The problem is energy. It would need lots. But once you have amortised transport costs (none) and the release of real estate (all that farmland), the price of GM-gourmet grub would be much the same as before.
With new allotments in cities and food virtually on tap, we would then need to think about what we do with the countryside. This decision may be taken from us when Bangladesh goes under the Indian Ocean and 40 million people need somewhere else to go. Australia would be perfect. There are barely a million people in the South Island of New Zealand, half that number in Tasmania. The Bangladeshis might feel a bit cool, but they seem to have coped in England (better than I did!). Both those islands could become one big city, bar the mountains, which look nice anyway. And inland Australia could house the remaining 38 million dispossessed.
If flooding doesn’t happen, or is mysteriously delayed, the rural remains can be developed, as Chongming has been, as 21st century eco-cities.
The odd thing about my novel is the date in the title. I wrote it in 2000, in a burst of rage about the way plants and animals-rainforests, coral reefs, apes and tigers-were being wiped off the face of the Earth. It made me feel a little better, but I did not notice much change. Those concerned were still anxious about what they knew to be an appalling threat to nature, but those in charge did little.
The switch came at the end of 2006. Now, in 2007, you have to be dim, deprived or George W Bush not to realise we have a mega problem. So my timing (I take no pleasure) was right. Will it be that bad? Is this not yet more exaggeration from what Margaret Thatcher used to call the ‘moaning Minnies’, the ‘elites’ keen to denigrate can-do enterprise?
Try doing a thought experiment. Take a house or a town designed for a reasonable number of people, then multiply the inhabitants by a thousand. That is what we are doing both to human habitats and to nature itself. I wrote my novel in a fury, thinking of all those apes consumed as bush meat, all that rainforest pulverised for unsustainable farming, all those fat fools tooling around in boys’ toys. It made me feel better, briefly.
Now the prospects are even more bleak. The worst scenarios offered by sober scientists of good judgement are truly horrifying. But we must assume there is some prospect for putting things right.
We have a chance, a slim one, as I shall note in the final chapter, to do something about it all. Cities are the key. We have to get the cities right-make them work. We have ten years. A narrow future.
No one need go broke, either! As my friend Ron Oxburgh exclaims: ‘It’s a prodigious opportunity.’
The Hunches of Nostradamus
2008 Minority of world’s population now lives in countryside. Fifty-five per cent of city-dwellers don’t know where meat comes from.
2009 Tokyo grows to 47 million.
2010 Adelaide and Brisbane ban flushing urinals. Pee Police set up.
2011 No one earning less than $180,000 a year can now live in Sydney (unless running drugs).
2012 Chinese cities, like Singapore, establish ‘city museum’ to show what they once were like (anything old having been covered in concrete).
2013 New York grows more of its food in rooftop and allotment gardens than it imports.
2014 Bio-identichips allow only locals to be in prestige cities. Visitors must pay by the hour. Beijing, Birmingham and Brisbane remain free.
2015 Pets banned in China, unless eaten.
2016 Intelligent materials, computerised doors and windows installed in London office buildings. Staff die in Stock Exchange when locked in.
2017 London cuts energy expenditure by factor of ten (March). Barrier on Thames breaks and half of city disappears in flood.
2018 Baghdad, Jerusalem, Haifa, Damascus, Tehran, Islamabad and Manchester become holes in the ground. UN conference convened.
2019 Galveston, Texas, and West Palm Beach, Florida, blown away.
2020 Santa Cruz, California, becomes a no-waste city.
6. The Future of Sex – And Why We Do It
Physics is like sex. Sure it may give some practical results, but that’s not why we do it.
– Richard Feynman, Nobel laureate
I have taken a vow of celibacy-I got married.
– Cartoon caption in The Spectator, 6 January 2007
I am naturally monogamous-except when married. My impression is that most people are the same.
There is something distinctly anti-aphrodisiacal about the business of household duties: the spousal talk of bills, of broken drains, of electronics gone bung, of catshit on the lino, of mess. Children, too, are off-putting, all of them malevolent disciples of Saffy (the finger-wagging, snarly, termagant-daughter from Absolutely Fabulous); their disapproval, even disgust, at their parents’ clandestine antics must be the biggest sexual downer since bromide. How can any moderately sympathetic, loving, omniscient Creator have thought that sex could survive even a year or two of standard married humdrum, let alone a lifetime?
Something ought to be done!
The paradox is profound. Sex is now a commodified, ubiquitous aspect of life: every women’s mag offers advice on blow-job techniques or dogging sites; every newspaper has updates on genital flashing by no-knickers celebs; mainstream movies don’t even simulate sex any more, instead requiring actors actually to fuck. But private life can be a desert. The backdrop is a brothel, yet the bedroom at home is monastic. Not really a surprise when you appreciate the desperation of media facing extinction in a ruthlessly competitive, lucrative and changing market where anything goes. Websites offer your favourite film and pop stars (well, second-favourite) with close-ups of pink bits and every imaginable priapic contortion.
How are folk supposed to cope with this? When I first went to Israel many years ago, I saw a bus shelter that had been blown up by a bomb planted by the Orthodox Jews, who didn’t like the bikini advert that adorned it. It was madness-but I can understand how they felt. Everywhere you look, bodies are being thrust at you to sell gear. Sensitive types will-must-inevitably be affronted.
I am nearly always against censorship. It doesn’t work, least of all online. Yet you have to wonder at the sheer quantity of smut. The US alone spends $US10 billion a year on porn, more than Hollywood does on feature films; and the figure is expected to grow, according to Bill Asher, president of Vivid Entertainment Group, by 500 per cent every year as Internet videos improve. Why do so many citizens of a largely devout Christian nation, led by a born-again fundamentalist, need to watch so many strangers bonk? This is an industry, don’t ever forget, that rivals armaments in its global reach and impact. We are not talking about an occasional peccadillo, a rare sticky indulgence most of us might smile at. The World Is Awash.
What am I missing? I have never seen actual contemporary porn. I did, on your behalf just now, try to put key words or terms into Google; but I instantly got demands for credit card numbers (you’d be insane to comply) or infinite nonsensical reroutes. So I gave up.