Even if it’s nice after the apocalypse, it might be better to avoid it
OUR FREE-RANGE ANCESTORS OF millennia past had no idea what society would become. Not only bereft of a crystal ball of the epic quality needed to do so, they wouldn’t even have the words to conceptualize how humanity would develop. How high the peaks, how utter the failures.
Early humans lived simple, often harsh lives. Certainly nothing any of us today – plugged in, awash in comforts – could envision, let alone survive.
Nomadic tribal societies grew in size and complexity, developing rituals, hierarchies and eventually systems of governance that invariably became overbearing and corrupt, from monarchs and church leaders to the dictators, in-name-only democrats and oligarchs crushing what remains of our souls and threatening the very planet trodden on by generations uncounted.
We still don’t have that magic crystal ball, but from this vantage it’s easier to predict what lies ahead. Oh, not the specifics of technology, for instance, but perhaps of a downward spiral. Well, at least that’s the picture seen by those of us with a pessimistic take on human nature and the ultimate sell out and die-off. Not everyone sees the situation as quite so dire, the narratives coming out of the U.S. election machine notwithstanding.
On the optimistic side, you can count Elmira’s Michael Purves-Smith, even if he’s penned not one, but two books looking at the collapse of society following the death of almost every human on the planet.
Writing as M.I. Lastman, the second part of Rocky Mountain Locust follows the continuing story of Jim Easom following a pandemic that kills just about everyone else on the planet. His encounters with a few other survivors and their struggles to create a life for themselves maintains a positive outlook on human potential.
Given the miseries humans have inflicted on each other, fellow species and the very earth itself, it may seem strange to believe in the goodness of human nature, but Purves-Smith maintains there is hope for us. That’s so even in the midst of some very real existential threats, from climate change to the kinds of epidemic that gives rise to the events of his novels.
“I think people are essentially good. Not all of them, of course, but in a crisis we would come together.”
The characters of Rocky Mountain Locust certainly find themselves in a crisis situation. Almost everyone is dead, bringing to a halt most of the modern conveniences we take for granted, Some technology such as gasolinefuelled vehicles will continue to work for a few years, and the stockpiles of goods and the very infrastructure might last a little longer still, but eventually they too will fail, leaving us in a state at least somewhat recognizable to our ancestors.
There’s one big difference, however, in that the surviving humans have the advantage of hindsight, being able to learn from past mistakes.
With his books, PurvesSmith has in essence hit the reset button on humanity, picturing what might happen if we were able to get off the crazy train we’re all riding just now. It’s hard to imagine altering our (collision) course without the kind of catastrophe that leads to the events of Rocky Mountain Locust. Having created that scenario, the author posits a future in which the remaining humans learn to cooperate with each other and with nature, developing an appreciation for a way of life most of us long ago abandoned.
While the story can be called post-apocalyptic – in an upbeat, non-Mad-Max way – it’s his concern about avoiding such an eventuality that prompted Purves-Smith to pen the two volumes.
“The issue for me is this: how do we solve the problem of the biosphere?”
Better to avoid the scenario of Rocky Mountain Locust, working with nature now rather than waiting until after a collapse of human society, he suggests.
He sees climate change as the most imminent threat, if not the only one. And he remains optimistic that we can still take steps to mitigate the worst of the impacts. Ideally, we can start taking action before the perhaps inevitable crisis that will force us into the kind of action we should be doing now as a preventative.
Purves-Smith sees a widespread carbon sequestration effort, using nature itself rather than relying on technology, as being helpful, a human-led initiative akin to the natural Azolla event – a mass blooming of a freshwater fern in the Arctic some 49 million years ago that is said to have helped cool the planet at a time when greenhouse gases were far more abundant than even today.
He stresses natural fixes over technical ones, noting that our reliance on technology is a large part of the problem. Not only polluting, the energy-intense machinery has added to an already complex world, one most of our ancestors wouldn’t recognize.
“The bottom line is that our world is extremely complex,” he notes. “When things work, it’s just fine, but ... complexity has very serious downsides.”
Those downsides are readily apparent in Rocky Mountain Locust, most notably when it comes to our energyintensive lifestyles. Residual human technology would make the transition to a neo-pre-industrial existence more comfortable, but there would be plenty of threats from now-unmaintained infrastructure, whether the flooding from inevitable hydroelectric dam collapses or potential fallout from nuclear plants.
Even injuries and simple diseases would become threatening in the absence of our complex medical equipment and the people to run it.
With most people gone, residual human technology would quickly disappear.
Right now, we have far more options than the author’s survivors, so we should be in a better position to stave off the worst effects of change. The optimist in Purves-Smith thinks we can rally around the cause. It’s that hope, after all, that drove him to write the books in the first place. That’s reflected in the largely upbeat tone. Readers growing to care about the fate of Jim, Jenny and Caroline as they rebuild their lives might just indicate that we, too, are optimistic.