Weird Times

Something weird is afoot. Has anyone noticed? There’s been a growing feeling of weirdness in the air for at least the last year or two.  The feeling has been elusive; hard to pin down. But it all crystalised for me a couple of evenings ago when I went to watch the latest Ridley Scott blockbuster, The Martian. In this film Matt Damon is a botanist who gets accidentally left on Mars when the rest of the crew on his mission are forced to evacuate during a sand storm. Being a plucky and resourceful chap he figures out various ways to survive with minimal food and other resources as he awaits a rescue which – even if it does come – will take years.

I won’t go into too much detail about what happens in the film. I enjoyed it - even if I did have reservations about whether potatoes would really grow in Martian soil fertilised only by freeze-dried astronaut dung. I took my kids, and they enjoyed it too. But I came away with that curious feeling of weirdness that has been floating around in the ether for the past few years. Perhaps it was the central message of the film. And that central message was that one day we’re all going to Mars. This will be possible thanks to legions of brave planet-hopping scientists who can overcome any obstacle and save the day.

Mind you, nobody has actually asked Mars if we would be welcome there. But that doesn’t really matter: it’s just there for the taking. Elon Musk is actually proposing that the first thing we do when we get there is to nuke the place. This seems a bit rude, but all's fair in the game of colonisation. In fact, you can play colonisation bingo whilst watching The Martian: vast empty landscapes and talk of ‘the first person ever to put a foot here’ – check; a tough guy white male in a vehicle that looks a bit like a caravan heading towards a horizon – check; talk of international laws not applying – check; the line “They say once you grow crops somewhere, you have officially colonized it. So, technically, I colonized Mars. In your face, Neil Armstrong!”; American flags – check. Right at the end of the film there’s a whole classroom full of starry-eyed new recruits who have signed up to be planet colonists. The message is clear: we will colonise Mars.

Except we won’t.

There aren’t any manned missions to Mars right now. We haven’t even sent anyone back to the Moon since Apollo 17 in 1972, in case anyone hadn’t noticed. Getting to Mars is, ahem, rather more challenging and expensive than going to our local moon.

That’s not to say that we won’t ever send anyone to Mars. There’s a Mickey Mouse Mars mission already being dreamed about, and so far over 100,000  people have signed up to volunteer for a cold and lonely death millions of miles away from home. But The Martian gives the causal viewer the impression that we are already doing this kind of thing and that it’s just a matter of political will and the ‘right guys’ being in charge at NASA (and – tellingly – their Chinese equivalent, who are begrudgingly acknowledged in the film (but not those pesky Russians)). 

On the same day I went to see The Martian it was splashed across the news that the UK government had banned hoverboards. Say what? Reading a few of the articles they talked about the kind of board that Marty McFly rode in Back to the Future Part II which is set in, ahem, 2015. I double checked to see if this was not some kind of early April fool’s joke but, no, it didn’t seem to be. How could the government ban something that hadn’t yet been invented? Curious to find out I looked online to see if I could buy one of these hoverboards. Yes – there they were – except they weren’t the kind of thing that Marty McFly would recognise. Instead, it turns out, they are merely a pair of wheels with a central platform that you balance on. There is computer circuitry inside them to stop you falling off them.

Hmm. What about fusion cars that run on banana skins and tin cans? A quick Google search reveals any number of articles that claim this will soon be a reality.

Speaking of cars, what about all those self-driving cars that we were promised? In theory, these might be able to work on the kind of empty and straight roads found in some countries – but would they work, say, where I live in Cornwall? Fuggedaboutit! Most of the roads round here are upgraded sheep tracks first nibbled out in the Bronze Age. They are congested with a variety of motorist fauna, ranging from little old ladies doing about 20mph in first gear, maniacal City traders doing three times the speed limit in their Audis as they drive down from London for a weekend’s surfing, and gigantic lumbering tractors driven by Romanian farmhands too busy sexting to notice they just flattened a cyclist. I’d love to see the software that can predict the random actions of these human variables – some humans simply refuse to behave like robots.

