by Ted Bernard
…[this] would create a whole new universe of possible ways the world might end. And it would mean that the most alarming of climate alarmists may turn out to be understating how bad things could get, and how quickly.23
If this be our fate, I foresee it as the worst of Late-K outcomes. A somewhat stable and predictable climate is, after all, fundamental to our future. Conversely, a wildly collapsing climate would haul many of our already vulnerable socio-ecological systems, which are helplessly tethered to their climates, right over the cliff. This is why I imagine that survivors in Brights Grove, in addition to many other obstacles, would be dealing with a new normal. They would be battling a challenging, unyielding climate. It would follow that many would fail to feed themselves and would succumb to starvation and disease.
A second set of drivers are species extinctions, biodiversity loss, and ecosystems diminishment. These combine to form a narrative that is scary enough in itself but even more foreboding for humanity’s future because this set of drivers could place our food supply at risk. What we know is that extinction rates of vertebrate species are now one-hundred times greater than they would be without us. In other words, species’ extinctions in our times are indisputably the outcome of intensifying human activities. Hunting, overfishing, habitat destruction, competition with invasive species, climate change, the altered chemistry of the oceans, monocultural agriculture, and many other human-generated causes endanger the future of at least three-fourths of all species. In just a few human generations from now, our great-great-great grandchildren will be living, if they are lucky enough to have adapted and survived, in a grim, diminished world. Elephants, polar bears, lions, tigers, rhinoceroses, blue whales, and many less charismatic species will no longer be part of those children’s experience or imagination. If indeed we are presently in the midst of a planetary extinction, it is an event that humans have never experienced, and, likely, “will only ever experience once.”24
Whether this progression will lead to our undoing is an open question. There is no doubt that with climates entering new domains, ecosystems diminishing and disappearing, and species dropping from existence, that critical other pieces of our support system will soon be threatened or eliminated. How would this impact our food system? Like all complex adaptive systems, the food system is subject to Late-K dynamics and dictates. Food crops, in fact, may be more vulnerable than other systems.25 Why? Investigation reveals that the project of feeding more than seven billion people has led to extreme Late-K over-connectedness and loss of redundancy, in this case expressed as over-dependence on just a handful of staple crops such as wheat, rice, corn, soybeans, sorghum and potatoes. These staples are propped up by elaborately entangled sets of systems that so far have ensured an adequate food supply overall, if not equal distribution and access. With climates changing rapidly, new patterns of precipitation and soil moisture and altered pest ecologies will inevitably affect these staples. Add to this the extinction of species of insects, pollinators, birds, and perhaps even organisms in the soil microbiome and one can understand how ecological disruption would impact our food supply.
Stocks of critical grains are already at ten-year lows. The amount of grain in storage now amounts to just twenty percent of the world’s needs in a year — a mere 71-day supply.26 Couple this shortfall with classic Late-K conditions in markets, transportation, trade regimes, fertilizer supplies and distribution (especially phosphates), seed production and distribution, irrigation systems — the list seems endless and daunting — and again you can fathom how our civilization, so dependent on ample amounts of cheap food, could falter. If you think panarchically, the combination of these elements could nudge our food system toward a situation in which a small, relatively contained set of shocks would be enough to seriously threaten our entire civilization.
What might those shocks be? In a scenario concocted in collaboration with my Brazilian colleagues, Thomas Verra and Elyana Sanchez, we combined windborne corn and wheat pathogens, a waterborne rice fungus, an abnormally hot and dry growing season causing a reduction in the amount of irrigation water, a shortfall in internationally supplied phosphates, work stoppages by farm workers, food riots in several states, and a transporters’ strike. We asked how this set of conditions would impact Brazil’s food supply.27 The answer: this combination of misfortunes led to shortfalls of more than thirty percent in six crops crucial to Brazil’s food security — maize, soybeans, wheat, peanuts, sugar cane, and rice. The food system’s existing vulnerability to systemic shocks such as work stoppages and political instability, exacerbated by climate change and ecosystem diminishment, consequent water shortages, and counterproductive trends caused by the globalization of a key agricultural input (phosphates) led to significant food insecurity. Though this scenario involved just one country, because of the globalization of markets, it would ripple outward to other countries dependent on Brazil’s agricultural system. Conceivably, a perfect storm of conditions on a wider scale could undermine food supplies and food security enough to open the way toward wide scale hunger and starvation.
