23 July 2008
Introduction: Waking from humanity’s sleepwalk, p. 1-2
Posted by Carleton Schade under: Dieback; Future .
Excerpt from chapter 1, Dieback: The Science and Soul of the Coming Collapse, p. 1-2
Imagine watching the collapse of 2030 unfolding from a cosmic perspective, from God’s omniscient eye. The skeletal figures of women and children mostly, yet many men too, with bellies swollen and eyes empty, languish in the heat and among the flies and in landscapes bleak without end; they drink from streams fetid, viscous and black, from which gases bubble up with a sulfuric stench. Linger upon the mother curled about her lifeless daughter. Gaunt fingers stroke soft cheeks, and memories blur into madness. Hundreds of millions, billions maybe, dying in a swath of land that stretches from the eastern coast of China through Southeast Asia and into Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, and from there through the Middle East and yes, of course, into the entire continent of Africa. A global famine from which there is neither respite nor hope—no monsoons that will save them or food aid rock concerts. For Civilization has no food surpluses and nations have emptied their storage granaries.
Three bad years, that’s all it’s 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—those 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 where only yesterday, it seems, the brand of toothpaste was the day’s great debate.
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We pause over Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran as immense fires rage over oil fields abandoned by American soldiers, fatigued from decades of fighting, retreating with stoic bewilderment. In the eastern distance, a dust cloudy biblical in proportion billows to the heavens as three million Chinese soldiers march forward to secure the last of the remaining oil. And in terror, the Europeans watch on helplessly, as they remain the only territory left on that miserable Eurasian land mass with fields of grain and mills still grinding the flour for their bread. They are fixed to their televisions, waiting to see if the Mongol hordes of yore will this time not halt at Vienna’s gates.
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 Refugee Wars. 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 thing 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. Objects without value. As if gold, itself, had suddenly mysteriously moldered. No one is buying them and no one will. The whole human economic machine—with the deafening roar of all its valves, pistons and gears—was 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 the ports, smoking cigarettes, not knowing what to do with themselves, worrying 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 yet own.