finished reading Trouble with Lichen

[miriam_e]

I love this bit where Diana is talking to Zephanie. Diana becomes a thinly veiled voice for the author, John Wyndham, his fears made plain here.

‘...You know as well as I do that the world is in a mess, and floundering deeper every day. We have only a precarious hold on the forces we do liberate – and problems that we ought to be trying to solve, we neglect. Look at us – thousands more of us every day…. In a century or so, we shall be in the Age of Famines. We shall manage to postpone the worst one way and another, but postponement isn’t solution, and when the breakdown comes there’ll be something so ghastly that the hydrogen-bomb will seem humane by comparison.

‘I’m not romancing. I’m talking about the inevitable time when, unless we do something to stop it, men will be hunting men through the ruins, for food. We’re letting it drift towards that, with an evil irresponsibility, because with our ordinary short lives we shan’t be here to see it. Does our generation care about the misery it is bequeathing? Not it. “That’s their worry,” we say. “Damn our children’s children; we’re all right.”

‘And there’s only one thing I can see that will stop it happening. That is that some of us, at least, should be going to live long enough to be afraid of it for ourselves. And also that we should live long enough to know more. We simply cannot afford to go on any longer attaining wisdom only half a step before we achieve senility. We need the time to acquire wisdom that we can use to clear up the mess. If we don’t get it, then like any other animal that overbreeds we shall starve; we shall starve in our millions, in the blackest of all dark ages.

‘That’s why we need longer life, before it is too late. To give us time to acquire the wisdom to control our destiny; to get us beyond this state of acting like animal prodigies, and let us civilize ourselves.’

I so wish John Wyndham had lived to the present day. We still have the same stupid politics (if anything, made even worse by the unashamed auctioning off of governments to big money interests), however there have arisen some truly marvellous things, giving us great hope for the future.

• The internet has made the world smaller and more tightly interwoven forming common bonds across borders and giving us social media -- the fertile soil in which many powerful people-powered movements for true democracy are growing.
• Alternative energy has taken off to a degree we hardly dared hope for only a short time ago, with people now preferring low energy devices over those that squander it, and windfarms and solar energy outstripping investment in dirty energy.
• But best of all, a previously unsuspected statistic has shown us that altruism can defuse the population bomb. It turns out that that the only reliable way to reduce population growth is to enhance the lifestyles of the least fortunate; helping them can save us all. When people reach a comfortable standard of living births fall to below replacement levels.

How John Wyndham would have loved to have known this!