The third cluster of planetary drivers that loom year by year and surely interact with both climate change and the shredding of biological diversity is the emergence of pathogens capable of spreading rapidly across the human population. Humanity has, of course, survived an array of plagues, influenza outbreaks, and hemorrhagic diseases, none of which approached the obliteration of everybody. However, our era is different. Late-K conditions — declining novelty, over-connectivity, decreasing redundancy, and slow moving command and control systems — together with a warming planet and increasing densities of human populations, all within about 48 hours of each other by air, and a host of other factors have created spawning grounds for the emergence of superviruses ( e.g. SARS, Ebola and HIV) that with just a mite of genetic alteration can leap across species boundaries from animals to humans and then become virulent pathogens potentially leading to a global pandemic.
The H1N1 “swine flu” outbreak in 2009 could have become such a pandemic. By the time public health officials acknowledged the virus, it was rapidly dispersing across the world. Fortunately, it turned out to be mildly pathogenic. The media then began to attack the Centers for Disease Control and the World Health Organization for their overreaction. In fact, it had not been an overreaction. H1N1 caught the worlds of virology and public health ill-prepared. Had the pathogen been as virulent as the 1918 influenza, it could have brought the world to a halt. It would have led to a doomsday scenario with mass fatalities and suffering beyond the imagination. Fred Guterl expressed it this way:
It’s hard even to imagine the effect mortality on the order of a severe pandemic would have on our modern world. You would have to go back to the Black Death that swept through Asia and Europe in the fourteenth century to come up with an analog … The writer John Kelly estimates that pestilence on the scale of the Black Death of the fourteenth century would claim almost two billion lives.28
A final driver at the global scale is the coming swan song of our carbon-fueled economy. The post-carbon era has been foretold for decades. Yet each time the demise of the era seems upon us, a breakthrough arrives in technology and investment, mainly through extracting oil and natural gas in remote or previously inaccessible parts of the planet. And so the fossil fuel fantasy gains new life. Currently, the booming gas and oil markets of North America based on hydrologic fracturing, mining Canadian oil sands, off-shore drilling around the world, and the prospect of exploiting oil and gas under the newly exposed Arctic Sea all promise to condemn the world to fossil fuels until the very last BTU has been burned and the last dollar earned. There are good explanations for this, among them the century-long infrastructural investment in oil and gas, the immense profits of the industry (enabling, of course, many good jobs), the political clout of the oil and gas industry, and the incontestable fact that no single source of renewable energy now available can pack so much raw power into such a compact package.
