Bardi: The Day When Food Ran Out

The Day When Food Ran Out. Ugo Bardi. June 19, 2024.

This is a science fiction story. Nothing in it refers to the real world unless you want to think it does.

As a Western citizen, you never thought you could have a problem with food scarcity. Not at all; famines are things of the past; they are about medieval peasants scratching the ground with wooden plows, about farmers exterminated by communists in the Soviet Union, about religious fanatics praying for rain. Things that others have to worry about; that mass of dark-skinned people who wear kaftans and turbans, who hate Western freedom and abundance. Those wretches who refuse to accept the rules of liberal democracy. They are those likely to experience famines.

For you, instead, the preoccupation with food is that you have too much of it and you are overweight. You have to diet, even though no matter what you do, you seem to keep gaining weight. But such is the price of prosperity.

Yet, not everything is well in the best of words. You may have noticed something was wrong when the COVID scourge swept the land. At that time, all of a sudden, everything that looked normal changed into something you wouldn’t have imagined before. A new normal, where the government locked you inside your home, forced you to wear a face mask, told you where you could go and where you couldn’t, what exact distance you should maintain from your fellow human beings, and more. Fortunately, Western science found a solution with advanced vaccines, and now the COVID-19 plague is a thing of the past. At least, this is what everyone says, although sometimes, you wonder whether it is true. You tried discussing that on social media, but you were told your post went against the community rules.

Yet, the COVID-19 story tells you that crossing from complacency to panic takes very little. And something ominous is mounting. You noted that the cost of food was increasing, but so far, that was nothing more than a minor inconvenience. As a Middle-Class Westerner, food never was a large fraction of your budget. The increase in food prices just made a dent in your disposable income.

But food prices keep rising. And they are now large enough that you can’t avoid noticing the effects. It is not just your disposable income that’s being affected. You have to cut on some foods you used to be able to afford. Less meat, for instance. Then, you discover you can’t afford the fancy foods labeled “natural” and “additive-free.” The Sunday trip to the restaurant with your family suddenly seems to have become something of the past. Too expensive. You also notice that many restaurants are closing, especially those fast food joints that once offered cheap food that even the poor could afford.

Your checking account now goes into the red by the end of the month. You have to be careful while you wait for your next paycheck to come. You have to buy smaller packages; a pint of milk, rather than a quarter gallon. It is not that you go hungry during the last days of the month, but you have to be careful.

Then, your credit card won’t let you get more into the red, and during the last days of the month you just can’t buy anything. Those days, the kids are whining that they are hungry and there is nothing they like in the refrigerator. Not even anything you like. A dinner on stale bread only? It is the best you can do on some days. You try to discuss this matter on social media, but you are told that your post goes against the community rules and is erased.

Then, the switch occurs. Food scarcity ceases to be a background problem that everyone tends to ignore. It suddenly becomes the centerpiece of the daily news. Words such as “famine,” “denutrition,” and “starvation” are no longer taboo. The government spokespeople openly say that drastic measures are necessary to fight the new threat to Westerners’ well-being. It is caused by evil foreigners who hate our freedom, and so they make it difficult to supply food to our great nation. However, the government is working hard to solve the problem by increasing military spending and developing new genetically modified food. We have to trust science. A solution will be found soon.

The government enacts a series of measures that look eerily similar to the “Non-Pharmaceutical Interventions” of COVID-19. You are not forced to wear a mask this time, but you must stay home. You have to “save calories” as much as you can. Exercising by running in the streets is forbidden. Gyms are closed by government decrees. Schools are also closed — it is a way to save calories. Your office tells you that they are closing down for a while. You’ll still receive your paycheck, but you will work only by telepresence. Using your car is not forbidden, but the government forces gas stations to close. We need to save gas for our military, you are told. You can keep the gasoline you have in your gas tank, but you can use it only for emergencies.

Food stamps were once only for the poor, but now everyone has them in the form of an electronic card called a “Green Card.” It gives you a limited allowance of bread, biscuits, vegetables, fruit, and a little meat for 2000 calories per day. It is not forbidden to buy food beyond your allowance, but prices are rapidly skyrocketing, and supermarkets now store the “extra” food on partially covered shelves so high to be difficult to reach, just like once it was done for porn magazines. A black market for forbidden food appears. Shady figures appear on the streets, selling t-bone steaks and pastrami at high prices.

