More Thomas Berry

Sorry about the break there -- posting will be lighter than usual this week.

The following is from a 1993 conversation with Father Thomas Berry at his home in North Carolina. John Lane and Thomas Rain Crowe interviewed him for Appalachian Voices magazine.

JL: What was this area of the Piedmont like in 1920, when you were growing up, when you were a boy?

TB: Well, there was much more animal life! Frogs, deer, and birds in particular. That’s one thing I remembered. Never ran into many wolves, as they were pretty well gone at that time. I did walk in the woods a great deal when I was a child. Already, the woods and nature were the most important things in my life.

By the time I was ten or eleven years old, I had a feeling that something was wrong. I didn’t, of course, have the least idea of what this was all about, but I grew up with the feeling that I couldn’t trust the developing industrial world in which I was living.

… JL: There is a doctrine that’s developing in some evangelical churches that’s called “cultural mandate” about subduing the earth. Have you heard about this and have you thought about it? Is that a disturbing development to you?

TB: I’ve heard about it. To subdue the Earth? There are churches wherein this is a developing doctrine now. It’s about subordination rather than finding a way to become better stewards. We need to be finding more ways to learn. In fact, the more precise translation of the contemporary Biblical passage which modern man is familiar and that says “And man shall have dominion over all the land” is really closer in translation to “And man shall be steward to the land.”

I would say that this whole direction by the contemporary church is a total misreading of the Christian religion as well as all other religions. All religions are founded on our experiences with the earth and the universe. St. Thomas, a great thinker in the Catholic tradition, lived in the thirteenth century, but is still a wonderful teacher, and his teachings are still available to us. He always said that the universe symbolizes the hopeless perfection in things.

One can look at it this way: From the standpoint of existence, the divine is primary, and the universe is derivative. On the order of human knowledge, the universe is primary and the divine is consequential. The very nature of religion robs itself of the perception that the universe is not self-explanatory ...

JL: So, how do we read this landscape that’s being decimated by developers as a creative landscape? Rather than wanting to “redeem” it and at the same time not wanting to save it? I don’t know if you’ve seen or heard the recent “news” on the failure of environmentalists. “The death of the environmental movement,” some have said.

TB: They are saying, the opposition that is, that the environmental people are missing the point somewhere. That is quite terrible. They (the nay-sayers) are missing the point of the larger issue. And one of the ways they are missing the point is that they don’t understand how the human mind functions.

Humans can be described as “that being in whom the universe reflects on itself in a conscious mode of self-reflection.” We humans actually enable the planet Earth because we are members of the planet Earth. We enable the Earth to reflect on itself.

We’re doing a terrible job with what knowledge we have. It’s not that the knowledge is wrong. It’s that we don’t know how to use it. This is one of the basic failures of science. Science does not instruct us on how to use science.

JL: Talking about children is a good place to ask some questions about population. When you were a child growing up in North Carolina, there were less than two billion humans on the planet. And as predicted, the world’s population rose to 6.5 billion in about twenty five years. This all happening in your lifetime. The South is the fastest growing region in the country. Can the South survive? Can we, as Southerners, survive this population boom?

TB: I don’t think we can. It would be very difficult to survive with that much population. It goes against all odds with regard to carrying capacity. And it’s here that religion has been at fault. Especially the Catholic religion--which has failed extensively in not paying attention to the decline of the natural world, and in this way it’s losing its own foundations, because the biblical world is thoroughly cosmological. Rituals are cosmological. They presuppose the universe.

I was in a monastery for ten years. I didn’t even come home to Greensboro, where my family resided, during that time--between the ages of twenty to thirty. In the monastery, we’d celebrate dawn with prayers and meditations. And we’d celebrate the mid-day, and celebrate the early evening. At vespers, we’d celebrate the early evening, and then the late evening, which was wonderful! Then I’d get up at two-o’clock in the morning and I’d have these experiences with hymns that would be sung according to the time of day and seasons of the year. The whole of that monastic literature was woven into the cosmological cycle. The scriptures, the book-of-songs was thoroughly cosmological.


Thanks to Tennessee's amazing Albert Bates for reminding me of this interview.

