The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World From Scratch (7 page)

We’ve looked so far at how the remnants left behind by our civilization will cushion the decline of the surviving society, offering a buffer zone of commodities like food and fuel, as well as components such as alternators and batteries that can be jury-rigged into post-apocalyptic power generation. But the dead cities will also provide the basic raw materials needed for rebuilding afresh.

Some crucial materials, like many metals and glass, are easy to recycle. Even if metallic components have been badly rusted and corroded over a long period, the metal is still there. It just needs to be separated from the other elements that have become bonded with it, mostly oxygen. A heavily rusted steel girder is essentially a very rich iron ore, and can be refined back to the pure metal using the same techniques used historically to smelt iron from rocky natural ores, as we’ll see later in the book.

Plastics are synthesized using sophisticated organic chemistry (and oil-derived feedstocks) and so will be available in the early stages of the recovery only by repurposing or recycling that which already exists. They fall into two camps, depending on their polymer structure and thus their response to heat: thermosetting plastics and thermosoftening plastics (or simply thermoplastics). Thermosetting plastics are nigh on impossible to recycle: when heated they decompose into a complex mixture of different organic compounds, many pretty noxious.
Thermoplastics, however, once cleaned, can be melted and re-formed into new products. The easiest thermoplastic to recycle with rudimentary methods is polyethylene terephthalate (PET). The simple way to tell which specific polymer your scavenged plastic items are made from is to check the recycling identification code imprinted on them. PET is distinguished with (1)—plastic drinking bottles, for example, are almost exclusively PET—and you may also have some success recycling (2), high-density polyethylene (HDPE), and (3), polyvinyl chloride (PVC). However, while glass can be melted and re-formed indefinitely, the quality of plastic products degrades with exposure to sunlight and the oxygen in the air, and they become weaker and more brittle each time they are recycled.
*
So while a post-apocalyptic society would be able to feed on our carcass of metal and glass, the age of plastics will inevitably draw to an end, until sufficient chemical proficiency can be relearned.

With the fall of civilization and the collapse of long-distance communication networks and air travel, the global village will shatter back into a globe of villages. The Internet, despite being originally designed as a resilient computer network to survive nuclear attack and the loss of many of its nodes, will fare no better than any other modern technology with systemic failure of the electricity grids. Mobile phones will also last only a matter of days after grid-down, once the backup generators at the computer centers and cell towers run out of
fuel. This will mean that marginal or old technologies will suddenly assume a profound new importance. One of the first things you’ll want to find are old-fashioned walkie-talkies for keeping in contact with other members of your group when you’re separated while out scavenging. For long-range communication, citizens band or ham radio sets will become pretty valuable for trying to establish contact with other pockets of survivors.

But the most valuable resource to gather before it is lost is knowledge. Books may have been destroyed in unchecked fires ripping though cities and towns, turned to illegible mush by the pulse of floodwaters, or simply rotted on the shelves from the humidity and rain blowing in through broken windows. Although far more expansive, our civilization’s paper-based writings are actually less-permanent records than the clay tablets, tough papyrus rolls, or animal-skin parchment of earlier cultures. But if the contents of libraries are still intact when the surviving population begins to rebuild, these fabulous resources can be mined for knowledge. Many of the titles listed in the bibliography at the back of this book, for example, offer details of key practical skills and the processes required for civilization, and would be well worth searching for. Equally, it would be worth trying repositories of older technology—science and industry museums—for contraptions like spinning machines or steam engines that could be studied and reverse engineered as appropriate technologies for the post-apocalyptic world.

So a scene that is likely to become common during the recovery would be growing settlements of survivors dotted across the countryside. These are not located haphazardly but arranged in rings around the dead cities, circling the core of dilapidated high-rises and other urban infrastructure. Only salvage crews venture into these uninhabited zones, picking over the bones of the dead cities, mining their remnants for the most useful materials, perhaps using homemade explosives
to fell buildings and makeshift acetylene torches to dissect metal components. The valuable swag is then hauled back to be reprocessed into tools, plowshares, or whatever is needed during the reboot.

One of your earliest challenges after the Fall will be restarting agriculture. While there will be plenty of empty buildings to provide shelter, and underground lakes of fuel for running vehicles and powering generators, all will be for naught if you starve to death.

AGRICULTURE

We’ve been given a flying start in a new kind of world. We’re endowed with a capital of enough of everything to begin with, but that isn’t going to last forever. . . . Later we’ll have to plow; still later we’ll have to learn how to make plowshares; later than that we’ll have to learn how to smelt the iron to make the shares. . . . The most valuable part of our flying start is knowledge. That’s the short cut to save us starting where our ancestors did.