The government cracks down on wasteful food, mainly meat. Restaurants reduce their menus to a few items, and many simply close. It is said that fancy restaurants are still open for the rich, but they do not advertise, nor are they visible from the street. You have to ring a bell to enter. You heard that from your neighbor, with whom you can still chat over the fence. But if you try to mention that on social media, your post is blocked, and you are told it is against the community standards.

The government enforces stiff penalties on the black market of food. Eventually, a drastic decision is made: cash is abolished, and all monetary transactions are allowed only using one’s green card. The government gives 48 hours to people to convert the cash they keep at home into an allowed electronic form at a bank, with the proviso that no more than $1000 can be converted in each transaction. Long lines are seen in front of banks, with people desperately trying to save at least some of their cash. Your neighbor tells you over the fence that, while standing in line, he saw people collapsing because of exhaustion and stress. Fortunately, you didn’t have that much cash at home. But you are told by your bank that from now on, you won’t be able to spend more than 50 dollars per day. And they also tell you, confidentially, that if you do that every day for a long time, there could be consequences. These stories are not reported in the media, and if you try to discuss the matter on social media, you are told that your post goes against the community standards and it is erased.

Next, the government cracks down on food hoarding. “Prepping” becomes a bad word. The police can now enter your home anytime to check what you have in your kitchen and refrigerator. Those preppers who keep more than their allowance are designated as “enemies of the people,” punished by stiff penalties, including disabling their green card for a certain period. During that period, they can’t buy anything anywhere. It is said that many preppers die of malnutrition or kill themselves because of depression. Some are said to have exchanged their family jewels for a sandwich. If you mention that on social media, you are told it goes against the community standards.

The new-new normal is firmly in place. It is accompanied by slogans such as “don’t starve granny,” “trust science,” and “together we’ll make it.” The times are especially tough on the elderly. Your neighbor over the fence tells you that he heard from a neighbor that there was an old couple in a home not far away. They died of starvation together in their bed, and they were discovered only when the stench of their decomposing bodies became impossible to ignore. The media doesn’t mention anything like that, and it is against community standards to say that on social media.

The government announces promising new discoveries in the field of GM food. The war overseas is in full swing and surely victory is just behind the corner. More than once, you see from your window armored columns of tanks and trucks passing on the street. Where they are going, what they are doing, you cannot say.

You are still allowed a daily trip to the mall to stock up in the food you can buy with your Green Card. There, the supermarkets now act only as distribution centers for green card holders, at least those that remain open. You stop going there using your car: you have to save gas. Instead, you laboriously push a supermarket cart all the way home. Those carts have become rare. People don’t have gasoline anymore, and they use them in place of cars.

In your trips to the mall, you note that the quality and amount of food your green card can provide seems to be decreasing daily. Shops selling food have disappeared, and restaurants, too. Maybe there are still some open for the rich behind closed doors. But you cannot know, and if you try to ask the question on social media, you are told that your post goes against the community standards. Coffee shops are still open, and they sell you a black liquid that tastes like coffee but doesn’t give you any more the kick that it once did. Your green card will buy one cup, and it comes with a single sugar packet — sometimes they will give you two; a little miracle. Outside the shop, you often see young women standing. They are giving themselves to strangers for one sugar packet. Those who are especially good-looking want to have two. But you need that sugar to give you that little extra bit of energy you need to push the cart all the way home.

At home, the children are whining all the time. They don’t go to school anymore, and they seem to spend most of their time in their room, watching cartoons on TV. You do the same, slouched on the sofa in the living room. Discussions about the war and about Genetically Modified Organisms have now completely taken over the time slots on TV that once were used for advertising. The war is going well, our troops are winning. The enemy are still fighting, but victory is at hand, and then the world will be different. About GMOs, large amounts of money are given to the pharmaceutical industry to develop new methods of modification of the genome of plants in order to create more productive crops. They are said to be obtaining spectacular results that will soon be implemented in the form of food for the people. It is now called “'One Food Policy.' Doubting that goes against the community standards.

Looking out from your window, sometimes you see people running in the street, chased by policemen wearing body armor. More than once, you heard shots being fired not far away, but you understand that it would not be a good idea for you to investigate in person. In TV, you hear that any form of riot will be rapidly quelled by the army – if it ever happens. Discussing these matters goes against the community standard.

And then the day comes: the government announces on TV that the “One Food Policy' bore fruit. The GMO foods are ready. The news is all over the TV channels and the press. Images show trucks carrying boxes and boxes of the new foods, and the most exciting news is that they will be distributed for free. No need for your green card, just show up at the distribution centers, and you will have GM food for your family. GM foods are good, they are nutricious, they are what you need to return to the normal world.