FADA update

The group is doing well here in County Kildare. We unveiled our new community garden recently -- "Bia Linn," or "Our Food" -- and bit by bit we have accumulated tools, earth, plants, seeds and people. Some members of our group came in with wood and nails, and hammered together garden beds. One person brought a water barrel, one a composter, several brought laundry-sized planting tubs. Bord na Mona, the Irish fuel company, donated tonnes of topsoil, and our chair carved a wooden sign for the entrance.

My FADA colleague Ciara Bennett has done an amazing job organising the facility, and already, just a few weeks into the project, the place is covered in beans, peas, cucumbers, pumpkins, cabbages and blackcurrant bushes. Ciara was on the local radio station's chat show talking about it, I also did an interview for the news, and we've had several newspaper articles and columns already.

We will be hosting another Feile na Samhna (Halloween Festival) this year -- the last one was a great success, bringing many area residents in to meet local beekeepers, weavers, growers, alternative teachers, and so on. It managed to combine the festive (puppet shows for the kids, craft workshops, dancing, indie films) with the serious (talks and community discussions of peak oil, climate change and the coming hard times). Those things might seem incompatible, but they blended well -- a student theater group, for example, presented short plays about post-peak life, like James Howard Kunstler's World Made by Hand, but sunnier.

Other people in FADA will be refining the 2020 show -- a fake newscast from County Kildare in the future, after a small but critical mass of people have made a few simple changes. It's a funny and inspiring antidote to the doomer view of the future -- I'll post it here when it's ready. I'll also post the new web site here as soon as it's done.

Orlov postscript

It appears that, as I was posting my notes from Orlov's talk, he was posting the actual talk. You can find it here:

http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/2009/06/definancialisation-deglobalisation.html

or

http://energybulletin.net/node/49243

and praise for it here:

http://sharonastyk.com/2009/06/16/why-dmitry-orlov-is-absolutely-positively-the-best-peak-oil-writer-ever/

http://theredmullet.blogspot.com/2009/06/definancialisation-deglobalisation.html

FEASTA conference

On Thursday I set off in the morning as usual for Dublin, but instead of going to work I took the train to the North Dublin neighbourhood of Drumcondra, and walked to the green and secluded grounds of All Hallows College and the site of the New Emergency Conference.

The conference was hosted by FEASTA, the admirable Irish organisation of Richard Douthwaite, Corrina Byrne, Davie Phillip, Emer O’Siorchru, David Korowicz and others. These people and many others created FEASTA in 1998 to research what would be needed for a genuinely sustainable society, and to develop systems for creating it. Its research papers, pamphlets, talks and podcasts have spread the ideas of zero-growth societies, carbon trading, reformed tax systems and new uses of land.

They named their organisation FEASTA, Irish for “in the future,” after a line in an Celtic song Cill Chai:

“Cad a dheanfaimid feasta gan adhmad? Ta deireadh no gcoillte ar lar.”
“What shall we do in the future for wood? The last of the forests have gone.”

This conference brought together people from across Ireland and from many other parts of the world: Julian Darley, late of Global Public Media and the Post-Carbon Institute; Oil Drum editor Chris Vernon; “Reinventing Collapse” author Dmitri Orlov, Davie Phillip of FEASTA and the Dublin non-profit Cultivate; and many others.

I could take no more than one day off work and attend one of the conference’s three days, but I immensely enjoyed talking to the people gathered there – elderly scientists looking to the future, young activists eager to take what they learned to their own communities, people who are trying living off guinea pigs or building room-sized bio-digesters. I took notes through all the talks, and will be posting an appropriate couple of them in the next day or two.

The current crisis gets us all down sometimes, but days like this give me hope. Days like this are how it begins.

A great man passes

Father Thomas Berry -- Catholic priest, historian, theologian, ecologist and visionary -- died last week at the age of 94.

Berry was the kind of scholar and thinker that is rare in our age. He was beloved by many longtime greens, the farmers and activists who formed the Bioregional Conferences of the 1970s, for his works combining religious devotion with ecological understanding.

I corresponded with his sister in the last couple of years, hoping to interview him -- but many others wanted to see him as well, and his health was poor. There is so much I want to say about him, but the words don't come together. Maybe in time. Goodbye, Father.

