I got completely sucked in to Cormac McCarthy’s The Road in a way I haven’t with a novel in years. I spend a lot of time reading about how screwed up the planet is—and will be in decades to come—with temperatures rising, water tables falling, oil getting harder and harder to squeeze from rock.
So it was fascinating to throw myself into this world which is about the worst-case scenario you can imagine, where all complex civilization has fallen apart, everything is burnt and grey, no plants grow, clean water is hard to find, and people are constantly on the move—both so they can keep scavenging canned food and stay alive as long as they can, and to keep from becoming targets for roming gangs of armed bandits.
The book never explains what happened to cause this. Maybe it’s a nuclear winter after countries started lobbing warheads at each other. Maybe global warming got completely out of control.
In a sense, it doesn’t matter. The point of the book is about holding onto our humanity in the midst of wreckage. That might sound trite, but what gives the story heft is the detailed rendering of what this kind of life would be like. As the screenwriter of the new movie of the book told New Scientist: “I loved the boldness of McCarthy’s supposition that when the end comes it’s going to be an excruciating conflation of high horror and banality. On the one hand the world will lapse into cannibalism, rape and civil war, on the other there’ll be the numbing repetition of having to find food every day and worrying about replacing your shoes.”
But still, something motivated McCarthy to imagine this apocalyptic world, and I wondered if he thought our world could fall apart because of the kinds of things I spend a lot of time reading and thinking and writing about—global warming, unsustainable food production, population overshoot, and more. Well, it sounds like it was all of those things.
As the screenwriter told New Scientist:
McCarthy told me it was some kind of environmental meltdown. He has an office at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico, he loves hanging out there and a lot of his friends are environmental scientists, molecular biologists and physicists, so he’s coming at it from a very scientific point of view. It’s about what would happen if environmental meltdown continued to its logical conclusion: crops and animals would die, the weather would go out of control, there would be spontaneous wildfires and blizzards, you wouldn’t be able to grow anything and the only thing left to eat would be tinned food and each other. But I was anxious not to quiz him too much about what happened because we wanted to preserve the mystique of it.
The book definitely has more power when you don’t really know what caused the apocalypse. If he’d said it flat out, then you could start thinking of ways to avoid it, or reasons why this wouldn’t really happen.
But really, we have had the power to really screw up the world in a variety of ways. The Road made me think that we can’t shy away from this worst-case scenario, and have to keep it always in mind when deciding what kind of world we want to live in, and what kind of world we want for our kids.
Related posts:
- Road to Serfdom: “right-wing crank” becomes best-seller John Cassidy's "How Markets Fail" explains how and why Hayek and his fellow free market advocates were cranks...
- 5 last-ditch schemes to avert warming disaster Radical, globe-spanning schemes—including giant space mirrors and high-tech "trees"—may someday be needed to prevent a global warming disaster...
- “If we don’t take joint action, the consequences for the planet may be very distressing [and] will have catastrophic consequences.” —Russian president Dmitry Medvedev on climate change...
