Millennium

by Ian Mortimer

  This is why the Earthrise picture strikes me as a profound reckoning point. It shows us our finite size, the shallowness of our pockets and the unrealistic nature of our dreams of freedom, universal well-being and equality of opportunity. Before 1968 we had been able to talk of going forth, increasing and multiplying without end. Gradually the awareness spread that this was very far from the case – that the limitations of the Earth allowed us to predict some things about our future with certainty. We will never have more than we have now. We will never see real economic growth return to the high levels it reached in the twentieth century. When we look to the future, we must have crisis planning in our minds, not heartfelt idealism. Utopian thinking is a thing of the past.

  Obviously I find all this extremely depressing. But I’d far rather see us head towards the Sustainable Future – even if we do not quite reach it – than allow ourselves to plummet towards the other extreme, the Universal Crisis, in which solar, hydro and wind power and biofuel do not make up a significant part of the necessary energy shortfall. In such circumstances, it won’t be an ordered hierarchy that gradually emerges; it will be a disordered one. The economies of marginal states will fail. Their political systems will quickly cease to function, and anarchy will break out. In the central core of the West, exports will decline. Imports of food will also diminish as trading nations’ economies collapse. Prices will go up, inflation will quickly take hold and people will stop spending on non-essentials. Businesses dependent on the sale of luxury goods will fold. There will be empty shelves in stores, followed by rationing. Law and order will start to break down. International trade between Western countries will dry up. The military will be ordered on to the streets. Those who have the means to defend their personal food supplies from looters will do so – they will have no option. What then will follow, as the economy shrinks further and the armed forces themselves dissolve into the community to protect their families, is both easy and horrific to imagine. Anyone who is in any way dependent on healthcare, commercially provided assistance, benefits, and so on will be hugely vulnerable. In marked contrast, those who have a private food supply and can guarantee to feed others will have great authority – as long as they can maintain control of it. Even in rural areas it will be difficult to recover a sustainable way of life. We have lost the farming methods we employed so successfully during the Agricultural Revolution in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, due to the de-skilling of the populace in general and the agricultural labour force in particular. There will be no surpluses to supply to the towns and cities. A crisis along these lines could easily see mortality rates as great as the 60 per cent or more experienced in some regions during the Black Death. The population might well revert to the level it was in the seventeenth century as it struggles to adapt to a world without cars, lorries, tractors, artificial fertilisers and motorised fishing vessels. The one thing that seems bound to survive is the ownership of property, just as it did after the Black Death and again through the crises of the seventeenth century. As a new stability emerges, with vastly fewer people, the survivors would be quick to take possession of all they could. They would start to rebuild society, retracing many of the steps highlighted in the second half of this book, probably ending up with the sort of oligarchy envisaged in the Sustainable Future. But in the immediate aftermath, those who survive will effectively be vassals like their medieval ancestors. Independent warlords will dominate a hugely dangerous neo-feudal system, their troops defending them and their fields and workers from the attacks of rivals.

  Given these two extremes, is there any way of predicting whether we will find our way to an approximation of the Sustainable Future, in which the world is riven with hierarchy and poverty but is essentially stable and relatively peaceful, or whether we will have to pass through the fiery furnace of the Universal Crisis? There are factors supporting each case. One of the prime reasons to fear the calamitous outcome is the complacency of society. People who know little about history and who cannot imagine a sudden and catastrophic downturn in their fortunes refuse to admit that they or their children will have to change their ideas of what constitutes a ‘normal’ way of life. They will continue to demand all the privileges of late-twentieth-century society – until it is too late.

  Total energy consumption in relation to total consumption of energy from renewable sources, 1965–2013 (millions of tonnes of oil equivalent)18

  The complacency is clearly illustrated by these four graphs. None of these countries is on course to meet even half its current total energy needs through renewable sources by 2050. Only one, Germany, currently finds more than 10 per cent of its energy requirements from renewable sources. While today’s papers and magazines often tell us that a child born now can expect to live a shorter life than his or her parents due to the current trend in obesity, the above graphs suggest that it won’t be long before the prognosis for a shorter life expectancy will be based on exactly the opposite reason: the inadequacy of the food supply.

  There are two reasons why I am confident that we will avoid calamity and end up clawing our way towards the Sustainable Future. First there is the amount of time that realistic, responsible and forward-thinking people have to plan for the end of fossil fuels. This includes the very wealthy, who have the most to lose from a cataclysmic implosion of an overstretched international economy. It also includes people like me, in the middle of the social pile, and those much less privileged. Let me be clear: in saying that greater inequality is inevitable, I am not suggesting that there is no point trying to limit it. Even if the great ship of liberal democracy and social welfare is slowly sinking, and its submergence beneath the waves of inequality and hardship seems inevitable, the last thing anyone should do is start drilling holes in the hull to make the end result come about sooner. We must do what we can to keep it afloat for as long as possible. With enough time, we might be able to lower our individual needs and expectations, so that communities move in a constructive fashion towards a more self-sufficient and sustainable way of life. We should be able to improve the outlook suggested by the above four graphs. For example, if the UK were to increase its production of energy from renewable sources by the equivalent of 2.5 million tonnes of oil annually – slightly less than the increase it achieved in 2012–13 – and at the same time reduce its primary energy consumption by just 1 per cent per year – a smaller reduction than it has achieved on average over the last ten years – then it could produce enough energy from renewable sources to meet its reduced total requirements by 2059.