An old lady driving a car. Human variables will never be understood by robotic cars

Oh yes: robots. Where are they all? My mother-in-law said she had a robot cleaner about six years ago, but when I went to have a look at it all she showed me a small circular vacuum cleaner that moved around the floor. It didn’t have arms or legs or a face, and it couldn’t even play chess. "It's definitely a robot," she said. "It says so on the box." Mind you, we are being told repeatedly in the media that robots will take away our jobs.

Hmmm.

Three things. First, I doubt that this will be possible for the vast majority of jobs. Artificial Intelligence is only as bright as the collective wisdom of whatever corporation is churning out the job-stealing robots. I don’t know if you’ve ever come across Dmitry Orlov’s concept of Organisational Stupidity but, in a nutshell, it essentially guarantees that any large corporation has a functional intelligence slightly lower than a seaside donkey. This wouldn’t bode well for the IQ levels of those shiny metal automatons. 

Here’s something which, when I tell people, they generally don’t believe me: I have worked with robots. Yes, I did an MSc. when I was 22 at Warwick University that involved writing code for industrial robots (I never finished it - I'd have rather gnawed off my own hands than end up as an industrial robot programmer). Those robots were used for building cars – you know the ones, they look like they are made of Meccano – and they were as dumb as. If you told it to pick up Part A and place it in Location B all would be fine unless Frank Smith, daydreaming about the girl he met in the pub last night, happened to wander in between Part A and Location B at the wrong moment, whereupon he would find himself unintentionally integrated into the chassis of a Land Rover. Industrial robots are like blind, hypnotised elephants.

Secondly. Assuming they could make intelligent robots that could do everyone’s jobs (or at least a sizeable chunk of them), that would mean those ex-workers would not have an income. Not having an income in an economy based on consumer spending means there would be less consumption and therefore less of an economy. This is already in an advanced stage of happening right now. Adding robots into the mix would be an excellent way to launch a fresh Neo Luddite movement and I can imagine the internet being filled with articles such as ‘101 ways to kill the robot that stole your job’. Thus, to protect themselves from disgruntled humans, the robots would need to be heavily armed and wearing thick armour. Can you imagine Robocop with Ronald McDonald’s face serving your child her Happy Meal? I thought not.

Would you like fries with that, little girl?

Thirdly – if the functional stupidity and economic realities haven’t already killed the robot dream – there is the small matter of specialised high-tech producers and delicate supply chains. Robots need a lot of bits and bobs to make them work. Those bits and bobs tend to come from specialised production plants in other countries operating on just-in-time principles. There’s no slack in the system, it’s all too efficient, so if anything goes wrong then everything goes wrong. And we are now heading into an era when things will tend to go wrong.

But it’s not just robots, self-driving cars, missions to Mars and all the rest of it that is creating this weird feeling (and don’t get me started on 3D printers, Amazon delivery drones, jetpacks, cryogenics, full-mind downloads etc. etc.) – it’s the fact that the collective conscious seems to think that all of these things are part of our lives now, when actual lived experience tells us that they are not. Yes, some of these technological wonders are either theoretically or technically possible at a great cost, but that doesn’t mean you or I get to experience them. So, instead of people acknowledging that nothing about the futuristic version of 2015 has actually come to pass, they exist in a kind of cosy miasma that whispers things ‘out there’ are progressing for the betterment of humankind, even if they can’t see it for themselves.

What, indeed, has changed about our everyday world since, say 1985? Most people will immediately say two things: the Internet and smart phones. And that’s true to a certain extent (although, it was possible to send and receive email in 1985 - I myself had a modem hooked up to my ZX Spectrum - but generally it was only extreme geeks that used it to send one another bits of code and unfunny jokes written in ASCII characters). As a society we’ve since then piled our resources into the tech sector and created a smaller version of the bulky mobile phones of the 1980s, which now come with an integrated mini computer. We could have piled it into renewable energy, conservation and social schemes - but instead we generally piled it into little devices that play videos of kittens. But apart from that, not much has changed compared to how we thought it would change back then. Essentially, we are still living with the inventions of the 19^th century, pimped beyond recognition in many cases, but Victorian technology nevertheless. Here’s a short list of some of the things we (the 99.9999%) don’t have:

