 Several readers have asked me to explain what I have called eco-collapse,
the cascading series of catastrophic environmental and cultural
failures that most scientists believe will start to occur unless we
radically rethink and correct our unsustainable behaviour. Unlike the
Club of Rome and the Malthus/Ehrlich population doomsayers, I'm not
going to predict that this will happen in our lifetimes (though I think
we'll see the early symptoms), nor that a single cause or effect will
dominate the collapse. I do think, based on this chart
of population and resource consumption, that collapse is likely to
occur by the end of this century, and that therefore the
great-grandchildren of the baby boom generation will likely bear the
brunt of it.
If you study history, and specifically the history of overcrowded
areas, you can learn the past consequences of the type of conditions that exist
already in much of the world today, and get an idea what the elements of eco-collapse will be. In no particular order, and not for the easily depressed, the ten elements are:
- Catastrophic Famines:
Eighty million died of starvation in Mao's China. Despite the surplus
of food that exists today, catastrophic famines remain common and are
increasing in magnitude with population. Humanitarian efforts may
alleviate the small famines of North Africa, but we're not equipped to
handle Asian famines resulting from catastrophic crop failures with
victims in nine figures, and that's what we can expect in this century.
- Epidemic Human Diseases:
We haven't found a cure for AIDS in a quarter-century of intensive
effort, and AIDS is a relatively slow-spreading disease. Plague left
half of medieval Europe dead, and smallpox has killed a billion humans.
Epidemic diseases are nature's population balancer. Diseases like SARS
mutate rapidly, faster than we can isolate and inoculate for them. And
BSE (Mad Cow) has now ushered in a whole new family of even
harder-to-contain diseases that result from prions. As population
density increases, new parasitic diseases always emerge with increasing
speed and ferocity. In the incessant battle against disease, nature
always bats last.
- Crop Failures:
Five animals and six grains now make up the large majority of human
food intake, with fewer varietals of each being produced each year.
This creates a hugely vulnerable human food system -- vulnerable to
plant and animal diseases (like potato blight) and insect infestations,
as well as flooding and drought. We are now drawing down the water
table below the soil, and replacing depleted soil with artificial
oil-based nutrients, so frighteningly quickly that shortages of
groundwater and oil are now even more likely to produce catastrophic
crop failures than diseases and infestations.
- Cannibalism:
Watch for the re-emergence of cannibalism in the 21st century. It has
been endemic, and even legal, in China for much of its history due to
that country's dependence on fragile monoculture, and also occurred in
the former USSR in the last century. It will of course get great press,
but its real importance is as a harbinger of cultural collapse.
- Nuclear & Biological War:
With North Korea and Iran joining Israel, India, China and Pakistan in
the club of nuclear-capable belligerants, it is sheer folly to believe
that, as conditions in these areas continue to deteriorate, nuclear
weapons won't be used. Even Dubya wants to re-start the arms race with
mini-nukes. In the unlikely case that nuclear bombs are not dropped in
this century, we can expect factions in at least 60 (and growing)
totalitarian states with rudimentary bioweapons capability to start to
deploy them. The number of possible users, agents and means of
deployment are limitless. The only question will be how many times they
will be deployed and whether they will get completely out of control.
- Water Rationing & Desertification:
The massive freshwater needs of 6, 7, 10, 14 billion people are rapidly
lowering water tables and depleting all available freshwater resources.
At the same time, the Arctic ice, which contains a large proportion of
what's left, is melting at an unprecedented rate into saline seas.
Deserts are advancing at an increasing rate, especially in tropical
areas where exploding population and poor soils quickly turn lush
forests into new deserts. Desalination is an expensive and
energy-consuming process. Look for massive water rationing, and at
least one 'water war' in this century.
- Economic Depression: Almost
all the anti-depression safeguards enacted in the mid-20th century have
been done away with in the interest of 'deregulation' and in the belief
that 'it could never happen again'. Currency, land, stock and commodity
speculators are again buying on huge margin (no money down) at
unsustainably low interest rates, manipulating and whipsawing prices
and rates and massively inflating the value of securities and real
estate. At the same time, market deregulation and 'globalization' have
greatly increased interdependence of economies -- one big domino can
now topple them all. And trade imbalances, debts and deficits
(government, corporate and individual) are at ruinously, irresponsibly
high levels, making the entire economic system extremely vulnerable to
the twin threats of interest rate spikes and deflation. Not only can it
happen again, recent economic policies have made another worldwide
economic depression a probability.
- Catastrophic Terrorism:
Technology, combined with the staggering concentration of power and
resources, economic interdependence and our dependence on uninterrupted
energy flows and grids, work to the terrorist's advantage. A
well-planned attack by a small group could easily produce millions in
casualties and trillions of dollars in economic losses. The
intelligence failure on 9/11 and the incompetent responses since then
have ably demonstrated the effectiveness and high likelihood of success
of terrorist actions. There is simply no way in our complex society to
suppress information about our vulnerabilities to attack or about the
technologies that could exploit these vulnerabilities. As desperation
and nihilism (expressed very effectively by the number of 'suicide'
attacks) grow, so will the probability of catastrophic terrorism. In
fact the restraint that the millions, perhaps billions of potential
terrorists have demonstrated to date speaks to our basic humanity, our
aversion to inflicting suffering on each other. It is in no way a
reflection of how 'anti-terrorist' acts have made the world safer -- in
fact these acts have made the world immeasurably more dangerous.