People crowd again in front of the distribution centers; those who still have gas come with their cars, many come pushing old supermarket carts, others simply with empty plastic bags. The lines don’t seem as long as they could have been, since so few of these centers are left. And they move fast. People emerge from the shops with boxes labeled with the “GM” letters written in bright green characters. They load them in their cars or in the supermarket carts, or carry them home in the bags.

You push your cart all the way home and open the boxes. GM food comes in the form of solid bars, slightly sweet, with a curious aftertaste. There are also small plastic containers of a sauce that vaguely reminds the old barbecue sauce - a little of a strange aftertaste, too. There are also cans labeled as “GM cola.” Very sweet stuff, again with that weird aftertaste. But better than tap water, recently it didn’t smell so good.

The kids are happy. They had been abulic, doing nothing but watching TV, and they had become thin and even a little gaunt. Now, they can eat to their satisfaction. And they say on TV that schools will soon be reopened.

Certainly, you can’t expect from GM foods the same quality you had before the crisis. A vague sensation that what you eat is not exactly good for you. But saying that on social media would go against the community standards.

Days go by. You get more GM food from the supermarket, and you eat it with your family. You feel satiated but a a little tired. You notice that for days, you have been doing nothing but watching TV while slouched on the sofa. The office should reopen someday, just like the schools. But nothing is happening. There is nothing to do but eat those strange GM bars and watch TV.

You decide to take a walk. You know that walking is not encouraged: it wastes calories. But now that you have GM food, maybe you can try. You need to walk, you have spent too much time sitting on the sofa.

You emerge into the street. The quiet is eerie. Nobody is walking. An armored car passes by, running fast. It has darkened windows.

The silence is disquieting. Where is everybody? On the sidewalk, half hidden behind a bush, you see something. It is a body lying flat. It is your neighbor, you recognize him. He has his mouth open, his vitreous eyes looking at the sky. The body has a curious gray color and it smells of something that you can’t exactly identify. Something that’s a little like. . . a little like. . .

You turn around. You have to go home. You want to walk fast but, strangely, you feel exhausted. Every step takes an incredible effort. Strange, you are not so old to need a deambulator. And, yet, you have the sensation that walking without one is nearly impossible.

You manage to get back home. Even walking the two steps to the entrance door seems to require a superhuman effort. You get inside. Silence is total; where are the kids? Where is your wife? You don’t know, but you don’t really care. You pass in front of the mirror of the living room. You look strange, and you hadn’t noticed that your skin had taken that weird shade of gray.

You stumble onward until you fall heavily on the sofa. The TV is off—no, it is on. You push the buttons on the remote control, but nothing appears on the screen. All the channels show only noise, and the audio is just a faint hiss. What’s happening?

You suspect that asking that question would be against the community standard. But you don’t care. You lie flat on the sofa, looking at the ceiling. Your sight is blurred; a certain grayness invades your field of view. Gray, all is gray. Darker and darker. And then, black.

Dowd: Being the Calm in the Storm

Being the Calm in the Storm.  Michael Dowd, 2023.

The Collapse is Coming

The Collapse Is Coming. Will Humanity Adapt? Peter Watts, The MIT Press Reader.
An evolutionary biologist and a science fiction writer walk into a bar... and mull over survival.


I’ve known Dan Brooks for 40 years now. Somehow we’re still talking to each other.

We’ve followed radically different trajectories since first meeting back in the ’80s. Dan built a truly impressive rap sheet of over 400 papers and book chapters, seven books, and too many awards, fellowships, and distinctions to count on your fingers and toes. I, in contrast, left academia in a huff (industry funding came with, shall we say, certain a priori preferences concerning the sort of results we’d be reporting) and became a science fiction writer. It’s a position from which, ironically, I’ve had more influence on actual scientists than I ever did as an academic — admittedly a low bar to clear.

And yet our paths continue to intersect. Dan offered me a post-doc in his lab around the turn of the century (DNA barcoding — I really, really sucked at it). A few years later I helped him relocate to Nebraska, leading to an encounter with the armed capuchins of the U.S. Border Patrol and eventual banishment from that crumbling empire. The protagonist of my novel “Echopraxia” is a parasitologist suspiciously named Daniel Brüks. And I once ended up one creepy handshake away from Viktor Orbán, when Dan finagled a speaking gig for me at Hungary’s iASK Symposium.

