collapse

Hi Everyone,

This is a call to arms. The science and other evidence is now without doubt - we are in the final days of our civilisation, whatever it might be called by history; it is hardly Western Civilisation anymore, since the destruction of nature (and I would argue human values, and quite possibly humans) has extended now across the globe.

We have environmentalists who, mostly in small groups, have been fighting the enslaught against nature since industrialism began. They have had their successes, but the rate of destruction is too fast and vicious, and their efforts are overwhelmed.

There is one example that has recently prompted me to post this call. At Stanley one company (with more soon to join) are buying farmland and mining the water i.e extracting the water which is supposed to be for farming and selling it as though it is their own private property. This is not like mining gold, extracting water in this way extracts it from all the neighbours as well. And now more companies/selfish individuals look likely to join the extraction, adding to the problem.

The local community resisted this and took the fight to VCAT, then to the supreme court, then to the appeal court. They lost, and $90,000 worth of costs have been awarded against the community (see here see also: The Guardian on this).

What has failed here? Firstly local democracy: the local council and local community banned the extraction. VCAT allowed it. The second failure: the legal system: even if the outcome was fair, the cost of justice is too high - how can individuals and communities possibly fight such expensive battles, even in this case much pro-bono work was provided to get to the court. The final failure is political again: at state and national level. It is reported to me that neither of the main political parties are even prepared to meet with the residents of the community to discuss changing the law around water mining.

This is our system - change is stifled politically, and by an over-expensive justice system. So what is to be done? Previously on this site I have suggested starting alternative local 'shadow' parliaments, but calls for this have not been taken up. The permaculture community have a philosophy that people should not waste energy on the current system, but rather put their energy into the building the replacement. This is a view I have much sympathy with, but I fear the current system will not leave much to work with.

So what to do? I think at this stage it might be worth one last-ditch effort at political reform before the collapse becomes unrecoverable (collapse both environmentally and financially). Can we call for a new Party, one which is a union of all the little environmental groups, the civic groups and all the individuals that want to save nature and mankind? The trade union movement has failed us. It is pro-growth, seeking short-term outcomes (jobs) for its members cutting down the forests and building more monstrous buildings. So we need a new union - and we need it urgently to bring about radical reform. Even if the new Union of Australians (for want of a better name) does not achieve power, it may gain enough seats (or threaten loss of seats) to change policy.

So here is the call - who is with me? No-one can do this on their own. As we have learned from history, the only way everyday people can stand against power is to do it together, otherwise they are crushed - as we truly are being crushed now by the never-ending greed and power lust that has been unleashed over the past 200 - 500 years and is serving the interests of a small minority - as it ever has.

Ps: The photo above is supposed to be the St Kildan's leaving their Island - perhaps the last traditional community to be removed from the land in the process of the Scottish highland and lowland clearances. Something I will write more about shortly.

Australia’s population annual growth of just under 400,000 people is absolutely unsustainable, according to Sustainable Population Australia (SPA). Our annual population growth, of which 60% is made up of economic immigrants, amounts to building another Adelaide every three years, with all its need for infrastructure, fuel, housing ... at a cost of about $200,000 per person.

Figures out today from the Bureau of Statistics reveal Australia’s population grew at 1.8 per cent, with net overseas migration of 238,300 people (60%) in the year ending March 31, 2013, and natural increase of 159,100 people (40%).

SPA National President Ms Jenny Goldie says infrastructure spending has not kept pace with such rapid growth, resulting in greater congestion, unaffordable housing and longer waiting times.

“It is now generally accepted that it costs $200,000 in extra infrastructure for every extra person. With 400,000 at $200,000 per person it means $80 billion in one year. No wonder the states are crying poor!

“Another way of looking at it is that we need to build another Adelaide every three years with all the associated infrastructure” says Ms Goldie.

“The environmental consequences of human population growth are equally concerning,” she says. “A rapidly expanding population demands access to more natural resources, be it food, fibre or oil, putting ever more pressure on soils, seas and forests.

