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Has the end of civilisation begun?

A few weeks ago I read what I believe is the most important environmental book ever written. It contains no graphs, no tables, no facts, figures, warnings, predictions or even arguments. Nor does it carry a single dreary sentence, which, sadly, distinguishes it from most environmental literature. It is a novel, first published a year ago, and it will change the way you see the world.

Cormac McCarthy’s book The Road considers what would happen if the world lost its biosphere, and the only living creatures were humans, hunting for food among the deadwood and soot. Some years before the action begins, the protagonist hears the last birds passing over, “their half-muted crankings miles above where they circled the earth as senselessly as insects trooping the rim of a bowl.” Mr. McCarthy makes no claim that this is likely to occur, but merely speculates about the consequences.

All pre-existing social codes soon collapse and are replaced with organised butchery, then chaotic, blundering horror. What else are the survivors to do? The only remaining resource is human. It is hard to see how this could happen during humanity’s time on earth, even by means of the nuclear winter Mr. McCarthy proposes. But his thought experiment exposes the one terrible fact to which our technological hubris blinds us: our dependence on biological production remains absolute. Six weeks after finishing The Road, I remain haunted by it.

So when I read the new U.N. report on the state of the planet over the weekend, my mind kept snagging on a handful of figures. There were some bright spots — lead has been removed from petrol almost everywhere and sulphur emissions have been reduced in most rich nations — and plenty of gloom. But the issue that stopped me was production.

Crop production has improved over the past 20 years (from 1.8 tonnes per hectare in the 1980s to 2.5 tonnes today), but it has not kept up with population. There will be roughly 9 billion people by 2050: feeding them and meeting the millennium development goal on hunger [halving the proportion of hungry people] would require a doubling of world food production. Unless we cut waste, overeating, biofuels and the consumption of meat, total demand for cereal crops could rise to three times the current level.

There are two limiting factors. One, mentioned only in passing in the report, is phosphate: it is not clear where future reserves might lie. The more immediate problem is water. Where will it come from? “Water scarcity is already acute in many regions, and farming already takes the lion’s share of water withdrawn from streams and groundwater.” Ten per cent of the world’s major rivers no longer reach the sea all year round.

Buried on page 148, I found this statement. “If present trends continue, 1.8 billion people will be living in countries or regions with absolute water scarcity by 2025, and two-thirds of the world population could be subject to water stress.” Wastage and deforestation are partly to blame, but the biggest cause of the coming droughts is climate change. Rainfall will decline most in the places in greatest need of water. So how, unless we engineer a sudden decline in carbon emissions, are we going to feed the world? How, in many countries, will we prevent the social collapse that failure will cause?

On October 27, for some light relief from the U.N. report , I went to a meeting of roads protesters in Birmingham, central England. They had come from all over the U.K., and between them they were contesting 18 new schemes: a fraction of the road projects the British government is now planning. The improvements to its climate change bill that Hilary Benn, the U.K.’s Environment Secretary, announced on Monday were welcome. But in every major energy sector the British government is promoting policies that will increase emissions. How will it make the 60 per cent cut that the bill enforces?

No one knows, but the probable answer is contained in the bill’s great get-out clause: carbon trading. If the government can’t achieve a 60 per cent cut in the U.K., it will pay other countries to do it on our behalf. But trading works only if the total global reduction we are trying to achieve is a small one. To prevent runaway climate change, we must cut the greater part of the world’s current emissions. Most of the nations with which the U.K. will trade will have to make major cuts of their own, on top of those they sell to us. Before long we will have to buy our credits from Mars and Jupiter. The only certain means of preventing runaway climate change is to cut emissions now.

It seems to me that we are already pushing other people ahead of us down The Road. As the biosphere shrinks, Mr. McCarthy describes the collapse of the protagonist’s core beliefs. I sense that this might be happening already: that a hardening of interests, a shutting down of concern, is taking place among the people of the rich world. If this is true, we do not need to wait for the forests to burn or food supplies to shrivel before we decide that civilisation is in trouble. — ©Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2007

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