THIS BOOK IS A CAN OPENER
“The world as we know it has ended. A particular virulent strain of avian flu finally breached the species barrier and hopped successfully to human hosts, or was deliberately released in an act of terrorism. The contagion spread devastatingly quickly in the modern age of high-density cities and intercontinental air travel, and killed a large proportion of the global population before any effective immunization or even quarantine orders could be implemented.”
This is the beginning of an English book written in 2014 by Lewis Dartnell, a UK Space Agency researcher. The title is “The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Civilization in the Aftermath of a Cataclysm.” Penguin Press, not some obscure garage publisher. If you live in Texas, I hope you have read this book, although it has no direct chapter on keeping warm.
More like “Popular Mechanics” than any high technology philosophy book, it is meant to be a way to survive that is practical rather than just apocalyptic and pessimistic. In fact, YouTube has many vids describing how to build a primitive shelter in the wilderness, recovering technology from centuries ago. The trouble is that most people would not be in the woods but in the cities, which might be reduced to rubble, so maybe there needs to be another book explaining how to use the debris of civilization.
Dartnell is on YouTube where you can find this useful advice about how to open a tin can if you have no can opener. Maybe it’s after an earthquake and you raid a grocery store.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSbb1orWFUk
A portion of the book about the “grace period” when there might be resources to forage from stockpiles for distribution functions, even gas in underground storage if you can figure out how to get it out and if roads remain intact enough to navigate. The people of the Middle East have learned how to do some of this. The people living on sidewalks in cities also use basic strategies and share ideas. Refugees are able to live in minimal camps.
My Scots grandfather was what they used to call a “mechanic” to distinguish the role from farming. though he was making his basic living from raising potatoes in Northern Manitoba. He lifted the family out of minimal prosperity into comfort by assembling Kovar field harrowers made in the US for sale in Canada, which was a time-limited strategy ended by tractors, herbicides and international tariffs. Even in old age he was trying to design the perfect shape and angle of a garden hoe.
One of the points in this book is that even without a cataclysm in the grandiose sense, there are always small shifts and maybe much larger climate-driven shifts, that would require the skills described here. More than that, the attitude. No sniveling. No hoarding. More thought than action but definitely action. And preparation.
As the world in all its inequalities goes rocking along, some modern technologies are making it possible to skip stages that history records. I was impressed by the use of emptied plastic bottles embedded in roofs to create a host of little skylights. Knowing ways to filter water. How to tie a knot. Basic Newtonian stuff like levers, screws, pulleys. Using magnetism to create electricity. Abacus skill. Fermenting, distilling, drying.
Most of the popular dystopian stories assume that people will survive individually, but quite possibly there will hundreds or thousands. The skills of leading a group, calming people, pooling labor, teaching reading will be invaluable. Robinson Crusoe may not be typical.
A fascinating anecdote is included about a man who decided to build a toaster from scratch, right down to finding the proper insulating sheets and wires. No photo is included, but the description says it’s a bit strange-looking but intriguing. It works. But the info some people may need more is how to build a fire that burns, like how to remember the principle that fire needs air, so build in gaps among your firewood, like pile the wood in a tipi or like a loose log cabin.
If we are reduced to cooking over open fires again, building a good fire and learning all the tricks to using it will be crucial. But so will all the tricks about making a little oven from mud, or how to cook over twists of straw, or how deep to dig a hole in order to bury something to bake under a fire — that’s where a new civilization begins again.
When we look at the modern understanding of history that is achieved by studying the subtle information of the rocks under our feet, the chemistry of our cells, the movements of the stars — all of it revealed by the design of highly technical instruments that expand our perceptions beyond anything ever imagined — what is most striking to many is that it has all happened in about ten thousand years after settling into agricuture. If all this has happened in ten thousand years, if our whole invented nation — so clever — has happened in a little over two hundred years, why do we think it will last forever, just as it is?
What holds it all together is not technological nor even specifically scientific — it is ideas and specifically the relationship between individuals, their communities and their environments. The internet did not save us from Covid-19. The internet made possible the scientific knowledge that developed the vaccines. A psychological/political idea disrupted that capacity for a year, so that half a million people died. Not that we couldn’t spare them — overpopulation is rampant around the planet — but that one depraved person could gather the power to kill so many.
If we face a catastrophe — and history shows us that they come along in various sizes and shapes at various intervals — and even if we weren’t the cause of it, the most needed “thing” will be ideas. No big Daddy in the Sky will save us. No holy book nor holy email will hold the secret to life. But thoughtful people taking care of each other can let us persist, in spite of our sometimes interfering mammalian heritage, while building on what that new sensitive instrument in the pre-frontal cortex lobe tells us.
This present wave of irrationality and childish stubbornness that has engulfed us is as destructive as a geographic calamity, but we can’t even understand where it came from and why, or where it’s going. I haven’t found comments about it from Dartnell, but here’s his comments on this book. He’s younger, better-looking, than I expected. He appears to be Turkish!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x4SGTdhYCr4
“The Knowledge” IS a can-opener of a book. His more recent book is “Origins” (2020) The vid below discusses both books in terms of the Pandemic. He’s on Twitter.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fI3sy3754Xs
