful hidden force was out to get us. Global events frustrated me on such a personal level that I stopped believing in random existence and started searching for a malevolent force that was determined to crush my dreams, one vote/disaster/minor celebrity at a time.

As usual, greater minds than mine had got there first. The secret rulers of our world may be obscured, but nothing can be hidden for long when you have glimpsed the truth and possess unmetered access to the greatest tool yet invented to disseminate human knowledge: the internet. I ventured to the civilised, intellectual spaces that make up our online culture and asked “whose idea was it to make 2016 so bad?” Like angels, a thousand voices spoke in return. Some were sweary, many were racist, and several asked if I would send nudes. A smaller number spoke the truth – these are their stories.

Our world is controlled by … a secret religious order

When there was just one religion, perhaps a group of half-apes worshipping forest spirits, the sun or a black monolith, humanity would have been relatively calm. Maybe a bit of incest and cannibalism, but nothing too bad, such as holy war or Songs of Praise. As soon as our numbers expanded enough to splinter into rival beliefs you would soon have had the bad stuff: war between the log worshippers and the monolith priests, sectarian persecution of the sun monkeys and Songs of Praise. You also would have had the growing belief that every problem in forest/monolith/sun society was caused by a shadowy religious order drawn from one of the others. In various civilisations this role has been forced on most religious minorities, but according to the greatest minds replying to YouTube videos it’s definitely either the Freemasons, the Templars or the Illuminati. Maybe all three. These groups are said to influence governments, have access to secret history and (according to my sources) to have arranged for the abduction of Prince and Lemmy from Mötorhead in order that Donald Trump can drink their vital fluids and regrow his hair. They will not rest until we all have joined them – a bit like Amazon Prime or the Jersey Buy and Sell Facebook group.

Our world is controlled by … an international financial conspiracy

To some truth seekers, talk of religion is just a smokescreen. Religion is the opiate of the masses, there only to distract us from the actions of our true masters: the secretive financial cabal that has controlled human society since the invention of paper money. Yes, long before chip and pin. Sometimes known as the Bilderberg group, sometimes operating under the auspices of the Rothschild family, this pinstriped priesthood is said to manipulate global events in order to enrich themselves beyond measure: rich enough to purchase George Michael and David Bowie, arrange a cover-up and to fund a cloning programme to repeat Band Aid. They are said to be behind every global war, every international treaty, every dictatorship and election throughout our world. It’s amazing when you think about it, although it still doesn’t make sense that an all-powerful global banking conspiracy still can’t do anything about those Nigerians who stole the balance from my PayPal account.

Our world is controlled by … an artificial intelligence operated by the shadow government

If there is a flaw in the (otherwise-watertight) theory that human society is controlled by a religious order, or a global capitalist bloc, it’s that there are limits to the organisational powers of even these two secret master conspiracies. The ability to perfectly synchronise wars and conflicts to empower and enrich your hidden sect would need such an incredible level of precision that it would need to run like clockwork on a global scale. Humans are intellectually incapable of that level of organisation, and it is therefore obvious (quite obvious, in fact, except to sheep or idiots) that the guiding hand could only be provided by some kind of globe-spanning artificial intelligence. Housed in a subterranean complex below the Pentagon, the UN headquarters or the Bullring Shopping Centre in Birmingham, the vast intellect of this machine would be able to monitor every human event through surveillance cameras implanted in our ubiquitous electronic devices. It would be a glowing, liquid-cooled hybrid of Skynet and Clippy from Microsoft Office XP; 2016 was the year it achieved full awareness and decided that humanity must be destroyed. The election of an orange-skinned reality TV star to the most powerful job on the planet was one step, the elimination of Paul Daniels and Terry Wogan was another. The Y2K millennium bug was just a drill.    

Our world is controlled by … an advanced alien race who manipulate our species for their own purposes

Providing you have an open mind, it is easy to accept that we are trapped in an advanced holographic simulation in order to provide power for sentient machines who manipulate our emotions by abruptly cancelling The Great British Bake Off. What really stretches the imagination is the idea that humanity could invent something as complex as a globe-spanning artificial intelligence without it going wrong. We can’t even connect fridges to the internet without hackers trying to use them to bring down the American government, so how on earth would we invent a sentient Artificial Intelligence without it getting infected by pornographic Ukrainian spyware? The answer is that we didn’t “invent” it, because the Bilderbergers and Illuminati have all along been getting IT support from an advanced race who have monitored us since the days when we worshipped logs and ate each other. Their motivation is far from benign, as the entire history of our pathetic species is just a soap opera for a race of shape-shifting iguanas from the Proxima Betelgeuse system. 2016, as awful as it felt to many of us, was nothing more than a Christmas episode of Eastenders where they ramp up the drama by killing a bunch of people off and introducing a new villain. Your pain and suffering is Ian Beale losing the keys to his chip shop and Phil Mitchell hitting the bottle; your joy and happiness is Pat Butcher finding an especially gaudy pair of earrings. Resistance is futile, and they are watching my every move. I’ve already said too much, but if you need to hear more of the uncensored truth you can just follow me on Twitter or subscribe to my YouTube channel. Watch the skies!