Planning for the world's end

SCENARIO: After a civilisation-destroying catastrophe - a nuclear holocaust, perhaps - who would survive and how would they do it? PHOTO/FILE A-WTA171208SUPWES1

WHAT happens if (or when) everything falls apart? Back in the '70s I read a frightening book. The story took place in rural Florida immediately after the nuclear bombing of much of the East and North US, and followed the efforts of a family and friends to survive.

What was emphasised in this disturbing scenario was the endless hard work needed just to grow or find enough food to survive. Fortunately, they had an agriculture specialist with them, otherwise they would have starved. There were, of course, the usual riff-raff to fend off, especially in the beginning, but the main focus was producing food and finding useful materials (think plastics and machined metals). Imagine city people living in high rises foraging for food in deserted stores and homes.

Plenty of literature, both fact and fiction, has sprung up around this subject, but it does seem the most likely development would be a world of tribes, constantly at war with each other and surviving on the knife-edge of starvation.

There are groups of people in the US who call themselves survivalists. They expect something catastrophic to happen and feel they are ready for it. They have a loose organisation based on survival after the calamity they are convinced will come.

They plan on living deep in the wild in small two-three family units. Guns and other lethal hardware play a large part in their thinking, but they have at least three months of tinned and packaged food stashed away, guessing it will all be over by then. They pour scorn on those who are, by their standards, unprepared. However, our civilisation is precarious, intricately cross-linked, and the permanent severing of a single link of our support system severely jeopardises the whole structure.

How many people can build a tractor, from scratch?

There will almost certainly be survivors in the Third World. They can still grow things the old-fashioned way and survive on not much - but the future for the developed world would not look good.

Obviously, the degree of anarchy would be the most important survival factor early in this scenario.

Survivalists are assuming a large, but survivable, catastrophe should find a central government reorganised within three months. If there were no signs of any after that, they would assume they were on their own. After the three-month interval, only those forming bands, with a good mixture of skills, seem likely to survive, and one would think insecurely.

On balance, let's try to avoid the above predictions. Life under those circumstances seems pretty grim. And we haven't touched on military-type damage, radiation or disease.

Our next door neighbours in rural Florida were unreformed survivalists, boasting of their firearm collection and food cache, and implied they had survival plans for our small community. This included getting rid of useless mouths - my wife and I.

Happily, there were no disasters while we lived there.

Ian Sutherland is a retired pathologist who has lived and worked in many, predominantly warm countries and has always had an interest in conservation and environmental matters.