-       Flying cars (that run on fusion)
-       Jet packs
-       Holidays in space
-       Hover boards that literally hover
-       Intelligent human-like robot servants
-       An affordable cure for cancer
-       Cities on the Moon

Here’s what we do have:

-        -     One billion petrol-powered cars

-     -  2,300 coal fired power stations
-  About 16,000 airliners that burn kerosene
-  An internet and tech sector that gobbles up 1,500 terawatt hours per year (which, incidentally, is the same amount of electricity that was used to light the entire planet in 1985)
-  Smart phones which consume 388 kwh per year (see here)
-  2,271 terrestrial satellites, most of which are used for communications and TV broadcasting
-  Collapsing ecosystems and accelerating resource depletion

-     -  7.3 billion people (compared to 4.8 billion in 1985)

7     - Sky rocketing rates of cancer, diabetes, drug addiction and mental illness 

So, it appears that we’ve entered a kind of weird twilight zone where our unmet expectations of the future we envisaged are being filled by the creative imaginings of the entertainment industry and the popular media. For now these fantasies are being powered by fossil fuels with a high net energy ratio, but that is declining with each passing year. As the per capita availability of energy decreases it will become increasingly hard for people not to notice this reality gap.

Yet it’s easy to be drawn into this comforting trance. I would love to be able to go to Mars, to ride on a hoverboard and to take my family on an all-inclusive break to a resort on the dusty shores of the Sea of Tranquility. However, I recognise that staking our future on the collective hopes of scientific materialists and their promises of salvation through techno-cornucopian abundance is probably not the wisest choice. Phantoms have a habit of evaporating in daylight, and fantasies of limitless technological achievement must surely do the same thing. 

We might be heading into interesting times, but we likely still have a few more months or years of weird times before us yet.

Bantering at the Collapse Cafe

Last night I hung out online with the Doomstead Diner for a chat at the Collapse Cafe. We talked about the state of the UK, what Jeremy Corbyn means for politics here, and a few other things too. If I'm looking a bit ruffled it's because I spent all day making cider on a farm and had just got in from the stormy weather outside.

Test Card

Who remembers this? This is the image they used to display on TV when there were no programmes to broadcast, and there was usually some accompanying muzak (or a high-pitched beep if it was late at night).

Personally I always thought the dwarf clown was a bit creepy. The girl too. And she is clearly playing noughts and crosses by herself as the clown has no arms to speak of. I wonder what she grew up to be.

Read more here. 

Nasty

I was having a cup of tea with a friend in his polytunnel the other day and he was telling me about how hard it was to live a simple life minding his own business. He's about ten years younger than me, is married and has a kid on the way, and they live on a three acre plot of land which they bought with their own money and manage using permaculture. They work every day of the week, have practically no money and their ecological footprint is probably so small it might even not register, and yet they are suffering from endless harassment to get them evicted and complaints from nearby wealthy residents who feel that people shouldn't be allowed to live as they please. My friend had a simple explanation for all this, he said that as a nation and a culture, we are basically nasty and intolerant.

This got me thinking. Britain, after all, was the first industrialised nation. We had the enclosures acts from the 17th century onwards which kicked people off the land and turned it over to the pseudo industrial practice of sheep farming (the rearing of 'woolly maggots' as George Monbiot describes them). Wealth has been concentrated at the top for so long and the society has been stratified by class that imagining normal people living and working in the countryside is practically impossible for most.

