The sad forecast for the fate of nature and human society if things continue on as they have in the recent past. As we speed along on the express track of modern technological inventiveness, headed toward the promised brilliant future, we hear a roar and feel the pull as another train rushes by in the opposite direction. Look quickly, and we will see ourselves seated there, too, on the express called the Reality of Life, headed not into the sunrise but into the storm and the gathering darkness.

If we continue on that track, sooner or later we will find that it ends in global chaos—upheaval and breakdown on a vast scale. Before the fragmentation of the Soviet empire, in 1991, nuclear war was the prime threat of global chaos, one that few discussed and nearly everyone feared. But the Soviet empire is in shreds and the American empire, nominally intact, has been taken over by its creditors as the United States sinks into a bottomless pit of debt. Huge nuclear arsenals are too expensive to keep, and unless there is a slip—always possible—most of the nuclear bombs will be dismantled gingerly and somehow disposed of, possibly by burning some of the radioactive contents in nuclear power plants. A few bombs will be kept and others will be developed by smaller nations, including nations controlled by amoral dictators and religious fanatics. Thus the danger of "limited" nuclear war remains, albeit lessened somewhat. If it happens, and if it goes much beyond the exploding of two or three weapons, the changes that will occur in nature and human society do not bear thinking about, at least not by me.

A more likely cause of upheaval is the disintegration of the extremely complicated and finicky economic, industrial, social, and political structure that we have put together in the decades since the Second World War. This structure has been supported by resources, especially petroleum, that are waning, and by an environmental and cultural legacy—soil, vegetation, air, water, families, traditions—that we foolishly took for granted, squandered, and lost.

The visible agent of this change would be a global economic collapse. Such a collapse would probably disrupt international trade, trigger the disintegration of many multinational corporations and other overstuffed, subsidized superorganizations, end the modern welfare state, diminish governmental regulatory supervision (including environmental regulation), bring about massive famines and movements of populations, greatly increase unemployment in the industrialized nations, all but eliminate luxury goods and exceedingly complex manufactures, including many advanced military weapons, hasten the spread of new and old epidemic diseases, trigger the inevitable population crash, and cause a proliferation of regional economic, social, and political systems. Some of these things are already happening.

In America and similar societies, these changes will be particularly dramatic. I can only mention a few of the more noteworthy ones. There will be major unemployment or reduced employment not only of blue-collar workers but of managers, professionals, and people who work in the "service sector" (travel and real estate agents, operators of fitness centers, securities salepersons, and so forth). The employment problem will be aggravated by the contraction of the largest high-technology enterprises, especially those subsidized directly or indirectly by the government. These include NASA, military research, large universities, much of agribusiness, and the medical research establishment. Many of the people who will be affected, especially the managers, have no useful skills and will suffer greatly.

The Age of Global Control is coming to its inevitable end. It is like ; a massive flywheel, spinning too fast for its size and construction, coming apart in chunks as it spins. There goes a chunk—the sick and aged along with the huge apparatus of doctors, social workers, hospitals, nursing homes, drug companies, and manufacturers of sophisticated medical equipment, which service their clients at enormous cost but don't help them very much.

There go the college students along with the vice presidents, provosts, deans, and professors who have not prepared them for life in a changing world after formal schooling is over.

There go the high school and elementary school students, along with the parents, school administrators, and frustrated teachers who have turned the majority of schools into costly, stagnant, and violent babysitting services.

There go the lawyers and their hapless clients, in a dust cloud of the ten billion codes, rules, and regulations that were produced to organize and control an increasingly intricate, unorganizable, and uncontrollable society.

There go the economists with their worthless, pretentious predictions and systems, along with the unemployed, the impoverished, and the displaced who reaped the consequences of theories and schemes with faulty premises and indecent objectives.

There go the engineers, designers and technologists, along with the people stuck with the deadly buildings, roads, power plants, dams, and machinery that are the experts' monuments.

There go the advertising hucksters with their consumer goods, and there go the consumers, consumed by their consumption.

And there go the media pundits and pollsters, along with all those unfortunates who wasted precious time listening to them explain why the flywheel could never come apart, or tell how to patch it even while increasing its crazy rate of spin.

It is not hard to imagine some of the practical consequences of the breakdown, and I see little point in dwelling on them. But a few images stick in my mind. I see huge, unsellable, suburban houses with attached three-car garages, abandoned by their owners of record, scavenged for usable parts and contents, surrounded by wild ' lawns filled with dandelions, brambles, dying ornamental plants, and vigorous, deep-rooted, ungainly tree of heaven saplings. I see endless shelves and display cases of "collectibles," which—like exercise machines—were a way of burning up excess wealth, and which will have reassumed their rightful monetary value: nothing.

The most terrifying thing about this disintegration for a society that believes in prediction and control will be the randomness of its violent consequences. The chaotic violence will include not only desperate, ruthless struggles over the wealth that remains, but the last great rape of nature. What will make it worse is that, at least at the beginning, it will take place under a cloud of denial and cynical reassurances. We will be told that "War Is Peace, Freedom Is Slavery, Ignorance Is Strength," even after Big Brother is dead and his empire a shambles. The denial and reassurance have already begun—I don't know how many people are being fooled. Yet even some of those who aren't, who are not inextricably bound up in the system, who see the flywheel breaking up and are preparing to take cover, will be struck down by random chunks: knowledge of what is happening will help but will not be a guarantee of safety in the midst, of chaos.

