The Fall of Man

Part I chapter 6

Chapter 6

Many months have passed since the funeral. We don’t leave the house any more. We don’t have any reason to. We subsist on microwave meals and take-away dinners, all delivered to our front door in plastic crates by mute, nameless drivers with the supermarket logo emblazoned across their chests. Even the act of cooking food has been removed from the vocabulary of our routine. The constituent parts of many of these pre-prepared dishes are unrecognisable, free from specific plant or animal matter. Polystyrene boxes, plastic plates and cardboard packaging have piled up in the corner of the kitchen where the bin once stood. A sticky goop oozes from one carton to the next, cementing them together like irregular bricks in a rickety garden wall.

Neither one of us has ventured upstairs since we found her there. Our sleeping bags lie permanently unfurled across the brown leather sofa in the living room like a pair of giant discarded chrysalis. The passing of the sun has no impact on this room – with the curtains drawn, night follows day unnoticed. Summer is spent and winter approaches, but inside nothing changes. Everything about the house was designed to exclude the elements; it jostles tight against neighbouring houses which overshadow it in every direction, and the windows of the living and dining rooms look futilely northwards in search of sunlight. It is a man-made bubble to protect against the outside world – mechanically heated, cooled, lit, shaded, ventilated, moisturised and scented to maintain ‘comfortable’ conditions no matter what is happening outside. Or inside.

In lieu of a fireplace, the television crackles day and night. It has become our clock as well as our window on the outside world, and provides a sort of structure to each day. Cartoons herald in the morning, followed by distinctly less educational chat and talk shows. Our diet consists mostly of endless re-runs of the fifth, sixth and seventh series of the shows that refused to die; the ones that remained popular long after they ceased to provide any real entertainment. For an hour each afternoon, the adventures of the Incredible Hulk provide us with a short, but welcome, respite from the mundane. Every day, Noah watches mesmerised as mild mannered David Banner struggles and strains himself into a ferocious muscle suit so that the green giant’s uncontrollable rage can save another unfortunate family from extinction, while the net of misguided persecution draws ever tighter around him. In the evening, made-for-television movies rule the roost, interspersed with the particularly spectacular drudgery of reality TV, for which painted imbeciles touted as celebrities are put on display in claustrophobic goldfish-bowl arenas, in the hope that the occasional prod will incite uncivil unrest, sexual frustration and violence. All of this material is without chronology. With no beginning and no kind of end in sight, it could be recycled over and over again endlessly, and probably will be. Of all the modern innovations that have shaped our society during the twentieth century, television in all its guises - for better and for worse - must be one of the most fundamental.

We try to avoid the news channels, or any other information that testifies to the passing of time outside. Most of it is bad now anyway – almost all of the reports and articles we have accidentally caught relate in one way or another to escalating oil shortages and/or global warming. When I do run across a ‘current affairs’ show as I stray from channel to channel, the content predictably falls into one of three categories:

1.            A noteworthy politician sits earnestly facing his interviewer, hands clasped on knees and hair roguishly tousled – presumably from long, sleepless nights spent debating the issues over glasses of brandy with colleagues and advisors. He explains in language littered with forthright condescension how these are OUR problems, and why we need to act NOW, before going on to set out a programme of infinitesimally small changes to the status quo, to be eked out over a suitably protracted period. This strategy will both enable much posturing and bluster, and avoid aggravating the non-voting public, but any resulting impact seems likely to be little more than a droplet in the ever-expanding oceans.

2.            The camera pans slowly across a small army of protesters camped out under a sky filled with banners and brightly daubed bedsheets. Pendants painted with rhyme in vigorous brush strokes flutter and snap in the breeze. The assembled masses abandon their coolers to jostle earnestly around the reporter, brandishing home-made t-shirts and vying for their moment of limelight. They live a relatively rich and varied lifestyle; one day the cause celebré might be a green-field site selected for development. The next day it could be the right to smoke in public, followed by the imminent return of ground troops to Afghanistan. In the moment when the banner of Sustainability was stretched to embrace social inclusivity, healthy eating and the moral indignations of the nation, it ceased to carry any meaning whatsoever. Green became the new black at the start of the millennium, and all four wheels fell clattering off the eco-band-wagon, which was quickly traded in for a sturdy four-wheel-drive people carrier with better-than-average petrol consumption. A film crew hovers around the fringes of one such mob, gathered at the gates to a power station. Behind them, five gargantuan cooling towers simmer like giant cigars, stubbed unceremoniously into the surrounding countryside. Their monolithic vastness dominates the landscape for miles in every direction. The interviewer directs the flow of conversation towards the human angle – the hardship of nights spent outside under the glare of floodlights, the likely diet of a typical demonstrator, and the lack of bathroom facilities on tap. Transcripts read like the letters page of the Mail on Sunday.

3.            The red carpet is rolled out for another eco-blockbuster in every major city. A flurry of B-list celebrities twirl in their frocks and finery before the flashing cameras. They gather in support of a film that will raise awareness globally, and uncover dark new truths about the threats facing humanity (or so the tagline promises). At the doors to each premiere, candid interviews with the twinkling stars reveal how deep the river of concern runs through tinsel town, and how earnestly each celebrity is beholden to the cause. Inside, the film tells the story of a world gone bad, and a society whose fate can only be saved by some quick thinking, astounding acrobatic feats and mind-numbingly expensive CGI effects. In return for his exertions, the hero gets the lady, the kids get their village back and the natural balance is restored. Sponsored discretely by a rebranded affiliate of a petrochemical conglomerate.

Perhaps the biggest problem is that there is now so much eco-spin that it is almost impossible to see the proverbial wood from the trees. It has taken us such a long time to climb to this particular precipice that our current position – teetering on the brink of various self-made catastrophes – is now seen almost universally either entirely normal, and even acceptable, or simply inevitable. It will take a very different kind of shock to jolt us out of the role of concerned but complacent bystander.

One such shock is gathering like the charge that builds in the air before a thunderstorm. Beneath a sky streaked with swirls of green and purple, eighty million barrels of oil are consumed every day. Our reliance on fossil fuels is complete. There is only one way that the relentless escalation in demand for oil can play out… Petrocollapse is an event that the automobile industry has been running scared from for at least thirty years. It will change the face of the planet, sweeping away everything that we know and hold dear. Nothing will be the same again.