Apocalyptic Thinking

My post at Round Earth League, Sustainability vs. Apocalypse, generated a little discussion between Wally and myself. He reacted rather negatively to a quotation by Ran Prieur, who can admittedly be heavy-handed and difficult to accept out of context. There is this idea in some corners of the internet that we are on the verge of an energy apocalypse (i.e. the whole peak oil / global warming thing), and Ran sees this somewhat as an opportunity to shed some collective baggage, i.e. the power asymmetries that have emerged and intensified with fossil fuels and the technologies they enable. I quoted Ran in my post a couple of weeks ago, South Central Farm, where he rather succinctly lays out the power dynamic that predestined the outcome there. While I don't necessarily agree with Ran on the likely long-term outcomes (or even necessarily the desired outcomes), I think he's pretty good at describing our present situation.

The fact is that there are very powerful and pernicious forces that would make people utterly dependent upon them, and have the firepower to enforce their desires. When food becomes a serious issue because of (1) global climate change and (2) the lack of petroleum for fertilizers, this will come to a head. Tonight I read a story posted via Heretic Fig that serves as an example:

New Delhi, May 8 - The Uttar Pradesh government was conducting raids on farmers for stocking up their own wheat produce, environmental activist Vandana Shiva and Bharat Krishak Samaj executive director Krishan Bir Chowdhary alleged Monday.

They assailed the double standards of the authorities for taking no action against multinational and private companies like Cargil, ITC and PepsiCo for buying wheat in large quantities even as the government was seeking to import 3.5 million tonnes of wheat to meet its buffer stock norms and public distribution system supplies.

While the government seemed reluctant to buy wheat stock from farmers at prices higher than Rs.650 per quintal, it was proposing to import stock at prices over Rs.950 per quintal.

Ran's position, not necessarily mine, is that things will take care of themselves in the very long run: lack of fossil fuels means that eventually all the terrible firepower will go away, or at least the transportation capabilities that makes it easy to deploy over a large geographical range. I don't think that's necessarily the case, since there is always nuclear power available to people who know how to use it and have the will to do so.

My personal belief is that it is important to develop sustainable technologies and also a sustainable food supply. It's also important to consider architectural changes, i.e. construct communities that are close to food supplies and do not require automobiles for daily life. That stuff is a no-brainer: we have to do it.

The real difficulty is how to deal with the political problem of power. As Wally suggests in our discussion, power and its enforcing structures are here to stay, and any disruptions would make things much worse in the short run (meaning our lifetimes). Katrina is a perfect example of this.

My only solution, at the moment, is to try to make people at least aware of the problem. If enough people have their antennae up about it, cultural solutions may emerge.

A separate issue is why people gravitate towards apocalyptic thinking. Apocalyptic scenarios are ultimately unproductive: you can never prepare for an apocalypse and expecting one only saps your productive energy. But I understand why some people gravitate towards this meme, and while I despise the violent apocalyptic frames of Christianity, I have sympathy for the people who are looking to them as a release from the pain of living in a world that is becoming increasingly difficult to negotiate. I think many (if not most?) people intuit the power asymmetry I'm talking about, sense that something is about to change, and fear the ramifications. Apocalyptic Christianity (or apocalyptic environmentalism) is a cognitive strategy some people use to grapple with it.

When looking to the future, we need to consider the meaning of this.