aeon | I stare out the window from my tiny flat on the 300th floor,
hermetically sealed in a soaring, climate-controlled high-rise,
honeycombed with hundreds of dwellings just like mine, and survey the
breathtaking vistas from my lofty perch more than half a mile above
ground: the craftsman cottages with their well-tended lawns, the emerald
green golf courses, the sun-washed aquamarine swimming pools and the
multimillion-dollar mansions that hug the sweeping sands from Malibu to
Palos Verdes. These images evoke feelings of deep nostalgia for a Los
Angeles that doesn’t exist anymore, back in the halcyon days before my
great-grandparents were born, when procreation wasn’t strictly regulated
and billions of people roamed freely on Earth.
There are only about 500 million of us left, after the convulsive
transformations caused by climate change severely diminished the
planet’s carrying capacity, which is the maximum population size that
the environment can sustain. Most of us now live in what the British
scientist James Lovelock has called ‘lifeboats’ at the far reaches of
the northern hemisphere, in places that were once Canada, China, Russia
and the Scandinavian countries, shoehorned into cities created virtually
overnight to accommodate the millions of desperate refugees where the
climate remains marginally tolerable.
Despite all this, history offers a game plan for our species to
survive. In analysing his copious research, Parker came to a startling
conclusion: the deprivations of the 17th century laid the basis for the
welfare state that became the ‘hallmark of all economically advanced
states’ by the 19th century. ‘In the 21st century, as in the 17th,
coping with catastrophes on this scale requires resources that only
central governments command,’ he notes in his book. ‘Despite the many
differences between the 17th and the 21st centuries, governments during
the Little Ice Age faced the same dilemma. . . [they ultimately
realised] that, in the long run, it was economically cheaper and more
efficient (as well as more humane) to support those who became old,
widowed, ill, disabled or unemployed, thus creating the first “welfare
state” in the world.’
Likewise, we are too technologically advanced – and, one hopes, too
socially sophisticated – for the doomsday scenarios some foresee.
Instead of fighting it out in barbaric, Mad Max-style, dystopian
colonies reminiscent of the American West, humanity’s 500 million
remaining souls, fed by artificially concocted edibles or even a 23rd
century version of Soylent Green, will no doubt be crammed into towering
high rises in dense urban areas creating their culture anew atop the
world.
