Noah’s Ark no kind of escape plan

Unless you’ve heard the Voice of God, you don’t really know if the Flood is coming or not.

At the Cancun climate talks this week, leaders of small island nations called for the rich countries to pay into an insurance fund that would help islanders relocate if rising seas from global warming force them to abandon ship, er, island.

While turning whole populations into climate refugees is a horrifying prospect, we who live in the West can take some small comfort in helping these folks to survive when their countries are gone. Especially since it’s pretty much our fault and they had nothing to do with it.

And as warming gets worse, more and more people will be on the move. So we’d better get ready to find them a safe harbor.

A peak oil safe harbor?

People who care about peak oil also foresee a troubled future where many places on Earth will become less hospitable and where refugees will be on the move, running as much from economic crisis and political strife as from climate hell.

And some peak oil activists imagine that the collapse of various economies and societies is as inevitable as rising sea levels. So they’ve given up on helping their societies, and have instead have started planning to save only themselves and their families.

Maybe they’ve moved from one place, like New York City, to another where they imagine people will suffer less in the future, for example, a small town upstate. Or maybe they’ve decided to stay put but to fortify their home with firearms and supply it with water and canned goods to last ten years. Either way, these people may have decided to find or build their own Noah’s Ark, a place to shelter themselves when everybody else will be drowned in the Flood.

Après moi, le déluge, as Louis XV said just before the French Revolution.

No place to run

There’s just one problem. The whole Noah’s Ark approach is built on a very questionable assumption, to wit, that you and your’n can stay dry while the rest of us drown.

That certainly did work for Noah. He could load up his family and all the animals, two by two, and be sure that they’d be safe because God told him so. His well built ark just bobbed upon the seas until God called back the waters and revealed dry land.

But imagine if, in the hours as the as the water started to rise before the heavy laden Ark took float, that Noah’s neighbors finally realized he was not crazy, but was in fact the only guy who was prepared to survive disaster. Frightened mobs of Israelites could have stormed the Ark to try to get aboard, wielding rope ladders with grappling hooks. Rich people could’ve sent archers to force Noah to let down the gangplank. Warlords of a neighboring tribe could’ve rushed in a catapult.

And even if none of them were able to board the ship, at least they could have put enough holes in the hull to ensure that the Ark would sink. For the doomed, sabotaging someone else’s escape plan can be a final desperate comfort.

Scuttling the peak oil Ark

Even if you predict that peak oil will bring the collapse of the economy, looting in the streets and the rise of neo-feudalism, are you sure that you’ll stay dry inside your Ark? Are you sure that those grappling hooks, archers and catapults won’t ruin your escape?

It may seem like the safest way to prepare for a scary future is to bring the family and the beasts aboard and then pull up the gangplank. But given how interconnected industrial society has become, this plan looks more and more risky.

Can you afford to forget about your neighbors, whether next door or across the continent? Can you risk writing off the news media, the political system and the larger culture? Can you ever amass enough gardens, guns and goats to feel safe in your Ark if your fellow citizens are not safe?

And unless you’ve heard the Voice of God as Noah did, then how do you know that the Flood is coming at all?

Waiting for the Apocalypse could turn out to be like waiting for Godot.

Transition Voice