Bringing back National Service

by | Feb 28, 2009 | Climate and resource scarcity

Just thinking through how our society copes with climate change. One way might be to bring back national service.

Why?

1) We need to train a generation of young people how to deal with crises, whether that’s food riots, race riots, or extreme weather. They will have to be physically and mentally tough, resilient and disciplined.
2) In general, we need to instill a war-time discipline into the country if it is going to cope with a drastic reduction in our quality of life.
3) We need a bigger domestic emergency force.
4) We may need a bigger external defence force as well.

What are the arguments against it?

1) It’s the first step to a fascist military state.
2) We need experts, not amateurs.
3) We need a bigger global peacecorps, not brownshirts at home.
4) We need de-centralised innovation and spontaneous systems evolution, not goose-stepping drones.

I think the arguments for are better than the arguments against. If you want the UK to be at a forefront of a global solution to food shortages, helping other states that are failing, then you will need an even bigger armed forces.

Our country will need to become much more disciplined very quickly, and I think national service is one step towards that.

The US seems to be thinking along the same lines. Eg the Innovations in Civic Participation’s Youth Service and Climate Change initiative. President Obama also seems keen to resurrect JFK’s Peace Corps spirit. Ask not what your climate can do for you. Ask what you can do for your climate.

I wonder if this could become part of the Resilience programme which Martin Seligman developed, and which the government is now piloting in some schools in the UK.

That programme is based on the assumption of an affluent society. But it could easily be adapted to a much more Stoical sense of resilience – how to survive and stay positive, engaged and ethical in a crisis-prone society.

More reasons to be cheerful

by | Feb 27, 2009 | Africa, Climate and resource scarcity

While we’re on the subject of climate change misery (see the two posts below), an interesting finding in Raymond Fisman and Eduardo Miguel’s ‘Economic Gangsters‘ is that in Africa, the world’s most conflict-prone region, “the risk of armed civil conflict is much more likely the year after a large drop in rainfall than in normal years.”

In the Sahel region – the area between the Sahara and the equatorial zone which takes in such beacons of stability as Sudan, Chad, northern Nigeria and Niger – climate change is expected to reduce average rainfall by 24 per cent. Much of the rain that does fall will evaporate because of higher temperatures. Fisman and Miguel reckon all this will increase the risk of conflict in the region by 15 per cent by 2080, meaning some countries will face a 1 in 3 chance of civil war EACH YEAR!

Enjoy your weekend.

Kraken Wakes – climate calamity

by | Feb 27, 2009 | Climate and resource scarcity

The Kraken Wakes - john WyndhamThe first signs of disaster are noticed by only a few doomsayers.

Newspapers profess themselves ‘distressed by the calamities that have befallen certain islands,’ but counsel awaiting more evidence before taking hasty action.

Industry reacts with fury when government indulges in what it sees as a ‘panic inspired’ reaction.

The loss of the ice caps brings breathless media coverage. “I have seen icebergs formed before, but never on anything like the scale that is taking place there,” reports one observer.

In the great ice cliffs hundreds of feet high, cracks appear suddenly. An enormous section tilts out, falling and turning slowly. When it smashes into the water the spray rises up and up in great fountains, spreading far out all around…

Very often a berg had no time to float away before a new one had crashed down on top of it. The scale was so big that it was hard to realize.

Only by the apparent slowness of the falls and the way the splashes seemed to hang in the air – the majestic pace of it all – were we able to tell the vastness of what we were seeing.

But still there is little appetite for action. The scale of the threat may be accepted by a growing number of ’eminent but very worried men’, but the public remains sanguine. Sea level rises of two and half inches appear an anticlimax, ‘ just a very slightly higher mark on a post.’ And, after all, by the time things get really bad, won’t the ‘boffins’ have come up with a technological quick fix.

Then London’s flood defences are breached for the first time and thoughts turn to protecting those parts of Britain that can most easily be saved. The result? “Great bitterness between those who were chosen and those who looked like being thrown to the wolves.”

The second flood is worse and prompts a state of emergency (“the government had removed the velvet glove”). For a while, despite crumbling infrastructure, some kind of normality is maintained,  “seemingly through habit or momentum.” Gradually, however, lawless ‘seeps’ in.

“Failure of the emergency electricity supply one afternoon, followed by a night of darkness, gave a kind of coup de grace to order. The looting of shops, and particularly foodshops, began, and spread on a scale that defeated both the police and the military.”

From there, it is a short step to the era of mass migrations, as people make a “panicky rush to stake a claim on the high ground while there is still room there.” A fiercesome “guerrilla war between starving bands” begins.

Standard climate change-inspired, apocalyptic fiction? Sure, except for the fact that John Wyndham’s The Kraken Wakes was first published over half a century ago, in 1953. (more…)