Our culture is a dominator one. Due to a geological accident regarding coal, combined with a military nature and a lust for foreign goods, we ended up being the world's largest empire. When colonisers arrived in Australia and encountered Aboriginal people, instead of making friends with them they buried their children up to their necks in the sand and played a game where you had to kick off their heads with a single powerful kick. In India we caused mass famines and when people complained we machine-gunned them down. We did the same in plenty of other countries too. We divided up vast expanses of Africa, Asia and the Middle East and drew lines on maps which caused huge upheavals and sectarian violence. Nelson razed Copenhagen with naval bombardment, just for fun, and we devised the world's first concentration camps during the Boer War, and enthusiastically firebombed cities during the Second World War. And then, even when we stopped being an empire, we spawned Margaret Thatcher whose enthusiasm for the ideas of neoliberalism was enthusiastically passed onto Ronald Reagan and forced upon the world.

People don't like to talk about any of these aspects of Britishness. They prefer to talk about the engineering marvels we brought to India and how we taught the world to speak English. We brought football, cricket and tennis to the natives, and helped them become civilised. They might concede that there was the odd 'dark chapter' but that overall the empire building was all good and proper.

I was in London a couple of weeks ago and took the opportunity to visit the City (i.e. the financial district) to do a bit of background research for my online book Seat of Mars. Leaving Liverpool Street station one passes by a bronze statue of some refugee children. I looked at the inscription and it was a dedication to the selfless efforts of local people who took in 10,000 Jewish children from Germany prior to the Second World War. Valiant stuff, but this is the statue that many of the 35,000 City workers walk past every morning as they head for their high rises to unleash further financial mayhem on the world. How many millions of people has the City of London killed in the last few decades? It's a valid question, but don't hold your breath for an answer. Yet these City workers, for the most part, see themselves as good people. They run marathons to raise funds for cancer research, they donate money on Children in Need night, and they buy kittens for their kids. I have some friends who are City bankers and they are not evil people (though we don't have much to talk about these days). Hell, I was once almost a banker myself, luckily fluffing my interview at Citi.

So maybe it's just the system that is evil.

But then I see evil everywhere. I see the attack dogs set onto Jeremy Corby for daring to suggest scrapping nuclear weapons. I see evil in the pages of the Daily Mail and the Telegraph as they attempt to character assassinate anyone who wants to stop global warming, or as they incite violence against refugees. I see evil in the countryside where farmers and rich people collude to kill the wildlife in the most painful and inhumane ways possible. Fracking is evil. Bombing by drones is evil. Hosting arms fairs is evil.

Of course, if you say these things to people they will call you a traitor and a 'Brit hater'. They will point out that it's not their fault, all those wars of conquest, and that they have no need to feel guilty - even though our way of life is funded by one-sided trade deals, easy access to energy and a ponzi system of finance that allows us to continue to rack up astronomical levels of debt and consume huge bites of the world's resource pie. I'm not a Brit-hater - there are far too many positive aspects of life in these isles - but that doesn't mean I have to be an apologist for the less-than-wholesome aspects.

Perhaps my friend had a point.

Or perhaps not. Perhaps it is a case that those in the top positions are psychopaths, willing to do anything and everything to consolidate their power and enslave the masses using mind control techniques. I know plenty of people who are not evil. As a matter of fact, I don't think I know anyone who is evil. Most people, it seems to me, are good at heart. They want to help. They want to love one another. They want to stop the destruction of the world. These are the people it is best to hang around with - they're better for for soul and your sanity.

So why do we collectively put up with all this evilness? Is it because badness has a natural advantage over goodness? Do evil plans always work out in the 'real' world and good ones are just 'idealistic dreaming'? Does the devil have all the best tunes?

I have a theory. Could it be that it is because Britain is an island that was once fabled for its gold and tin mines? That it has been invaded again and again since the end of the last ice age, and that the settler populations always selected for the most war-like? For me, you could forgive the Anglo Saxons and the Romans, but it was the Normans that did it. With their Scandinavian blood, their aristocratic French ways and their lust for conquering - the country changed dramatically after 1066. One of the first things they did was catalogue all the people, land and assets in the Domesday Book. Invasion, murder and cataloguing - the start of the dominator culture. It's been almost 1,000 years and still the top landowners in this country can trace their lineages back to the Normans. Or maybe there is some kind of supernatural explanation ...