This experience we observe even now in the indigenous peoples of the world. They live in a universe, in a cosmological order, whereas we, the peoples of the industrial world, no longer live in a universe. We live in a political world, a nation, a business world, an economic order, a cultural tradition, in Disneyworld. We live in cities, in a world of concrete and steel, of wheels and wires, a world of business, of work. We no longer see the stars at night or the planets or the moon. Even in the day we do not experience the sun in any immediate or meaningful manner. Summer and winter are the same inside the mall. Ours is a world of highways, parking lots, shopping centers. We read books written with a strangely contrived alphabet. We no longer read the book of the universe.

Nor do we coordinate our world of human meaning with the meaning of our surroundings. We have disengaged from that profound interaction with our environment inherent in our very nature. Our children do not learn how to read the Great Book of Nature or how to interact creatively with the seasonal transformations of the planet. They seldom learn where their water comes from or where it goes. We no longer coordinate our human celebration with the great liturgy of the heavens.

We have indeed become strange beings so completely are we at odds with the planet that brought us into being. We dedicate enormous talent and knowledge and research to developing a human order disengaged from and even predatory on the very sources whence we came and upon which we depend at every moment of our existence. We initiate our children into an economic order based on exploitation of the natural life systems of the planet. To achieve this perspective we must first make them autistic in their relation with the natural world about them. This disconnection occurs quite simply since we ourselves have become insensitive toward the natural world and do not realize just what we are doing. Yet, if we observe our children closely in their early years and see how they are instinctively attracted to the experiences of the natural world about them, we will see how disorientated they become in the mechanistic and even toxic environment that we provide for them ...

The difficulty is that with the rise of the modern sciences we began to think of the universe as a collection of objects rather than a communion of subjects. We frequently identify the loss of the interior spirit-world of the human mind and emotions with the rise of modern mechanistic sciences. The more significant thing, however, is that we have lost the universe itself. We achieved extensive control over the mechanistic and even the biological functioning of the natural world, but this control itself has produced deadly consequences. We have not only controlled the planet in much of its basic functioning; we have, to an extensive degree, extinguished the life systems themselves. We have silenced so many of those wonderful voices of the universe that once spoke to us of the grand mysteries of existence.

We no longer hear the voices of the rivers or the mountains, or the voices of the sea. The trees and meadows are no longer intimate modes of spirit presence. Everything about us has become an "it" rather than a "thou." We continue to make music, write poetry, and do our painting and sculpture and architecture, but these activities easily become an aesthetic expression simply of the human and in time lose the intimacy and radiance and awesome qualities of the universe itself. We have, in the accepted universe of these times, little capacity for participating in mysteries celebrated in the earlier literary and artistic and religious modes of expression. For we could no longer live in the universe in which these were written. We could only look on, as it were.

-- From The Meadow Across the Creek, 1993.

Election Day

Today is Election Day here in Ireland, and for several weeks posters have hung from telephone poles and streetlamps all along the roads. The radio news has been full of polls, debates and interviews, with each candidate gingerly demonising the opposition and proclaiming themselves the choice of hope, change, reform and whatnot.

Superficially, this sounds like any American election, and Ireland has infighting, corruption and voter apathy like anywhere else. Their electoral system, however, offers many improvements over US elections, and a freedom of choice that most of my own countrymen lack.

First of all, Ireland maintains, by law, a strict election season – the advertisements go up a month or so before the election, and must be taken down immediately after. Parties and candidates do not spend two to three years campaigning, as in my native USA, and while I don’t watch much television, I’ve never seen a campaign commercial here.

Come Election Day, Ireland’s voters rank their first, second and third choices for an office, and those are mathematically factored in when no candidate gets a clear majority – and they rarely do. Candidates put up posters for themselves, of course, but in the fine print recommend one or two other candidates to write below their own name. Greens in America have long promoted this method under the name Instant Runoff Voting, and its installation would vastly improve America’s electoral landscape.

Also, one person is not chosen to represent a region of Ireland; rather, each region sends the top three (or more, depending on population) candidates, the public’s first, second and third choices. Americans so rarely have more than two candidates in a race anyway, but here ten people might run for an office and three of them might get elected.

