Apocalypse or Liberal Democracy 2.0?

That’s very simply the subject of this whole post, not that it’ll be a long one. Basically I was reading George Monbiot’s latest post, a debate between him and Paul Kingsnorth, about what happens next. In the last 50 or 60 years industrialisation has exploded, the population has increased several times over, our CO2 emissions have risen impossibly, fish stocks have dropped, ice-caps have started to melt a lot faster than expected, and so on and so forth. Just in the last few decades we have changed things on this planet to an irreversible degree. My question – and the subject of the aforementioned debate – is this: what happens next?

George Monbiot says we should keep fighting to maintain the status quo, switch over to renewables, keep on ‘fighting’ for our world as it is, and that way we can stop mass extinction of billions of people and hopefully salvage the basic structure of the society we have. He says that the alternative is that our world as it is will collapse with devastating, sudden and apocalyptic completeness, and that we will end up in a world much like that scene in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (which you absolutely ought to read) and things will be truly terrible.

Paul Kingsnorth, however, argues that it’s too late, society as it is is doomed to collapse – Liberal Democracy 2.0 is an impossible pipe dream. Instead things will slowly collapse – a new Dark Age, but not impossible to manage or work with. People will die, and things will get worse, and we won’t have the internet, vacuum cleaners, or Sky, but we won’t all die and get flooded out and have a horrible time of it. We will remember how to grow potatoes without having to put on our Cath Kidston wellies first.

I think the consensus is roughly the same here – the world as it is cannot continue like this and everything probably will basically collapse – although we might just rescue it, we might still be able to turn things around and I might be able to realistically imagine my grandchildren driving my great-grandchildren to their tweed-wearing, traditional country primary school in a hydrogen-powered hovercar or something before going home and checking the news on the screen of their 33rd generation iPhone or whatever – but yes, if we don’t, and we probably won’t, then that’s the end of the world as it is. The argument here is about Just How Bad the end will actually be.

How do you imagine the future? How collapsed is collapse? Will we be eating other peoples’ children out of desparation, and toasting squirrels over miserable, badly constructed wood fires, or will we be converting our cosy centrally-heated homes back into homes with working chimneys to burn wood, growing potatoes in our gardens and digging up the roads to do so and being utterly civilised, just without the hoover and the Sky and the Coca-Cola? What do you see when you imagine your grandchildren growing up?