Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
The problem with that reassuring picture is that we have come to rely on electrical power for so
many things—and have so completely let go of the knowledge, skills, and machinery that could en-
able us to live without it—that the adaptive process might not go well. The survivors might not be
able to attain a 19th-century way of life without spending years, decades, or perhaps even centuries
reacquiring knowledge and skills and reinventing machinery.
Imagine the scene, perhaps two decades from now. After years of gradually lengthening brown-
outs and blackouts, your town's power has been down for days, and no one knows if or when it can
be restored. No one is even sure if the blackout is statewide or nationwide, because radio broadcasts
have become sporadic. The able members of your community band together to solve the mounting
practical problems threatening your collective existence. You hold a meeting.
Someone brings up the problems of water delivery and wastewater treatment: the municipal fa-
cilities require power to supply these essential services. A woman in the back of the room speaks:
“I once read about how you can purify water with a ceramic pot, some sand, and charcoal. It's on a
website. . . .” Her voice trails off.
There are no more websites
.
The conversation turns to food. Now that the supermarkets are closed (no functioning lights or
cash registers) and emptied by looters, it's obviously a good idea to encourage backyard and com-
munity gardening. But where should townspeople get their seeds? A middle-aged gentleman pipes
up: “There's this great mail-order seed company—just go online. . . .” He suddenly looks confused
and sits down.
“Online” is a world that no longer exists. Even if an order could somehow be placed,
the local post office has closed its doors and its delivery trucks have run out of fuel because gas
station pumps need electricity to operate
.
Is There Something We Should Be Doing?
There is a message here for leaders at all levels of government and business—obviously so for
emergency response organizations. But I've singled out librarians in this essay because they may
bear the gravest responsibility of all in preparing for the possible end of electric civilization.
Without widely available practical information, recovery from a final blackout would be diffi-
cult in the extreme. Therefore it is important that the kinds of information people would need are
identified and preserved in such a way that it will be accessible under extreme circumstances, and
to folks in widely scattered places.
Of course, librarians can never bear sole responsibility for cultural preservation;
it takes a vil-
lage
, as Hillary Clinton once proclaimed in another context. Topics are clearly essential to cultural
survival, but they are just inert objects in the absence of people who can read them; we also need
skills-based education to keep alive both the practical and the performing arts. What good is a set
of parts to the late Beethoven string quartets—arguably the greatest music our species has ever pro-
duced—if there's no one around who can play the violin, viola, or cello well enough to make sense
of them? And what good would a written description of horse-plowing do to a post-industrial farm-
er without the opportunity to learn hands-on from someone with experience?
Nevertheless, for librarians the message could not be clearer: Don't let topics die. It's under-
standable that librarians spend much effort trying to keep up with the digital revolution in informa-
tion storage and retrieval: their main duty is to serve their community
as it is
, not a community that
existed decades ago or one that may exist decades hence. Yet the thought that they may be making
the materials they are trying to preserve ever more vulnerable to loss should be cause for pause.
