Global Meltdown: Immigration, Multiculturalism, & National Breakdown in the New World Disorder

Abstract

Global Meltdown: Immigration, Multiculturalism, & National Breakdown in the New World Disorder Smith, Joseph Wayne; Lyons, Graham; & Moore, Evonne Praeger Westport, Connecticut 1998 ISBN 0-275-95600-8 Flipping the pages of this book, your reviewer discovered that here was the ultimate horror story, told by three visitors from Mars who landed, of all unlikely places, in Adelaide, Australia. Your reviewer closed the book and thought a while. Having read their earlier 1997 work, Healing a Wounded World: Economics, Ecology, and Health for a Sustainable Life,1, your reviewer expected to agree with what these authors had to say. What he wanted to know for himself was, NOT whether there will be a meltdown of civilization, but: (1) When will it come? (2) Can it be avoided? (3) What are the mileposts along the way? (4) Where are we now? The book divides into four chapters dealing respectively with: (1) The cultural collapse now occurring worldwide as the authors and others see it. (2) The mechanisms of technological and ecological collapse without regard to cultural collapse. (3) Australia, offered as a case study of the way we are going. (4) A survey of the views of other doomsayers. Chapter 1: Here the authors do two things: (1) Review, analyze and compare the views of past and present seers who look to the future after 2010 A.D., (2) Travel around the world looking unsuccessfully for a country which is not already crumbling. Chapter 2: Many thinkers have been pondering the social and economic world problems that will bring our civilization to an end for much the same reasons past civilizations ended. Only a few have thought beyond to the question of the extinction of mankind. In this chapter our visitors from Mars first examine some mechanisms by which man may become extinct, as he surely someday will, and, second, examine the more immediate mechanisms by which we shall descend into permanent anarchy. Among the interesting possible mechanisms for extinction are nuclear winter, volcanic winter, run-away ozone layer destruction, an uncontrolled laboratory release of nuclear or zero-point energy, enhanced greenhouse effect, an asteroid strike, an ice age induced by passage through an interstellar cloud, radiation damage by a supernova explosion, disruption of the solar system by the visit of a cold massive intruder from outer space, a disaster in genetic engineering or nanotechnology, a computer-initiated global thermonuclear war, destruction of agricultural potential by loss of biodiversity. The authors discuss the likelihood of asteroid and meteorite attacks in some detail and the discussion is carried forward to the more immediate prospects of the destruction of our techno-industrial civilization without the extinction of man by the partial destruction of earth systems or areas, for example, by a large meteorite. There are also very real dangers of a psychological nature: the spread of Schopenhauerian pessimism or the spread of the current doctrine denying objective meaning and moral rightness (e.g., with regard to killing people for amusement). Among immediate psychological dangers they list as pre-eminent the persisting optimistic philosophy of economic globalism and growthism. They cite as an example of "Nature biting back" the effects of the Green Revolution, which involved crop specialization and vulnerability plus increased irrigation and fertilization, the minimal result of which has been merely to worsen and delay consideration of the population problem. "The new technology and the Green Revolution supplied an artificial prop to an already unsustainable population growth in the Third World." (p. 39). From its rate of growth there are already hints of a "Chernobyl on the Internet," whose cost and consequences cannot be foreseen. One possibility is economic collapse following the unrestricted creation of e-money by the "Java wallet" described by Netscape in its Navigator-4 web browser. …