This weekend I channel surfed past a TV show about the bizarre evolution that they’ve had in New Zealand over the last 35 million years. It’s interesting stuff that makes for good ‘child safe’ TV viewing. A parrot that lives in the snows atop a mountain; a penguin that raises it’s young in the forest; a bat that burrows in the ground like a mouse. This is the kind of odd footage that makes nature photographers really feel like they’ve earned their pay. But the first thing I thought of was that these animals are - every single one of them – at an evolutionary dead end.
The problem, according to this show anyway, is that New Zealand is very remote. It’s over 1,500 miles to the next nearest land mass, which is much too far for any predatory mammal to swim. So these odd little creatures have gone their own way for 35 million years in an environment where there wasn’t anything to be afraid of. As a result they’ve become the fat, slow, lazy, biologically self indulgent offspring of creatures that were their vast superiors in a general survival sense. Their happy island was a paradise for them with a moderate and diverse climate, lots of food, and a complete absence of large predators of any kind. That is… until man showed up.
The Maori are the main aboriginal ethnic group of New Zealand, and they arrived there somewhere prior to 1500. I personally found it telling that the very first thing they did when they landed on the beach was to hunt one of the more defenseless local birds to extinction. The New Zealand Moa was a huge flightless bird which apart from being relatively slow and easy to catch was also apparently pretty tasty. In fact, they were so perfectly evolved as a human food source that the only way nature could have improved upon them, would have been to instill in them an admittedly unlikely desire to build their nests directly in Maori cooking pots. A few birds managed to hang on precipitously until the 1700’s but according to the Discovery Channel, they met their final natural end in 1773.
This is the point where your typical lefty would get all amped up about the evils of man and how nature should be allowed to progress on it’s own without human ‘interference’. Nonsense. I mean… a few thousand Maori tribesmen with stone tools and grass skirts are hardly the same thing as releasing dioxin into the primary water supply. What exactly about their arrival and interaction with the local fauna was ‘unnatural’? The fact of the matter is, man is the planet’s most successful predator for a very good reason. And sure as the sunrise, he was bound to find his way to wherever the prey is so fat, slow, and delicious.
In other words, the real problem here was not that the Maori were so effective at catching and eating the Moa but that the Moa was so inept at avoiding capture. It took a total of 35 million years for nature to hobble them so thoroughly and for the consequences of that hobbling to become apparent. And now that more diverse predators are finding their way to New Zealand by hitchhiking on human civilization, the rest of New Zealand’s over-evolved species are probably on borrowed time as well.
So what’s the broader point?
Well there a bunch of places my mind runs to with data like this. The first and foremost is that America’s education system has become a lot like the evolutionary environment of New Zealand. Free from the pressures of coping with the real life consequences of their thinking, they have wandered off far too much into the realm of the theoretical.
Deconstructionist thinking (if you'll forgive the misuse of the term "thinking") is the intellectual equivalent of the cooking pot nesting Moa. It’s the kind of thing that leads to your personal and immediate extinction in the exact proportion to your degree of commitment to the idea. And that bill comes due at the very moment you’re forced to deal with an environment that has even the lamest predators in it. But I’m loath to point to someone else and call them over-evolved when my own position seems so terribly tenuous. I was really thinking more of myself.
We here in the west are utterly dependent upon the things that a college professor would refer to as ‘modern conveniences’; and not just because they’re so convenient. The fact is, many of them are absolutely essential to keeping the machine of the modern world running. Without modern water treatment, modern refrigeration, all the trappings of modern farming, and the high technology of modern medicine, a great many of us would never see another spring. And while guys like me prefer to believe that it would be the
hitchhiker’s guide - ‘third space ship’ types that won’t make the cut, the truth is, they probably won’t be the only ones.
One of the things I’ve gotten a kick out of reminding people when this subject comes up is that 6 months after the lights go out in New York City, every whitetail deer in North America will be dead. The whitetail is no Moa. It’s fast, quiet and very nervous – all good skills to have if you’re a large herbivore. But the problem for the whitetail is that the carrying capacity of North America (Canada included) at a ‘hunter gatherer’ lifestyle level is roughly 10 million people. Even if you were to upgrade the survivors to a subsistence farming lifestyle the total carrying capacity is only something like 105 million people.
That means that if the lights were to go out there will be something north of 245 million starving people duking it out over every last piece of suburban road kill. A year after that, most of North America’s forests will be stripped bare either to provide fuel or to clear land for cultivation. In the meantime, even the slowest of the omnivorous humans will be stripping the environment of every spare calorie that isn’t already being heavily guarded, including most of the things that our bloated deer population has been eating for years. Today the whitetail is a good survivor, but against enormous environmental pressure like that the nervous and elusive Deer looks a lot like the ‘cooking pot nesting Moa’.
The other thing this should highlight is that after civilization’s collapse, all the hunting, camping, and survival skills you’ve been studying up on won’t really mean all that much. In fact, even if you’re one of those people who have been stockpiling Soviet rifles and cold war era ammo to pass out among the faithful after the collapse, it still probably won’t matter. Because the things you’ll really need to survive in a post apocalyptic world aren’t things you can learn in the US Army Field manual. They aren’t things that you can do on your own at all. They are more a question of logistics.
The thing you’ll need first and foremost is help... lots and lots of help. The best kind of help is the kind whose loyalty can be relied upon, specifically – family. A big family helps plant, harvest, kill and clean, but also gives you more points of interaction with others. Not only will it give you more people to sit watch at the fence, but it will give you more chance to specialize while doing other tasks. But we modern suburban dwellers have very small families and city dwellers, often no families at all. That means a big ecological disadvantage in that setting.
Beyond family a congregation or parish would be the next best organizational group, but we in the modern west don’t think so much of church-going either. That will no doubt change soon after the first gay minority English professor is killed in a fight over a curbside possum carcass. But the churches might not be so amenable to new members by then. The fact is, most groups will probably see new folks coming a long way off, and not just because there will be so many of them. If you don’t offer to your new group far more than what you’ll cost them, then my guess is that the ‘inn will be closed’ to you too.
Anyway, my point isn’t to get you all depressed. The truth is, this almost certainly won’t happen. It’s just that I’m reminded once again that the values and priorities of liberals are all a product of ease and excess. Take away that ease and excess, make survival an imperative, and they instantly become big liabilities. What’s more, even something we think of as being basically conservative – that uniquely American ideal of the “independent spirit” is in itself probably also quite liberal. Or at the very least it’s framed in light of having spent our whole lives in a world where survival was so easy and free from predation that even a modern liberal could manage it.
You may think of yourself as the great independent outdoorsman, and it may even be true. But that ‘all by yourself’ existence won’t be nearly enough if things fall apart.
Bearclaw Chris Lapp may have helped Jeremiah Johnson survive , but he was also a crazy old coot. He was fine when Robert Redford wandered onto his mountaintop, but replace him with 2,000 starving liberals from Denver, and he wouldn’t have stood stand a chance. In fact, his Grizzly Bear and Mule wouldn’t have had an easy time of it either.
If you really want to be prepared for anything, you’d be better off thinking of the Amish or the Mennonites. Since they already operate without the use of most modern conveniences, and are already set up for mutual support and cooperation, they have almost all of the survival skills they’ll need post collapse. Almost.
What skills are they missing? Well they may not be quite as far gone as the ‘cooking pot nesting - tenured English Literature Professor”, but their world is still premised on comfort and excess too. Don’t think so? Let’s see how they do when 2 million starving phone sanitizers, interior designers, and wanna be gang bangers from Philadelphia show up in the heretofore pastoral Lancaster county countryside.
