Welcome to the April A to Z Blogging Challenge! Every year, bloggers from around the world commit to posting every day in April (except Sundays), working through the alphabet one letter at a time. This year, I’m visiting twenty-six fictional alternate Earths — worlds that diverged from our own at some crucial moment and became something wonderfully, unsettlingly different. Think of it like the TV show Sliders, which followed a group of travelers “sliding” between parallel dimensions, never quite knowing what version of Earth they’d land on next. Each day, we visit a new one. Today: G.

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The sky above the city is the wrong color.

Not wrong in a troubling way — not the sickly orange-brown you might expect from a world that had gone harder in the other direction. Wrong in the way that something beautiful sometimes is, when you’ve been told your whole life that it comes in one shade and then you step outside and find it in another. The sky over what was once called Detroit is a blue so saturated it looks painted, interrupted at the edges by the canopy line of the forest that has consumed, or been consumed by, or — more accurately — been woven into the city in a way that makes the distinction feel somewhat beside the point. Glass and oak. Solar panels and sugar maple. Streets of reclaimed stone running beneath a ceiling of interlocking branches that the city’s architects spent forty years deliberately cultivating into a living roof.

This is Green Earth. And it is, whatever else you want to say about it, genuinely, breathtakingly beautiful.

It is also a place where, if you want to have a child, you fill out an application.

The Winter That Changed Everything

To understand how Green Earth got this way, you have to go back to the winter of 1973, and specifically to a version of the Arab oil embargo that did not end the way ours did.

On our Earth, the embargo was painful — gas lines, rationing, a recession — but it was ultimately resolved. The oil flowed again. The lesson most governments took from it was that supply security mattered, which led to strategic petroleum reserves and diversified sourcing and a general recommitment to finding more oil rather than needing less of it. The crisis was a warning that the world treated as a logistics problem.

On Green Earth, the embargo did not end. Or rather, it ended in the worst possible way.

The precise sequence of events is a subject of some historical debate among scholars on Green Earth, but the broad outline is not disputed: in late 1973, a combination of pipeline sabotage, refinery fires of contested origin, and a catastrophic tanker collision in the Persian Gulf removed approximately forty percent of Western Europe’s oil supply not temporarily but permanently — or permanently enough that by the spring of 1974, three European governments had collapsed, two more were operating under emergency powers, and the United States was facing fuel shortages so severe that the term “rationing” had been replaced in official communications by the term “allocation,” which meant the same thing but sounded more manageable.

It was not manageable.

What happened next is what historians on Green Earth call the Reckoning, which is their word for the approximately eighteen months during which the governments of the industrialized world were forced to confront, in conditions of genuine crisis, the question they had been successfully avoiding for decades: what happens if we run out?

The answer, it turned out, was: this. This is what happens. Hospitals rationing heating fuel. Factories shutting down because the trucks that delivered their raw materials could not be filled. A winter in which the phrase “the heating oil didn’t come” stopped being a logistical inconvenience and started being, in parts of the American Midwest and the British Isles, a cause of death.

By 1975, the political will to do something that would have been unthinkable two years earlier had been generated — not by environmental conscience, not by scientific foresight, not by the kind of principled long-term thinking that people on Green Earth now credit in their history textbooks — but by the oldest engine of human change: sufficient, widely distributed suffering.

The Geneva Energy Accords of 1975 did not set out to save the planet. They set out to ensure that the winter of 1973 never happened again. The fact that the most direct path to that goal turned out to also be the thing that climate scientists had been recommending for years was, in the words of one of the Accord’s chief architects, “a fortunate coincidence we should be embarrassed to take credit for.”

What Was Built in the Rubble

The Accords established three things that changed everything.

First: a binding international commitment to phase out petroleum as a primary energy source within twenty years, backed by trade penalties severe enough that non-compliance meant effective economic isolation. This was not idealism. This was the industrialized world collectively deciding that it would rather spend the next two decades building something new than spend the next two decades being held hostage by a supply chain it could not control.