The dance continues. Sometimes we hug like brothers. Sometimes we feel like punching each other’s lights out (also, I suppose, like brothers). But one thing we never do is bore each other — and whenever Dan’s in town, we manage to meet up at a pub somewhere to reconnect. What follows is an edited record of one such meeting, more formal than most, which took place shortly after the publication of “A Darwinian Survival Guide.”


The following conversation was recorded in March 2024. It has been edited for clarity and length.

Peter Watts: In this corner, the biosphere. We’ve spent a solid year higher than 1.5 degrees Celsius; we’re wiping out species at a rate of somewhere between 10,000 and 100,000 annually; insect populations are crashing; and we’re losing the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, no matter what we do at this point. Alaskapox has just claimed its first human victim, and there are over 15,000 zoonoses expected to pop up their heads and take a bite out of our asses by the end of the century. And we’re expecting the exhaustion of all arable land around 2050, which is actually kind of moot because studies from institutions as variable as MIT and the University of Melbourne suggest that global civilizational collapse is going to happen starting around 2040 or 2050.

In response to all of this, the last COP was held in a petrostate and was presided over by the CEO of an oil company; the next COP is pretty much the same thing. We’re headed for the cliff, and not only have we not hit the brakes yet, we still have our foot on the gas.

In that corner: Dan Brooks and Sal Agosta, with a Darwinian survival guide. So, take it away, Dan. Guide us to survival. What’s the strategy?

Daniel Brooks: Well, the primary thing that we have to understand or internalize is that what we’re dealing with is what is called a no-technological-solution problem. In other words, technology is not going to save us, real or imaginary. We have to change our behavior. If we change our behavior, we have sufficient technology to save ourselves. If we don’t change our behavior, we are unlikely to come up with a magical technological fix to compensate for our bad behavior. This is why Sal and I have adopted a position that we should not be talking about sustainability, but about survival, in terms of humanity’s future. Sustainability has come to mean, what kind of technological fixes can we come up with that will allow us to continue to do business as usual without paying a penalty for it? As evolutionary biologists, we understand that all actions carry biological consequences. We know that relying on indefinite growth or uncontrolled growth is unsustainable in the long term, but that’s the behavior we’re seeing now.

“Darwin told us in 1859 that what we had been doing for the last 10,000 or so years was not going to work.”

Stepping back a bit. Darwin told us in 1859 that what we had been doing for the last 10,000 or so years was not going to work. But people didn’t want to hear that message. So along came a sociologist who said, “It’s OK; I can fix Darwinism.” This guy’s name was Herbert Spencer, and he said, “I can fix Darwinism. We’ll just call it natural selection, but instead of survival of what’s-good-enough-to-survive-in-the-future, we’re going to call it survival of the fittest, and it’s whatever is best now.” Herbert Spencer was instrumental in convincing most biologists to change their perspective from “evolution is long-term survival” to “evolution is short-term adaptation.” And that was consistent with the notion of maximizing short term profits economically, maximizing your chances of being reelected, maximizing the collection plate every Sunday in the churches, and people were quite happy with this.

Well, fast-forward and how’s that working out? Not very well. And it turns out that Spencer’s ideas were not, in fact, consistent with Darwin’s ideas. They represented a major change in perspective. What Sal and I suggest is that if we go back to Darwin’s original message, we not only find an explanation for why we’re in this problem, but, interestingly enough, it also gives us some insights into the kinds of behavioral changes we might want to undertake if we want to survive.

To clarify, when we talk about survival in the book, we talk about two different things. One is the survival of our species, Homo sapiens. We actually don’t think that’s in jeopardy. Now, Homo sapiens of some form or another is going to survive no matter what we do, short of blowing up the planet with nuclear weapons. What’s really important is trying to decide what we would need to do if we wanted what we call “technological humanity,” or better said “technologically-dependent humanity,” to survive.

Put it this way: If you take a couple of typical undergraduates from the University of Toronto and you drop them in the middle of Beijing with their cell phones, they’re going to be fine. You take them up to Algonquin Park, a few hours’ drive north of Toronto, and you drop them in the park, and they’re dead within 48 hours. So we have to understand that we’ve produced a lot of human beings on this planet who can’t survive outside of this technologically dependent existence. And so, if there is the kind of nature collapse that the Melbourne Sustainable Studies Institute is talking about, how are those people going to survive? A completely dispassionate view would just say, “Well, you know, most of them won’t. Most of them are going to die.” But what if it turns out that we think that embedded within all of that technologically dependent society there are some good things? What if we think that there are elements of that existence that are worth trying to save, from high technology to high art to modern medicine? In my particular case, without modern medical knowledge, I would have died when I was just 21 years old of a burst appendix. If I had managed to survive that, I would have died in my late 50s from an enlarged prostate. These are things most would prefer not to happen. What can we begin doing now that will increase the chances that those elements of technologically-dependent humanity will survive a general collapse, if that happens as a result of our unwillingness to begin to do anything effective with respect to climate change and human existence?