So, no, I don't think we are evil. Just some of us. The ones with the power. And the ability to project that power has been multiplied a thousand-fold since we discovered that you could burn coal and use it to power engines. So will we see a future where access to limited high-concentration energy also leads to a corresponding drop in the ability of bad men (yes, it's mostly men) to do bad things? One can only hope so.

Who knows, maybe in 500 years time it will be possible to live on a small piece of land and raise a family without having the collective wrath of a millennium of dominator culture threatening to fall down and crush you just for wanting not to be a part of that system.

The Long Road

Refugees walking northwards towards Sweden along a motorway in Denmark

For the last few days hundreds of Syrian refugees have been trudging northwards up Danish motorways trying to get to Sweden. Right now, in Europe, if you’re a refugee you want to be in either Germany or Sweden as these are the two countries that have the most lenient asylum policies. Basically put, they won’t write a number on your arm, stick you in a detention camp or clobber you with nightsticks.

Judging by images on the news it’s a surreal sight. Denmark is a land of orderly neatness and happy conformity where the ugly reality of the ‘outside world’ is kept at bay. This is no place for unsightly groups of refugees. Long term readers of 22 Billion Energy Slaves will remember that I used to live in Denmark where I worked as a journalist, and moved to the UK two and a half years ago. Before that I lived in Spain, and before Spain I lived in Denmark again. As an EU passport holder I can flit from country to country and call myself an ‘expat’, and nobody calls me an immigrant or a refugee or an alien. It’s my privilege – I’m one of the lucky ones.

But the refugees don’t have any such luck. They drew the short straw of being born in the wold's most unstable region, and now they want to get out of it, even if it means crossing the sea in a leaky dinghy and risking their lives. Most of them don't actually want to be in Denmark. If a bridge could be built that passed right over the country you can bet that it would be filled with Syrians trudging from Germany to Sweden. Basically, they are unwelcome in Denmark. Fetegan Altorek, a 26 year-old Syrian yesterday remarked “It’s obvious to see they [the Danes] don’t like us. They spit on us and fight us.”

Perhaps they had not seen the adverts put out by the Danish government in recent weeks telling them they they were not welcome in the World's Happiest Nation (TM).

Travellers at the airport receive a different welcome

But not all Danes are like that, of course, and some have been stopping to offer lifts to the bridge that separates Denmark from Sweden. However, this is regarded as ‘people-smuggling’ and carries the risk of a three-year prison sentence. Some do it anyway, reminding their forgetful compatriots that Danish citizens once helped Jews flee to Sweden during the Second World War. “At the time we were occupied by the Nazis, but this time we voted them into power,” quipped someone on social media, referring to the current government and the resurgence of the far-left nationalists the Danish People’s Party.

Apart from the lure of not being incarcerated or deported, why do so many Syrians want to get to Sweden? To live in peace and join family already there, they say. I had a chance to see some of them doing just that when I went on a walk to a Swedish forest last year. I wrote about it in my book The Path to Odin’s Lake, in a chapter I called The Far Flung People. This is an excerpt, in which I had just emerged from the forest into a small rural town in a bucolic setting, and had found a hotel in which to get some breakfast:

…

The girl on duty, presiding over an empty breakfast buffet, was accommodating if a little frosty, although in all probability I did look as if I had been dragged through a hedge backwards. Which was half true. I poured myself a coffee and sipped the sweet black liquid, savouring its restorative effect as I gazed out of a window at the empty streets. By the time I had finished my second refill and also eaten a Danish pastry (also called Vienna bread in Sweden) people in the outside world had begun to wake up and give some life to the town.

But something was odd. One might have expected the people walking the streets in a tiny town in rural Sweden to be, well, Swedish. But almost everyone I saw looked to be from the Middle East. Women wearing headscarves pushed prams, men sat on walls idly fingering worry beads and olive-skinned teenage girls giggled and chatted into their mobile phones. Among them was the occasional obviously Swedish person – an old silver-haired woman here, a blonde boy on a moped there – but the majority were clearly from somewhere else. They were all smart-casual dressed, as if they’d just stepped out of an H&M store. “What’s going on?”, I asked the girl behind the breakfast bar who, in other circumstances, could have been a catwalk model and perhaps was. “Are these people refugees?”