Second: the Global Restoration Compact, which redirected the capital that had previously flowed into fossil fuel infrastructure into a combination of renewable energy development and what the Compact called “ecological remediation” — a term that initially meant cleaning up the mess that extraction industries had made, and gradually came to mean something much more ambitious.

Third, and most controversially: the Population Sustainability Framework, which is the part that people on our Earth, upon learning about it, tend to find the most uncomfortable.

The reasoning behind the Framework was presented as scientific, and the science was not wrong: the crisis of 1973-74 had been a resource crisis, and resource crises are, at their mathematical core, a function of how many people are consuming how much of what. The ecologists and systems theorists who drafted the Framework’s foundational documents were not callous people. They were people who had just watched a supply shortage kill civilians in peacetime, and they were trying to build a world where that could not happen again. The licensing system for reproduction — which requires prospective parents to apply to a regional Sustainability Board, demonstrate financial and residential stability, and receive approval before conceiving — was not designed, its architects insisted, to control who could have children. It was designed to ensure that no child would be born into conditions where the resources to support them did not exist.

The distinction matters to the people who support the Framework. It matters somewhat less to the people who have been denied.

A City That Grew Up Instead of Out

Step through the portal to Green Earth and the adjustment period is unusual: things look better than you expected, and that makes the rest of it harder to process.

The cities are genuinely extraordinary. The integration of urban and natural space that began as an ecological policy in the 1980s has had forty years to develop into something that functions as its own aesthetic and architectural tradition. Buildings here do not have green roofs as an amenity. They have green roofs because a building without integrated plant systems is considered incomplete, the way a building without plumbing would be considered incomplete on our world. The distinction between “park” and “street” has blurred to the point where, in older neighborhoods, it has effectively disappeared — you walk through the city the way you walk through a forest, which is to say with the understanding that the path is a suggestion and the canopy is the ceiling and the ground underfoot is alive.

The technology is selective in ways that feel slightly off-kilter to a visitor. Clean energy infrastructure is extraordinary — solar collection, wind, tidal, and a geothermal network that was built out across the American Midwest in the 1990s and is still considered one of the engineering achievements of the century. Medical technology is advanced, funded generously by governments that understood early that healthy populations consume fewer emergency resources. Computing exists and has developed, though without the same commercial acceleration that characterized its growth on our Earth — the regulatory culture here is deeply skeptical of industries that scale rapidly and consume heavily, which has made the technology sector more cautious, more deliberate, and about fifteen years behind where we are.

Consumer culture is modest by our standards, not by theirs. There are things you cannot easily buy on Green Earth — certain plastics, anything with a supply chain that hasn’t been certified under the Compact’s extraction standards, fast fashion in the sense that we mean it. A twenty-year-old on Green Earth would look at the volume of packaging surrounding an average Amazon delivery on our world with the same expression your grandparents might have used for something casually wasteful in a way that felt vaguely immoral. It would not make them angry. It would make them sad, in the specific way of someone watching a person make an obviously bad decision.

The Map Has Edges

Here is the part the tourist brochures — if Green Earth had tourist brochures, which it does not, because interdimensional tourism is not yet a recognized industry — would not emphasize: the Framework’s map does not cover the whole world.

The Geneva Accords were signed by thirty-one nations. They were not signed by all nations. The countries that declined — a coalition that included, at various points, several major oil-producing states, a handful of rapidly industrializing nations that viewed the Accords as wealthy countries pulling up the ladder behind them, and a few outliers whose objections were more philosophical — did not disappear. They continued. They industrialized on the old model. They had complicated relationships with the Compact nations, relationships that involved trade in the Compact-certified goods that the non-signatory nations wanted and non-certified goods that the Compact nations officially did not import and unofficially, in certain quantities, did.

There is a word on Green Earth, used primarily in Compact nations, for the territories outside the Framework: the Unremitted. It is not a neutral word. It carries, depending on the speaker, registers of pity, of judgment, of guilt, of envy, and occasionally of longing. The people of the Unremitted territories have their own words for the Compact nations, which carry different registers but are similarly complicated.