  My second reason for optimism is that the human race is extraordinarily adaptable. We dealt with the Black Death with remarkably little social breakdown. We not only coped with the incessant wars and famines of the seventeenth century, we managed at the same time to produce some of the greatest art, architecture and literature the world has ever seen. In the great scheme of things, you’d be mad to bet against mankind coming out of the impending crisis stronger than ever before. If the correct agricultural and technical knowledge is reintroduced into society, and enough preparation takes place in terms of sustainable energy generation, planned crop planting, limited livestock production, and the reduction of unnecessary manufacturing, there is no reason why most Western countries should not support a sizeable population. With modern technologies such as hydroelectric and solar energy and the ability to make artificial fertilisers from biofuel, it is reasonable to suppose that a highly organised approach to food growing and distribution could sustain a large population without fossil fuels. But it could not provide all those people with our current standards of living. As Paul Ehrlich has pointed out in a recent address to the Royal Society:

  to support today’s population of seven billion sustainably (i.e. with business as usual, including current technologies and standards of living) would require half an additional planet; to do so if all citizens on Earth consumed resources at the US level would take four to five more Earths. Adding the projected 2.5 billion more peop
le by 2050 would make the human assault on civilisation’s life-support systems disproportionately worse, because almost everywhere people face systems with non-linear responses, in which environmental damage increases at a rate that becomes faster with each additional person.19

  It follows that the poor would have to be predominantly vegetarian, as peasants had to be in the thirteenth century, simply because land planted with staple cereal crops can yield more than ten times as much food as land used for livestock.20 Nor could the population be allowed to grow freely again. If mankind can adapt to a different diet, more physical working patterns, less travelling and smaller families, there is no reason why we should not find ourselves moving in the direction of the Sustainable Future.

  To end on a positive note, certain civilisation-curve benefits are likely to be with us for centuries to come. It is in the interests of both governments and individuals for everyone to be able to read. That in turn will ensure that much knowledge that is beneficial to mankind will not be lost; for example, we are unlikely ever again to be ignorant of basic medical matters, such as the circulation of blood or germ theory. People will continue to enjoy the benefits of contraception for the foreseeable future, in respect of safe sex as well as the avoidance of unwanted pregnancies. Low-energy technological devices such as phones and computers will keep us connected. It is likely that the state will continue to suppress private violence. Some negative changes might even be reversed. Throughout this book we have seen the universality of Braudel’s rule – ‘a dominant capitalist city always lies at the centre’. It is not hard to see how current patterns of distribution will change when fossil fuels are no longer available. Trading regions will alter massively, at the international level as well as the local. It will no longer be possible economically to fly asparagus from Peru to Moretonhampstead, for example. Thus local markets will recover their importance, as people won’t want to walk more than a few miles to buy their groceries. Communities will grow stronger. Individuals will have greater reason to strengthen their relationships with their neighbours. We will probably start to reverse the process of de-skilling. Overall, resource depletion should not counteract any of the positive changes in the first eight chapters of this book, and many of the technological ones since 1800 should continue to benefit us, albeit not equally.

  Whether you see the following as a positive sign or not is a matter of personal opinion. It seems to me highly likely that religion will become more prevalent in the West as the greater hierarchies take hold and the majority of people become comparatively poorer. As the Gallup survey of religion indicated, there is a strong relationship between religion and poverty across the world.

  The above should not be taken to mean that poverty causes religious observance – the relationship between money and religion is not that simple. It is much more likely that the opposite is true: that money results in a lack of spiritual devotion. Either way, I suspect that the consolations of faith and the communities that religions create will prove important again in the future. The world’s traditional religions have all catered for both lords and servants for many centuries, seemingly being tailored to the demands of a hierarchical society As we return to such a hierarchy, I fully expect the world’s faiths to come into their own.

  Per capita GDP % stating that religion is an important part of their daily lives

  < $2,000 95%

  $2,000–$5,000 92%

  $5,000–$12,500 82%

  $12,500–$25,000 70%

  >$25,000 47%

  Importance of religion according to wealth, according to the international survey conducted, by Gallup (2009)21

  In conclusion, the reason why it matters that the twentieth and nineteenth centuries saw the most change is because many of the advances experienced in those two centuries were dependent on an anomalous windfall of energy and will undoubtedly be reversed at some point in the future. It is thus highly likely that society will experience an even greater set of social changes in this century or the next than it did in the twentieth. It might take a hundred years or more, but we are going to see a return to the extreme hierarchies of the pre-industrial age. Over the next thousand years, we will witness the downward curve of the common standard of living in the West and the increased power of the very wealthy. We will return to a point that, in terms of social structure, will have more in common with the world of 1800 than that of 2000. The only question is whether we will get there painfully and suddenly, or gradually.

