Marq De Villiers - Our Way Out: Principles for a Post-apocalyptic World

Ecology is not a spectator sport.

Ecologist/blogger John Weber

It takes as much energy to wish as it does to plan.

Eleanor Roosevelt

That country is the richest which nourishes the greatest number of noble and happy human beings.

John Ruskin

Before Nature we are illiterates, [and] the best way of destroying a library is not knowing how to read.

Jrme Deshusses

F IRST, WE HAVE TO figure out where we want to go, and then we need to examine more meticulously than ever, more carefully, and more fully how we are positioned to get there. The task of Part I is to examine the crises so far, attempting to avoid hyperbole, and to suggest some strategies for solutions. Initially, we need some facts: how big are the problems, how big are the necessary solutions, how plausible the paths so far outlined?

But if it is broke, fix it.

Engineers credo

O NE THING NEEDS to be said, up front and with drum roll: There is a way out.

It needs to be said because what I hear, from a depressing number of people, in a depressing number of countries, and in a depressing number of books and articles and blogs and conversations, can be boiled down to The system is fucked. Some put it more genteelly, but they mean the same thing.

The charge-sheet, digested, is essentially this:

• Our politics is corrupted by money and poisonous ideologies. Hardly any of us bother to vote, for good reasons.
• Our economy has become a casino for the rich, a gilded rat cage, while millions are struggling, waiting for the bailiffs knock. The media are full of an obscenity called a jobless recovery that is, recovery only for the affluent.
• Our corporations sue for the right to bribe (lobby) politicians and deny that they have any obligation to clean up the toxins they so carelessly create. We have become resigned to a garbage-strewn world. When last did you dare to drink wild water?
• Our planet is warming, with still unknown but probably dire consequences, but our oh-so-clever newspaper columnists and bloggers and radio talk-show blowhards are still finding oh-so-clever reasons why this cannot possibly be so. The people we listen to dont have a clue. Governments remain miscreant. Nothing gets done, just greenwashing that passes for action.
• Our oil is running out, but we have no real plan for its obsolescence.
• Humanitys uncontrolled global swarming has left us a world where more than 1 billion people live in mega-slums the size of small countries, reduced to huddling in cardboard boxes and wrecked autos, drinking putrid water and eating muck while they watch their children die. And were still debating the ethics of contraception!

How can we fix anything? How can there be a way out?

I recently had lunch with a gaggle of journalists, all of them experienced reporters who have covered the Middle East, Central Asia, all the worlds trouble spots, people who have been around. Every one of them believes that were screwed, and that its too late to do anything about it.

Well, jeez.

This bleak vision is the secular equivalent of the Christian Rapture. In that view, similarly, the world is going straight to hell in a handcart, though the righteous will be plucked from the handcart at the last moment and taken up to Jesus Jesus in the sky with diadem. The rest of us will just burn. So long, good riddance, tant pis.

Nevertheless, I believe in neither the handcart nor the selective plucking. If I did, I wouldnt be offering a book called Our Way Out. Id be hunkering down, drinking the last of my good wine, living somewhere remote, behind a dont-mess-with-me razor wire keep-out fence, shotgun on hand to keep the ravening mobs at bay.

Its true, politics is a swamp and too many politicians lie constantly, without shame or remorse. But there are many honest politicians, and a deep-rooted eagerness exists among voters for something better. Change is attainable, reform within reach. Our economy is a casino for the rich, yes (I give you Goldman Sachs), and estranged from the world most of us live in. But we can use our revulsion to leverage change, and better models do exist. Too many corporations are predatory and without conscience, but they can be tamed and remade, from within as well as from without, and reenlisted in a new cause. We can even make globalization a force for good. Global warming is real, but we know how to fix it. Its not easy, but it is perfectly doable. There are far too many of us, but we know how to deal with that too.

To borrow a slogan from Barack Obama (before he became mired in the muck of American federal politics), Yes, we can.

We are not without our options. Ive spent years reading about solutions to our problems, and talking to the people who propose and oppose them. Many of these solutions are clever, even ingenious, and eminently practical and affordable. There are technical solutions, political solutions, economic solutions, and solutions through social engineering. Some are commonsensical and some dismayingly draconian. Mostly, though, they are solutions proposed in a vacuum they are single-issue solutions. Almost all ignore the critical issues of population and economic growth, a lamentable failing.

You cant solve any one problem on its own. But you can solve many if you solve them together.

Everything is linked, thats the point. Solutions lie in the linkages.

Lets try a thought experiment, in the cant phrase of the day. Let little Sable Island, a curious bow-shaped sand dune in the Atlantic, 100 and more kilometers from anywhere, stand in for the planet. Like Earth, Sable Island is a closed ecology, and within its protecting embrace the islands biosphere has achieved a balance. The population, such as it is really just birds, a herd of 400 or so wild horses, and a varying number of transient seals has come to equilibrium. The energy the system uses, the sun and the rain that allow grasses to grow and the population to feed, is constant. It can be diminished, but only marginally increased. Still, the ecosystem is self-sustaining. The horses eat the grass, and their manure encourages more grass to grow. If there are too many horses, the food supply for each animal diminishes, and in a year of poor rain horses die, and the population returns to equilibrium.