“Biodiversity is adversely affected. Birds and mammals have been driven to extinction by human overkill, loss of habitat, invasive species, pollution and disease. Human activity is the prime cause of these processes and they intensify as human numbers grow.”

Ms Goldie says it is alarming that over 100,000 were added to Victoria’s population in one year.

“It’s all very well for the Victorian Government to talk of better planning but that kind of growth simply translates into crowded roads, trains and schools, higher house prices and rents, and loss of general amenity such as sunshine and views when more high rise buildings are built.”

Ms Goldie hopes the new federal government will realise that rapid population growth is not beneficial to the average citizen who has to wear its downside.

“The new government must lower immigration and remove all incentives for a high birth rate.”

Teaser: The question has been asked, "What useful purpose is served by spreading the most pessimistic message possible?" The answer is that Malthusians need to convince people that our situation is extreme before they will agree to what they now perceive to be our "extreme" solutions---until then it will be "business as usual". Movies, videos and you-tubes can be more effective in conveying the extent of our clear and present danger than dry text. "The Road" is one such movie. After viewing it, many people will ask themselves, "Do I want my children or grandchildren to wind up on that road---or can we take a detour now, while there is still time?"

"I think the value of 'The Road' is to wake people up. They have to say that could be me.... The action is not to run and hide in transition towns. The action is to first realize that if the world had 1 million births a year, and we had a global population of only 70 million in 70 years there is no guarantee we could keep it together in the transition. The transition will take careful planning and people have to support both, a highly controversial process for limiting births to 1 million and that planning process. Only someone who sees a really black future like 'The Road' as the high probability event would even consider this extreme deviance from business as usual." Jack Alpert, Director of the Stanford Knowledge Integration Lab.

I have seen perhaps 100 dystopian or apocalyptic movies in my lifetime. That is what makes me such a cheerful fellow. I am gleeful at the prospect of this imperfect world tumbling down, and revel in so many calamitous possibilities. Then I remember that my dog or the people I love would most likely be among the casualties. That tends to throw a wet blanket over the whole idea of an apocalypse. I guess the people who wrote the story of the Great Flood and Sodom and Gomorah were similarly inclined. In fact, I suppose most of the great religions of human history had flood-myths or stories about how wicked and unrepentant people met a sorry end. But I notice that the prophets of these catastrophes seemed to have had an escape hatch. Noah made it through the flood, along with his family, and Lot escaped those cities of sin in time to miss Yahweh's fireballs (his wife, however, looked back and turned into a pillar of salt). And of course, many fundamentalist Christians are quite happy to see this decadent world go to hell because they will go to heaven--- raptured there at the last moment. Those who don't make the cut have no one to blame but themselves. All they had to do was accept Jesus into their hearts and keep the local preacher in the style to which he had become accustomed.

Which movie depicted the disaster scenario that seemed most likely to happen? In the first half of my life, they were movies about nuclear war. "On the Beach" was the first. Then came "The Day After" and "Testament"-- a poignant movie. But the most graphic and hard hitting was the one about a nuclear attack on the city of Sheffield, the aptly named "Threads". There is nothing like a disaster movie to show how fatally interdependent we have become. The British always seem to do it best. They have an eye on realism, while Hollywood has an eye on profits. "Hey, the people want a happy ending, so let's give it to them." But now the Americans---albeit with the help of an Australian director---- have surely taken the prize for realism with a 2009 release. Why?

Since the end of the Cold War, the mushroom cloud has faded from our nightmares. Perhaps it shouldn't have. Perhaps critical resource shortages will spark the nuclear exchange that we feared decades ago. But right now, the shortage of hydrocarbons seems to be grabbing the centre stage, jostling for attention with the spectre of global warming, which I believe will recede into second place as our nightmare flavour-of-the-month.