; On the other hand, this recent oil and gas surge drives our planet in exactly the wrong direction. If we were intent on stabilizing and then reducing our output of carbon emissions, as well we should be, then we ought, as President Barack Obama has urged, to be leaving these new sources in the ground. Sadly, for the planet, the fracking boom in the US and elsewhere, Alberta oil sands, and Arctic oil will inevitably speed up climate change and all its devastating impacts, sooner rather than later. Perhaps, the point of no return will not arrive in the distant times of our great-great-great grandchildren, as I earlier wrote, but rather during the lives of our children and grandchildren. Ultimately a collapsing climate will contribute to the demise of a multitude of other complex systems and will bring on the sunset of the era of the greatest material abundance and heedless consumption in human history that itself was made possible by these sources of cheap energy. We come ‘round again to the dark prospect of climate change. James Hanson, the eminent American climatologist, concluded his stunning book, Storms of My Grandchildren, this way:
… a devastated, sweltering Earth purged of life … may read like science fiction. Yet its central hypothesis is a tragic certainty — continued unfettered burning of all fossil fuels will cause the climate system to pass tipping points such that we hand our children and grandchildren a dynamic situation that is out of control.29
These planetary drivers, which underpin our existence in ways we take for granted, could cripple us. Does that mean that omega will cause every last human to perish? C.S. Holling offers a slim possibility that our collective realization of our plight, of our current degree of vulnerability, might “trigger a pulse of dramatic social transformation” on the order of the agricultural and industrial revolutions. But the trigger is a hair-trigger. Things could go either way: thrusting humanity into frighteningly deep collapse or, admittedly a long shot, changing its course toward a creative rebuild.30
Are the so-called sustainable communities like Brights Grove the last and best hope? Long ago, I remember my outrage when I read these words, written by a scholar who detested the term “community sustainability”. I could not have disagreed more vigorously with her assessment. But now, knowing what I know about panarchy and having struggled with the plight of communities like Brights Grove, I find myself embracing her words.
Long before the interlinked events that led to abrupt and almost total collapse, people in power failed to heed the warnings, deluded as they were in achieving efficiencies, economies of scale, bigger machines and outputs, smaller costs per unit, and historic amounts of wealth funneling to the already wealthy. Despite these trends, ordinary citizens in a few places were hopeful. They believed their locally-scaled economies were resilient enough to weather the looming storms. They believed that they had achieved community sustainability. They were wrong.31
And yet, we are a devious and tenacious species. Even though our communities would surely be gutted, stragglers of our species may be able to survive the shocks and anarchy, the influenzas, the gone world of their ancestors. In the bleak and depleted decades after omega they may join together and begin to fashion a life without information systems, computers, mobile devices and wireless communications; without fossil-fuel infused transport and food production; without the vast material resources of government and foundations; even without robust ecological services. Their road from omega to alpha, if there is one, will be miserable and treacherous, a journey aiming toward some kind of tenuous future with but a sliver of hope to carry them through.
9
THOROUGHLY SCHOOLED ON PANARCHY by now, we students had become hyper-aware and prone to gallows humor about the Late-K circumstances of our day. After we read Nickleby's omega chapter, Stefan forced us to imagine the prospects of a bleak and depleted world and to ponder what we were supposed to do with this information.
Samantha and I had gone to ground, literally. We sat on the grass outside our tent. It was a balmy evening for October 29th, but I was bundled in jeans, wool socks, an orange Gilligan sweatshirt, and a matching skier’s toque topped with an orange tassel. Samantha, who had spent her life enduring North Dakota winters, wore shorts, flip flops, and a loose-fitting Gilligan t-shirt that did not quite conceal her capacious breasts. Samantha idly fussed with her hair which, in three-plus days, had not been shampooed. I studied her greasy strands, her stained t-shirt, her scuffed knees and dirty feet. I’d never seen my friend so disheveled yet so animatedly happy. I could never have imagined that Samantha, once the sorority’s most discriminating fashionista, would have persisted here for more than a few hours.
“Longing for a hot shower?” I asked.
Samantha smiled. “No way. Showering would be totally wussing-out.”
What was up with Samantha? Had she crossed over to the dark side? Last night, Samantha, a rabid teetotaler, sipped half of Nick’s beer and vowed never to cease fighting for Blackwood. In response to Nick’s question, she slurred, “Yeah, I would go'f ta jail to shave Blackwood.” I noted Nick surveying Samantha anew as if he’d like nothing more than to inspect the goods beneath her t-shirt. Samantha, tipsy for the first time in her life, might have obliged. Occupying the Quad must have provided Samantha license to live less virtuously and more dangerously, to strip away her tight-assed upbringing, to become unrestrainedly risk-inclined. As for me, I longed for a hot shower and my soft bed. But like Samantha I had cast my lot with the rabble and I would not abandon them.
