By: David Dudley

Notes on the new culture of the end

On the last day of my Apocalypse Weekend—a 72-hour immersion (it was a holiday weekend) in recent end-of-the-world books and movies—I emerged from the bunker of my home to take my daughter to the playground. It was a staggeringly beautiful late-spring afternoon, and at the swings a neighbor and I fell into conversation with a chatty boy of perhaps 8.

“You know what happens when the bombs go off?” he asked suddenly. “When the bombs go off the city blows up and then we all have to go live in the wilderness.”

I asked where he’d heard this crazy notion, which also happened to be the plot summary of several books I’d been reading. It was hard to tell; the boy seemed to understand it as a foregone conclusion. The encounter was made more uncanny by other, deeper weirdnesses. (The kid was wearing a Peter Pan costume, for one.) But I shook off the coincidence. Why shouldn’t a child wonder about the end of the world? The scenario he sketched is as familiar as a fairy tale. Generations have grown up in the shadow of the Bomb; we all know how this story ends.

If you are in the end-of-the-world business, these are good times. Name your portent: The disaster-movie destruction of the World Trade Center, wars in the Middle East, the flooding of a major American city, and a chorus of environmental doomsaying. In June, the New York Times reported that cars were starting to litter the roadsides in Mississippi, abandoned because their drivers were too poor to buy gas. The world is starting to look more plausibly apocalyptic all the time.

Apocalypse culture tends to oscillate between tragedy and farce; earnest alarmism (The Day After) giving way to hammy fantasias (The Day After Tomorrow). Like the films and movies produced in the wake of the early 1970s oil embargo, the new visions of the end are fueled not by atomic nightmares but by environmental anxiety: the specter of climate freakout, civilization-ending resource depletion, and perhaps a growing unease with urbanization itself. A more-crowded world dreams—with awe, terror, and longing—of the emptying of cities.

“Things will be better when everyone’s gone,” says an old man wandering the wastes in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2006. The book’s literary cred doesn’t disguise its sturdy genre roots: The lean plot is Mad Max with shopping carts, the same shaggy lone-survivor odyssey of many a lesser pulp artifact. A father and his young son walk an empty road, trekking south years after some nameless cataclysm has blackened the world. The pair shares this world with a few other scavengers—ghastly loners scrabbling for the planet’s last cans of food, or cannibalistic bands trundling along in wheezing trucks.

Tellingly, the only way the residents of The Road can articulate their plight is by referencing other cultural artifacts. “We’re not survivors,” the man’s wife says in a flashback, before she wanders off to die alone. “We’re the walking dead in a horror film.” (The inevitable Road movie, due this fall, is being shot in the post-industrial wastes of Pittsburgh—site also of Night of the Living Dead.)

It’s perhaps the bleakest imaginable bestseller: The exchanges between father and child are almost unendurably sad, and their journey is a pitiless exercise in human suffering. McCarthy isn’t too concerned about the whys and what-ifs of this world; the ecological scenario he presents doesn’t make much more sense than an early Cold War chestnut like On the Beach, in which fallout from a global nuclear exchange somehow defies meteorology and spares Australia for months. Like many fellow new apocalyptics, McCarthy is more entranced by the philosophical and aesthetic possibilities offered by the unraveling of civilization—“the ponderous counterspectacle of things ceasing to be.”

Journalist Alan Weisman struck paydirt last year by conjuring that spectacle in World Without Us, a book-length expansion of a 2005 Discover magazine story called “Earth Without People.” The conceit for his “thought experiment,” due in paperback next month, was to remove causality. “Any conjecture gets muddled by our obstinate reluctance to accept that the worst might actually occur,” he observes in the preface. “We may be undermined by our survival instincts, honed over eons to help us deny, defy, or ignore catastrophic portents lest they paralyze us with fright.”

