Caroline was convinced, she said, that what had happened on Easter Island was what was happening right now, what we were doing to ourselves. Our whole planet, she said, was Easter Island. Here we were, she said, doggedly persisting in the practice of our idolatrous consumerism, heedlessly continuing in the way of life we knew to be causing total ecological collapse, knowing full well the gravity of its consequences, persisting until the last tree was gone, until the soil could no longer support life.
“The way we build our gods,” she said, “is the way we build the apocalypse.”
She was, in her way, a kind of prepper, though she had nothing but contempt for the actual doomsday survivalists she frequently encountered in her involvement with the bushcraft scene. They were always men, she said, and they came along to classes, but they didn’t seem to want to learn. They were interested ultimately not in making things but in equipment. They were always talking about their kit, she said, about their stockpiled foods and their secure locations, about their plans and preparations for absolute self-sufficiency should the shit hit the fan. But the fact of the matter, she said, was that if civilization did collapse these men would be entirely useless to themselves, and worse than useless to everyone else. What they didn’t understand, she said, was that the thing that would allow people to survive was the same thing that had always allowed people to survive: community. It was only in learning to help people, she said, in becoming indispensable to one’s fellow human beings, that you would survive the collapse of civilization.
She knew what every plant was, every fungus, and took a quiet pleasure in informing you whether it was edible or whether it would kill you. She could probably survive alone in nature if she needed to, she said, and I believed her. But this didn’t mean, of course, that she would necessarily want to. She told me one evening about a little carved wooden box she kept locked away on her boat on the Thames, in which she stored thirty seeds she’d gathered from a yew tree. A handful of these, she said, would cause almost immediate heart failure and death. They were an insurance policy against the worst that might happen.
* * *
—
I’d had a weird experience at Heathrow Airport about a month before that trip to Alladale. My first book had been published earlier that year, and I’d been flying a lot in the period since, to book festivals and other events, and running beneath the white noise of my days was a low hum of guilt and shame about the damage my own individual life was doing to the world, the future. In accordance with my anxious custom I had arrived at the airport much too early, established myself at the conveyor belt of a Yo! Sushi. I drank a Japanese wheat ale, and then another. I racked up a tottering stack of color-coded dishes, consuming marine species in delicate arrangements, mackerel, salmon, crab, octopus, tuna. Everything was in season; everything presented itself for immediate acquisition from the moving platform that snaked around the bar, renewing its lavish stock as if by some fairy-tale mechanism of self-replenishing bounty. I was aware of the rapidity with which people were coming and going, racking up their own little stacks of dishes, before grabbing their briefcases, their flight bags, their backpacks, and hurrying for the gates. I had been sitting there for perhaps an hour, longer than the intended Yo! Sushi dining experience, when I became aware that my heart was racing, that I was experiencing a kind of abstract terror. I looked out over the heaving open-plan restaurant, with its ill-defined borders against other similarly heaving restaurants, a gastropub “experience,” a Heston Blumenthal–branded solution for on-the-go molecular gastronomy, a high-end meat-and-two-veg concern. In that delirium of commerce, the whole thing lay revealed to me in all its efficiency and excess, its bleak luminescence. I looked at the bright little plates of fish and rice and seaweed and meat as they sailed across my field of vision, cruising their way smoothly around the room to be plucked deftly now and then off the conveyor belt by mostly lone travelers, doughy and exhausted men in pinstripes, young couples in loose-fitting leisure attire, and I thought about the volume of animal and human flesh that was required to keep this system going, the raw tonnage of fuel needed to extract the fish from the sea and ship them to where they were processed, to get them to the gaping mouths of my fellow consumers. All these humans moving between all these places, all this ceaseless motion and consumption, all this hunger and money and flux: it was miraculous and terrible. And it simply couldn’t last, was the obvious thing, it simply could not be maintained. The sheer weight and velocity of the system, all of it precariously undergirded by God knew what shifting substructures of finance and power.
An airport is a place in which time and personal autonomy are suspended, in which the only freedom you possess is the freedom to make purchases. The aggressive automation of labor; the nightmare synthesis of fevered consumerism and authoritarian surveillance; the apocalyptic frisson of knowing that all this exists in service of, and is dependent upon, massive rates of carbon consumption. And always, too, the distant limbic hum of death, the screaming descent of the burning jet, as the situation’s presiding possibilities, the Chekhovian pistols unholstered at security and irrevocably introduced into the psychic theater of air travel. The oppressive space of the airport—the junkspace, to use Rem Koolhaas’s unimprovable term—is the architecture of the future itself.
I kept returning to the Heathrow sushi revelation, internally and in conversations with others, because I encountered it as a sort of wound. I encountered it, I mean, as both a realization of the wrongness of our way of life and a mournful intimation of its future passing.
I mentioned it to Andres one afternoon as we sat cross-legged in the grass, and he said it made him think of a graph he had once seen that illustrated the rate of increase of resource consumption throughout the twentieth century and into our time. In the years after the Second World War, he said, the line of consumption had begun to shoot skyward at a vertiginous rate, and looking at it, he experienced a kind of fearful swooning, as though he were gazing downward into an abyss. Looking at the near-vertical line on a page, he said, he felt that he had come into a direct encounter with the absurdity of our world, our way of life.
This was something I myself struggled with, I said, this sense of total absurdity. I felt disinclined to relinquish hope in the world, even incapable of doing so since becoming a parent, and yet the rational part of my brain, the graph-reading part of my brain, insisted that the future was intolerably dark.
There was a paradox at work, I said, in the uneasy depths of my life. The experience of becoming a parent had illuminated that encroaching darkness, made it appear closer to the margins of my own life, and yet in that time I had felt the unmistakable stirrings of hope for the future. I was aware of the possibility that this was a psychological defense mechanism, a denial of the unavoidably obvious, and yet it was no less potent for that awareness. I wondered, in fact, whether there was not some deep selfishness in operation here, some covert mechanism of human delusion, whereby the very fact of having brought a child into a world on the verge of darkness was what had forced me to have hope. And so maybe my own increased sense of optimism about the future had been acquired at the expense of my son, who would now, having been born, have to live in that future.