Peter Watts: So to be clear, you’re not talking about forestalling the collapse —

Daniel Brooks: No.

Peter Watts: — you’re talking about passing through that bottleneck and coming out the other side with some semblance of what we value intact.

Daniel Brooks: Yeah, that’s right. It is conceivable that if all of humanity suddenly decided to change its behavior, right now, we would emerge after 2050 with most everything intact, and we would be “OK.” We don’t think that’s realistic. It is a possibility, but we don’t think that’s a realistic possibility. We think that, in fact, most of humanity is committed to business as usual, and that’s what we’re really talking about: What can we begin doing now to try to shorten the period of time after the collapse, before we “recover”? In other words — and this is in analogy with Asimov’s Foundation trilogy — if we do nothing, there’s going to be a collapse and it’ll take 30,000 years for the galaxy to recover. But if we start doing things now, then it maybe only takes 1,000 years to recover. So using that analogy, what can some human beings start to do now that would shorten the period of time necessary to recover? Could we, in fact, recover within a generation? Could we be without a global internet for 20 years, but within 20 years, could we have a global internet back again?

Peter Watts: Are you basically talking about the sociological equivalent of the Norwegian Seed Bank, for example?

Daniel Brooks: That’s actually a really good analogy to use, because of course, as you probably know, the temperatures around the Norwegian Seed Bank are so high now that the Seed Bank itself is in some jeopardy of survival. The place where it is was chosen because it was thought that it was going to be cold forever, and everything would be fine, and you could store all these seeds now. And now all the area around it is melting, and this whole thing is in jeopardy. This is a really good example of letting engineers and physicists be in charge of the construction process, rather than biologists. Biologists understand that conditions never stay the same; engineers engineer things for, this is the way things are, this is the way things are always going to be. Physicists are always looking for some sort of general law of in perpetuity, and biologists are never under any illusions about this. Biologists understand that things are always going to change.

Peter Watts: Well, that said, that’s kind of a repeated underlying foundation of the book, which is that evolutionary strategies are our best bet for dealing with stressors. And by definition, that implies that the system changes. Life will find a way, but it won’t necessarily include the right whales and the monarch butterflies.

Daniel Brooks: Right, right. Yeah.

Peter Watts: And you take on quite explicitly the neo-protectionists, who basically want to preserve the system as it exists, or as it existed at one point in the idealized past, forever without end, as opposed to allowing the system to exercise its capacity to change in response to stress. You cite anoxic ocean blobs; you cite, quite brilliantly I thought, the devastating effect beavers have on their local habitat.

Daniel Brooks: Yeah.

Peter Watts: And you take on the sacred spirit animal of the World Wildlife Fund, the polar bear. And the bottom line here is that shit happens, things change, trust life to find a way, ‘cause evolution hasn’t steered us wrong yet.

Daniel Brooks: Yeah.

Peter Watts: Now, this is an argument that some might say is invasible by cheaters. I read this and I thought of the Simpsons episode where Montgomery Burns is railing to Lisa, and he says, “Nature started the struggle for survival, and now she wants to call it off because she’s losing? I say, hard cheese!” And less fictitiously, Rush Limbaugh has invoked essentially the same argument when he was advocating against the protection of the spotted owl. You know, life will find a way. This is evolution; this is natural selection. So, I can see cherry-picking oil executives being really happy with this book. How do you guard against that?

Daniel Brooks: Anybody can cherry-pick anything, and they will. Our attitude is just basically saying, look, here’s the fundamental response to any of this stuff. It’s, how’s it working out so far? OK? There’s a common adage by tennis coaches that says during a match, you never change your winning game, and you always change your losing game. That’s what we’re saying.

One of the things that’s really important for us to focus on is to understand why it is that human beings are so susceptible to adopting behaviors that seem like a good idea, and are not. Sal and I say, here are some things that seem to be common to human misbehavior, with respect to their survival. One is that human beings really like drama. Human beings really like magic. And human beings don’t like to hear bad news, especially if it means that they’re personally responsible for the bad news. And that’s a very gross, very superficial thing, but beneath that is a whole bunch of really sophisticated stuff about how human brains work, and the relationship between human beings’ ability to conceptualize the future, but living and experiencing the present.