- Cascading Weather Disasters:
Scientists warn that global warming brings with it extremes in climate
change: heavier and longer floods, devastating hail, severe and
recurring drought (and related fires), crippling blizzards and ice
storms. So far these increasingly extreme weather patterns have been
merely newsworthy. Soon they will start causing major casualties and
huge economic losses.
- The Decline of Democracy, Constitutional Liberalism and the Rule of Law: Israel and Palestine are models of what happens
when advocates of escalating war, reprisal and terrorism gain the upper
hand. Many of Latin America's ever-fragile democracies are already
imperilled, as are some of Eastern Europe's. Totalitarian states tend
to spend more on military adventures, and provoke more terrorist acts.
And economic and physical hardship tends to destabilize nations
politically. Look for the percentage of the world's nations that can
fairly be called 'democracies' and 'free' to start declining soon, as
well as increasingly common suspension of civil liberties and the 'rule
of law' in favour of 'security needs outweigh the need for freedoms'
and 'might makes right' politics.
The Flashpoints: The
frequency of each of these ten elements is likely to increase slowly
over the coming decades, amplified by the reality that many of these
problems are self-sustaining, and reinforce and precipitate the other
elements, in a cascading sequence like we saw in the first half of the
20th century. Throughout history, the main locations of violence and
catastrophic loss have usually been those with at least two of (a) high
population density, (b) high population growth rate, and (c) high
utlilization of limited resources (arable land, energy, water etc.)
Three areas to watch, therefore, are the Mideast/South Central Asia
area, China, and Latin America. These are all under massive
environmental stress already -- horribly polluted and degraded and
under huge population and resource stress. Many of the ten elements
above will thrive in these areas, so watch for these areas to explode
first -- 'the beginning of the end'.
The Last Straw: The wild
cards in how all of this will play out are human innovation and
technology. Remarkable human resourcefulness has made fools of Malthus,
Ehrlich and the Club of Rome. I don't believe famine will be our
undoing. There is currently a veritable (though highly vulnerable) glut
of human food on Earth -- obesity is now commoner and a greater killer
of humans than starvation. I think human ingenuity will keep food
production high enough that we won't starve before we kill each other
off. I also think that we will kill each other off before nature even
comes to bat with the devastating consequences of global warming. (So
save your money and don't go see the incredibly silly Day After Tomorrow).
We have three much greater vulnerabilities: (#2) Diseases, (#5) War and
(#8) Terrorism, all of which already fill the daily newspapers, any (or
a combination) of which will, I believe, prove to be our undoing rather
than the other seven elements.
Once the world starts to be pummelled regularly by famines, crop
failures, desertification, water scarcity, economic depressions,
weather catastrophes, and cultural collapse, we'll be so caught up in
physical, social, economic and political turmoil that we may not even
see the knockout punch coming -- India/Pakistan nuclear war, a major
bioterrorist attack, or emergence of a new superdisease to take the
place of Smallpox and the Plague, or some similar rapidly escalating
catastrophe that will simply get out of control. There simply won't be
time for us to step back from the brink as we did at least twice in the
20th century. Whether this holocaust is nuclear or biological, the
result will be what scientists call an Extinction Event -- a sudden
drastic change in Earth's absolute biomass and its constituent makeup.
There will be a huge drop in human population as well as a similar drop
in the populations of all the species that have cast their lot in with
us -- the major animals and high-carb grains we eat, plus the pets,
rodents, insects, weeds and diseases that feed on or thrive in dense
urban and monoculture environments. Whether the rest of life on Earth
is better or worse as a result of this Extinction will depend on its
direct cause -- if it's a human-specific disease like Smallpox, the
rest of the planet's life could recover and thrive quickly, whereas if
it's nuclear war or an undifferentiated bioweapon, its impact on the
whole ecosystem could be as profound as the meteorite that wiped out
the dinosaurs and much of the rest of the planet's species 60 million
years ago. Scientists currently seem to believe that the next cycle of
life will be dominated by birds and insects -- creatures that can fly
above the devastation and cover long distances to find scarce food. Apres nous les dragons.
Nature abhors absolutes, and it is unlikely that either humans or our
co-dependent life species will be completely wiped out by an Extinction
Event. At least not immediately. Depending on the nature and cause of
the Event, the human survivors could find themselves with a second
chance -- back in an Eden with the opportunity to build a new culture
and society that melds a simple hunter-gatherer-gardener economy
together with those technologies still relevant in a post-apocalyptic
world. Or, if the Event leaves the planet seriously poisoned, we could
instead be a marginalized, poorly-adapted, struggling minor part of a
new global ecosystem dominated by those species better suited than we
to what we have wrought, until evolution brings our wretched history to
an ignominious end -- a whimper after the bang.
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MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
Apologies for my unannounced silence since
last Saturday. The power supply on my Dell failed, draining the battery
so I couldn't even back up my files to another computer. I just got it
back now. More on this spectacular failure next week. This week has given me the chance to work on my novel, 
