Imagine watching the collapse of 2037 unfolding from a cosmic perspective. Imagine the skeletal figures of women and children mostly, and many men too, languishing in the heat and in bleak, parched landscapes, drinking from streams that are fetid, viscous, and black. Your eyes sweep across hundreds of millions of our human family dying in a swath of land that stretches from China’s eastern coast through Southeast Asia and into Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and from there through the Middle East and into the entire continent of Africa. It is a global famine from which there is neither respite nor hope—no monsoons or food aid rock concerts that will save them. For Civilization has no food surpluses and nations have emptied their storage granaries.
Poverty: Käthe Kollwitz, 1893-1894
Three bad years, that is all it has been. A drop in any bucket of time's reckoning. But there are so many of us, and there has always been so little room for error. Even in America, legendary for its vast supermarkets—the enclosed air-conditioned acres with shelves to the ceilings, brimming with cans and boxes and bags of foods processed, sugared, fattened, salted, preserved, and dyed—even there in that paradise, the shelves are now empty, and a fear of death hangs about the people when only yesterday, it seems, obesity and organic food were considered relevant concerns.
(Image: CEN / Twitter)
We pause over Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Iran, as immense fires rage over oil fields abandoned by retreating American soldiers. In the eastern distance, a dust cloud billows to the sky, the collective upheaval of a million Chinese soldiers marching westward to secure the last of the remaining oil. The Europeans watch on anxiously, for theirs’ is the only territory left on that landmass with fields of grain and with mills still grinding the flour for their bread. They are fixed to their screens, as the ubiquitous play of survey cameras and news cameras and personal cameras witness the refugees—belongings balanced on their heads and stuffed in suitcases—pouring in from the deserts and mountains and crossing the Mediterranean in waterlogged boats, causing the European cities to resound like myriad versions of Babel.
Europe is not their only destination. Refugees by the millions stream across borders like the Ganges flooding its banks, for what is a border and the name of a nation when there is no food for one’s children and no water for even their thirsts? No one can count the conflicts they prompted or the petty wars that spontaneously combusted around the planet. And now there is talk and fear—by all those with enough food in their bellies to worry of such things—about all the nuclear weapons known and unknown, secured and loose, hydrogen, atomic, suitcase, and dirty, and about those who might be desperate and hateful enough to use them. Unpredictably mixed in is that most explosive chemical, testosterone—civilization's bargain with the devil—which now fuels the passion of many young men filled with resentment, greed, fear, and rage. For but a few dollars they will hungrily trade a pound of plutonium. And young boys banded in their newly formed clans skitter about the brush and through the streets firing foreign-made guns, behaving not like the communities’ children but like drunken victors, taking orders from psychotic men in fatigues conspicuously starched, reveling in their rockets, jeeps, and tanks.
(Natalie Behring / Getty Images)
The Americans, barely holding on to some semblance of a nation, are in an inchoate process of directing the full force of their military onto their own people, for, even in this country of the constitution, the looting and violence cannot be contained and the rule of law sustained by mere policemen. Isolationism is no longer a luxury, but rather an ominous imperative, for the global economy imploded within weeks of the Chinese-Russian War.
CREDIT: AAMIR QURESHI/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
And as in any Ponzi game, everyone who was caught holding the bag has gone under. Hundreds of vast container ships stuffed with the usual bounty of the Third World countries—all the toys and electronics and clothes and every other imaginable bauble the indigents made in their factories for pennies—now sit in the harbors of Hamburg and Los Angeles and Newark and hundreds of other cities, with nowhere to go. The stores are still filled with these very things. No one is buying them and perhaps no one ever will. The whole human economic machine—with the deafening roar of all its valves, pistons, and gears—has been abruptly switched to OFF, leaving us in an eerie silence. Eerie, because of how fragile the whole thing really was. And the men in the ships wait in port, smoking cigarettes, not knowing what to do with themselves, fretting about their loved ones at home, thinking that surely the system will pick up again from where it left off and empty their vessels of these worthless goods onto the dockside platforms, and all will be as it was before. And with this same faith in civilization, the marines safeguard these ships and the stores and the power stations and everything else that a rich man may still own.
Taking a Break: Ken Koskela, photographer (https://www.kenkoskela.com/photo/taking-a-break/)
It is true that the skies are still blue and the oceans are wide and deep, but their beauty no longer obscures their truth. We know that saline waters have leaked into the interstices of sediments once flush with oil and fresh water. We know that there once existed tremendous aquifers under the American Midwest, under China, India, and the Middle East, virtual underground seas, emptied for decades onto irrigated fields that were also fed on steroids, on oil, fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, hormones, antibiotics, and everything else we could muster against nature. The great rivers—once revered as gods—are now but open sewers. Some never reach the ocean, drained by the billions of thirsty mouths they must pass on their ancient journeys to the coast. The oceans themselves have become deserts, where no fishing boat will waste its time hunting. And the glaciers, once strongholds in the mountains, are melting into the seas, their waters creeping up the coasts and down the city streets into basements and subway tunnels.
We could worry for the future, but who really has time for such abstractions? Who, but the wealthiest few cloistered behind armed walls, do not spend their days working to make it to the next? Who even remembers how it all started, why the grocery shelves suddenly went bare? Or it seemed sudden to us. Three years ago, in 2034, when the droughts, floods, and plagues came upon us. Just a natural coincidence of variables, really, any archeologist will tell you this. These things happen and have happened and will happen many times more—the lands cropped for centuries finally died and the forests all about the tropical earth were then razed for farmland. From the fires that consumed all this life, smoke roiled up black and thick, as if from a ceremony of massive sacrifices. And still the famines mounted. And the economies came to a screaming halt. There was no wage for a day's work, and no taxes to be taken, the roads and bridges went without repair, the coal trains stopped on their way to the power stations, and cities darkened overnight. People poured out of their buildings into the streets and shouted slogans and pumped their fists at invisible leaders, and eventually they went home, scratching their heads, murmuring to each other about who was to blame.
Billy H.C. Kwok/Getty Images
And on and on we could without hyperbole divine the future suffering of our kith and kin and the ruin of our lovely, nurturing, and simultaneously exacting planetary home. We have already visited examples of less destructive societies, places such as Ladakh and Kerala where some few have managed sustainable lives, the kind of places that we have the resources, technology, and the know-how to create, but will have neither the will nor the wisdom to realize. Instead, the likely outcome of humanity's experiment with Civilization will be some approximation of the above. It may not happen in 2037—that date was picked for dramatic effect—or by 2050, or 2075, even. However, the younger one’s age, the more assured she is of witnessing these horrors. I have a daughter, and I am scared for her at times, especially in my early morning awakenings, when the sun is still far from rising, and I despair about the world our generation has left for her. I sit up and meditate until the sun has risen enough to light the air and the birds sing their morning songs of hope and celebration. When I step out in the day to join my community, I will remember that it is by honestly facing the futility of the easy solutions thus far offered by pundits and the leaders and followers alike of political tribes can we to engage us in the difficult work ahead.