THIS IS MY SEVENTH STORY WITH “APOCALYPSE” IN THE TITLE

“An Inconvenient Apocalypse” Is Not The Feel-Good Book of the Year

“We are starting too late to prevent billions of people from enduring incalculable suffering”

I haven’t written a book review since I pretended to have read Paradise Lost back in university, partly because I think books should speak for themselves, but also because I’m lazy and what the fuck do I know about literature anyway.

I’ve made an exception for An Inconvenient Apocalypse: Environmental Collapse, Climate Crisis, and the Fate of Humanity because like me, the authors, Wes Jackson and Bob Jensen, don’t have high hopes for our collective future. Unlike me, they have academic cred and a great deal of rigour and research to back their views on why our environmental crises have doomed us.

Warning: this book is a gently written but exceedingly bleak work which pulls no punches about where our civilization is headed.

If you’re a techno-optimist who’s counting on windmills to drag us from the edge of the abyss, a social justice enthusiast who thinks smashing capitalism will fix what’s broken, or just a garden-variety Pollyanna grasping for silver linings, this is not the book for you. No solutions are offered or anticipated.

However, unlike many works in the eco-catastrophe genre, An Inconvenient Apocalypse isn’t strident, angry, or panicked about the impending collapse. It’s more of an elegy for a dying civilization, which takes a pragmatic but soft-spoken approach to the problems we face; so soft-spoken that it’s a slight shock when we realize what the authors are saying.

Their thesis can be summed up succinctly: our current set of cascading crises isn’t evidence of a society gone badly off the rails, but a result of basic human nature, as evidenced by history and evolutionary biology. Considering that catastrophe is built into our DNA, and how far and fast we’ve already tumbled down our Gaderene path to self-destruction, there’s no outcome that doesn’t include a massive, near-term decline in the human population.

Jensen and Jackson — self-described “old white guys from the United States,” who acknowledge in the introduction their privileged status and potential biases — tackle some sensitive questions that are often avoided in apoca-literature, including how many humans the earth can reasonably sustain.

How many?

Well, “far fewer” than the current eight billion, probably around two or three billion. And while three-quarters of humanity are starving, roasting, or drowning their way off the mortal coil, the remainder — the ‘saving remnant” — will be unable to maintain nation-states, cities, or complex technological society. The only way to forestall disaster, says Jackson and Jensen, is to move at a speed “faster than it appears we are capable of.”

In case you’re saying “yeah, but…”, the authors demolish two hopeful myths about how homo sapiens sapiens could escape the inevitable fate of all animals who devour every available resource while shitting all over the environment that sustains them.

The first myth is that humans are infinitely resourceful and will find technological solutions to our problems. There’s precedent for this — the Green Revolution of the nineteen sixties and seventies allowed food production to skyrocket and support a soaring global population.

However, those innovations came with a new set of challenges. For example, nearly half the world’s food supply relies on synthetic fertilizer manufactured by a process heavily dependent on fossil fuels. What happens when those fossil fuels are suddenly unavailable, an issue that’s already happening in the developing world?

Each technological step we take simply builds the house of cards higher and sets us up for a more disastrous collapse.

The second flawed argument is that if we can just achieve income equality, social justice and other cheery improbabilities that have never been accomplished over millennia of structured civilization, the environment will spontaneously sort itself out. The authors acknowledge that “cultures and systems…have intensified this crisis, capitalism and European imperialism being the most recent” but point out that no ecosystem, however progressive, can sustain eight billion humans in a level of comfort even close to what first world populations enjoy today.

What can we do?

As far as avoiding collapse and mass casualties, not much except try to be philosophical about how much it’s going to suck.

Jensen and Jackson advocate preparing for the great power-down as a society, rather than investing in personal bunkers loaded with ammunition and beef jerky. They suggest that while developing survival skills for a much smaller world will be useful, individuals and small groups are unlikely to be able to get through the coming disasters. Instead, larger society needs to start planning for life in a world dramatically different from the one that we presently live in.

Is there hope?

In a word, no.

The two authors write separately on hope, each equally depressing in their own way. Jensen simply says hope has never been a big part of his life, thereby dodging the entire question. Jackson likens the arc of human history to a gigantic Ponzi scheme based on stealing energy from future generations, and we’ve just hit the point where the investors find out their money has all been pissed away on Maseratis and beach houses.

The authors say that we can’t avoid the huge population crash they’re predicting, and at best we can try to manage it with a minimum of suffering. They propose a hard cap on carbon as the most likely way to get there, knowing as we do that it will never happen.

Some lines that summarize the stark tone and content of the book: “The modern economy created by the Industrial and Digital Revolutions is not running out of time but rather has run out of time to correct the course…we are starting too late to prevent billions of people from enduring incalculable suffering.’

Could they be wrong? Of course. But they won’t be unless we change course in sweeping, unprecedented ways, unless we abandon consumer culture and voluntarily cut our ecological footprints to that of a hunter-gatherer in a primeval forest.

Yeah, I don’t think so either. Good luck, everyone.

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