There seems to be a mismatch within our brain — this is an ongoing sort of sloppy evolutionary phenomenon. So that’s why we spend so much time in the first half of the book talking about human evolution, and that’s why we adopt a nonjudgmental approach to understanding how human beings have gotten themselves into this situation. Because everything that human beings have done for 3 million years has seemed like a good idea at the time, but it’s only been in the last 100 or 150 years that human beings have begun to develop ways of thinking that allow us to try to project future consequences and to think about unanticipated consequences, long-term consequences of what we do now. So this is very new for humanity, and as a consequence, it’s ridiculous to place blame on our ancestors for the situation we’re in now.

“We’re hoping that people will begin seriously thinking that our short-term well-being is best served by thinking about our long-term survival.”

Everything that people did at any point in time seemed like a good idea at the time; it seemed to solve a problem. If it worked for a while, that was fine, and when it no longer worked, they tried to do something else. But now we seem to be at a point where our ability to survive in the short term is compromised, and what we’re saying is that our way to survive better in the short term, ironically, is now based on a better understanding of how to survive in the long run. We’re hoping that people will begin seriously thinking that our short-term well-being is best served by thinking about our long-term survival.

Peter Watts: What you’ve just stated is essentially that short-term goals and long-term goals are not necessarily the same thing, that one trades off against the other. When you put it that way, it seems perfectly obvious — although I have to say, what you’re advocating for presumes a level of foresight and self-control that our species has, shall we say, not traditionally manifested. But yeah, a widely adhered-to view of evolution is a reactive one— the pool is drying up, and evolution looks at that and says, oh my goodness, the pool is drying up! We should probably get those fish to evolve lungs. Whereas what evolution actually does is say, oh look, the pool is drying up! Good thing that fish over in the corner that everybody picked on has a perforated swim bladder; it might be able to, like, breathe air long enough to make it over to the next pool. Too bad about all those other poor bastards who are going to die. And to hone that down to a specific example that you guys cite in the book, you’re saying “high fitness equals low fitness” — that you need variation to cope with future change.

Daniel Brooks: Right.

Peter Watts: So optimal adaptation to a specific environment implies a lack of variation. When you’re optimally adapted to one specific environment, you are screwed the moment the environment changes. And the idea that high fitness equals low fitness is what I call a counterintuitive obvious point: It is something that seems oxymoronic and even stupid when you first hear it, but when you think about it for more than two seconds, it’s like — who was it that responded to “The Origin of Species” by saying, Of course! How silly of me not to have thought of it myself. I’ve forgotten who said that.

Daniel Brooks: A lot of biology professors, who then wrote articles about how they actually had thought of it for themselves, but nobody paid any attention to that!

Peter Watts: And that might be one of the more essential values of this book — that it reminds us of things we should already know, but never thought about rigorously enough to actually realize.

Shifting gears to another key point in the book, democracy, which you describe as the one form of government that allows the possibility of change without violence. But you also admit — and this is a quote: “Our governance systems, long ago coopted as instruments for amplified personal power, have become nearly useless, at all levels from the United Nations to the local city council. Institutions established during 450 generations of unresolvable conflict cannot facilitate change because they are designed to be agents of social control, maintaining what philosopher John Rawls called ‘the goal of the well-ordered society.’ They were not founded with global climate change, the economics of wellbeing, or conflict resolution in mind.” So what you are essentially saying here is that anyone trying to adopt the Darwinian principles that you and Sal are advocating is going to be going up against established societal structures, which makes you, by definition, an enemy of the state.

Daniel Brooks: Yes.

Peter Watts: And we already live in a world where staging sit-down protests in favor of Native land rights or taking pictures of a factory farm is enough to get you legally defined as a terrorist.

Daniel Brooks: That’s right. Yeah.

Peter Watts: So, how are we not looking at a violent revolution here?

Daniel Brooks: That’s a really good point. I mean, that’s a really critical point. And it’s a point that was addressed in a conference a year ago that I attended, spoke in, in Stockholm, called “The Illusion of Control,” and a virtual conference two years before that called “Buying Time,” where a group of us recognized that the worst thing you could do to try to create social change for survival was to attack social institutions. That the way to cope with social institutions that were non-functional, or perhaps even antithetical to long-term survival, was to ignore them and go around them.

