The Enclosure

Every organism seeks refuge from harsh environments. Our ancestors took shelter in caves where temperatures were stable, running water was naturally available, and the entrance could be patrolled. Today, a tiny minority of wealthy humans is retreating into a new type of cave: air-conditioned environments that are increasingly becoming a matter of life and death on an uninhabitable planet.

But how safe are these new caves? My recent stay at a luxury hotel ended up exposing the farce of industrial civilisation. Overloaded by the gazillion light switches on the wall for bed lamps, desk lamps, mood lighting, and five other types of lighting, the electricity supply ended up short-circuiting within a day of my stay. Meanwhile the AC went full-on Arctic, refusing to obey orders. As our life increasingly depends on AI-controlled life-support systems, what makes us think that we can live through the perfect storm of climate crisis and AI? A simple glitch in the system is all that is needed for us to die like plants in a greenhouse. No one will survive.

This civilisation is becoming an exercise in absurdity. It has become an onion of enclosures, each onion layer trying to achieve what the previous one failed to protect. But the onion is rotting from both the outside and inside. The ultimate enclosure is not the one we create, but the one we destroyed: Earth itself is an enclosure, it has always been one. Having permanently short-circuited its climate controls, what makes us think that we can reliably create new, safe enclosures for this failed species?

This is one of the themes I explore in my books, where I argue that one of civilisation's greatest illusions is that technology will save us, and even replace the planetary systems that made us possible in the first place.

My new book The Biology of Collapse is Out Now