Food, Life and Sanity: the Triple Disappearing Act

It is ironic but not at all surprising that, for a civilisation claiming to have taken care of its most basic needs a very long time ago, its demise will come down to the one, most basic need common to all organisms: food.  

Civilisations may survive without technology or organised society, but they cannot last more than a few weeks without food.  Crops won’t grow on scorched land, and farmers won’t work in lethal temperatures.  Countries most likely to be among the first to starve as a function of water stress vs food production capacity (vs population) include the UK, France, China and India – that is, 4 out of the 7 largest economies on the planet. This of course means global civilisational decline. 

Food inflation is caused by a surge in demand in relation to supply.  The scarcer our foods and the larger the population, the faster prices suddenly spiral out of control to the point where money is meaningless, which is what it has always been.  The climate crisis is destroying both our ability to grow food, as well as the infrastructure needed for resilience.  Weather events will bankrupt and incapacitate key decision centres in iconic central business districts of the word’s capitals, so many of which are at sea level. 

But the worst enemy is us.  Our history demonstrates that, in times of crisis, we are known to make things worse for ourselves.  As nations starve, war over disappearing water and land resources becomes inevitable.  By contrast with animals, violence in humans is considerably more pre-emptive, triggered by perceived as opposed to real threat, another unfortunate side effect of our overactive paranoia disorders.  And while cannibalism in most species appears spontaneously only at times of stress, in humans there are various sophisticated forms of cannibalism which are a permanent fixture of the modern economy: war being just one of them.  A species who has built its civilisation on the premise of making other species extinct will always ultimately be prone to mutual extermination within its own tribe. 

In our interconnected world, hunger and war will find humans wherever they are, whoever they voted for.  Even if they have food, the lack of health services, internet, and electricity within a fragmented social and technological fabric will decrease life expectancy and further increase conflict.  Before the food collapse will come a food nutritional quality collapse and a mental health collapse.  As hunger goes global, many humans will have no choice but switch to eating low nutritional content toxic foods.  Even “healthy” food will not be able to avoid contamination with microplastics and forever chemicals which have already infiltrated the food chain.  This will bring about a spiralling health crisis, including a mental health crisis for which the world is ill-prepared.

But food isn’t simply fuel.  Food is the summation of Earth’s biomass.  Every life form, including humans, is ultimately an item of food for another being whether raw, cooked, or disintegrated.  All life is food, and all food is life.  When one goes, so does the other.  Vanishing ecosystems implies fewer life forms, which means less food, which in turn means even fewer life forms.  This is a negative feedback loop which humans began tens of thousands of years ago, and which has accelerated. This means that our gentle roll down the biodiversity hill over thousands of years has sped up into a free-fall.  The biome is collapsing so quickly, it is like an apocalyptic Netflix binge which skipped straight to the last episode. You didn’t even finish your popcorn and the world ended.  Oops.

Extinction events are in fact speeding up so much that we are barely catching glimpses of a disappearing world.  The rapid decomposition of the planet’s biome is truly cataclysmic, yet humanity cannot even cognitively process these changes as it surrounds itself with its Civilisational Lie. We already live on a planet hardly reminiscent of the rich, biodiverse jungle that Earth once was, and we are rapidly heading towards an Earth which will bear absolutely no resemblance to the present.  As the entire ecosystem is pushed outside the habitable temperature zone, this planet will become a barren landscape of just a few species of plants and microorganisms here and there who have managed to adapt.  Whether some humans manage to exist or not somewhere in this hellscape, they will be fighting for survival in a new, lethal environment no human has ever lived in. 

No technology will be able to help us grow enough food.  As long as we only use technology to extract resources and annihilate each other, the belief that technology will come to our rescue is a product of a highly delusional thought process.  Even if everyone went vegan tomorrow, 8 billion people still need to eat. This means petrol, electricity, pesticides and herbicides, marketing and advertising, all of which are part of the food industry.  With the necro-economy still intact, the autodestruct sequence on food, biodiversity and our own sanity can only accelerate.

George is an author, researcher, molecular biologist and food scientist. You can follow him on Twitter @99blackbaloons

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