So: Humanity has vanished. What happens to our stuff? The answer proved interesting enough to inspire a pair of recent cable documentaries, Life After People (History Channel) and Aftermath: Population Zero (National Geographic Channel), full of mesmerizing CGI renderings of skyscrapers devoured by vegetation. As Weisman explains, time and organic processes will eventually reduce the age of man to a vein of rust-colored minerals. In the interim, however, the planet will have to deal with all manner of irritants: toxic clouds from unattended refineries and reactors, a carbon-laden atmosphere, and vast indigestible heaps of plastic. He describes the erasure of New York City in great detail. Flooded subway tunnels will carve rivers through the canyons of Manhattan while an ailanthus forest sunders the sidewalk. The Statue of Liberty, icon of so many disaster flicks, will oxidize beneath the rising sea: “In the end, Liberty’s sea green patina will thicken until she turns to stone, but the sculptor’s aesthetic intention will still be preserved for the fish to ponder.”

Images of the empty metropolis reconquered by nature—“a world relieved of our burden,” as Weisman says—are obligatory stops on the Armageddon highway: The last-man-on-Earth blockbuster I Am Legend drew its greatest power from its visions of a weedy Manhattan overrun by deer. James Howard Kunstler’s new novel World Made By Hand (blurbed by Weisman on the cover) takes the post-apocalypse pastoral to another level entirely. Kunstler is best known for The Geography of Nowhere, his 1993 attack on the excesses of suburbia, but he’s also written several novels; this one is a fictional companion to 2005’s The Long Emergency, which foretold social upheaval caused by a global gas crisis. Kunstler is a devotee of the “peak oil” theory, which holds that the impending decline in oil production will topple governments and return the industrialized world to something like the mid-19th century.

This, Kunstler can’t help but observe, will be kind of great. In World Made By Hand, the United States has been isolated and unplugged after some ill-considered foreign policy moves. Washington and Los Angeles have been nuked, and the “Mexican Flu” has culled the population, but some hardy agrarian survivors carry on in the upstate New York town of Union Grove, a stand-in for the author’s present hometown of Saratoga Springs.

Kunstler seems to see post-peak-oil societal collapse as an opportunity for enforced application of New Urbanist planning principles. In Union Grove, suburbs have been abandoned, and the remaining community is an eminently walkable burg of sturdy Arts & Crafts bungalows with yards full of vegetable gardens. The men labor in the organic fields, hold hootenannies, go fishing (giant sturgeon have returned to the Hudson River), and exact frontier justice on threatening mobs downstream in Albany; the women cook, take in laundry, and offer sexual comfort to the menfolk. Much attention is paid to the mechanics of off-the-grid life: The town dentist brews his own laudanum from poppies; one enterprising landowner rigs up a hydropower generator and figures out how to make hot dogs. Kunstler is particularly taken with the foodways of the post-oil future: plenty of eggs, butter, and cream, plus artisanal beer and home-grown marijuana. “Everything was local now,” says the narrator, Robert Earle.

For a former software exec, Earle takes a little too much Kunstlerian glee at the defeat of modernity’s awfulness. A recent reviewer in Slate, Rebecca Onion, called the book “hatefully regressive,” not only for its depiction of gender and class roles (the peaceful pot-smoking townsfolk lock horns with a more feral tribe of NASCAR-loving trailer dwellers) but also for its air of wish fulfillment. “You could argue that people are generally better off mentally than we were back then,” Earle lectures a younger Union Grover who still mourns the Internet and the mall. “We follow the natural cycles. We eat real food instead of processed crap full of chemicals.”

In Geography of Nowhere, Kunstler’s jeremiad against the oppressive cruddyness of the postwar landscape, that rage at industrialized America’s misplaced ideals had the force of revelation: He wrote as if he were the only man alive who had divined the truth, and after reading it, you couldn’t help but share his horror at roadside clutter you’d previously been content to ignore. Peak oil, it seems, has now offered Kunstler the means to destroy all those big-box stores and SUVs, and little wonder that he takes some unseemly pleasure in speeding that end.

Much has been said about the religious fervor of peak oil proponents, and World Made By Hand’s righteousness does beg parallels with its counterpart in Christian eschatology, the Left Behind series of Rapture potboilers. But peak oilers have physics on their side, and their queasy conviction—the I-told-you-so quality—is part of what has always made such speculation, secular and otherwise, so compelling. After all, even an eco-apocalypse is a story of judgment—the sinners suffer; the faithful are tested. And in the end, both are cast out of the ruined cities to wander in the wilderness.

—David Dudley is Urbanite’s editor-in-chief.


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