For summertime reading pleasure and significance, it is hard to top the most recent issue of the journal Sustainability and its riveting centrepiece, An Analysis of the Potential for the Formation of ‘Nodes of Persisting Complexity.’
For it is there, amid 32 pages with 100 annotations, you will learn where it would be safest on the planet to duck the apocalypse.
Spoiler alert: it’s not British Columbia, exactly, but it’s not not B.C.
The academic paper is not for the limited of heart or limited of vocabulary. Still, it spells out who would most likely survive and who would be most susceptible in a societal collapse. Collapse is not an exaggeration; pretty much our economies and environments would hit the skids. It is described as “decreases in measures including: human populations; stocks of non-renewable resources or representations such as ‘wealth’ or ‘nature’; and other ‘services’ supporting civilization.” While I’m alive, I don’t want to go there.
Editor’s note: these findings might be important to you for your next job or housing plan, or the ones after. After all, the report says: “Overall, the literature sources … paint a picture of human civilization that is in a perilous state, with large and growing risks developing in multiple spheres of the human endeavour.”
The study’s authors, Aled Jones, director of the Global Sustainability Institute at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge, England, and his co-author, Nick King, write about the increased sociopolitical complexity of civilization – population growth, migration, industrialization and climate change, among them. They chronicle “global decomplexification,” in which the last 70 years known as the “Great Acceleration” has sent the globe into overdrive on all things problematic.
It is possible you have heard earlier of what studies call “collapse lifeboats.” The term describes places where societal collapse and climate change may not be strongest and where populations might be maintained. Northern Canada scores well on this, as do Russia, Scandinavia, New Zealand and the British Isles. In this spectre, mass migration would also be likely in the British Isles, Scandinavia, Patagonia, Tasmania and the South Island of New Zealand.
But the authors’ new contribution is in identifying a concept they call “nodes of persisting complexity.” They define it as “the greatest opportunity for human society to retain technology and organization into the longer term.” It’s a wonderful euphemism to describe where it won’t be wonderful but will be, um, a complexity in order to permit us to be persisting. In short, better off than the next person.
Caveat about the study: it has been critiqued by others as focusing too much on the developed world and too little on the military might among them to assert privilege. The standings in this Survival Olympics are, they say, skewed by the criteria.
I say, read on.
The researchers portray the foundation of the problem of such rapid global development: “The aggregate effect of this dramatic growth has been the strong and increasing perturbation of the Earth system and the biosphere, making collective human civilization a major force acting at global scale.” My take: that major force is going to need a major hideout if the proverbial change-led destruction hits the fan.
Best place to burrow is no surprise, because billionaires are squirrelling away there already in bunkers: New Zealand. Remote, lots of resources to exploit, and even if the global supply chain craters, its isolation will not be all that gruesome.
The silver medal is a shortish flight trek away if NZ disappoints: Tasmania. Why? Well, we’d better take note: agriculture. It can’t take in many people, but it can feed those it has.
The bronze goes to Ireland, and not all because of potatoes or whisky. Ireland is an exporter, so its agriculture can sustain its population, and it won’t be so needy on the rest of the world.
Iceland finishes just outside the medals, docked mainly because it is experiencing the worst kind of climate change due to melting icebergs, but its remoteness dispels migration, and it has an exceptional potential for agriculture and renewable energy.
Next up is an annoying placement as a Canadian: the United Kingdom. Why? Not its current state, but its history of surviving and adapting despite its challenges in developing renewable energy and its propensity to import food. It gets points for experience. Thought we had more than that to offer. Go figure.
And here we arrive with ourselves, in a tie with our southern neighbours; places five and six, not much distinguishable. Out of the medals.
It is at this point that you might ask: what does it mean to me, here in my office or living room with the paper, on my desktop, or my mobile phone? How am I to do?
Well, there is good news and bad news.
The good news is we have a lot of land per person. In case you haven’t noticed, too, we have direct access to the Pacific Ocean. We have lots of in-house energy resources and, ahem, a “moderate” tech manufacturing capacity to propel us; our neighbour, let it be known, has “very large” capacity.
Our big problem, other academics note, is the spectre of mass migration, with Americans flooding across the border for a cooler climate of energy resources and agricultural subsistence. It does not help that we and America are large importers. How we will source the iPhone 77? How will we handle all those American invaders with the 77 in hand?
These questions and more await the future. Meantime I am scouring my Ancestry.com account for a benevolent cousin in New Zealand. •
Kirk LaPointe is publisher and editor-in-chief of BIV and vice-president, editorial, of Glacier Media.
