There are various apocalyptic scenarios I don’t worry too
much about. The eruption of a supervolcano should be forecastable well ahead, and
while the arrival of a big meteorite might catch the earth by surprise more,
there should still be time to do something about it. And the earth is immensely
resilient: soil deterioration and the decline of insects could be reversed, if
we human beings chose to act (insects breed awfully fast). A generation ago
people talked in dire terms about the damage to the Ozone Layer, and that is
being repaired; back when I was small, the threat was of a new Ice Age (an old
Dr Who story, The Ice Warriors, had that background, and I breathlessly read
the book). The effects of a few centuries of increasing volumes of carbon
dioxide being pumped into the atmosphere, though, are of a different order:
they have acted slowly, are still acting, and would carry on acting even if we
were to stop adding to them tomorrow, which we won’t.
If the whole of the polar ice were to disappear, the
estimates are that global sea levels would rise by about 80 metres. The Chapel
of St Catherine at Abbotsbury would probably survive, but only just, the new
sea waters lapping at its door at a high tide. The losses are unlikely to be
that severe, but they will happen, and as most of the world’s population
currently lives at a fairly low level, even a modest sea rise of a couple of
tens of metres, coupled with accompanying climatic changes, will render large
parts of the earth impossible to live in. Huge numbers of people will be set moving,
the international trade system will be shattered, and nations will dissolve.
Our ability to feed ourselves will be put under strain. The worse it gets, the
more this will tip towards social collapse and mass starvation. It won’t happen
quickly, in human if not in geological terms: it will take a few generations. We
know remarkably little about the last time this kind of thing took place,
during the fall of the Roman Empire; most of what we understand about that
event comes from urbanites like St Augustine or Sidonius Appolinaris, in whose context
some Romanitas survived, but for most citizens of the Empire a way of life fell
apart very gradually over a century and more. The facilities of civilisation,
schools, libraries, the postal system, and public institutions, became
progressively unsustainable, the economy faltered, and the cities themselves
were abandoned. Ultimately all left were ruins and weedy roads. The coming
great disruption will be worse as it will affect the entire globe, and will
probably take us down further (think of how we rely on electricity and the
internet). I think the baby I baptised this morning will see the beginning of
the acute phase of it in his lifetime; but I wonder whether the state of the UK’s
roads, hospitals, schools and streets, and our inability, apparently, to
support the goods we want to socially, are already the first dim harbingers
of what is to come.
What can a church do? We probably need to encourage the
stockpiling of knowledge in a form people will be able to access in a century
or so after the internet stops working, and that means books. I wonder if the
government shouldn’t start a programme to transfer key texts onto parchment? We
know that survives, after all. There isn’t going to be any point shutting
yourself in a basement with a gun and a load of tins: you’d be better off
learning how to grow food as it’s those abilities which will be in demand;
perhaps we should facilitate that. We should also encourage love, for one
another and for the earth. Not to surrender to hatred and fear, and not to lose
our nerve in the face of disaster, will maximise the chances that at least some
human beings, and something of humanity, will make it through to the next phase
in our history.
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