Gas stops flowing and the roads are all but desolate, as only a few vehicles are still able to run. Container ships from China stop pulling into port, grocery store trucks can’t deliver supplies and emergency services can’t answer desperate pleas for help. Governments fall apart as they fail to control an angry, hungry, rioting population which, after a long period of total anarchy, finally begins breaking into pockets. Civil wars arise over resources like clean water. Civilization in general returns to a simpler time when everyone was left to fend for themselves, depending on the land for survival.
It’s pretty much the worst-case scenario, whether it were to come about due to a terrorist strike on the oil market, a shutdown of the economy, war or some other extremely disruptive event. And, though it may seem like it comes straight from the mind of a tinfoil-hat-wearing conspiracy theorist, it’s entirely possible that society will experience a major breakdown sometime in the next couple of generations. We don’t like to think about it, and that’s part of the problem – we’re totally unprepared.
EarthFirst has already delved into what would happen if there were an extreme, widespread, prolonged gas shortage –basically, utter chaos. There would be numerous repercussions. Many would die. Our lives would change drastically. Few people would feel safe and stable. We’d be thrown straight back to the Pre-Industrial Revolution era, with a strange mix of 21st-century ideas and technology thrown in. But, could there be an upside to the dissolution of our modern world?
Barring nuclear war, the biggest beneficiaries of a total breakdown in society would be the earth and all of the non-human creatures that live on it. Like it or not, the major decrease in the human population that would come part and parcel with a total breakdown in society would be the single biggest environmental benefit this world could possibly experience. None of us want to imagine our communities, our families, ourselves dying off in war, hunger, disease and lawlessness – it’s a nightmare. It would be hell on earth, for a while. But the remaining population would pick up the pieces and find a new way, and the earth would be better off for it.
Imagine: a dystopian, practically technology-free society where factories no longer pump pollution into the air, cars no longer idle in freeway traffic jams, and people are forced to re-use everything they can. No more endless processions of plastic junk down the assembly line, no more hormone- and antibiotic-packed Frankenmeat being raised in inhumane, environmentally damaging conditions.
As life became almost completely local, we’d be forced to take over growing our own food, effectively stopping the environmental damage done by factory farms. Since production would stop on synthetic fertilizer, farmers would go back to using organic solutions instead. That means no more constant streams of poison going from the cornfields of middle America to the Gulf of Mexico via the Mississippi River, expanding the ever-growing dead zone that threatens sea life. We’d no longer be shipping tons of food from one end of the country to another, or importing it from overseas. We’d be eating fresh, healthy, seasonal food and we’d make damn sure not to waste any of it.
We’d get incredibly creative with re-using items. People would pore through landfills looking for things once tossed away without a thought, but which would now be seen as still serving a valuable purpose. Since disposable items would be a thing of the past, every item would be used until it literally fell apart. With factory production at a standstill, we’d see a resurgence of nearly-lost arts like hand sewing, blacksmithing, woodworking and food preservation.
Walking onto a suburban homestead in this practically post-apocalyptic world, you’d see a strange melange of simple old-fashioned tools, whatever 21st century technology still works and plenty of green tech like improvised wind turbines and greywater systems. It’d be like Mad Max, without all the mullets and pleather.
With construction at a standstill, forests would remain intact and animals would get a chance to build their populations back up. In many areas we’d likely see wildlife taking over abandoned industrial sites, like something out of a disaster movie. Since humans would no longer be expanding into untouched areas like a plague, ecosystems would have some time to rebalance themselves. Perhaps some endangered species could even rebound from the brink of extinction.p
Let’s break down a few of the benefits, just in the U.S.:
- Over 300 million cars off the road in the U.S. alone. (238,697,097 vehicles were in use in 2005, the last year for which we have a concrete figure). The EPA calculates that each passenger vehicle in America emits about 5.5 metric tons of greenhouse gases annually, so in a year we’d save at least 16.5 million metric tons from entering the atmosphere.
- Power plants no longer pumping CO2 into the air. The consumption of electricity in America accounted for more than 2.3 billion tons of CO2 in 2006, with coal-fired power plants responsible for 1.9 billion tons. That number is undoubtedly higher today.
- Over 300 million cans of beverages per day no longer consumed. Americans use approximately 212,000 aluminum cans every 30 seconds, and only a small fraction of those cans are recycled. The rest end up in the landfill. If we stopped drinking soda, we’d stop mountains of trash from accumulating – and soda cans are just one small example of the disposable products that would stop piling up.
Sure, there would still be plenty of opportunity for harm to the environment. Governments, struggling to regroup, would hardly be concerned with policing environmental offenses like dumping trash in the ocean, or the maintenance of toxic waste sites. We’ve already done too much damage to be able to simply turn back the clock to a time when most of the world’s population lived far more eco-friendly lifestyles simply by virtue of living closer to the land. But in all honesty, the earth would still be a hell of a lot better off than it is right now.
It’s unfortunate that it could possibly take a catastrophic event to force us to live in a way that’s healthier for the entire planet – including our own species – so that we could extend our time on this earth and ensure that it remains a pleasant place to live. But, let’s face it. Without us, this planet would grow up around our ruins and return to the lush, diverse, amazing collection of life that it was before we began messing it up.
Photo credit: I Am Legend, Children of Men, Mad Max