When this is done over an entire country, it’s called Proportional Representation. If the USA had this in our Senate races, for example, and the Democrats received 40 percent of the vote, they would get 40 percent of the seats. If 10 percent of the public – across the country, everyone voting together -- wanted to vote Libertarian, that party would get 10 Senate seats. Ireland’s smaller version, PR inside small districts, means that candidates are local, yet factions within each locality get a voice in government.

These rules, as opposed to America’s winner-take-all system, allows third parties to exist in Ireland. There are two parties much larger than the others -- Fianna Fail (Fin-a fall, rhymes with tall) and Fine Gael (Fin-a Gail, rhymes with hail) – but neither has a clear majority, and several third parties and many independents are major players as well. In a typical election, Fine Gael and Fianna Fail might each take 40 percent of the vote, but the remaining 20 percent will be divided among the Greens, Labour, the Progressive Democrats and Sinn Fein (shin fain, rhymes with rain). There is usually a healthy smattering of independent candidates as well, activists well-known in their local area and not beholden to any party. No matter which major party wins, they cannot govern unless they form a coalition with one or more other groups.

America used to be much more like Europe is now, in the late 18th and 19th centuries – third parties thrived and operated as major players on the political scene. We never had ranked voting or proportional representation, but we had electoral fusion – that is, more than one party could pick the same candidate.

This meant that, while there were two large parties, they could not elect any candidates alone – they needed to make concessions to other factions to be elected. Our history books do not reveal much of this activity for two reasons; first, they only deal with the federal government, when much of the action was at the state and local levels. Second, they tend to list the major party of national candidates, so that William Jennings Bryan is referred to only as a Democrat and not as a Populist.

Third parties only attained the presidency once – the Republicans were arguably a third party when they elected our greatest president in 1860 – but they remained a force in politics until around a hundred years ago. Then, in state after state, the two largest parties consolidated power by eliminating fusion, forcing third parties out of elections except as “spoilers” that, like bees, sting once and then die. The few states that did not do this – say, New York State – are the few that still have active third parties.

In 1996, a group of Minnesotans tried to fight this, forming a third party and endorsing a major-party candidate. After the Minnesota courts ruled their action illegal, they brought their case to the USA Supreme Court, which handed down one of their less-known and more jaw-dropping rulings -- that the USA owes its “sound and effective government (sic)” to “the emergence of a strong and stable two-party system.”

As recounted in Lisa Disch’s excellent book The Tyranny of the Two-Party System, Supreme Court justices described in terror the consequences of having multiple parties. Justice Stevens envisioned a “parade of horribles,” elections in which there would be a “newly formed ‘No New Taxes,’ ‘Conserve Our Environment’ and ‘Stop Crime Now’ parties would face off against an opponent running for ‘The Fiscal Responsibility,’ ‘Healthy Planet’ and ‘Safe Streets’ parties.” How this would be negative, or even radically different than the current system, Stevens did not say.

The presence of only two major parties in the US not only limits our choices to two extremely similar groups, it also encourages the belief that these groups are all that can exist. Belief in a left-right spectrum is ubiquitous in America, and presents a massive barrier to non-mainstream ideas– say, peak energy or localisation. Since all meaningful issues – education, crime, health, religion – are considered political in America, and politics is binary, everyone’s first and last question will be “Which side are you on?”

I’ll go into more on that last point in a later post, but for now let me just note that, contrary to what the US media claim, democracy is not an ineffable quality that the US government bestows on the world through conquest. It does not involve flags, loyalty or unity. Its actions are far more painstaking and, to mainstream US culture, feel more alien – gathering in a library basement, calling your neighbours, canvassing door to door, protesting in the streets and forming your own factions. It means you move, and move, and move, until you are a movement, and what you and your neighbours want eventually percolates into the halls of power under sustained pressure. It means people get a chance to vote for what they want, and get to vote for parties that believe in it.

Ireland’s politics need a lot of reforming, but one fact stands out for me. Most Irish people vote – between 60 and 90 percent, depending on the election – perhaps because they know their vote counts for something.

In my country, most people don’t vote – not because they are stupid or callous, but because they think that their vote counts for nothing. And they are usually right.

Star Trek and the future of science fiction

I remember a writing course in which we were challenged to create a new character, past and all. Sounds easy enough, and we took turns blurting playful answers to basic attributes.

First name, asked the teacher? “Alastair!” someone shouted. Last name? “MacAlastair!” said someone else, laughing. Lives in? “Um … New Orleans!”