Occupy Centennial Quad rolled on through day four. The site was becoming trammeled, dusty, unmistakably overcrowded, trending toward unruly, and smelling faintly of urine. More new tents had been pitched bearing dozens of fringe occupiers, some from out of town along for the thrill, perhaps with their own agendas. Classes went forward unabated, campus police were rarely visible, and the media crush of the past days had waned. Our social media team continued to blast information and pictures across a range of sites. But they could no longer claim Gilligan as the only campus occupation in the nation. Officials at Kanawha State University across the river in West Virginia announced that a small group of anti-fracking protestors had likewise occupied the Chesapeake Science and Engineering Complex in solidarity with their “sisters and brothers in Ohio”.
While Samantha and I sat quietly by our tent, the imaginations of many of those sisters and brothers had turned hyper-phobic, fretting about the ticking time bomb of our own making. By noon on the day-after-tomorrow, we, the leadership of this fiasco, were poised to go public with information the Redlaw administration feared would stain Gilligan’s good name, besmirch one of the university’s biggest donors, and set off statewide, if not national, political repercussions. Though the mass of occupiers was clueless about these ramifications, they were fully aware that the morning of October 31st was some kind of deadline.
In an Occupy Town Hall yesterday, Nick casually mentioned the date. But he avoided the frightening possibilities in this game of chicken. The information gap in turn led to wild speculation. From the tarps, tents, and yurts, the rumor mill ceaselessly churned. What was happening inside Stiggins Hall? Would the university capitulate? Or was the Redlaw administration determined to end the stalemate and order campus police to clear the Quad? Would the brass declare a state of emergency and order an armed lockdown of the campus? Would the governor intervene? Was Morse Valley Energy about to start drilling at Blackwood Forest? Nobody could definitively answer any of these questions. It was not as if one could Google Ohio National Guard: Daily Schedule for October 29th or locate a press release telegraphing President Redlaw’s real plans. Yet hundreds of bits of unverified data of uncertain provenance thrummed back and forth across the Quad, intensifying in direct proportion to occupiers’ anxieties, my own included, about how our parents might respond to pleas for bail.
Lost in my own apprehension, I became mute. In collusion with Greta and my friends in the Group of Thirteen, I was now playing Mata Hari in an improbable plot to hoodwink Dr. Tulkinghorn. I couldn’t help dwelling obsessively on my tawdr
y role. My performance and the impending deadline set off flights of butterflies doing laps in my gut. What if I let down these dedicated and dependent friends? What if the man is even more dastardly than we’ve anticipated? Swallowing hard against these fears, I willed myself to talk of other things.
“So, in ten words or less, how would you describe that professor you’re obsessively crushing on?”
“Ten words or less, hmm.” Samantha sheepishly smiled. “And what professor would that be?”
“The hunk with the intense blue eyes.”
“Oh, that one. Well, I’m no longer such a fangirl of that guy or of his big words and ideas, or of that, oh, what? that masculine sweetness that once stirred my juices. That guy?”
“Yep, that one.”
“Stefan. He has so weirded me out that I’m losing my head. Omega sends chills through me, Hannah. It’s the opposite of a healthy arousal. I ask myself: Am I becoming a geeky doomsayer?” She took a long breath. “But, ya know, in a heartbeat, I could be lovesick all over again.” Samantha’s lips opened again but there were no words, just a palpable in-breath, a slight headshake. “There, I confessed. It took much more than ten words.”
I smiled at her, feeling her bewilderment, a sensitivity I reserved for girlfriends. Calmly, I said, “Yeah, that says it all.” My voice may have been steady but inside I wrestled with my own little crush. How insane, those teeny emotions back then.
Samantha turned the conversation in a different direction. “You know, as I said in class this morning, omega reminds me of The Rapture.”
“Stefan didn’t exactly seize that idea and run with it,” I reminded her.