Leading The Wireless’ project on New Zealand in 2030, I feel like I’ve been living in the future for the past four weeks. But Dr John Robinson has spent 40 years with an eye on the coming decades, and he’s telling anyone who will listen: it’s not a pretty sight.
But few people do listen. The retired scientist says he’s been shut out of the scientific community because his views of the future are so unpalatable, even though they’re backed up by research. The late Sir Paul Callaghan wouldn’t answer his emails, he says; now, neither will Callaghan’s protégé, Professor Shaun Hendy. Even students’ associations – usually more tolerant than most organisations of alternative viewpoints – won’t give him a platform.
Because Dr Robinson believes that not only are we bound for a global crisis that will prompt a social breakdown on a scale not seen since the Black Death gripped Europe, but that it’s too late to change course.
My flatmate Lewis had given me a copy of Dr Robinson’s self-published book NZ 2030: The World’s Lifeboat when I told him about the project on the future I was working on. A small but dense title, NZ 2030 outlines a “perfect storm” brought about by “today’s selfish capitalism with its mania for impossible infinite growth”.
Dr Robinson had given it to him a couple of years ago when he came into the office of the student magazine Salient. He told Lewis that no one would give him the time of day, let alone a platform; as Salient co-editor at the time, I myself had probably been one of the people to nod and smile before politely excusing myself to roll my eyes behind his back.
Because whether or not Dr Robinson is right about the end of the world (he doesn’t seem to ever use that phrase, perhaps cautious of being dismissed as a doomsayer), it’s a tough argument to swallow. To do so is to accept not only blame but defeat, because a central tenet of his belief is that we’re well past the point where anything can be done. Given the choice of being aware of the coming apocalypse (another word he avoids) but powerless to prevent it, I’ll take blissful ignorance – and it seems most of society agrees with me.
Dr Robinson doesn’t think very much of this attitude. He didn’t think very much of The Wireless’ collaboration with Sunday Morning, either, he tells me minutes after I arrive at his Island Bay home. “They’re showing no awareness of those trends.” (I don’t know if he’s seen the rest of the 2030 coverage on The Wireless this week, but he does have internet access at home.)
Sitting in his living room, looking out at the choppy seas on the horizon through the floor-to-ceiling window and listening to him talk about the collapse of civilisation as we know it, I feel as I did when I read NZ 2030: conflicted. On the one hand, his credentials are impressive – he studied at MIT in Massachusetts; he holds Master of Science degrees in mathematics and physics – and some of his arguments, compelling. But others are not (as Lewis warned me when I told him I was interviewing Dr Robinson: “Just don’t ask him about the Treaty of Waitangi” (but he didn’t tell me to steer clear of 9/11)), and I struggle to know whether the points of his argument I find obscene mean I should dismiss it altogether.
His beliefs are grounded in albeit somewhat controversial research: The Limits to Growth, a book commissioned by the global think tank The Club of Rome and released in 1972. Its authors modelled data on industrialisation, population, food, use of resources and pollution up to 1970 to develop a range of scenarios out to 2100, depending on what action was taken on environmental and resource issues. If no significant changes were made and “business-as-usual” prevailed, the report warned that we could expect “overshoot and collapse” of the economy, environment and population before 2070.
That’s the reality Dr Robinson says we should resign ourselves to, and though he can’t put a specific year to it, he predicts it will reach a “crunch point” around 2030. He was a scientist employed at the now-defunct government Department of Scientific and Industrial Research when The Limits to Growth came out, and its central argument that “the earth is finite” resonated with him at once. Within 10 years, he’d devoted himself to researching that global future full-time: “This proved a disastrous career move,” so reads his author bio on a guest post he wrote for a science blog.
Since then, he’s found little to disprove the worst-case scenario set out in Limits of Growth. Of the Arab Spring, he says, eyes glinting behind his glasses with what I take to be black humour: “I can both look at the world with horror and with amusement because I made forecasts and it’s interesting to see if they come true or not.”
With its small population and isolated location, New Zealand is in a better position to bear the brunt of this global crisis, if not to ride it out entirely. Believing, as he does, that we’re past the point of no return, Dr Robinson wants more people to be aware of the coming crash so that we can do the best we can to prepare for it. One measure would be the introduction of population policy, so that when New Zealand becomes a “place of escape” from “a hellish world”, we have something to guide our response to “demand for places on one of the world’s lifeboats”. (Hey, that’s the title of his book!)
Even better, he’d like the issues and future set out in Limits of Growth to be the subject of serious, non-partisan scientific study and debate. But it seems that neither his peers in academia nor “the man on the Clapham omnibus” – to whom he frequently refers, in his submission [pdf] to the 2010 review, to justify why the Foreshore and Seabed Act should be repealed – are interested. (One point he might have better luck gaining traction with, at least in Wellington, is his fervent dislike of Auckland: “I won’t go near the place. It’s a horror.”)
For now, the only platform he has is the Island Bay World Service, a small group of Wellingtonians who share his concern. A group of four or five meet at the Embassy every month, but there are about 30 on the mailing list, he says, acknowledging that it’s a pitifully small venture before I can say so myself. He shows me a photograph of the World Service’s stand at Transition Towns’ Environment Week in 2009, and as I study it – some print-outs of pie charts; a sign that says “We have met the enemy and he is us” and another that says “Only have one child or none”; photocopies of the Guardian – he jokes that if I want a copy I can buy it off him. At least I think he’s joking. I sometimes find it hard to tell. (As it turns out, the photo’s online anyway.)
In 2010, I interviewed Jason Kerrison, purveyor of New Zealand Post-endorsed easy listening and the second-best judge of the country’s second-best televised talent show. I told his press person it was about a gig he was doing to benefit the earthquake relief effort in Christchurch but really, I’d just read his tell-all in Woman’s Day about the “monolithic dome” he’d built to ride out the Mayan calendar prophecy and I wanted to ask him what “transformative changes”, exactly, he was expecting to come about.
But Kerrison refused to be drawn on specifics, probably because the press person hadn’t bought my philanthropic cover story. Still, we had a nice enough chat on the phone and he quoted ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’ at me and I laughed as I pictured it written down and we parted ways agreeably, him having done his bit for charity and me, mine for student media.
In the hour I spent with Dr Robinson, I was told bluntly, unapologetically, and in no uncertain terms that humanity is a scourge on the earth
Interviewing Dr Robinson was another experience altogether, in part because he’s a much more prickly character than Kerrison.
In the hour I spent with Dr Robinson, I was told bluntly, unapologetically, and in no uncertain terms that humanity is a scourge on the earth; that we will “simply do what a plague does in a petri dish: it uses up all the nutrients and then dies off”.
I agree that our waste, our consumption, our growth is harming the planet; that we’re wilfully ignoring the evidence to that end; and that it’s too late to reverse or even slow that damage. In my heart of hearts, I even agree that New Zealand and the rest of the world will face threats and scenarios in the coming decades that are so horrific, we can’t or don’t want to know what they’ll be yet. But whether this means I agree with Dr Robinson and the Limits to Growth, I don’t know. If I’m being honest, it’s less to do with my having poked holes in his argument (in fact recent research [pdf] from the University of Melbourne has found the book’s forecasts to be accurate, 40 years on) than my not wanting to believe the worst-case scenario, even if it’s the inevitable reality.
I imagine he’ll take this as validating his low opinion of both young people and the media, but I left his house feeling as I’ve done after countless conversations with people over 65 – like I’d been batted around the head with how young people are stupid and lazy, how society’s going to hell in a hand-basket, that things were better in their day. The difference with Dr Robinson is that the “better” time he looks back to wasn’t during his lifetime, either.
