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What will all the engineers and scientists do when civilisation collapses?
By Ciaran Mundy | November 26, 2008
I am going to be wildly optimistic as there is little point in anything else and I’ve been getting very depressed about our chances of averting civilisation crushing climate change lately! I still can’t persuade too many of my friends to cycle to Cornwall or train to Scotland, rather than taking a plane to the rapidly sinking Maldives 
or storm soaked Thailand.
I just read two competing versions of how we will most likely fail to save the human race by two stalwarts of the environment movement.
First, George Monbiot, arguing we must, despite the risks and likely failure, attempt a massive building program for renewable energy and electrified transport etc. The population at large will never swallow a huge cultural shift to another way of living and anyway this would lead to catastrophic economic and societal collapse vs. Second, 
Sharon Astyk’s plea for everyone to; a) just stop living high consumption lives and start subsistance agriculture in your back garden because we will have to anyway and b) a massive build program would mean huge emissions in the short term tipping the climate into irreversible change. Both George’s and Sharon’s plans seem improbable but maybe the reality is some of both?
Sharon is surely right about what it is possible to ask of people in these rapidly changing times. George has the problem of being dead right, but ignored for so long that to stay sane he lives in a bubble, so even when a crowd gathers around in agreement he cant see or hear them!
So, Sharon, meet George! Can we not combine George’s and Sharon’s respective approaches to generate the greatest odds of success? Besides, they look uncannily alike (maybe they are one and the same person? Hmmm. . . ). As I see it, in a huge depression we will see many out of work and factories closing. . . . no more Airbus A380s or arguments over building more airport runways, big Pharma companies will falter and decline, energy intensive farming grinding to a halt etc. Conscripting the best and most able engineers, scientists, farmers etc. into a semi voluntary green army (they get free cabbage, turnips and potatoes in the UK!), focused on the least carbon intensive build out of things such as a distributed energy network and mass transit systems, surely are achievable goals? Re-skilling every parks authority to train people in domestic food production and carbon sequestration techniques such as pyrolytic bio-char production . . . These possibilities only seem remote from our recent historic perspective of affluent consumer culture. But if most of us have F*** all else to do, then lets make a plan. I will start tonight by trying to organise a Transition group right here in my neighbourhood, in my home town of Bristol.
Better get busy . . . .
p.s. I suspect Sharon is right about major builds such as the Severn barrage planned for near my home. In these times would it ever get finished?
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