On The Road | Global Dashboard - Blog covering International affairs and global risks

On The Road Jules Evans

February 27, 2009 | More on Climate and resource scarcity | 8 comments

Spent the afternoon at a water-park in Dubai, mainly reading Cormac McCarthy’s 2006 novel, The Road .

If there’s ever a book I don’t recommend reading in a water-park in Dubai, its Cormac McCarthy’s novel, The Road.

The book is set in a post-apocalyptic world, in which some unspecified ecological disaster led to the sun being covered behind dust or ashes, leaving the earth in perpetual winter. American society has broken down, most people are dead, most plants and animals are dead, and most of the survivors are marauding bands of cannibals.

In this horrendous environment, a man and his son travel a road, trying to stay alive and get south, where they hope some form of human society may have survived.

Reading it makes me wonder if the so-called ‘politics of well-being’ may be hugely presumptuous.

Geoff Mulgan said this century would be defined by the politics of well-being. Lots of others are involved in this emerging politics – Lord Layard, Richard Reeves of Demos, Martin Seligman, Oliver James, NEF, and in a small way I am too, that’s why I named my blog www.politicsofwellbeing.com

But the main idea of the politics of well-being is western societies are safe and affluent, therefore can afford to turn their attention to higher transcendent goods like inner peace and so on.

Then you read a book like The Road , or like James Lovelock’s Revenge of Gaia , and you wonder…

What if this century isn’t about well-being at all? What if it’s mainly about ecological disaster, food shortages, water shortages, extreme weather, burnt out fields, societies breaking down?

James Lovelock predicted that the global population will go from 10 billion to 1 billion in the next 90 years, because of food shortages and rising oceans.

If people don’t have enough food, they will eat each other. That is the grim message of McCarthy’s book. Civilisation will break down.

In this sort of situation, the question becomes ‘how can states prevent themselves from breaking down’?

They need two things – food and security. They need to be able to protect their borders from the huge amounts of people who will migrate in search of food, and from other states hunting in search of food. And they need enough arable land to make their own food.

The UK as a society, in such an apocalyptic future, would have a chance of surviving, because its institutions are strong, and its people are (one hopes) good at coping in crises and not eating each other.

But if we are facing huge food shortages in the future, then is there an argument for controlling or even stopping immigration? Partly because we can only take a population that we can support with our own land, and partly because I am not sure how a multi-cultural society copes under extreme stress…

Do you think liberalism survives climate change? Or that the open society survives climate change? I don’t think they do.

Like I said, not a great beach book…but a great book nonetheless.

8 comments »

jipps on February 27th, 2009 at 2:28 pm:

is to decimate not to take a tenth part, rather than to leave a tenth part?
jipps on February 27th, 2009 at 2:29 pm:

interesting concepts, all the same. ballard comes to mind.
Jules Evans on February 27th, 2009 at 2:41 pm:

yes, it appears you’re right.
Peter Elliott on February 27th, 2009 at 4:19 pm:

Following your logic, Britain’s geopolitical position as an island-state will also augment its ‘resilience’ when securing borders.

However, perhaps the best way to prevent states from “breaking down” during an era of food shortages, is, to quote Alex, to think more about “food democracy” as opposed to “food security”. This would have two mutually re-enforcing effects: With ‘controlled’ food shortages, individuals would have less reason to migrate abroad; and, states would be better positioned to provide for those that did. If so, I believe that an ‘open society’ would remain a viable reality.

Other issues arise from this of course. Would Brits (to use them as an example) be willing to compromise their lifestyles for a globally sustainable future? Are democratic ‘nation-states’ in a good or poor position to implement these changes? If not, what are the alternatives and how could they realised? And that is not to even mention any ethical issues.
Jules Evans on February 27th, 2009 at 5:03 pm:

By controlled food shortages, you mean rationing? Globally governed rationing?

Rationing will only work as well as the state in which its implemented. Look how well it worked in Somalia, for example.

A global coordination of food supplies…

Maybe.

I think we need to act locally.

There’s a new book out today, in fact, by James Lovelock, called the Vanishing Face of Gaia.

Here is an extract:

We in Britain live on one of the safe havens where life can continue in the heat age. The northern regions of Canada, Scandinavia and Siberia, where not inundated by the rising ocean, will remain habitable, and so will oases on the continents, mostly in mountain regions where rain or snow still fall. But the more important exceptions to this planet-wide distress will be Japan, Tasmania, New Zealand, the British Isles and numerous smaller islands.

The human world of these “lifeboat islands” and continental oases will be constrained by limited food, energy and living space, however. The ethics of a lifeboat world where the imperative is survival are wholly different from those of the cosy self-indulgence of the latter part of the 20th century. I cannot help wondering how we will manage – how we will decide who among the thirsty will be allowed aboard. We in the UK have little land left to farm and feed ourselves, but we and the refugees may in any case not be able to do so because the majority of us are urban, caring little for the world outside the city and not understanding that all our lives depend upon it.

Apart from the occasional disastrous flood, excessive heatwave or wholly unexpected frost, the climate in the UK will change slowly and imperceptibly at first. In the short term, nothing much is likely to happen with the climate here that would stir a rebellion. What might do so are the disastrous consequences of sea level rise leading to the destruction of a city or the failure of food or electricity supplies.

These dangers will be aggravated by the ever-growing flux of climate refugees, to which will be added returning expatriates who left the crowded United Kingdom for what they thought would be a pleasant life in Europe. Our gravest dangers are not from climate change itself but indirectly from starvation, competition for space and resources – and tribal war.

Yet Britain provides a history and an example of human response to a threat which, although far less severe than global heating, was sufficient to make survival an imperative. For these islands this was the second world war and it was certainly enough of a threat to stir the response now needed.

suspect that effective action to sustain this island community will come from some form of internal tribal coherence and rare leadership, not from international or European good intentions. With luck the same will apply with the other havens. There will be time enough for internationalism during the stability of the long hot age. We have no option but to make the best of national cohesion and accept that war and warlords are part of it.

For island havens, an effective defence force will be as important as our own immune systems. Like it or not, we may have to increase the size of and spending on our armed forces. Perhaps the next generation of scientists and engineers will be competent and serve the Earth as general practitioners serve us in medicine. In wartime old dogs are quite quickly taught new tricks.

The first truly great environmental disasters will usurp the political agenda and displace many false ideas hampering change. As in war, there could be the rapid application of new technology to climate and survival problems. I hope it will work, but I do not think humans as a species are yet clever enough to handle the coming environmental crisis and I fear they will spend their efforts trying to combat global heating instead of trying to adapt and survive in the new hot world.

So let us prove Garrett Hardin, the American biologist, wrong when he said gloomily in 1968 that, as humans are naturally selfish, our condition is truly tragic; for in tragedy there is no escape. We can prove him wrong by surviving.
David Steven on February 27th, 2009 at 5:40 pm:

“I fear [humans] will spend their efforts trying to combat global heating instead of trying to adapt and survive in the new hot world.”

If it’s a matter of losing 7 or 8 billion people off the global population, surely even a latter-day Stoic would think it worth at least trying to reshape our collective fate?
Jules Evans on February 27th, 2009 at 6:38 pm:

of course i do.

but i think we may have passed the high water mark of globalisation, and of global solutions.
Jules Evans on February 27th, 2009 at 7:09 pm:

what do i know. maybe we haven’t. will have to ask Alex and Emma next time i see them.

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