“Yes,” she replied sparsely. “There is a centre here.”

I asked where they had come from. “Mostly Syria, from the war”, she explained. “Some from Somalia.” I thought back to the man I had seen earlier at the lake, about how his eyes had been so wasted. I didn’t think Somalis liked to drink.

“There is nothing for them to do here”, said the girl. “They are not allowed to work, so they just hang around. Some have bad habits.”

I wondered if this was causing problems. Sweden, famously, is the most accommodating country in the world when it comes to taking in refugees. Its liberal policies dating back to the 1960s have been the envy of progressives the world over, and many of the Swedes I had met over the years were justifiably proud of them. But decisions about refugees were made in faraway Stockholm, and such an influx of people from a different country, with a different religion and culture, was bound to cause tension, I thought. The girl seemed to read my mind.

“Some people say there are too many for our town – we are only 800 people but we now have to support 400 refugees.”

“Is this a problem?” I asked.

But the girl just shrugged. “No problem, really”, she said. I tried to ask her more questions but she became tight-lipped, indicating that the matter was closed, so instead I asked her how much it cost to stay the night in the hotel.

…

Röstånga in the afternoon wasn’t much different from Röstånga in the morning. The lumber trucks still rolled southwards on the Riksväg 13, the occasional moped or Volvo stopped at the petrol station and the streets were still scattered with bored-looking refugees. They milled around listlessly in small groups; a bunch of pram-pushing women here, a row of men sitting on a wall there. Their presence in this rural Swedish hamlet was incongruous and they seemed like actors in a movie who had turned up on the wrong set. It was as if they were waiting for something to happen, a bus to arrive, or a concert to start.

During half a lifetime of travelling the world I had noticed that in most countries people’s lives are played out in public places. From Madrid to Istanbul, Guatemala City to Mumbai, it is on the streets that social interaction takes place, news is passed on, gossip is blathered, deals are done and emotions are vented. Not so in Scandinavia. The streets here are infrastructure – cold boulevards for the conveyance of people and goods from A to B. Scandinavian life takes place in private behind closed doors, and perhaps that’s why these people seemed out of place.

Passing a few women on the pavement I tried to make eye contact with them. Most blocked me out but one made the briefest of contact before looking quickly away, as if embarrassed. Another group, this time teenage girls, gave me the same response. The groups were always segregated by sex. It was a curious thing, this business of casual greeting. During my perambulations around the forest, I had often come across other walkers. In Britain, nine times out of ten, walkers crossing paths in a forest would greet each other with a cheery ‘morning’ or ‘afternoon’. In Denmark, I had found the opposite to be true, but here in Sweden it was really a 50/50 situation. On the one hand you could take the initiative and boldly say ‘hi’ only to be met with that steely Scandinavian look of horror that a stranger is trying to make contact with you, but on the other hand there was an equal chance that the other party would take the initiative just when you had decided it wasn’t worth making yourself look a fool. After a few days of this I had learned to settle for some brief eye contact, a quick head-nod and a short ‘hi’ at the ready on my lips should they greet me. It was best to hedge one’s bets.

But with the refugees it was a different matter. There was a barrier there; something protective was in place. I was interested in speaking to a few of them, curious to find out their stories. But it seemed that the newcomers inhabited a different world to the Swedes – a kind of parallel universe separated by a vacuum across which communication was difficult. Eventually, after wandering around the village in circles, I decided I had better find out what time the bus would come the next morning to take me back to Lund.

At the bus stop two men were talking animatedly in Arabic. They looked to be in their mid-twenties, one heavily muscular and with a crew cut, the other thin and bearded. I guessed they were friends. As I stood there studying the timetable the muscular one asked me if I had a light. He stood there with an unlit cigarette hanging from his lips and mimed striking a flint lighter with his thumb and clasped hand. I rummaged in my bag and found one, proffering it to him. He took it and lit his cigarette and then that of his friend, handing it back to me between hands pressed together as if in prayer. I asked them where they were from. “Syria”, he said.