So let me give you an example: I was speaking with member representatives of a rural revitalization NGO in Nebraska a year ago, and they said, “OK, this rural revitalization stuff and climate migration, this sounds like a really good idea. How are we going to get the federal government to support these efforts?” And I said, “They’re not going to.” I said, “You have to understand that in the American situation, the two greatest obstacles to rural revitalization and climate migration are the Republican Party and the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party is a party of big cities; they don’t want to lose population. The Republican Party is the population of the rural areas; they don’t want people from the cities moving into their areas. Both parties are going to be against this. This is why Joe Biden’s, you know, ‘the climate president,’ but he’s not doing nearly enough. Not even close. Because these people are all locked into the status quo.” And so I told these people, I said, “You don’t ask for permission, and you don’t go to the federal government. You go to the local towns in these rural areas and you say, ‘What do you need? What do you want?’ You then advertise for the kinds of people you want to come in. You want to have electricity self-sufficiency in your town. You need somebody who knows how to build and maintain a solar farm. Advertise for people like that in the big cities. Get them to come and live in your town. Don’t ask the government; do the right thing. Never ask for permission; just do the right thing. They’re not going to pay any attention to you.” And these people said, “Yes, but then if we’re successful, the politicians will come in and claim credit!” And I said, “So what? Who cares! Let them come in, do a photo op, and then they go back to Washington D.C. and they’ll forget you.”

Peter Watts: Maybe. But in cases where it’s been tried, the power utilities step in and squash such efforts as though they were bugs. Set up solar panels and the utility will charge you for “infrastructure maintenance” because by opting out of the grid, you’re not paying “your fair share.” Drive an electric vehicle and you might be subject to an additional “road tax” because, by not paying for gasoline, you’re not paying for road work. The system actively works to make these initiatives fail. And this power goes beyond just stifling progress. They have control of armed forces; they have a monopoly on state violence. We are not allowed to beat up the cops; the cops are allowed to beat us up.

Daniel Brooks: I suppose I have more faith in human nature than is warranted by the evidence. Sal and I do not think such local initiatives will be easy or that they will mostly succeed — at least not until things are so bad that they are the only workable option. What we are saying is that these local initiatives are the Darwinian response to trouble (move away from trouble, generalize in fitness space, and find something that works), and if we recognize trouble early enough, we can opt to begin surviving now. At the same time, during climate perturbations, lots of organisms do not make it, so we need as many individual efforts as possible to increase the chances that someone will survive.

“Local initiatives are the Darwinian response to trouble, and if we recognize trouble early enough, we can opt to begin surviving now.”

There is evidence that some people are doing this, sometimes with the blessing of local and state authorities and without arousing the interest of national authorities. What people need to do is have a commitment to survival, decide what their assets are and their local carrying capacity, and then go about doing the right thing as quietly as possible. As for your point about state violence: What happens if the cops in a small town are the people you go to church with?

Peter Watts: That’s an interesting question.

Daniel Brooks: That’s the point. I mean, what we’re trying to find out, one of the experiments that rural revitalization and, and climate migration is going to resolve for us, is, what is the largest human population that can safeguard itself against being taken over by sociopaths? Let me explain what I mean. Generally speaking, the larger the population, the smaller the number of people who actually control the social control institutions. So you have five different language groups in the city, but somehow it turns out that the people in charge of the religion, or the banks, or the governance only represent one of those language groups. They end up controlling everything. This is a breeding ground for sociopaths to take control. And sure enough, by about 9,000 years ago, when this is all in place, we begin to see religious and governance and economic institutions all support the notion of going to war to take from your neighbors what you want for yourself. And we’ve been at war with ourselves ever since then, and this was not an evolutionary imperative; this was a societal behavioral decision. It’s understandable, in retrospect, as a result of too many people, too high a population density. So you live in circumstances where people cannot identify the sociopaths before they’ve taken control. And that’s the subtext in the idea that one of the ways that we should deal with the fact that more than 50 percent of human beings now live in large cities in climate-insecure places, is for those people to redistribute themselves away from climate-insecure areas, into population centers of lower density, and cooperating networks of low-density populations, rather than big, condensed cities.

Peter Watts: Let’s follow this move back to the rural environment a bit, because it’s fundamental. I mean, you brought it up, and it is fundamental to the modular post-apocalyptic society you’re talking about.

Daniel Brooks: Sure. Not post-apocalyptic: post-collapse.

