Standing on Zanzibar

Back in 1968, science fiction author John Brunner wrote the first of his great dystopian novels, Stand on Zanzibar. The novel was about one of the great worries of the age, overpopulation, and was set in far-off 2010, when there were an unimaginable seven billion people. As you may have gathered from the news over the last week, we're now living in that dystopia. Though its turned out to be not quite as dystopian as Brunner imagined.

Stripping away the ephemera from the book (the continuation of 60's racism and sexism, the Catholic schism, the awful slang), Brunner's future can be described in one word: crowded. With seven billion people, humanity is apparently squashed together so tightly that no-one can live in a house, and even the wealthy are forced to share apartments. This produces a state of mass-psychosis, with the human race like too many rats sharing too small a cage. Some people can't handle the stress, go berserk and run amok as "muckers". As a result, everyone is in a constant state of fear of the people around them, or drugged out of their mind to avoid it.

We seem to have largely dodged that bullet. Yes, the US has mass-shootings - but they seem to be a result of permissive gun laws and a culture of violence, not of crowding-induced insanity. In most of the world, it seems that we still have enough room left in our cage. Which is pretty scary when you see how crowded some parts of that cage are. Singapore has 7,000 people per square kilometre, Macau more than twice that. Clearly we can go quite high, globally speaking, before we hit our psychological limits (our physical limits, resources and pollution, are another question entirely, but that's another book).

Oddly, for a dystopian novel about overpopulation, population control doesn't get much of a mention. A lot of effort is spent on eugenics, but this is seen more as a means of saving medical resources than limiting growth (there's even an odd moment when it becomes clear that you can be forced to have an abortion for eugenic reasons, but can't get one voluntarily). The effects of this are primarily psychological as well, with large numbers of people forbidden to have children due to some defect, and going neurotic as a result. We dodged that bullet too, thanks to a man with a moustache discrediting the entire idea. Meanwhile, we now have an increasing number of people who are voluntarily childless, and quite happy about it (though I suppose some people would regard this as a social pathology and a symptom of Calhoun's "second death").

Brunner clearly thought that things couldn't go on much longer with seven billion people. In reality, the population is still growing. While the demographic transition looks like it will deal with it in the end, the global population is likely to peak at between nine and ten billion. Which means that even if we manage to cope with the resulting resource and pollution problems, we're still going to need a bigger island. Brunner allowed two square feet (0.186 square metres) per person for standing-room-only, which means something like 1860 square kilometres for ten billion people. Bintan, anyone?

His time ran out and Death fell softly from the summer sky...

The SF fans among you will recognise the title of this post as the final words of Arthur C. Clarke's "Death and the Senator". Now that Clarke's time has run out, I thought I'd take a little time to remember him.

My love of Clarke's work goes back a long way. The first two "real" books I ever owned (I'm unsure as to which was the first, but I still have both of them, well-read, though smelling a little dusty) were Malcolm Edwards' collection Constellations: Stories of the Future, which contained (among other things) Clarke's story "The Wind From The Sun", and Clarke's Islands in the Sky, a children's novel about a kid who scams a trip to a space station. And with those, I was hooked - both on science fiction and on Clarke. Over the years, I devoured pretty much every short story he had written - the libraries were awash with his collections - then moved on to the novels. Imperial Earth, Childhood's End, Rendezvous with Rama, 2001 and 2010. His later novels, written "in collaboration" with various others, tended to suck, so I gave up on them. But his classics are some of the finest works of SF ever written.

Still, it's the short stories I keep coming back to. Clarke was a master of that form, able to deliver a honed-down story (and his point) in just a few pages. Rather than focusing on logic puzzles (Asimov's trap - he was really a mystery writer) or scientific trivia, Clarke focused on people and big ideas - and yet his stories are the best I know for presenting the wonder and beauty and cold mathematics of space travel. His venture into film is the perfect example of this - the science in 2001: A Space Odyssey is perfect, but its just a backdrop for something else. That something else might be alien contact ("The Sentinel"), a crisis of faith ("The Star"), or the consequences of nuclear war ("If I Forget Thee, O Earth"). The best of these stories will be remembered long after Clarke is dust.

