The Malthusian Catastrophe

You may have read lately about the Climategate, the leaking of e-mails depicting climatologists cooking the books to show a general trend of global warming. There is little doubt that scientists are doing this, but some have asked me why, if in fact warming is not taking place -- the answer is fear of the Malthusian catastrophe, or "overshoot."

Thomas Malthus was a eighteenth-century economist who warned that eventually populations would outstrip their food production. Malthus did not foresee the agricultural revolution of the nineteenth century, or the Green revolution of the 1950s and later. Both of these greatly increased food production, and kept Malthusian fears at bay. However, The Limits to Growth, first published in 1972, began banging the drums again, using the basic conclusions taken from the work of Jay W. Forrester -- namely, World Dynamics.

Of course, since that time, global warming/cooling/climate change has become the mantra of many. The idea is to re-tool whole societies to become "green," more "sustainable." The hope, they say, is that mankind will learn to take care of planet Earth. There is more to this than polar bears.

As societies reign in energy expenditures, their economies falter. When this happens, their military power is reduced. Thus, by linking global warming to economic changes, it becomes a political tool with which one can attack its enemies. This is why many in the world want the U.S. to leap on board Kyoto and other limits on emissions (which is just another way to say "reduce energy use"). You can bet China will not be doing such a thing. If the U.S. does, what will happen? Certainly our standard of living will slip. There could in fact be geopolitical ramifications -- war treaties, national security problems, etc.

If population controls and emissions and energy consumption are not controlled, what will happen? Can we continue suing energy at such prodigious rates? No. The end result will be what Malthus predicted in the first place -- massive starvation and political realignment. Could we survive this die-off? Perhaps. But it's just as likely, say the experts, that nations as we know them will evaporate. Africa's been incapable of putting itself back together for over one hundred years now, they point out. Without an outside force imposing order, all that us left is the Hobbesian result "nasty, brutish, and short." Don't believe that's possible? Ask the Rwandans, or the Croats. Two places that experienced genocide in the last twenty years.

The books you need to read to understand the academic background which buttresses survivalist fears:
Joseph Tainter, The Collapse of Complex Societies
Zartman, Collapsed States

What you need to do:
1. Know that food stability could continue unabated for decades, or it could become a serious problem in the next few years.
2. Have a stash of food for hard times. Good basics are white rice, canned meat, and vegetable oil. Add in a good multivitamin. These are perfectly useful staples which you can rotate as needed, keeping at least a month, perhaps more, in reserve for your family. Think Hurricane Katrina, and as you can afford it, move out from there.
3. Buy land on which you can raise food, even something to make a profitable small business from if necessary.
4. Learn to garden, farm, raise livestock, etc. This may become life-saving over the long term.
5. Plan for security and safety. If food security becomes a problem, you will be forced to protect you and yours.
6. Create a strong local community. It won't just happen. You have to work at strong friendships and strong local ties. Do it. Your survival may depend on it.

The Road

I just finished reading The Road again, Cormac McCarthy's Pultizer Prize-winning story of a father and his son as they travel through a U.S. destroyed by some unspecified calamity. It is the second time I've read the book. It is a book so painful and powerful I remain melancholy for days and weeks afterward. I went back to it a second time to prepare for the film adaptation which will come to theaters this month.

When I first heard of the book, it was in the context of McCarthy's interview on Oprah Winfrey. I thought it quite odd that McCarthy would be interviewed on Oprah over a science fiction book describing the end of the world. I picked it up to see what Oprah and her followers could possibly get from a book by America's most brutal and starkly emotional novelist. Apocalypse aplenty, that's what.

The Road is what I fear. Helplessness. Powerlessness. People in my charge, loved ones to care for and provide for, and nothing to do but watch them die. The end of civilization. Complete political, environmental destruction. A man and his son wander south, trying to escape to a place that no longer exists, trying to escape the bestial rapine of the road, chased by the Hobbesian man-eaters clawing for life in the bowels of a dying world. The Road is about fear, and love, and what man will do when reduced to nothing else but gasping for air as in the last moments of a dying fish on dry land.

I am not hyping the book; it's had plenty of that already. I suspect the film will be so-so, at best. Perhaps it will be a great and epic film. But, perhaps more importantly if in a few months you want an easily defined and understandable description to explain your seemingly freakish desire to stockpile toilet paper and rice, go read The Road. When someone asks what you are doing, or why, you can simply say those two words. And one other thing: everyone from the Pulitzer Prize committee to Oprah Winfrey admits the book is chilling because deep down they too realize that what McCarthy describes so well -- that man is man's own undoing -- is true.

And yet, McCarthy is also saying that the road we all travel is fraught with peril, that it's a worthless and terrible world made better only by love and kindness and devotion to something beyond yourself. Survival is evil, black, dark and on its own, totally without value. The man and the boy are alive as they survive; they play cards together, drink soda pop and hot cocoa, and eat tinned pears and enjoy themselves when they have enough food and the wood to build a fire and chase the cold from their bones. Enjoy the time you have with your children, McCarthy says, no matter the sorrows, no matter the pressures of the world. Parenting is tough, children deserve your devotion. Even at the end, man's spirit will smile. We are not so easily beaten, we are not merely beasts.

The book is long -- and I don't mean lengthy, I mean it's strenuous reading. It wears you out and breaks you down. You will want the end to come, but it will be hard for you to read.