When
I decided on a post climate change world
for my first novel, Ellen’s Tale, I
blithely thought petrol, oil. Then I
began to think electricity. The whole of
modern civilization crashed around my ears!
Think
about it, think about what vanishes. The list is endless and I still probably
haven’t thought of it all.
Phone
your insurance company when its computers are down – you don’t exist. Phone the bank to check your hard earned
money and its computers are down, the money might as well not be there. Are they keeping the written records in a
vault somewhere? I do hope so.
Come
the demise of fossil fuel, will you rush to the bank? They don’t keep the cash there. File an insurance claim? Forget it.
Phone
for help? Phones are down. Get news of the apocalypse? Only if you have a wind
up radio.
Do
the weekly shop- there will be so little food there. Refridgerated containers?
Gone. Intensively farmed goods? Gone.
Do
not- I repeat- do not get ill. Hospitals
and all their wonderful complicated machines and research centres? Down. I mean
even the lifts won't be working?
Trains?
Planes? Ships? No. No. No.
Well
those of us who can garden or farm will be okay? Garden? Yes - until an unseasonable local
drought hits – there will be no running tap water to help, so those veggies
will die if you don’t have collected rainwater or a well. Know how to farm?
Fine but are you going to plough the fields by hand, kill each fresh bug or
blight individually because the chemicals needed to spray are all fossil fuel
based. Where the fertilizer?
Can
hunt but then so can anyone else with a gun – and despite our gun laws quite a
few people in UK possess guns (other countries I cannot comment on!) anyone
else with a gun can be shooting, maybe not to kill the odd rabbit, but to have
your garden sprouts! And when the
bullets run out? When the guns break?
No
worse, you say, than before the industrial revolution. We did then, we can do now. Yes-well - apart from the fact that we are
mostly an urban animal now with barely a touching knowledge of nature, the
population in the UK stands at 60+ million whereas before the industrial
revolution it hovered around the 6-7 million mark. Where’s the food coming from?
A
quick resume of what we need electrics for would include
Transport
– even gas and diesel need electrics to start an engine
In
the home – heating- cooling – washing -lighting – communication – entertainment
Industry
- driving almost every moving part as well as all above mentioned
Medicine
/research as mentioned
I
am sure you could come up with more
I
fondly imagined that as I had grown up post Second World War, I and other baby
boomers would cope quite well. Hah!
We
have been mechanized too long.
Mechanized too well. Spoilt!
There
is more!