The laughter died away, though, as it became a challenge to keep the story straight. If Alastair MacAlastair had fought in Vietnam, what was he doing in college today? “Uh … he is trying to rebuild his life after prison.” And why was he in prison? Each new fact gave the character added complexity, demanded more answers, reduced our ability to play around. Like life itself, each choice shuts off all others, and making no choice is a choice as well.

I thought of this while watching the new Star Trek movie, which has problems. One thing I didn't have a problem with, though, was that the writers chose to create an “alternative timeline,” bringing the long-beloved characters back to the beginning but jettisoning all previous canon. Batman and James Bond have also done this recently, and I wouldn’t be surprised if other cult franchises followed suit, seeing this as a way out of the corners in which they’ve written themselves.

As science fiction jumped from a fringe genre to blockbuster status in the countercultural era – say, the late 60s to the early 80s – stories that began as B-grade entertainment swelled over their banks. Star Trek, X-Men, Doctor Who, Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica, Terminator – each developed near-religious followings whose members saw in these fictions a profundity they occasionally deserved. Each fiction spun off into more and more comics, books, television series and movies, and occasionally languages and commemorative porcelainware. Each simple story grew more and more fractal iterations and an increasingly crowded “universe,” until the creations threatened to collapse under the weight of their own Byzantine mythology.

For a while, the solution was more sequels and spin-offs, and in comics or books this can go on as long as there is an audience to buy them. But movies and television necessitate actors who age, until the Terminator was obviously collecting a pension and the increasingly jowly Enterprise crew kept lumbering back out of retirement. And in any medium, plots must be resolved, characters are killed off and story arcs reach the end of their feasible trajectory, leaving sequels feeling increasingly strained.

Jumping far ahead in time is also a possibility, as Star Trek did well with the Next Generation and the original Battlestar Galactica did badly with Galactica: 1980. Not all stories are suited to such a leap, however – Doctor Who already jumps around in time, X-Men would have to become a show about the future rather than the present, and the last two Terminator movies implicitly declared the heroism in T2 to have been in vain.

Prequels are an obvious alternative, keeping the characters and universe fresh while leaving room for new stories. But Star Trek: Enterprise, the Star Wars prequels and the recent X-Men: Wolverine movie all suffered from the same problem: how to make all these characters meet before they met and save the universe together, while also ensuring they got amnesia, were blindfolded during the action, or never left behind records of anything. It’s also just not that interesting writing a story with a foregone conclusion. As David Wong wrote in Cracked magazine, “The universe gets smaller as we find out that every page of history contains the same dozen names.”

Prequels have an additional problem: at the same time that the fictional world has gone backwards, the real world has gone forwards. The original Star Trek’s primitive special effects, heavy-handed social allegory, mini-skirted assistants and sexually irresponsible captain fit well in prime time in 1966; the 2000 prequel series never felt like it was happening earlier.

The most logical solution to all this, then, is the reboot. Batman, James Bond, Battlestar Galactica and now Star Trek have revived venerated characters and story with modern special effects and fresh actors. Writers get the best of both worlds: an already-familiar history from which to draw plot, along with the license to ignore it. Nods to the mythology can please fans, but embarrassing aspects of the original can be discarded. People who remember the original Battlestar Galactica can easily re-invest their emotion in the familiar quest for Earth, but Earth can be anything this time. Kirk and Spock’s understood relationship makes their first meeting momentous, but no one has to worry that it violates the canon of novel 23 back in 1979.

Even if other sci-fi franchises do reboot, though, it will be interesting to see what their universe will look like. Much of science fiction has been a product of its time looking much more like the year it was made than the year it is set; again, Star Trek may have been set in the 23rd century, but its sets, dialogue, costumes, score, villains and exaggerated play-fighting looked very much like 1966 Westerns or cop shows. (Relating to the title of this blog, they even used the set of Mayberry, with some tumbleweeds added, for a post-apocalyptic wasteland.)

