III. DESCRIPTIVE/INTERPRETIVE FUNCTION OF MODALS: DESCRIPTIONS FROM THE SPEAKER'S POINT OF VIEW (OPINION)

Example

If everyone would clean up their garbage, our neighborhood would be nicer.

• Here, obviously, it is not possible for everyone to be nice, so it is a hypothetical or imaginary situation. In the past, the cause has already happened, and you cannot change the past to get a different result.

Contrasting Worlds

Imagine if we 'human animals' didn't take care of our animal family and they were all to go extinct. Even if we only caused the extinction of many of the animals on the Earth, it is hard to imagine a more dull and boring world. Hikers would not have to worry about encountering a bear on the trail because there wouldn't be any, but neither would they experience the joy of seeing a grizzly bear in the distance, minding its own business while feeding on salmon from a far. There would be no bald eagles floating in the sky. The African savannah would be empty, except for grass that is much longer than normal because there would not be any animals to eat it. The few birds that we would see would mostly be of the same breed—crows and brown scavengers, with no colourful hummingbirds flitting around and no vibrant parrots.

Children would go to the zoos and see only live insects or maybe a few small lizards, mice or rodents. Instead of seeing elephants, tigers, and hippopotami, there would only be fake animatronic animals, moving clumsily in one place—front paws chopping at the air. Eventually, we would despair of seeing any of the live animals of the past, because once they're gone you will never bring them back—ever.

But then imagine if we humans were to start to see animals not as pests but as beings that make our world colourful and rich and which we have a relationship with. Instead of destroying them, we would help them to thrive, blossom, and flourish. Instead of seeing a few small elk herds roaming the meadows of the Rocky Mountains, we would see vast herds of them as far as the eye could see. Instead of seeing a few small flocks of flamingoes on a small lake, the lake would be bursting with pink from shore to shore to shore.

If we were to care and stop to think about the effects of our actions now, at least we would keep what we have now, though it is already less than before. It truly is an amazing, awe-inspiring world that we live in. What if we were to realize the riches of our extraordinary world? Wouldn't the sound of thousands of buffalo hooves pounding on the prairie be more exciting and worthwhile than staring at our phones for mind-numbing hours at a time?