Flirting with disaster
Doom and gloom keeps books jumping off the shelves
BY Ron Nurwisah
Photography by Mike Cassese/Reuters
If you’ve scanned the shelves you’ve seen them: disaster books. They’re serious books, tackling the most serious of topics, the survival of the human race itself. And they sell. Jared Diamond’s book Collapse looked at how seemingly stable societies like the Maya in the Yucatan Peninsula or the natives of Easter Island drove themselves into extinction; the book spent more than 35 weeks on The Globe and Mail’s bestseller list.
So it’s not surprising to see more authors examine just how the world as we know it is going to end. First we have University of Toronto professor Thomas Homer-Dixon’s The Upside of Down, a book that touches on the same themes as Diamond’s work and draws on Homer-Dixon’s first book, The Ingenuity Gap. The Upside of Down explores how disasters can lead to innovation that makes a society stronger but also how those same societies can falter and fail if they’re unable to respond to catastrophe.
But before any of us can see our cities turn into ghost towns, we might just all die off first. At least that’s what Alberta author Andrew Nikiforuk thinks. His book Pandemonium looks at how a combination of global trade, misuse of antibiotics and wilful ignorance of the natural world have pried open a biological Pandora’s box of exotic diseases and ecological invaders that will render millions sick and our ecosystems ravaged.
It’s easy to see why these books are popular. Homer-Dixon uses seemingly inconsequential details to support his thesis. In one brilliant thought experiment, Homer-Dixon flashes back to Imperial Rome and calculates the amount of food that went into quarrying, moving and placing one block of stone that still holds up an arch in the Coliseum. In another scene he looks at how a small detail, such as the smoothness of sediment in a Roman aqueduct, is a barometer of the strength and stability of that society.
Pandemonium is filled with anecdotes of diseases, and deaths from recent outbreaks of SARS, antibiotic-resistant bugs, bird flu and the like that wouldn’t be out of place in a Michael Crichton novel. According to Nikiforuk, we are courting biological disaster; our overpopulated cities resemble buffets to an array of viruses and diseases. The trains, ships and planes that connect our cities have introduced biological invaders such as zebra mussels, Dutch elm disease, and cane toads in Australia that have irrevocably changed ecosystems around the world.
These books tap into the psychological unease that many of us get whenever we read the news, but don’t offer much in the way of solutions. For Homer-Dixon, our salvation will come from making our “systems” more responsive, and by moving our economy toward resilience and away from the pursuit of growth—both ideas that are vague and overarching. Nikiforuk, meanwhile, gives us little more than tips on how to avoid infection next time we happen to find ourselves in a crowded hospital.
And this is where George Monbiot’s Heat stands out. Monbiot, a columnist for the Manchester Guardian, acknowledges that climate change is a very serious threat to global civilization, but skips the doom and gloom and gets down to the hard work of cutting carbon emissions and putting the brakes on rising temperatures.
He sketches out a plan that sees the U.K. cut 90 percent of its carbon dioxide emissions by 2030. It’s an audacious and exciting plan to read. Monbiot’s solutions range from the simple to large-scale reorderings of our society, everything from new rules to make homes more energy efficient to all-but banning air travel and shifting the focus of our transportation networks away from private cars. All of them require a quantity of political will and public acceptance, commodities that at the best of times are in short supply. These might be imperfect solutions, but in a world that admittedly faces problems that can paralyze us with their scope and complexity, thinkers should be applauded for having the courage to try and solve them.
