A Natural Theme is Hard {Gaia's Lament}

Lucius's wedding was coming up soon and it was beyond hectic. He was apart of a wealthy family, so it had been decided to use a natural theme, without his consent he always noted. Weddings were usually annoying to make happen, but add on top of that he had to find plants. The centerpiece was the hardest to find, but eventually he found a service where you could rent a tree in a pot, from what he knows the tree is smaller than what they used to be in the wild, but he couldn't be that picky. It's not like trees are that widely available. Then he had to get the catering, and his family insisted that he should find mostly natural food, they suggested to get a bunch of fruit and said that they would pay for it. That was a find idea, but not when you had to track down the food. Most of the fruit he found was to be rented and shown off, not eaten. Eventually he found a few orchards and farms that would sell them food, but for a really high price, he still coughed the cash up though. He wondered what it was like back in the day, where you could just go to the store and get a ton of fruits for not that much money. Before that people did rent pineapples to be fancy, but still. Only tropical things being scarce is still much better than almost all natural foods being rare. If he remembers right then most of his food woes come from overpopulation which was because of people still wanting families even though there was a time where people's want to have family decreased. For some reason once benefits made children not a liability anymore child rearing went up a few decades after that was introduced. That was such a big deal, so most places farmed almost exclusively efficient food, things like potatoes, corn, beans, squash, and wheat. Yes, the farms with other plants were still around, but with how heavily subsidized the more efficient food was the others didn't stand a chance to be good in that market. Then he came to the hardest challenge, the flowers. Flowers used to be abundant, and easily available. However, with what was prioritized beautiful things didn't really get top billing. The only flowers he could find were red or white roses, back then he might have been able to find a plethora of different flowers, but the only reasons roses survived was because how important they are as a symbol of love, so that's all he got. As he went through the trials and tribulations of finding most of the natural stuff he wondered if maybe one day in the future people will be able to get all those things that they love and we'll all be able to survive, but for the middle classes taking a long shower is still a luxury, and a long hot shower isn't even something they think of, but it seems like the population boom was behind us and the population will shrink a bit. After that it might go back up, but from what was studied it probably won't go up as high as quickly. After the wedding bells rung and he kissed his love he looked around a little bit more. The wedding was beautiful, but even with the theme it didn't seem like it had that much nature, a single tree in a pot standing tall, a few roses strewn about, but not much more than that. He was still only standing on concrete and there wasn't an inch of green grass in sight, that venue was there, but the price was so much only royalty or people of that class could get it. The pictures of long ago are so strange, seeing the beautiful lush forests and green grass on lawns is mind boggling. Now the so called urban jungle seems to reach everywhere, and where it's not that it's most likely only a desert, so not much green there. He couldn't do that much about it though. The only thing he could do is try to vote for candidates who are trying to bring back a bit of green or hope that the future generations will be kinder to the planet than the past few have been.