Down with catastrophism

James Howard Kunstler’s new book, The Long Emergency, depicts humans as parasites who might benefit from a mass die-off. Speak for yourself.

As recently as a decade ago it was unusual to encounter books predicting the imminent collapse of civilisation and probable extinction of the human race. When they appeared they were outside the mainstream, specialist philosophy texts or on the extremist fringe of environmentalism. Today such works are common. The core elements of the litany are predictable: climate change, disease, terrorism, and an-out-of-control world economy. Other elements such as killer asteroids, nanotechnology or chemical pollution can be added according to taste.

James Howard Kunstler’s The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century clearly fits the genre. While not neglecting any of the usual suspects, Kunstler builds his litany around the increasingly fashionable panic over oil depletion. The Long Emergency has received a warm welcome, featuring on the front covers of both the leftish British publication the New Statesman and Pat Buchanan’s old-right American Conservative.
The picture of the future put forward in The Long Emergency is truly grim. The best-case scenario is a mass die-off followed by a forced move back to the land, complete with associated feudal relations. As the title implies, this is to be an ongoing state rather than a crisis to be overcome – a sentiment that the US critic Susan Sontag described as ‘apocalypse from now on’. How bad will it be? ‘The prospect will be so grim that some individuals and perhaps even groups (as in nations) may develop all the symptoms of suicidal depression.’

The successes of science and the Enlightenment present a conundrum for green pessimists. How to explain away the failed predictions of collapse from Malthus on, through to Paul Ehrlich and the Club of Rome in the 1970s?

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