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Civilization Ends with a Shutdown of Human Concern. Are We There
Already?
A powerful novel’s vision of a dystopian future shines a cold
light on the dreadful consequences of our universal apathy
By George Monbiot
10/30/07 "The
Guardian" -- -- A few weeks ago I read what I
believe is the most important environmental book ever written.
It is not Silent Spring, Small Is Beautiful or even Walden. It
contains no graphs, no tables, no facts, figures, warnings,
predictions or even arguments. Nor does it carry a single dreary
sentence, which, sadly, distinguishes it from most environmental
literature. It is a novel, first published a year ago, and it
will change the way you see the world.
Cormac McCarthy’s book The Road considers what would happen if
the world lost its biosphere, and the only living creatures were
humans, hunting for food among the dead wood and soot. Some
years before the action begins, the protagonist hears the last
birds passing over, “their half-muted crankings miles above
where they circled the earth as senselessly as insects trooping
the rim of a bowl”. McCarthy makes no claim that this is likely
to occur, but merely speculates about the consequences.
All pre-existing social codes soon collapse and are replaced
with organized butchery, then chaotic, blundering horror. What
else are the survivors to do? The only remaining resource is
human. It is hard to see how this could happen during humanity’s
time on earth, even by means of the nuclear winter McCarthy
proposes. But his thought experiment exposes the one terrible
fact to which our technological hubris blinds us: our dependence
on biological production remains absolute. Civilization is just
a russeting on the skin of the biosphere, never immune from
being rubbed against the sleeve of environmental change. Six
weeks after finishing The Road, I remain haunted by it.
So when I read the UN’s new report on the state of the planet
over the weekend, my mind kept snagging on a handful of figures.
There were some bright spots - lead has been removed from petrol
almost everywhere and sulphur emissions have been reduced in
most rich nations - and plenty of gloom. But the issue that
stopped me was production.
Crop production has improved over the past 20 years (from 1.8
tons per hectare in the 1980s to 2.5 tons today), but it has not
kept up with population. “World cereal production per person
peaked in the 1980s, and has since slowly decreased”. There will
be roughly 9 billion people by 2050: feeding them and meeting
the millennium development goal on hunger [halving the
proportion of hungry people] would require a doubling of world
food production. Unless we cut waste, overeating, biofuels and
the consumption of meat, total demand for cereal crops could
rise to three times the current level.
There are two limiting factors. One, mentioned only in passing
in the report, is phosphate: it is not clear where future
reserves might lie. The more immediate problem is water.
“Meeting the millennium development goal on hunger will require
doubling of water use by crops by 2050.” Where will it come
from? “Water scarcity is already acute in many regions, and
farming already takes the lion’s share of water withdrawn from
streams and groundwater.” Ten per cent of the world’s major
rivers no longer reach the sea all year round.
Buried on page 148, I found this statement. “If present trends
continue, 1.8 billion people will be living in countries or
regions with absolute water scarcity by 2025, and two-thirds of
the world population could be subject to water stress.” Wastage
and deforestation are partly to blame, but the biggest cause of
the coming droughts is climate change. Rainfall will decline
most in the places in greatest need of water. So how, unless we
engineer a sudden decline in carbon emissions, are we going to
feed the world? How, in many countries, will we prevent the
social collapse that failure will cause?
The stone drops into the pond and a second later it is smooth
again. You will turn the page and carry on with your life. Last
week we learned that climate change could eliminate half the
world’s species; that 25 primate species are already slipping
into extinction; that biological repositories of carbon are
beginning to release it, decades ahead of schedule. But everyone
is watching and waiting for everyone else to move. The unspoken
universal thought is this: “If it were really so serious, surely
someone would do something?”
On Saturday, for some light relief from the UN report (who says
that environmentalists don’t know how to make whoopee?), I went
to a meeting of roads protesters in Birmingham. They had come
from all over the country, and between them they were contesting
18 new schemes: a fraction of the road projects the British
government is now planning. The improvements to the climate
change bill that Hilary Benn, the environment secretary,
announced yesterday were welcome. But in every major energy
sector - aviation, transport, power generation, house building,
coal mining, oil exploration - the government is promoting
policies that will increase emissions. How will it make the 60%
cut that the bill enforces?
No one knows, but the probable answer is contained in the bill’s
great get-out clause: carbon trading. If the government can’t
achieve a 60% cut in the UK, it will pay other countries to do
it on our behalf. But trading works only if the total global
reduction we are trying to achieve is a small one. To prevent
runaway climate change, we must cut the greater part — possibly
almost all — of the world’s current emissions. Most of the
nations with which the UK will trade will have to make major
cuts of their own, on top of those they sell to us. Before long
we will have to buy our credits from Mars and Jupiter. The only
certain means of preventing runaway climate change is to cut
emissions here and now.
Who will persuade us to act? However strong the opposition
parties’ policies appear to be, they cannot be sustained unless
the voters move behind them. We won’t be prompted by the media.
The BBC drops Planet Relief for fear of breaching its
impartiality guidelines: heaven forbid that it should come out
against mass death. But it broadcasts a program - Top Gear -
that puts a match to its guidelines every week, and now looks
about as pertinent as the Black and White Minstrel Show.
The schedules are crammed with shows urging us to travel
further, drive faster, build bigger, buy more, yet none of them
are deemed to offend the rules, which really means that they
don’t offend the interests of business or the pampered
sensibilities of the Aga class. The media, driven by fear and
advertising, are hopelessly biased towards the consumer economy
and against the biosphere.
It seems to me that we are already pushing other people ahead of
us down The Road. As the biosphere shrinks, McCarthy describes
the collapse of the protagonist’s core beliefs. I sense that
this might be happening already: that a hardening of interests,
a shutting down of concern, is taking place among the people of
the rich world. If this is true, we do not need to wait for the
forests to burn or food supplies to shrivel before we decide
that civilization is in trouble.
George Monbiot is the author of the best selling books The Age
of Consent: a manifesto for a new world order and Captive State:
the corporate takeover of Britain. He writes a weekly column for
the Guardian newspaper. www.Monbiot.com
© 2007 The Guardian
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