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By now it's a truism for many that America and many other nations are "addicted to oil," in the sense that "[t]he problem is not that we lack evidence [of the damaging effects of fossil-fuel use] or the economic and technical capacity to solve the problem, but that we lack the collective will to act." (This quote is from the Alliance for Climate Protection, which will garner support from ticket sales for the upcoming movie An Inconvenient Truth.)
Observers of individual addicts, such as David Foster Wallace in his novel Infinite Jest, have noted that they rarely if ever manage to break the cycle of addiction without outside help before they've "hit rock bottom." Will the same be true of our society? Will we continue to feed our "addiction" with coal even after the oil runs out, until the consequences of our actions finally build up to the point where civilization is too damaged to continue to "stay the course?" If so, can an independent group of humans provide the "outside help" we need to break our addiction? Or is the arrival of benevolent aliens the only thing that could really prevent the global-warming catastrophe that is now inevitable if we don't change our ways within ten to twenty years?
...except they'd never get here in time, so planning for handling catastrophes and their aftermath is now more important than ever. If we're going to hit rock bottom, and it's too late to open a parachute, we should at least try to deploy some kind of cushion. Here are some ideas of what that should include:
Despite all this talk of inevitable disasters lately, I still consider myself an optimist compared to some. I believe firmly that even if we hit rock bottom, while hideous amounts of suffering and death will occur, humanity as a whole will survive and will gain wisdom from this awful experience that will put us on the right road to breaking the cycle of addiction once and for all.
Observers of individual addicts, such as David Foster Wallace in his novel Infinite Jest, have noted that they rarely if ever manage to break the cycle of addiction without outside help before they've "hit rock bottom." Will the same be true of our society? Will we continue to feed our "addiction" with coal even after the oil runs out, until the consequences of our actions finally build up to the point where civilization is too damaged to continue to "stay the course?" If so, can an independent group of humans provide the "outside help" we need to break our addiction? Or is the arrival of benevolent aliens the only thing that could really prevent the global-warming catastrophe that is now inevitable if we don't change our ways within ten to twenty years?
...except they'd never get here in time, so planning for handling catastrophes and their aftermath is now more important than ever. If we're going to hit rock bottom, and it's too late to open a parachute, we should at least try to deploy some kind of cushion. Here are some ideas of what that should include:
- Prepare contingency plans for evacuating the regions that will be hardest hit by global warming.
- Improve international standards for quarantine procedures in case of multiple major disease outbreaks.
- Build a complete list of the web of ecological dependencies that sustain all the species humans use, and preserve every necessary species in this web in captivity, along with frozen samples of its seeds or fertilized eggs.
- Reinforce buildings and sewer systems, create a stockpile of boats, and so forth so that coastal cities and towns can smoothly handle the transition as their streets start to become canals.
Despite all this talk of inevitable disasters lately, I still consider myself an optimist compared to some. I believe firmly that even if we hit rock bottom, while hideous amounts of suffering and death will occur, humanity as a whole will survive and will gain wisdom from this awful experience that will put us on the right road to breaking the cycle of addiction once and for all.