Similarly, the original Star Wars was wildly popular partly because it hit all the right notes of 1977: young rebellion against the Man, plucky female characters, pseudo-Oriental wisdom -- and whole sections of plot and dialogue lifted from Westerns, a genre whose recent demise had left a hole in popular culture. (That scene where Luke realizes his parents are in danger? Lifted from The Searchers.) At the same time, it did things no science fiction had ever done: it was fun, had great special effects and presented a dented, lived-in world instead of the usual spires and togas. The prequels failed partly because they kept all the wrong things: they abandoned the fun story and grimy world, but the outdated kung-fu mysticism remained, grandfathered into the mythology like Star Trek’s Cold War allegories or Clark Kent’s fedora.

Science fiction has done this for a century, extrapolating the burning headlines of the moment and offering earnest writers a soapbox. But the whole genre is rooted in changing technology -- it wouldn’t really have been possible until the last few centuries, when people could expect the future to be radically different than the past. Not coincidentally, science fiction arose as technology began to boom about a century ago, when a critical mass of people began to abandon traditional lives and skills for a crowded and frenetic urban life. Its popularity really took off in the 1960s, when consumption went into overdrive and the global energy use curve took a much steeper angle. The more rapidly society changed, the more popular sci-fi became.

But what happens when we begin to slide down the other side of the energy curve? (You knew I would get to this sooner or later.) In the next few decades we will not only not see the economy recover to what it was, we might have to rethink what “economy” means. We might experience more natural disasters until we consider them normal. We might see fuel problems increase until more and more people give up trying to get petrol.

What form will science fiction take? Movies, television and YouTube will be in trouble eventually as energy becomes scarce, but they won’t go anywhere in the next few decades -- although they might be available to fewer people. Science fiction fills the top-grossing movie lists and whole sections of the bookstore, and probably won’t go away either. But what would it look like? If it predicts a future of small farms and small towns -- like, say, Mayberry - is it science fiction anymore?

Almost all Hollywood futures fall into one of two types: the one in which most people are more prosperous, better-educated and nicer than today, surrounded by wondrous technology in starships or domed cities; and the one in which most people are eating rats out of the gutter and fighting a desperate battle to stay alive during the End of the World.

As John Michael Greer has pointed out, most people seem to believe that we will progress until we ascend as supermen to the stars, or that disaster is about to weed out the unworthy. Either way, it’s a kind of religious belief that comes directly out of Christianity –the belief that we will improve ourselves until we ascend to God, and the idea that Judgement Day will cleanse the world.

To be more specific, these are roughly the futures of two main strains of apocalyptic Christianity, called post-millennialist and pre-millennialist to their friends. To grossly over-generalise, post-millennialists believe that Christians will gradually transform the world until the Kingdom of God is established here. It can take a healthy form, like the reformers who sought to end slavery or establish labour laws, or it can take the uglier form of radicals who want to create a Shia-like theocracy in the USA, but either way, it demands that Christians change the present and create a “better” future before we ascend.

Pre-millennialists tend to believe that the world is going south fast and will be destroyed soon, with a few believers saved – either uploaded to heaven in the post-60s “Rapture” religion, or by surviving the coming Tribulation.

During the mid-20th century, as energy use skyrocketed exponentially, science fiction was definitely post-millennialist – the world was getting better and better, and soon – 1980, 1990, 2020, whatever – we would ascend to the stars as superior beings. In the 1970s, though, social unrest, oil shocks and recession darkened the global mood, and issues like overpopulation, pollution and the limits to growth percolated into the public consciousness. Also – and this was probably both cause and effect -- the pre-millennialist Rapture movement spread through Christianity, popularizing the imminent end.

Not coincidentally, science fiction got dark, dystopian and pre-millennialist fast – only a few years separate 2001: A Space Odyssey from Soylent Green. Star Wars had a few hopeful moments but didn’t predict any future – it happened “a long time ago,” remember – and most other science fiction of my generation has foreseen desperation and despair around the corner. Alien, Resident Evil, I Am Legend, 28 Days Later – they all involve everyone dying horribly except for a few survivors whose future is uncertain, and each new film boosts the death rate further.

With one exception: Star Trek. Created at the tail end of the utopian-future era, it has lingered and flourished even through decades of holocaust porn – perhaps this is the reason for its famously devoted following in a cynical age. Its vision has been diluted somewhat from Gene Roddenberry’s creation, but it continues to show a world without corporations, without poverty, without class, without even fashions. I wouldn’t choose Roddenberry’s vision of one-world socialist government to get there myself, but I’m completely behind the ideals.

