Civilization
Ends With A
Shutdown Of Human Concern.
Are We There Already?
By George Monbiot
31 October, 2007
Monbiot.com
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. Monbiot.com
Leave
A Comment
&
Share Your Insights
Comment
Policy
Digg
it! And spread the word!
Here is a unique chance to help this article to be read by thousands
of people more. You just Digg it, and it will appear in the home page
of Digg.com and thousands more will read it. Digg is nothing but an
vote, the article with most votes will go to the top of the page. So,
as you read just give a digg and help thousands more to read this article.