In the undeveloped world, many of these processes of decline are well underway with brutal effect. In a growing number of countries public services such as transportation and medical care have all but stopped, and the cities, swollen by millions of refugees displaced from the rural areas by the technology and hidden agendas of export agriculture, are experiencing unprecedented populations, crime, and misery. That this will get much worse as the industrial world colllapses is evident, at least for the short run. Eventually, if nations and regions are left to work their problems out separately, in isolation, things will get better for some—there is no predicting which ones.

And what of nature in the undeveloped world? I believe that a global economic collapse will have two different and opposite effects on world floras and faunas. In countries such as India, Bangladesh, Mexico, and some of the more densely populated of the African nations, where natural resources, especially trees, are already seriously depleted, little of the native flora and fauna will survive. As export industries and cash crops fail, unprepared and disrupted local agricultural communities will have to feed themselves and large urban populations—an impossible burden on human resources and on eroded and poisoned soils. Anyone who flies over Mexico today will see what an obvious prediction this is. On the other hand, international economic collapse would also bring about the cessation of many disruptive processes. No longer would Japanese industry and companies like Weyerhauser and Georgia-Pacific be cutting the last remaining primary forests of Australia and the South Pacific nations at today's staggering rate. No longer would Volkswagen and Liquigas and the like be using defoliants or napalm or bulldozers to turn Amazonian rain forest into short-lived cattle ranches for the fast-food trade. No longer would there be a market for pet hyacinthine macaws and palm cockatoos, at five thousand dollars or more apiece. So although global economic breakdown would strain the ecosystems and species of some places past the breaking point, it would give ecosystems and species in other places a new lease on life. And in many areas these contradictory processes would be happening side by side.

We cannot begin again as if the twentieth century had not happened, as if it had caused no lasting damage to the physical world, to nature, or to human culture. Nor would we want to reject those true advances in the human condition that have come from our social and technical inventiveness. Any utopian vision that pretends that nothing irreversible happened in the years before the new millennium is a lie. Nevertheless, there is a second alternative to mitigate the unrelieved bleakness of the first. Even in the midst of upheaval and disintegration it is possible to change course. Eventually, perhaps quickly, a different way of living will be organized, a better system will form. Some of its possible outlines are coalescing and becoming visible even now. This second alternative already exists within and as a response to the Age of Control, it is growing, and it may yet come to a blessed dominance.

This second alternative is a transformation of the dream of progress from one of overweening hubris, love of quantity and consumption, waste, and the idiot's goal of perpetual growth to one of honesty, resilience, appreciation of beauty and scale, and stability—based in part on the inventive imitation of nature. We have already had examples of what this alternative can be like: the chinampas, or swamp gardens, that were the glory of pre-Columbian Mexican farming and which might again sustain the Mexican people; the city of Florence in the Renaissance and the city of Toronto before the building boom of the 1970s and 1980s; the hedgerows of post-Elizabethan England; old Jerusalem and the terraces of the Judean hills; and the ingenious multicrop gardens of tropical west Africa, to name a few. The changes that people inevitably work on the earth do/ not have to be destructive ones.

If this alternative way of living grows and prospers, I doubt that it will do so by some master plan or protocol. Instead, it will be advanced by countless people working separately and in small groups, sharing only a common dream of life. They will tend to be flexible, inventive, and pragmatic, and most will have practical skills—carpentry, the building of windmills and small bridges, the design and repair of engines and computers, the recognition and care of soils, the ability to teach. Nature will have entered their lives at an early age and will remain as a source of joy and as the measure of their best and worst efforts. They will welcome the challenge of the world that Orwell hoped for, a simpler, harder world in which machines, like their inventors, are understood to be limited. They will devote their first energies to the places where they live. They will come to authority not by violence but by their evident ability to replace a crumbling system with something better. And they will share an awe for a power nobler and larger than themselves, be it God, nature, or human history.

And then they must remember what happened before their time. The Jewish observance of the Passover, the exodus from Egypt, can serve as a model of the kind of remembrance that brings survival. At the heart of the Passover is a family ceremonial meal, the seder, a Hebrew word which means order. The seder, which may last five or six hours or more, is built around an orderly and largely prescribed retelling of the story of the exodus in song and narrative. Everyone who is old enough to speak participates. There are no absolute heroes or villains in the retelling: Moses is mentioned only twice; the death of the Egyptian host in the sea is observed with sadness, not glee, by the deliberate spilling of wine from a full cup. The original participants in that ancient drama are spoken of as "I" or "we," not "they"; everyone at the seder is meant to feel that he or she was there. Only in this way can the significance of great historical events be recreated with accuracy and relevance for each successive generation.

In similar fashion, the twentieth century must be remembered by those who follow, even by that majority that will want to forget. The leaders who eventually guide society back to a true heading will be the most fit to tell the story and establish the ritual of its remembrance. They should not dwell on heroes and villains but on the pleasures and sufferings of the age that was left behind, on the causes of its deadly impermanence, and on the choice—life—that inevitably determined what was kept and what was discarded by the founders of the new millennium.

from David Ehrenfeld, Beginning Again: People and Nature in the New Millennium
(New York: Oxford University press, 1993), pp. 189-194