RDH - Thinking Ahead to the Post-Pandemic Future

Thinking Ahead to the Post-Pandemic Future

October 10, 2008

It's nice to think that global warming (and the coming holocaust—whether through famine or drought or both) is our fault because, if it is, why, then, we must be doing something wrong. And if we're doing something wrong, there must be something right that we can start doing to fix everything before it's too late.

But it's not our fault of course. We're human. Humans can't help themselves. It's in our genes to create an artificial environment. We're like those cliché aliens who've landed on planet Earth desperate for a new source of fuel that will carry us home. And, like those aliens, we're all dying, of course, and unlike dogs or salmon, we're perfectly aware of this fact. The minute we're born we begin to crave—in a process that accelerates until the day we die for real—a huge home (with space for servants), powerful forms of personal transportation, a mobile computing device that plays all of our favorite music—anything to compensate for our mortality. And it's not just Americans. Everyone knows that the rapaciousness and gluttony is just as strong in India and Iceland and China and the Amazon and Sydney, Australia, to take a few examples. (Witness the US-like growth of type 2 diabetes in the first and last examples, the banking crisis in the second example, the recent gold medals in the third example, and the efforts to be rid of an inscrutable, dangerous rainforest in the fourth.) Even human toddlers seem to know what's in store: all but the most brainwashed product of left-leaning parents will clamor for thousands of dollars of battery-operated equipment as soon as they can speak.

Speaking of futility, let's look at a typical presidential candidate. He cruises around in post-Katrina black SUVs to tell us we need to do something about global warming. He wears enormously expensive suits and shoes. He's a millionaire with an audience that he paid for with more millions. And he's sure we need to do something about global warming. The solution's always easy: spend trillions of dollars, using the latest electric-powered computers, to figure out how best to invest trillions of dollars in "clean" energy (and how to build the new infrastructure to support new methods of energy delivery and transportation) so that we (humans the world over) will be able to support the projected nine billion people who will be clamoring for their digital media players by 2050.

"Mr. Harper, I must object to your use of the term 'solution' in this context." Sorry—I guess I am being a little insensitive. But you will note that I'm not advocating for any type of human intervention until after many of us are dead and gone. The biggest mistake of the twentieth century (think Hitler and Stalin, to name the two most salient advocates for depopulation) was to think that people could take human destiny into their own hands. Greater patience and humility are needed.

The actual (if not final) solution, of course, is far simpler. Billions of us will need to stop using things (i.e., die). Put another way, global warming can be reversed only by reducing the human population to about one billion birth-control-loving people in the short run and, in the long run, about one quarter that many or less.

The Short Term: Cleaning Up the Mess

The perfect global deluge (or dustbowl, or both) would leave us with about a billion people. That's how many will be needed to perform the daunting project of dismantling the excess infrastructure.

In the United States alone, the population has gone from about 75 million in 1900 to nearly 300 million today. To accommodate this surge, enormous swaths of look-alike housing have been erected in places that were never intended for human habitation. From the boring outskirts of Denver to the stultifying communities surrounding San Bernardino, millions of less-than-ideal homes have gone up, bought on credit and propped up by daily automobile trips to jobsites in a smog-producing circuit of human madness fueled by the need to pay off forty-year mortgages and support the upkeep of the automobiles that allow the daily trips to the jobsites (not to mention the need to support teenage children who, appalled at the monsters their parents have become, get themselves hooked on methamphetamine). These ugly homes—and many of the vehicles that made them possible—will lie fallow after the die-off. Engineers and sanitation crews will be needed to tear them down and recycle the waste.

Here's a short to-do list of items that should receive top priority in the first decade after the pandemic:

1. All but maybe three or four nuclear power plants will need to be shut down and cleaned up.

2. Abandoned septic tanks will need to be drained (before they start leaking).

3. Superfluous gas stations, convenience stores, and fast-food restaurants will need to be torn down (and, if possible, the resulting brownfields cleaned up).

4. A few choice buildings like the Sears Tower will need to be refurbished to become kick-ass apartment buildings.

5. Scattered populations will need to be relocated to American and European college towns, where they can get a first-rate education.

The importance of that fifth item cannot be overstated. In order to prevent another population explosion, everybody in the new, slimmed-down human population will need to get at least an undergraduate education in a subject like physics or art history—the only proven method of discouraging large families.

"But how will we pay for this?" That's easy. Think of all the leftover gold and silver abandoned by the once-covetous dead. And, for that matter, some of the better automobiles left behind by their dead owners can be offered as further incentives for hard work.

The Question of Anarchy

The biggest danger in a post-pandemic world may not come from hazardous materials leaching into the groundwater from abandoned service stations and other industrial sites. In the short run, before the mess is safely under control, the biggest danger may come from ourselves. It will be enormously tempting simply to take up residence in an abandoned community and live—indefinitely—off canned food and beer from the local abandoned supermarket.

But while this danger is real, it will likely be short term. Basic services in outlying communities—no matter how idyllic the setting—will not likely continue more than a few weeks beyond the deaths of most of their inhabitants. And, to be blunt, there will be little joy in living off the fruit of the dead if you can't even watch a DVD when you want to.

The Long Run: Paradise Regained

For long-term success—that is, after all the heavy lifting has been done and the world has been scaled back to a mere tens of millions of inhabitants spread across a thousand or so of the best of the cities and towns of the last thousand years (from Moscow to Malibu)—strong leadership will be necessary. Fortunately, there will be tons of recorded history from the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries on hand to remind us of the dangers of overpopulation and the hypocrisy of people like Popes and Republicans and all those who blithely chanted their pro-life messages over the heads of the planet-ruining swarms at their feet.

Meanwhile, the films of Woody Allen's middle period can serve as an instruction manual for regaining the good life. Who wouldn't want to live in a big, gaudy city like New York as if you owned it? New York's best neighborhoods and choicest brownstones and restaurants, as everybody knows, were once a paradise. With a drastically reduced population, there will again be plenty of choice real estate—if not in New York, then in Seattle or Minneapolis or Budapest or someplace like that.

The point is that many of us have tasted paradise. This time, once the planet sloughs off its human surplus (cross your fingers that it's not you), we don't have to make the mistake of ruining things all over again by breeding ourselves into oblivion.