“What do you think of it here?”, I asked, meaning Sweden.

“Good life”, he replied, inhaling the smoke. “Good people.”

It was a stupid question. I asked him another stupid question. “Why are you here?” He immediately said something to his friend, who it was clear did not understand English, and they both laughed. “Assad”, he said. He thought for a moment and added “War bring us here. When Assad gone, I go back, rebuild my house”. He turned back to his friend and they continued with their fast-paced conversation and I, having noted the time of the buses, left them to it.

…

Granted, it wasn’t much of an insight, but the thing that struck me the most was how deeply separated the hosts were from their refugee guests. And with the refugees being unable to work or better themselves, isn’t there a risk of them going stir crazy? Scandinavians love to talk of ‘integration’, but that would seem to be quite a tall order when such a barrier exists. In any case, I suspected, integration really means ‘forget who you are, be like us’.

Yet at the moment, despite all the media hysteria, it is just a trickle of refugees arriving. It’s a given that there will be more. Currently, like everything these days, their appearance is highly politicised. You’re either for them or against them. Currently, if one is a right-wing ‘realist’ you will talk about building walls and fences and dropping more bombs on the countries they are fleeing. Bombing is always offered as a solution to violence. On the other hand, if you’re a compassionate liberal you talk about opening up the borders, giving them all somewhere to live and allowing them to invite the remainder of their families over too. I suspect that this second point of view will sadly have a limited shelf life as things progress further down the road and people begin to grasp the sheer scale of the problem. 

And the rhetoric on both sides is rising, which is unfortunate if not entirely unpredictable. The unpalatable truth is that the Middle East and North Africa is becoming uninhabitable and not fit for human habitation. 100 years of oil exploitation, imperial plundering and ecological mismanagement has led us to here. In the case of Syria, as this article in The Ecologist points out, disastrous land management practices initiated in the 1960s turned most of the Syrian steppe into a dustbowl. Global weirding, in the form of droughts, followed by downpours and epic dust storms, destroyed much of the remaining topsoil. Millions of farmers and pastoralists were disenfranchised – ideal recruitment fodder for jihadist militias.

So a proxy war between Russia and the USA over control of the remaining energy resources was all that was needed to tip Syria into total chaos. The population is caught between their own crazy dictator dropping barrel bombs on them, and the murderous thugs of ISIS cutting and raping their way across what’s left of their country. Is it any wonder they want to get to Sweden?

The wider picture is no less unappealing. The age of oil that allowed for the greening of the desert is drawing to a close. Nitrogen fertiliser was first synthesised using fossil fuels after the last world war, meaning that vast swathes of desert could now be irrigated and used for growing crops. At the same time, selling their oil wealth has permitted countries such as Saudi Arabia to import massive amounts of food from the more fertile areas of the world, and to create a generous social security system for its people. Predictably, in light of this, the birth rate shot up, meaning there are now an order of magnitude more people living in these fragile desert regions than the ecology can support. As the oil crutch is kicked out we’ll find out the hard way that you can’t bargain with nature.  So it goes.

And so pretty soon we can expect hundreds of thousands more from Syria. Turkey currently puts up two million of them, but as other nations prevaricate and squabble, its patience is wearing thin. There are said to be twelve million Syrians displaced. And after Syria we have Afghanistan, Libya, Egypt, Yemen, Iraq and a few other places that we have meddled with. That’s not a political statement, it’s a simple fact. Where else will they go other than the smallish, wealthy and fertile western Eurasian appendage knows as Europe? There are 381 million people living in the arid regions fringing Europe, and it has the fastest-growing population of any of the planet’s major regions.

Last year I had a conversation with an historian who knows a thing or two about mass migrations. “It starts off as a trickle,” he said “but then, as things collapse, all of a sudden it turns into a flood. When you have entire nations full of people suddenly deciding to get up and leave, there is literally nothing anyone can do about it.”