As for which is my favourite, paging through The Collected Stories (the same publishing technology which allows Robert Jordan to write 900 pages of nothing also allows the publication of almost everything Clarke has ever written in one fat volume), I'd have to vote for "Transit of Earth", the bleak story of a doomed scientist facing his fate with no hope of rescue, and nothing to do but record the damn numbers. Matter of fact science, sense of wonder at the universe, and tragedy all in one package. Unfortunately, it's not online, but if you can find it, read it.

One I have to get

Glorifying Terrorism, edited by Farah Mendlesohn. It was written in response to the British Terrorism Act 2006, which (among other things) outlawed the "glorification" of terrorism, and the aim is for every story in it to violate the act. But somehow, I doubt this will result in any of the SF authors contributing to it being dragged away and prosecuted - unless they're Muslim, of course.

(Hat tip: Ken MacLeod)

Lovecraft meets Dilbert

Imagine that there are crawling tentacled horrors waiting at the bottom of the Mandelbrot set to invade reality and raven and slay. Imagine that there are people who know this - and therefore that there are secret government agencies whose job it is to stop them. Imagine those guardians of reality have managers, office politics, HR departments, paperclip audits, and all the petty bureaucracy that comes with being a modern, efficient government department.

That's pretty much the premise behind Charles Stross' The Atrocity Archives. It combines the horror of H P Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos with the horror of modern bureaucracy - with a good dose of geek humour thrown in. Magic being a science (and a specialised branch of mathematics, at that), it naturally attracts geeks - particularly when they inadvertently discover how to summon Nyarlathotep and almost destroy Birmingham. But it's not all laughs - there's about a squick a page of ickyness (more in some places), and the peculiar horror of a setting in which classified government documents blandly state

We remain convinced that this is the best defensive posture to adopt in order to minimise casualties when the Great Old Ones return from beyond the stars to eat our brains.

It's well worth reading, if you can get hold of it.

Lowering the bar: a history of climate change targets in New Zealand

I've been reading Alexander Gillespie's Burning Issues: the Failure of the New Zealand Response to Climatic Change over the last few days. While it's a bit dated (1997), it does provide useful background information on the history of New Zealand climate change policy. One particularly interesting thing that emerged is our history of setting targets. For example:

• In 1990, the Labour government under Geoffrey Palmer set an interim objective of a 20% reduction in CO₂ by 2005, and a 60% reduction by 2020. Methane was to be reduced by 15% by 2020.
• During the 1990 election campaign, National adopted Labour's target, and toughed it to a 20% reduction by 2000.
• In 1994, with the release of Climate Change: the New Zealand Response [PDF] (our first communication under the UNFCCC), National endorsed this target, and expected to meet it. The preferred means was a massive planting program of 100,000 Hectares of forests per year until 2005, coupled with energy efficiency programmes.
• In 1996, the Working Group on Carbon Dioxide reported that our ambitious targets were unlikely to be met.
• In 1997, we signed the Kyoto Protocol, committing us to reduce total greenhouse gas output to 1990 levels on average over the period 2008 - 2012.
• In 2002, the Labour government adopted the goal of "[making] significant greenhouse gas reductions on business-as-usual and [being] set towards a permanent downward path for total gross emissions by 2012.”
• According to the recent Review of New Zealand’s Climate Change Policies, even this modest goal seems unlikely to be met and should be revised.

There's a common feature linking this repeated lowering of the bar, and that is the failure to back goals with concrete action. For example, the 1992 Carbon Dioxide Action Plan suggested reducing emissions through a combination of "least regret" policies, including taking greater account of CO₂ emissions in transport policy, tightening building standards, and planting forests on the East Coast. Very little (if any) of this was done. National's 1995 plan to soak up our emissions with massive forest plantings simply wasn't implemented - National left it to the market, which at the time was projected to reduce plantings (then-Environment Minister Simon Upton even went so far as to say at a climate change conference that government interference in the market to reduce emissions should be guarded against). And Labour both delayed implementation of their carbon reduction policies until it was far too late in the piece - and then systematically backed away from them when faced with the slightest political opposition. The underlying reason for this systematic failure is summed up by Gillespie in a prescient quote:

the government was (and remains) facing a paradox - how to reduce emissions yet deregulate the market. The government has no enthusiasm for interfering in the market in order to bring about increased energy efficiency, whether by penalising motorists, say, or subsidising public transport. Trying to reduce methane emissions by forcing increased costs on an already sensitive agricultural sector was not an attractive option at all.

