All Our Yesterdays

A week ago a very good article called “If we’re all going to die in the collapse, why bother prepping?” appeared.

I sent it to a friend whom I have a great deal of respect for. He replied with this below, and kindly gave his permission for it to be used as a guest post.

At this point, being as prepared as possible for emergency states, for other ways of meeting basic needs, to look out for your neighbours, and so on, should be de rigeur. Of course, so many folks are struggling to just make ends meet as things stand, so there’s already millions (billions?) who can’t “prep” in any meaningful way. Seems likely that the countries that will bear the initial brunt of deadly heatwaves are the ones where the weather is already hot, which are also in many cases where there is a lot of population growth, as well as large absolute population numbers.  So the idea of hitting 10Bn or whatever numbers the UN is chucking about based on “normal” seems increasingly unlikely to me.  We have, I think, somewhat forgotten just how dreadful the “Four Horsemen” can be when they really get going.

I suppose what I find odd about posts like these is the idea that we are certain to see an “end” to “civilisation” and that necessarily means the death of every human being.  I’m not trying to play down the horror of what’s already here, and accelerating. Just that if we were to fast-forward 50 years, what would we expect to see? Humans *are* really intelligent, adaptable, and there is an awful lot of us. So if I had to guess, there will be a few million (tens of millions, perhaps) humans who have witnessed “The Fall”, have had human folly indelibly branded into their racial consciousness, and who are living in a world that is more hostile and less fertile than the one that even we grew up in. But not, I don’t think, one that is wholly uninhabitable. Fast forward 50,000-100,000 years, humanity might even learn to live in something like harmony with the “new earth”, if they can last that long.

Or there might be something lurking “out there” that really will do away with every last human (and a great deal of other life as well, more’s the tragedy). In which case, I can’t stop it, and neither can you. In either case, doing our best to carpe as many damn diems as we can in the meantime, trying to help our fellow living things as we go, seems like the best we can do at this point.

Just that claiming anything in the absolute seems more like a human desire for certainty, than anything else. 

Of course, all of this thinking is happening in a different partition of my brain than the parent part, because otherwise I’d go mad, and that won’t help me help anyone….

This is not a future I’m cheering for, in some sort of misanthropic fug. It’s just the one that, if I stand outside myself and try to extrapolate forward, seems the most likely. It’s worth reminding ourselves that there are many shades of grey in commonly-used terms like “doomed”, “fucked” and whatever other adjectives you might choose to apply to humanity’s future, and the lighter ones, even if locally, even if not forever, will always be worth fighting for