Until recently it seemed that "Mad Max", even with all of its cheap stunts, described our most credible disaster---a world where every drop of gas is almost more precious than water. It was a world without government, without education, medicine and social safety nets. And most conspicuously, without law and order. A world where those who survived had to be "mobile enough to scavenge, and brutal enough to pillage." I say "seemed" rather than "seems" because last night I saw a movie that hit home harder than anything that I have ever seen. It was entitled "The Road". It depicted a post-apocalyptic America of the near future, an America of crumbling ghost towns or Alpha cities with empty roads strewn with rusty broken down cars and deserted homes, malls and skyscrapers. The mood was bleak. Set in winter, it followed the wanderings of a man and his young son walking in makeshift shoes and tattered clothing down a road in search of food and shelter, only to find the countryside largely empty of survivors, as armed marauding packs, as desperate for sustenance as they were, search for people to kill and eat. If you think a nation of civilized people would not practice cannibalism then you don't know the full story of Leningrad's 900 day siege. Archives opened in the post-Soviet era confirmed that Leningraders not only ate disinterred corpses, but actually killed living people to survive.

If you want to know how miserable life was for the survivors of this particular apocalypse, imagine being on a camping trip for the rest of your life. Your clothes are wet, damp and dirty, your hair and uncut beard are filthy, your teeth are rotting, a bath or a shower is a distant memory, and your whole life is focused on getting warm and getting something to eat. There might be moments of grief and nostalgia as flashbacks of the good life come back to you. A deceased wife, a daughter, a family dog, a garden, a piano. But those dream-like intrusions were swiftly dispelled by focused desperation. And at every moment, if you were not busy trying to start a fire or look for food, you fear an ambush or an assault. The loss of a jacket or a blanket or the food that you carried to thieves could be a death sentence, unless you were killed outright. To compound the futility of the struggle, the movie was filmed without colour, in a kind of brownish sepia tone that you see in old photographs. I was reminded of "The Elephant Man", which achieved the same gloomy effect.

It was not clear what had precipitated the disaster. The landscape was lifeless. No birds. No greenery But since the ruins and cars and buildings still stood, it seems doubtful that America had been nuked. It seemed rather, that society had simply collapsed. But everything you see makes one thing apparent. There are no hydrocarbons and no energy to run anything. The cities are empty not because of a neutron bomb or chemical warfare, they are empty because they were deserted. As analysts like Rick Belfour and Richard Embleton have observed, post carbon cities of more than 20 or in some cases 30 or 40,000 people will not be able to be fed or energized. In this movie you do not see urban streets or buildings littered with dozens or hundreds of skeletons. With some exceptions, it seems that people fled and died elsewhere.

This film is as emotionally devastating, and my opinion, as realistic as it can get. I don't see any soft landings or smooth transitions in my crystal ball, so to me, it was like viewing a documentary. Had I been the director though, I would have included a vignette of a formerly delusional Green who had once been on the lecture circuit talking about how the End of Oil would usher in a New Jerusalem where people experienced a Spiritual Awakening engendered by a communal life based on sharing, caring and a rejection of materialistic values. Viewers like myself would then spend delicious moments thinking about when his delusional bubble burst. When did his epiphany come? When he realized that his battery-powered car could not be recharged? When the local health food store could no longer be supplied with Amazonian soybeans or blue-green algae harvested from some obscure Oregonian lake, or be stocked with any one of innumerable over-priced exotic herbal placebos that he once thought essential to his life? When he began to regret that off-shore oil drilling succumbed to his environmental protests? Or that his campaign to reinstate Canada's gun registry resulted in his inability to defend his family from rape and murder? I would cast a Jack Layton look-a-like in that role. The last scene would have him on the end of a rope that he threw over the limb of a tree, clutching a copy of the last Sierra Club newsletter, which offered advice as to how we might lessen our personal ecological footprints and welcome more refugees to share our country's bounty.

"The Road". See it, and then savour every moment of life in this doomed civilization.

PS For those lucky enough to be beyond the reach of the CBC , New Democratic Party leader Jack Layton was instrumental in getting his trained parliamentary seals to vote the party line and help urban MPs keep their pet boondoggle, the Gun Registry. You see, law abiding Canadians have no need for guns, as they have the police force to protect them in an emergency, as Americans did in New Orleans during Katrina. I understand that the police can be everywhere at once, and in the midst of a societal collapse, will forget about attending to the needs of their own families, and stay on the job interminably without pay.

Tim Murray

September 25, 2010