How To Stay Alive?
We are not "post-collapse" or anywhere close - we are "mid-collapse" or really "just entering collapse" and it will take a long time to get "post".
We have a long, long, long way down to go. Food supplies are still plentiful everywhere that they were plentiful before. International travel is still a thing. Very few states have failed and fallen permanently into civil war and chaos.
History doesn't repeat itself but it does rhyme.
Probably the Roman empire is the best example we have of world-wide collapse but it's also very different. It took centuries to work out. Almost everyone was a farmer, and for most of them the collapse was completely abstract. Indeed, it's likely that most people living "under" Rome might have seen evidence of the empire's existence perhaps a couple of times a year.
Ours will be much faster. Very few people grow their own food. The last time I was on a farm was the 1990s.
I'm in one of the world's great food exporting countries, the Netherlands (and yes, I did move here partly because I saw the collapse coming, as my wife reminded me last week!), and yet significant quantities of what we eat come from other countries and even other continents — and most of our energy, too.
The whole world is desperately interconnected in a way it certainly wasn’t a century ago, but far more than it was even twenty years ago.
Forgetting about knives and such, our most basic personal weapons (guns) are perhaps an order of magnitude more effective than personal weapons in the Roman times were. It's a complex calculation because you can do a lot of damage with a sword, and you don't need to reload, but you also need to be trained and in good physical condition.
But once you get to military weapons, we have munitions that are a million times more effective — six orders of magnitude. An atom bomb’s yield is measured in millions of tons of dynamite, and there wasn’t even a weapon in Roman times that was equivalent to one ton of dynamite.
Many people today deny that any sort of collapse is happening. I assure you that post-collapse, not one even vaguely sane human will believe that.
It is early days. Let us chat again in twenty years. Depending on black swan events, by then we’ll either be on a steep slope downwards, or have fallen off the edge of the cliff and waiting to hit the bottom.
Oh, this is assuming that humans don’t get a clue and try to save themselves, but I think that’s a really safe assumption.
I was introduced to the concept of climate change in the 1970s by my visionary uncle, the noted Australian architect Bill Lucas, and at the time I scoffed, as I did at a lot of things he said that were totally right. Sorry, Bill.
Watching humanity bungle COVID, which has epidemics go could have been far, far worse in multiple ways, and watching humanity fail to deal with climate change all my life, have convinced me that humans are completely incapable of dealing with systemic global issues.
I believe a collapse is certain. Until we have seen a collapse is possible, everyone proceeds under the assumption that it cannot happen, no matter how irresponsible we are as a species.
My utopian hope is that once we have had our noses relentlessly rubbed in the falsehood of this statement, we as human beings will become wiser, if a lot sadder, and figure out a way to live on the planet . I don’t know if this is true, but I know I will not live to see it, which is sad, but I expect to die of natural causes before the worst happens, and that’s some meagre consolation.
The brilliant musician Daevid Allen recorded one last album with his band Gong a couple of years ago, and on it he has a song called, “How To Stay Alive”:
How to survive without killing the planet?
(We need to know!)
How to stay alive?
(We need to know!)
Somehow he manages to make this a cheerful upbeat song despite the gloomy message (there’s an ongoing motif where he sings, “I don’t think so!”) so I give this to you, the reader, in hopes of a better day to come.