Peter Watts: Post-collapse. Fair enough. So, another quote from the book: “Neo-protectionists compliment the ever-larger city’s perspective by suggesting that the biosphere would be best served if humans were maximally separated from the wild lands.”

Daniel Brooks: Right.

Peter Watts: “This makes no sense to most humans, and that is why no post-apocalyptic or dystopian novel or film depicts large cities as places of refuge and safety during a crisis.” Just putting up my hand, I can vouch for that, having written my share of apocalyptic sci-fi.

Daniel Brooks: Nobody’s running to the cities.

Peter Watts: “Any attempt to separate humans from the rest of the biosphere would be detrimental to efforts to preserve either.” And I believe at some other point you reference neo-protectionist arguments that we should put aside half of the natural life —

Daniel Brooks: Yeah. That’s E.O. Wilson’s half —

Peter Watts: And putting aside, for the moment, my sympathies for that sentiment — in defense of the neo-protectionists, all of human history says that whenever we interact with nature, we pretty much fuck it up.

Daniel Brooks: No. It doesn’t say that. First of all, when you talk of most of human history, you’re talking about the last thousand years, 2,000 years, 3,000 years. What has been the actual historical record of humans for the last 3 million years?

Peter Watts: I take your point. And it’s a legitimate point when you talk about a global human population, that you mention, in the millions. But we’re at a population of 8 billion now. So accepting, wholesale, without argument, your argument that cities are basically wasteful, unsustaining, pestholes of disease and so on —

Daniel Brooks: That benefit a few people a lot, and treat the great majority as a disposable workforce.

Peter Watts: Yeah. But we still are dealing with a planet in which 94 percent of mammalian biomass on this planet is us and our livestock, so how does that kind of biomass integrate intimately with what remains of our natural environment without just crushing it — or are you anticipating, like, a massive cull of a —

Daniel Brooks: But, see, you’re repeating a bunch of truisms that are not borne out by the actual evidence. We don’t crush — Homo sapiens doesn’t crush the biosphere. Homo sapiens interacts with the biosphere in ways that alter it. See, evolutionary alteration of the environment does not mean collapse. It means change. This is the neo-protectionist language — that any change is going to collapse the biosphere. That’s bullshit. I mean, what human beings are doing to the biosphere right now is nothing compared to what blue-green algae did to the biosphere 4 billion years ago.

“This is the neo-protectionist language — that any change is going to collapse the biosphere. That’s bullshit.”

Peter Watts: Absolutely.

Daniel Brooks: And what happened? Us, OK? The Chicxulub asteroid: If it hadn’t killed the dinosaurs, there would be no us.

Peter Watts: I actually, personally, find comfort in the idea that there have been, what, five major extinction events? And that in every single case, there has been a beautiful, diverse —

Daniel Brooks: Because there was sufficient evolutionary potential to survive.

Peter Watts: Exactly.

Daniel Brooks: Not because a whole bunch of new magical mutations showed up.

Peter Watts: Right. But, it took anywhere from 10 to 30 million years for that to happen —

Daniel Brooks: So?

Peter Watts: — and I would argue that most people — I mean, I’m kind of on your side in this, but I’m also increasingly sympathetic to the human extinction movement. I think most people are hoping for recovery in less geological terms, timescale-wise.

Daniel Brooks: This is a really critical point, because this, then, loops back to the whole Asimov’s Foundation thing. Do we wait 30,000 years for the empire to rebuild, or can we do it in 1,000 years? That’s what we’re talking about. We have great confidence that the biosphere is going to restore itself, within — you know, no matter what we do, unless we make the whole planet a cinder, the biosphere’s going to “restore itself” within, you know, 10 million years. Whatever. That’s fine. And we — you know, some form of humanity — may be part of that, or may not. But the reality is that what we want to do, as human beings, is we want to tip the odds in our favor a little bit. We want to increase the odds that we’re going to be one of those lucky species that survives. And we know enough to be able to do that. We know now enough about evolution to be able to alter our behavior in a way that’s going to increase the odds that we’ll survive. So the question is, are we going to do that? So this whole business of whether or not, you know, what’s going to happen in 3 million years — you’re right: That’s not important. But what happens tomorrow is not important either. What’s important is what happens in the first generation after 2050. That’s what’s important. That first generation after 2050 is going to determine whether or not technological humanity reemerges from an eclipse, or whether Homo sapiens becomes just another marginal primate species.

Radagast: The Grand Work

The Grand Work. Radagast. May 29, 2024.