Our appetite for destruction will starve us of a future

THE day before 9/11, a satellite photograph of the United States showed the country covered by a white grid. Straight lines going up. Straight lines going across.

Straight lines clustered thickly over cities such as Washington, New York and Atlanta. Straight lines more sparsely distributed over less populated states. Straight lines, thin and sharp. Straight lines swelling and going fuzzy. Jet-trails, every one of them, tracing the flight path of a passenger jet.

Two days later, the satellite view showed the continent clear and visible. No grid. No planes in the sky, creating jet trails. With one single solitary exception. A lone trail going up the east coast: Air Force One, taking President George W Bush to New York.

When planes were airborne again, the received wisdom was that it would take years to get back to the days before 9/11. It didn’t take years - 1.6 billion passengers will travel by air this year alone. That figure is set to double by 2010. Where I live, the growth’s visible. Because my home’s directly under the flight path to Britain, by breakfast time this morning, my sky was filled with jet-trails: the underside of that satellite photograph.

Very fetching, the display.

That’s the oddity about aircraft. They’re top of the industrial beauty parade, while incinerators are at the bottom. People say “Not In My Back Yard” (NIMBY) about incinerators because of bad stuff they might send out through their chimneys, notwithstanding the number of licences they have to get before they send anything at all out through their chimneys, and disregarding the fact that if they look crooked at a dioxin, the EPA can close them down quick as look at them. Nobody says “Not OVER My Back Yard” although what comes out of the exhaust pipe of a jet-plane obeys the law of gravity like everything else. Ergo it comes down in our back yards. Do we get upset about it? No.

Because we use and love planes, we buy into how the aviation industry describes its plans. Sustainable growth. That’s what they say they’re aiming at. Ask them to define “sustainable” and they tell you about tourism, about how everybody can afford to fly, these days, and how they’re working to reduce emissions.

Once upon a time, “sustainable” was the mantra of the Greens. Now, it’s been nicked and co-opted, not just by aviation, but by every industry. It’s comforting but imprecise. De-natured. Its essence has been dissipated, like chewing gum, post-mastication. Does your chewing gum lose its flavour on the bedpost overnight? Too right, it does. And your sustainability, likewise.

What’s happened ‘sustainability’ as a meaningful contribution to public debate is similar to what happened when Mark Twain’s wife, mortified by his swearing, began to use his swear-words back at him to show him how bad they sounded. It didn’t work. He said she had the words right, but didn’t know the tune.

We’ve lost the tune of the future. According to Professor Jared Diamond’s book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, a brilliant new study of the way societies disintegrate and become extinct, we’ve now put in place all of the key factors which destroyed many of those societies. The only difference between us and the people who died in places such as Easter Island is that we have state-of-the-art rationalisations for doing the same crazy things they did.

One of those rationalisations is the happy delusion that technology will rescue us. Technology is developing all the time and in no time at all, we believe, some scientist will come up with a way to sort everything out. Sure, weren’t there dire predictions back in the late 19th century that Cork and Dublin would soon be impassible, due to the horse droppings donated by the dominant mode of transport at the time?

The local authorities of the day counted the horses, worked out how many more of them were going to arrive on the streets, multiplied that by the volume of waste material each animal pooped, and forecast that traffic would get slower and slower, as it waded through knee-high manure.

DID that happen? Not quite. New technology came along, and guys such as Henry Ford pioneered ways of making that technology cost-effective. We can now buy cars that can go from zero to 90 kilometres in 60 seconds for the pleasure of sitting in them while they do three kilometres an hour.

The manure they generate is largely invisible and doesn’t smell quite as vividly as the horse-generated alternative. In fact, as you sit in your air-conditioned car, talking on your hands-free, listening to the radio or to a CD, you might even kid yourself that you’re making progress.

Prof Diamond says it was ever thus; people destroying their future with actions that make perfect sense at the time. Like chopping down trees to plant crops, thus ensuring that the topsoil blows away, there’s nothing to hold the crops and the local population has to flee the resultant dust storms. Or insisting on eating one particular foodstuff (think fish, at the moment) long after the signs of impending extinction are clear.

Several of the societies he studied eventually ended up eating each other, so that the killer line in any argument became “The flesh of your mother sticks between my teeth.”

Precious few societies seem to apprehend the truth hammered home in business courses: if you keep doing what you’ve always done, you’ll keep getting what you always got. Take roads, for example. They figure in both by-elections, but particularly in the one in Meath. The local Chamber of Commerce has found that many people from the county spend 120 working days a year in their cars. That’s more than someone living in Los Angeles spends in their car, but nearly as much as endured by commuters in Bangkok, where the latest must-have item (unlikely to be stocked in the new shopping Mecca in Dundrum) is a small portable chemical toilet, for use mid-journey. Whatever about men employing such a gadget unseen, it’s difficult to imagine women in business suits in the middle of gridlock doing so.

Back in Meath, the candidates lashing around the constituency - interestingly enough, on their feet - are understandably eager to prevent this trend taking hold in Trim, Navan or Kells, never mind Nobber.

So they are promising to join up unjoined roads, build new and bigger roads, bypass the bypasses. Nay-sayers have been drowned out by the hugely popular message that roads are the delivery-systems of sustainability.

We could, of course, change our individual and corporate behaviour, like those few societies in history which made radical changes in order to survive. We could kick life back into the ‘sustainability’ concept.

There’s two chances of that happening: slim and none. What we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history. Instead, we’ll opt for more roads, cars, planes, congestion and environmental destruction, excusing it all as “sustainable.”

If advanced societies in the past ended up eating each other, then, a few years hence, we may celebrate Mother’s Day in a quite new way.

With Mother as the main dish.