Unfortunately, the market will not solve the problem. It is fundamentally incapable of it, as long as carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions remain an unpriced externality. If the government wants to stand any chance of meeting its international obligations (and avoid subsidising carbon polluters from general taxation by buying credits on the international market), it has to bite the bullet and interfere in the market - if only to internalise the externality and ensure that emitters are paying the full cost of their activities.

Collapse

The sharp-eyed among you may have noticed that I've finished reading Jared Diamond's Collapse. I started reading it way back in April, put it down to do some higher priority reading, and have only just got round to finishing it. I'm glad I made the effort.

Much of Collapse consists of the stories of past societies which, for one reason or another, disappeared. Easter Island, the Maya, the Anasasi of the American Southwest are just some of the examples. Many of these stories (and particularly those of Pitcairn and Henderson and the Greenland Vikings) are relentlessly depressing. Diamond identifies four factors which may contribute to a society's collapse: environmental damage, climate change, hostile neighbours and disruption of trade links. But the most important factor is how that society responds to its challenges. Sometimes, as in the case of Pitcairn and Henderson, nothing can be done. These societies were locally unsustainable colonies effectively supported by trade; when that trade dried up (due to the parent society engaging in environmentally unsustainable practices), the colonies slowly died off. In other cases, as with Tokogawa Japan and Tikopia, changes can be made which ensure sustainability and social survival (Tokogawa Japan enacted strict laws to prevent deforestation; the Tikopians killed all their pigs because they recognised that they were destroying their island's fragile environment). But the most tragic cases are those where a solution was clearly possible, but was not taken - as in Greenland, where a Viking colony died out because of their refusal to eat fish (!) and insistence on trying to live as European sheep-herders in an environment which simply did not support it.

There are also some chapters devoted to modern societies under pressure - Rwanda, Haiti, China and Australia - which provide modern examples of the same problems. Rwanda has effectively already suffered a collapse, with a genocide at least partly driven by overpopulation and intense pressure for land. Haiti's poverty is at least partly the result of their having destroyed their environment through deforestation. China and Australia face longer-term problems (pollution and outright unsustainability, respectively), which while less likely to lead to collapse, are going to have to result in significant changes if their societies are to survive.

There are two key points I took from Collapse. The first is the dependence of a society on its environment. The environment is the basis of the economy; it provides the food we eat, the water we drink, and the resources and services which make the production of houses and books and oil tankers and computers possible (there is now an entire subdiscipline of ecological economics devoted to studying these links, as well as applying economic thinking to environmental problems and vice versa). Most of Diamond's examples collapsed because they lived substantially beyond their ecological means (though sometimes they had no way of knowing they were doing so until it was too late). There's a leson there for all of us. The second, as mentioned above, is the importance of human choice. Faced with a crucial environmental challenge, we can choose to ignore it, or we can choose to adapt to or resolve it. Which choice we take will affect our quality of life, sometimes drastically. As Diamond notes,

[s]evere problems of overpopulation, environmental impact, and climate change cannot persist indefinitely: sooner or later they are likely to resolve themselves, whether in the manner of Rwanda or in some other manner not of our devising, if we don't succeed in solving them by our own actions.

In a world which is increasingly living beyond its means, we will be facing such situations more often. But thanks to globalisation and increasing interconnectedness (not to mention science, technology, and the lessons of the past), we have more capacity than ever before to solve those problems. I'm just hoping that we collectively manage to make the right choices...

Collapse: Pitcairn, Henderson - and New Zealand?