As the world enters an era far more difficult than the 1970s, science fiction might lunge even further into grim survivalist epics, but – and I’m afraid to even ask this – how much darker and bloodier can they get?

On the other hand, when a crisis begins, the public mood does not always go south – sometimes, as when World War II began, people pull together in common cause, more hopeful than they would be in a time of hedonism. Movies made during the Wall Street boom of the 1920s leaned toward tragedy, and the science fiction of the time towards dystopias. Only when the Great Depression and World War II began, and the world was plunged into darkness, did people find the future hopeful and holy again. As we enter what may be the greatest crisis, Star Trek’s optimism might have reached right across the decades to find its moment again.

Of course, that optimism assumed that we would ascend to the stars soon, and now it seems we won’t. But we can still enjoy the mythology even after it has slipped the surly bonds of expectation, just as we can enjoy Lord of the Rings even if we don’t believe there were ever elves. We can love it as a fantasy, whether or not we remember that, once, it was what the future was like.

Just in case

Sometimes people accurately sketch a vision of the future based on facts and reason, and sometimes they pose a hypothetical wild card that proves eerily prescient. James Howard Kunstler has done both in the last few years – his 2005 book The Long Emergency predicted volatile oil prices, a busting house bubble and bank collapses, but in his fictional 2008 follow-up World Made By Hand he threw in an additional insult – a lethal “Mexican Flu.”

As creepy as the parallels are, it’s important to separate Kunstler’s dire fiction – and the public’s looming sense of dread – from a range of likely outcomes to this outbreak. In two weeks this virus has apparently killed 150 people, and while each of those deaths are tragic and the numbers will no doubt increase, keep in mind that ordinary flu already kills as many as half a million people every year worldwide.

Remember that officials or the media may or may not be overreacting to the swine flu. New diseases crop up all the time, and most are not serious. Most of the serious ones – SARS, Ebola – are contained quickly, and do not become pandemics. Even in the middle of a pandemic, most people do not get sick. Most people who get sick from a pandemic get better. This might become very serious, or not, but the risk of death to any of us is statistically low – except in the long run.

Certainly news of this flu hits an already weary world. The elite media has too little, too late covered the planet’s limits to growth, the peaking of oil, the changing of the climate and the growing fragility of the economy, so many people must see the events of the last few years – oil price swings, bank collapses, Third-World famines, foreclosures – as a bizarre confluence of unexplainable catastrophes. A new disease is likely to push some already stressed and ordinarily clear-headed people into thoughts of Nostradamus, the imminent Rapture or the alleged Mayan 2012 whatever.

So really, really don’t panic. This is especially true for parents – kids soak up the stress around them, and it doesn’t do them any good. Talk to them calmly and sanguinely about what to do in an emergency, making it into a game. Tonight I praised my four-year-old for blowing her nose, and cheerfully went over the things that help keep us from getting sick – washing our hands, covering our mouths when we cough, eating our vegetables and so on. She loves knowing the answers to quiz questions, so in the coming weeks, we’ll make a fun game of what to do when other people get sick.

Of course we might all have to keep our children home from school, wear face masks or cancel travel plans. I had hoped to bring my daughter to America this year to see my family – we don’t fly much, so every trip is a major event – and I planned to book tickets this week. Now I’ll be putting that off a little while to see what the swine flu does – European governments are warning against nonessential travel right now, and I want to make sure we can visit Missouri and still get back to Ireland.

Do try to think about what a worst-case scenario might be like, based on historical accounts of times when this has happened before. Hypothetically, what happens if you have to stay home from work for a while? What happens if the kids have to stay home? If the supermarkets are emptied? If the hospitals are overburdened? If the water is turned off?

Keep a few months’ worth of stored food, and have something growing in your yard or on your land that is edible. What foods you stock up will depend on your situation – we have dried beans and pasta in the house, but will be stocking up the shed with vermin-proof tin cans. We will also keep sealed containers of sugar, flour, oil, vinegar and spices, which would help us make dishes with stored and foraged food. Stock up on medicine, soap, toothpaste, bandages and blankets. Have stores of potable water, just in case.