The tension is not military — the Compact’s foundational documents included strong language against resource wars that has, mostly, held. It is economic, diplomatic, and deeply ideological. The Compact nations believe, or officially believe, that the Framework is the reason their air is clean and their cities are forests and their children have not experienced a resource crisis in fifty years. The Unremitted nations believe, or officially believe, that the Framework is a system of control dressed in the language of ecology, that the Population Sustainability Framework in particular represents an unconscionable intrusion into human autonomy, and that the fact that the people enforcing it happen to have clean air and beautiful cities does not make it right.

Both of these positions contain truth. This is what makes it a real argument rather than a simple one.

The Application

The Sustainability Board offices, on Green Earth, are pleasant. This is deliberate. They are built into the same integrated architecture as everything else — living walls, natural light, the sound of actual birds filtering in through windows designed to let in air without losing heat. The staff are, by all accounts, kind. The process is thorough and treats applicants, officially, with dignity.

None of that fully addresses the central fact of the thing, which is that you are sitting in a room, across from a person with a form, waiting to find out whether you are permitted to have a child.

The approval rate is high — around eighty-three percent of first-time applications are approved, and the appeals process has a reasonable success rate. The criteria are genuinely focused on what they claim to be focused on: financial stability, housing adequacy, demonstrated access to healthcare. There are no genetic components. There are no political litmus tests, or at least none that are formally documented. The people who work in the offices believe, most of them, that they are doing something important and humane.

The seventeen percent who are denied in the first round do not always experience it that way.

There is a movement on Green Earth — it does not have a single name; different chapters call themselves different things — organized around the position that the Framework, whatever its origins and intentions, has become a system that concentrates the power to define “sustainable” in the hands of people who already have enough. That the approval rate being high does not address the structural problem of approval being required. That a world where the air is clean and the forests are growing and a board of appointed officials can tell you that your family is not viable is not, whatever else it is, a free one.

The movement is not large. It is not, on Green Earth, considered mainstream. But it exists, and it is persistent, and the fact that the Compact nations officially consider it a fringe position while the Unremitted nations officially hold it up as proof of the Framework’s true nature has given it a strange double life — dismissed at home, weaponized abroad, which is a position that tends to make any movement feel, with some justification, like it is not being heard clearly by anyone.

What the Sliders Know

If you slide to Green Earth, you will stand in a city that is more beautiful than any city you have ever seen, and you will breathe air that is cleaner than any air you have ever breathed, and you will understand, in your body before you understand it in your mind, that something here went better than it went at home.

And then you will spend enough time to learn the rest of it.

The forests are real. The clean energy is real. The fact that this world’s atmosphere is not carrying the accumulated exhaust of a century of unchecked extraction is real, and it is not a small thing — it is, arguably, the thing, the thing that every version of our world was warned about and that this one, through catastrophe and political will and fifty years of deliberate reconstruction, managed to avoid.

The application is also real. The seventeen percent is real. The Unremitted territories and the complicated trade arrangements and the movement that can’t decide whether it’s a civil rights organization or a political party are all real.

You will leave Green Earth — you will want to leave, eventually, because the dial-up on Eternal 1999 Earth was excruciating but it did not require paperwork to start a family — with the particular discomfort of a world that cannot be cleanly categorized. It is not a cautionary tale. It is not a utopia. It is a place that made a genuine, costly, necessary choice and then made several more choices in the shadow of it, and some of those subsequent choices were wise and some of them were the kind of thing that looks like wisdom until you are the one sitting across from a government employee with an application.

The sky is still the wrong shade of beautiful as you go. The trees are still extraordinary. Both of these things remain true at the same time, which is, on Green Earth as everywhere else, the most honest thing that can be said about any world that human beings built.

Join me tomorrow for H — and another world waiting just beyond the edge of what we know.