“What about Europe?” I asked.

“Italy, Spain, Greece, France, a few other places … toast,” was his reply.

That’s the predicament we’re in. It won’t be pretty and our only guidance is compassion, not fear. The great change is already upon us.

Always be Prepared

As a youngster I was a member of the Boy Scout movement and the motto that was drilled into us was “Always be prepared.” Prepared for what? Prepared for whatever life throws at you, was the answer I got. It seemed a pretty reasonable idea to my eight-year-old brain. By training us young boys (and girls, if you were a Brownie) we could learn to pre-empt danger by thinking about the given risks of any situation and either prepare accordingly or choose to avoid the situation entirely.

So how has it happened that we have ended up with a society whose motto seems to be “Never be prepared”?

Watching the wild gyrations of the major stock markets of the last few days I noticed a couple of things. When things looked like they were going to get bad, the TV and internet pundits generally said: “There’s nothing to worry about, this situation can’t possibly happen.” And then when things actually did get bad they tended to say “Oh, well we knew there was always a risk of this happening and it’s time we faced up to the fact that what we feared most but had left unsaid has come to pass.” And then, when the dead cat bounce took the markets higher again the pundits trotted out and said: “Everything is fixed! We told you there was nothing to worry about!”

The average small investor (if there is such a thing anymore, outside of China) must be squirming on his couch clutching his head as spasms of cognitive dissonance rack his body. “But they said it couldn’t happen!”

Yet one person who couldn’t ever be confused with a TV finance pundit this week was Labour MP Damian McBride, who advised his Twitter followers to stock up on canned food and water, withdraw their cash and agree a rallying point with friends in family in case of communications breakdown and civil disorder.

He wasn’t mincing his words.

And McBride isn’t just some lowly backbencher either – he was Gordon Brown’s adviser when he was prime minister, as well as being a senior civil servant at the Treasury. As such he must know more than most people how fragile the global financial system is.

Predictably enough, he was roundly mocked by the press for being alarmist. Twitterers everywhere joined in with the two-minutes’ hate. In a world where sentiment is more important than reality such boat-rocking cannot not be allowed to pass.

The news message right now, as I type these words, is that markets have recovered from their panic attacks (even though this is patently untrue). China has calmed the waters by lowering its interest rates (what they still have interest rates above zero?) and there is soothing talk of more stimulus measures. The long-feared rate hike in the US is also being talked down. Nothing to see here, move along.

If current newspaper editorials and TV finance channels could be stuffed together into a cultural blender and reformed into the medium of music they would emerge as some kind of gently soothing mood music – the kind they play in dentists’ waiting rooms in the hope that it’ll drown out the noise of the drill and cries of pain coming from the next room.

Of course, none of this matters at this point because what this week’s market carnage has shown is that central banks are not omnipotent and they may even be running out of pumping power for all the epic mega-bubbles that have been created in recent years. Even those who haven’t been paying attention must now surely be able to see that unleashing quantitative easing (i.e. printing money) is simply an exercise in transferring the private risk/debt of the rich into public hands. You can unleash the monetary floodgates all you like and watch as all that liquidity flows into the feeding troughs of the world’s financial centres leaving the real – productive – sectors of the economy high and dry while wrecking many of the aspects of modern life that allow us to consider our societies as civilised.  

This is certain to have real consequences in the real world as levels of debt continue to skyrocket, and the ability of the real economy as a whole to repay that debt diminish by the week. You can extend your credit limit to the Moon and back, but if your income is falling and you keep piling on the debt then you must know that some day there will come a knock at the door. So should individuals prepare for the ensuing calamity that this moment of reckoning will bring into being? Or should we just sit there on our hands humming Everything is Awesome and hoping that the moment will never come?

*I just checked the Cub Scout’s website and – sure enough – their motto is still “Be prepared” – even if it now has far fewer members than it did in the 1970s and is embroiled in a sexual politics wrangle.