Think about how you would sterilize water from wells, rain, canals, streams or lakes. If the water is cloudy, you could strain it through a water filter. If it is clear, you can kill micro-organisms with an ultraviolet filter. A few drops of bleach in a liter of water helps kill germs, although I’d prefer to boil it and avoid the chemicals.

Check on elderly neighbours, and make sure they are okay – flu could hit them hard. Some might not leave the house as much as they used to, so this might be a good time to offer to make suppers for them. Keep in mind you might be the only person in your community who is preparing, so you will be the distribution point for the neighbourhood – be prepared to be a leader. If you don’t have the kind of personality that orders other people around, all the better – those are the kind of people who usually take charge, and we see the results in the world around us.

Collect information on what to do if hospitals are full, either for the flu or for anything else that might happen – one very good book on the subject is Where There Is No Doctor: A Village Health Care Handbook by Jane Maxwell, Carol Thuman and David Werner. It is reportedly used by WHO and UNICEF for their workers in the Third World, and deals with everything from injuries to childbirth.

Brush up on traditional treatments – comfrey for headaches, plasters to aid breathing. They won’t cure the flu, but neither will antibiotics.

Whatever happens with swine flu, there will be many more outbreaks in the future – modern medicine has blessed us with a lifespan and health far beyond most people in most places, but we are still mortal, and our modern lifestyles are likely to create new diseases faster. The world’s population has increased from two billion to seven billion in a single lifetime, mostly in the Third World where health care and sanitary conditions are subhuman. Air travel has increased exponentially, so diseases that took centuries to travel across the medieval world now spread from Mexico to New Zealand in less than a day. Our food has been increasingly mass-produced in ways that breed disease – rightly or wrongly, villagers near the disease’s apparent ground zero reportedly blame a nearby U.S. hog “factory.” Companies that mass-produce meat overuse antibiotics to paper over their grotesque practices, allowing diseases to more quickly evolve a resistance to them.

If all this sounds apocalyptic, keep those second and third paragraphs in mind – this flu might not require any of these preparations. But most of them apply to most crises – they are Long Emergency insurance, just as we might have health and fire insurance. They don’t make us immortal or protect us from any future, but they allow us to get on with life happily, as ready as we can be for the crisis – or the panic – next time.

Photo: Girls wearing masks in Helena, Montana during the 1918 flu, courtesy of "Helena As She Was" web site, www.helenahistory.org.

Prophets

David Zax wrote a piece recently in Slate magazine praising the movie Waterworld, saying that the $200 million action movie was an “eco-parable whose message was ahead of its time.” He notes that the world in the film was water because the ice caps had melted, that the cities had been submerged, that the story pits a sail-boating urine-recycler Kevin Costner against gas-guzzling “smokers” who worship the captain of the Exxon Valdez.

I don’t disagree that this waste of $200 million had an ecological message – that was well known at the time, and obvious from seeing the movie. No, I object to the now-commonplace assumption that climate change is a recently-discovered issue -- that films about climate change from the 1990s are prophetic, because no one had any idea.

Nonsense. John Tyndall, an early scientist from County Carlow south of us, first proved the greenhouse effect around the time of the American Civil War. The Swedish scientist Arrhenius proposed a hundred years ago that emissions from our fossil fuel use would cause the world’s climate to heat up.

I mentioned previously my 1955 copy of The World We Live In, which states casually that our cars and factories would create a hotter world. Ten years later, on Feb. 8, 1965, U.S. president Lyndon Johnson included the problem of climate change in an address to Congress for the first time. Nine years later, climate change was part of the background of the film Soylent Green.

We can applaud the people who have brought climate change into the media’s radar in recent years, but let’s not say they discovered the issue. If climatologists are right and the weather grows increasingly freakish in the years ahead, we will hear messages like this a lot, just as we will with oil shortages and the current economic collapse. It's not our fault. No one knew this would happen.

It's almost never true.

The Girl

Tonight, after a long day at work and on the bus, I got home to a four-year-old that had, apparently, eaten a wheelbarrow of sugar-coated espresso beans. After being bounced on repeatedly, playing games and giving many piggyback rides, I said, "This child is bouncing like a rubber ball." I turned to the Girl. "Why is that, sweetie?"

"Because that what childs are supposed to do," she said earnestly.

A fair point.