I'm reading Jared Diamond's Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive at the moment. In the outline chapter he identifies five broad factors which can determine a society's fate: environmental damage, climate change, hostile neighbours, friendly trade partners, and how that society responds to its challenges. An early chapter examines Easter Island, which due to its lack of outside influences and isolation from the rest of Polynesian culture is perhaps the textbook example of a society killing itself off by degrading its environment (they cut down all their trees, which both decreased agricultural production due to erosion and reduced soil fertility, and meant they had no canoes, meaning much reduced access to seafood). But a sadder story is told in the next chapter, on Pitcairn and Henderson. These societies were not self-sufficient, but sustained by trade from the larger island of Mangareva; when that trade disappeared, Mangareva having made the same mistake as Easter and cut down all the trees which provided it with ocean-going canoes, so did the inhabitants of Pitcairn and Henderson. Not immediately - there is evidence that human habitation continued for up to a century after trade ceased - but by the time these islands were "discovered" by Europeans (1606 and 1790 respectively) they were empty. Diamond thinks that this should be a warning to us; globalisation has led to increasing economic interdependence, which allows us to offset the cost of degraded environments and sustain a well-fed, high-tech society through imports. But what happens if a vital part of the global economic system falls over?

Diamond uses the specific example of oil, and its fairly easy to see what the consequences of a sudden and sustained disruption of oil supplies (due to a nuclear exchange in the Middle East, for example) would be. The price would skyrocket, and in much of the world, transport would grind to a halt - resulting in a disruption of industrial production, economic recession, and possibly famine. If the disruption was long-lasting, societies would adapt, but more expensive transport would change patterns of industrial production and habitation; as in the nineteenth century, before we began using oil, factories would need to be closer to suppliers, and people closer to food sources.

What about total disruption? You'd need to look very hard to find a modern society as isolated and dependent on external trade as Henderson or Pitcairn was, but we can always do a though experiment. What would happen if New Zealand was completely cut off from the rest of the world? I think we'd actually do pretty well - we'd have to drop down to a 1900's or maybe 1940's level of existence, but we wouldn't die. And I think most western societies are probably in the same boat. The loss of imported fuel and raw materials would lead to vastly reduced standards of living, and the transition would be painful, but it wouldn't necessarily result in that society disappearing.

And OTOH, a painful transition is bad enough...

Following on from Diamond's point, if globalisation exposes us to risk, how can we manage it? Autarchy - self-sufficiency on a national level - may seem a tempting answer, but this throws out the benefits of interdependence along with the risks. I think a better solution is to use globalisation itself. Just as countries can ameliorate famine by working with others, we may be able to ameliorate other distributional disruptions (and on a global scale, famine is a distributional problem, not one of there not being enough food). Of course, self-interest and history will interfere with this, just as they interfere with other efforts to resolve global problems collectively - but I think its a lot better than each society trying to solve its own problems alone.

Power and Greed

While my CBIP shows that I am currently reading Selwyn manning's I Almost Forgot About The Moon, I've been neglecting it in favour of other books over the past few weeks. One of these has been Philippe Gigantes' Power And Greed.

Gigantes' central theme is the clash between individual freedom and the need for rules to prevent that freedom from descending into a Hobbesean nightmare. But rather than examining this as a question of political theory, Gigantes looks at it through the lens of history - and specifically, the history of our rulers. Gigantes calls our rulers the "Grand Acquisitors", those who "always want more, and hence... disturb the social order" who he compares to the dominant male in a pride of lions:

The rest of the pride does all the work to get a kill; the dominant male gets the best share of the meal, all the sex, and he does the serious roaring. The dominant lion has the power, and he has the greed.

According to Gigantes,

grand acquisitors, in their need for freedom to achieve their desires, wage war on society's need for order - a war that often has a determinant effect on history

(Lest anyone think the portrayal is purely negative, Gigiantes also points out that the acquisitors are "creators as well as destroyers", and that they have given us the industrial revolution, railroads, and much of modern society's infrastructure. Power and greed is a powerful motivating force...)

The first part of the book looks at our most influential rulemakers - those who have generally established the social order the grand acquisitors struggle against. Most are religious - Moses, Jesus, Mohammed - but there are also several secular rulemakers, particularly Solon and Plato. The former is praised for establishing the rule of law and open government, and for giving political power to the masses so they could check the powerful; the latter is reviled for laying the foundations of totalitarian oppression. Brahminism also comes in for heavy criticism for its caste system. The overall message? Sometimes the rules can serve the powerful.