  Outside the sun is shining. As I sit here I can hear the bells of Moretonhampstead church ringing, as they have done for centuries. I can hear a motorbike, its throttle twisted hard as the rider comes out of a corner on the road from Exeter. My mind goes back to the priests who came here on foot a thousand years ago, and stood near the cross outside this house, preaching the Word of God that would eventually bind this small place into the vast network of the human race. Tomorrow the newspapers will be filled with the flotsam and jetsam of modern life – international crises, stock market reports, murder trials, sex scandals, and an aircraft lost without trace in the South China Sea. And at the end of it all, I find myself wondering what hasn’t changed over the last thousand years, and what won’t change over the next. At first those questions seem vast, and overwhelming. But then I think about them again. I picture a troubadour singing in the shadows of a hall fire. I imagine thousands of people walking beneath the overhanging eaves of narrow streets to see Shakespeare’s plays. I hear the shouts of drunken farm workers in the candlelit gloom of a seventeenth-century inn as Jan Steen studies their ruddy faces, preparing to paint them. The simplicity of the answer makes me smile. What doesn’t change is that we find so many things in life worthwhile – love, beauty, children, the comfort of friends, telling jokes, the joy of eating and drinking together, storytelling, wit, laughter, music, the sound of the sea, the warmth of the sun, looking at the Moon and stars, singing and dancing ...

  What won’t change? Everything that allows us to lose ourselves in the moment.

  Everything that is worth dreaming about.

  Everything that is without price.

  APPENDIX

  Population estimates

  European population figures for the early centuries before 1500 are very difficult to estimate with any accuracy. Paolo Malanima conveniently quotes several demographers’ estimates for the year 1000 in his paper on medieval growth.1 B. T. Urlanis (in 1941) estimated that Europe had 56.4 million people; J.-N. Biraben (1969) 43 million; J. C. Russell (1973) 38.5 million, C. McEvedy and R. Jones (1978) 36 million; H. Le Bras (1993) 43 million; A. Maddison (2007) 39.2 million; and Malanima himself (2009) 47 million. Leaving aside the highest and lowest of these, the mean of the remainder is 42.1 million. With regard to the population in 1500, the same demographers have the following figures: 100.4 million (Urlanis); 84 million (Biraben); 81.8 million (Russell); 81 million (McEvedy and Jones); 84 million (Le Bras); 87.7 million (Maddison) and 84.8 million (Malanima). Again, leaving off the highest and lowest, the mean of the remainder is 84.5 million. There is a close consensus on this figure for 1500. Only Urlanis, the earliest of these demographers, differs from the range 84 million +/− 3.7 million. The figure of 84 million also appeals to Massimo Livi Bacci, who newly calculated his figure from national datasets.2

  Given the wildly varying range of figures for the period before 1500, I have revisited national estimates for the three most fully documented countries to develop a core on which to build my own estimates. Fortunately, these three countries are reasonably representative of Europe, one being northern European (England), one central (France) and one Mediterranean (Italy).

  ENGLAND

  The figures in Tables 1.1 and 1.2 for the period 1086–1541 are based on the annual growth statistics established from manorial data by Stephen Broadberry, Bruce M. S. Campbell and Bas van Leeuwen of the University of Warwick in their paper ‘English Medieval Population: reconciling time series and cross-sectional evidence’ (2010).3 These suggest a
decline of the population in 1348–51 of 46 per cent. The studies assessed by Ole Benedictow suggest a national mortality figure for England of about 62.5 per cent for these years.4 In trying to reconcile these different figures, we have to note that Benedictow’s figure for the fall in taxpayers was slightly less, 50–55 per cent, and this class is nearer the population reflected in the sources that the Warwick group used. That still leaves something of a discrepancy, albeit of only 4–9 per cent. If we do apply Benedictow’s 55 per cent depopulation figure for England, then this suggests the population was around 5.8 million in 1300, 4.0 million in 1200 and 2.2 million in 1100 (using back projection), which further indicates a population of 2.0 million at Domesday, which is not impossible. However, the Warwick group’s figures have an integrity that cannot be replicated by taking a death rate from one sample and laying it across another. For instance, Benedictow’s high-mortality samples might have seen greater growth than the Warwick group’s sample before 1348. In addition, the Warwick group analysed the agrarian output of England at an estimated peak of 4.81 million (in 1348) and reckoned that it would have been difficult to feed that number, let alone a million more. At no time before 1700 had England sustained a population of more than 5.4 million. The probability is that the truth lies between the two extremes – that is, between the Warwick group model and 5.4 million – and I have chosen to use the Warwick group’s figures at face value in order not to exaggerate the population of England in 1300, and thus that of Europe as a whole at that time.