However, by far the longer and more interesting section is a short history of the world from the rise of the Roman Empire to the global vilage, focusing on the grand acquisitors. Agrippina, Justinian and Theodora, Cortez and Pizarro, and Napoleon all feature in a long history of conquest, torture, rape, looting, and pillage. But the picture is not entirely dim; Gigantes gives credit where it is due, praising moderate rulers such as Henri of Navarre and pointing out that while the British Empire fought two wars to enable its businessmen to sell opium to Chinese peasants, it also ended the global slave trade and transplanted democratic values to India. He also praises the United States for its constitution enshrining the principle that the people were sovereign and that their delegated power could be revoked. While it has not always lived up to those values, they are there, "a sort of immune system eating away at political disease", corroding the power of grand acquisitors everywhere.

I'm not fond of the "great man" theory of history - I prefer to think that there are only ordinary men in great situations, which magnify both their virtues and their flaws. But while Gigantes focuses on the grand acquistors, he's not focussing on their uniqueness (an essential part of great man theories). Instead, he is stressing their essential similarity, in being ruthless monsters driven by power and greed.

Checking out the Free Ahmed Zaoui site, I see that Scoop's Selwyn Manning has co-authored a book on the Ahmed Zaoui case. Another one to add to the reading pile...

Them

There's this journalist, see? He goes around interviewing loonies of various denominations (such as Omar Bakhri Mohammed and Randy Weaver), and he finds out that the Bilderberg Group plays a central role in their conspiracy theories and worldview. Some think the Bilderbergers are a cabal of evil Jews, akin to the mythical "Elders of Zion" from the fraudulent Protocols; some think that they're shadowy businessmen in league with Satan; some think they're Catholics working for the Pope (who is, of course, the antichrist); and some even claim they are giant shapeshifting lizards. But all share a belief that the Bilderbergers are the Secret Masters, secretly ruling the world from a little room somewhere (usually in a five-star hotel, with a golf-course).

So, the journalist decides to look into this. On the way he talks to some very wierd and scary people. He's trailed by men in dark glasses, hugged by creepy millionaires with a fetish for Nicolae Ceausecu's shoes, outed as a Jew at a Jihad training camp, and observes America's political and financial elite behaving like drunken frat-boys at a re-enactment of a pagan ceremony involving a giant stone owl. But he also pieces together a picture of the Bilderberg group:

the group was created in 1954 by a band of influential post-war internationalists who believed that global capitalism would be the best way to thwart future Hitlers... The central tenet was, presuably, that international businessmen were not affiliated with crazy ideological belief systems. They were not ideologues. In fact the comforting thing about them was that they cared about nothing at all except for profits.

(Yes, that is irony there...)

They network. They have an outreach scheme, bringing together young politicians with financiers and industrialists, who offer them "wise words". As for the secrecy, they claim not to be secret, only private. "Nobody is going to speak freely if they're going to be quoted by ambitious and prurient journalists".

Why am I writing about this? Firstly, because it's a very interesting, funny, and scary book. Secondly, because some of the people mentioned in it are in the news this week (the Rev. Ian Paisley, for example). But mostly, because Crooked Timber has an excellent post about the paucity of the English language in describing groups such as the Bilderbergers:

the English language is amply stocked with words to describe paranoia and irrational fear, but doesn’t have one single concise term to describe a rational fear of political persecution. Similarly, the journalistic lexicon is well stocked with phrases like "conspiracy theorist", "moonbat" "tinfoil hat brigade" and so on, but if we were to want to turn our conversation toward discussion of the facts that people have political views, that people with similar political views tend to flock together, that groups of people with political views tend to want to influence the direction of policy, and that the process of influencing policy is usually most efficient if carried out in an organised manner ... well then we would already find it powerfully difficult to describe our discussion to a third party without using terms which implied by their ordinary usage that we were in some way weird. If we then took the further step of noting that often people have political views which are unpopular enough with the general public that it is prudent for them not to publicly express those views, then we are certainly in the realm of consipracy theory.

All of which is applicable to the Bilderbergers (who I suspect legitimately fear what everyone else might think of the world's richest and most powerful people clubbing together in such a fashion). And it's certainly applicable to discussion of the NeoCons (the actual topic of CT's post).

As for the loonies in Them, they go well beyond a shortage of adequate vocabulary...