J
OHN
W
YNDHAM,
The Day of the Triffids
(1951)

THE URGENCY WITH WHICH
you will need to reboot agriculture depends entirely on how many people survived whatever event precipitated the collapse of society. For the purposes of our thought experiment, you will have breathing room before the stocks of preserved food are depleted. This will give you time to find your feet, scout for some suitable land to resettle on, and gradually learn from your mistakes in the fields before a reliable harvest becomes a matter of life or death.

You’ll need to move quickly after the Fall to recover and preserve as many crop plants as you can. Every modern strain of crop represents thousands of years of diligent selective breeding, and if you lose ready-domesticated species, you may lose any hope of shortcutting the rebuilding of civilization. Over the course of their domestication, species
such as wheat and maize have been optimized for the production of nutrition and are now poorly adapted for life without us. Many will be quickly outcompeted and may be driven to extinction by wild plants seizing their opportunity to reclaim the abandoned fields.

Overgrown, abandoned fields or backyard vegetable patches would be sensible places to look for surviving edible plants. Varieties like rhubarb, potato, and artichoke are likely to keep self-propagating long after the patch is abandoned. But the staple of our diets is cereal crops, and if you were particularly conscientious, you might try to organize sampling expeditions immediately after the Fall to collect seed before the plants die and rot in the fields. Or you may be lucky enough to scavenge from abandoned farm barns sacks of seed corn still viable years later.

The problem you will face, though, is that many of the crops cultivated in modern agriculture are “hybrids”: they are produced by crossing two inbred strains possessing desirable characteristics to produce progeny that are very uniform and extremely high-yielding. Unfortunately, seeds produced in turn by this hybrid crop will not retain that consistency—they do not “breed true,” and so new hybrid seeds must be bought to plant each year. What you really want to gather in the immediate aftermath, therefore, are heirloom crops: traditional varieties that can be reliably propagated from one year to the next. Many Preppers stockpile heirloom seeds for exactly this eventuality, but where should you turn if you’ve not prepared a reserve ahead of time?

Hundreds of seed banks exist around the world, safeguarding biological diversity for posterity. The largest of these is the Millennium Seed Bank in West Sussex, just outside London. Here, billions of seeds are stored in a nuclear-bombproof, multistory underground vault, offering a vital post-apocalyptic library, not of knowledge-laden books, but of diverse crop strains. The seeds of many kinds of plants remain viable for decades in a cool, dry environment, including cereal crops, and peas and other legumes, as well as potato, eggplant, and tomato.
But even these seeds die after a while if they have not been germinated, grown, and fresh seeds collected for continued storage.

MAP AND LATITUDE-LONGITUDE COORDINATES OF THE SVALBARD GLOBAL SEED VAULT.

Low temperatures extend this persistence period, and so perhaps the most resilient agricultural backup, a SAVE file that will last long after the collapse of civilization, is the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. This repository is built 125 meters into a mountainside on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen. The 1-meter-thick steel-reinforced concrete walls, blast doors, and airlocks will protect the biological cache inside from the worst global cataclysm, and even with a loss of power the entombing permafrost (the site is well within the Arctic Circle) naturally maintains a subzero temperature for long-term preservation. Viable wheat and barley seeds will be safeguarded for more than a millennium.

The crucial question that you need to be able to answer is: How do I walk out into a muddy field with a handful of seed and make food come out of it before the winter sets in?

This might seem like a no-brainer: seeds germinate naturally, and plants had been growing quite happily for millions of years before humans evolved. But that doesn’t mean by a long shot that cultivation and agriculture come easy. While plants grow naturally, farming is grossly artificial. You are trying to cultivate one particular variety of plant in monoculture, a pure and uniform crop isolated in a field to the exclusion of all other plants. (Any other plants that do begin growing in the field are by definition weeds and are competing with your food crop for sunlight and soil nutrients.) You are also trying to optimize the density of crop plants in your field, to get as much as possible out of the land and minimize the effort and energy expended in cultivating large areas. But you need to prevent this juicy target from being overrun by insects and other pests or fungal diseases that run riot under such ideal conditions (in the same way that cities are perfect breeding grounds for human pathogens). These two factors mean that a field of crops is a highly synthetic environment, and nature is constantly pushing back at you. It takes a great deal of careful control and effort to maintain this unstable situation.

Yet you have an even more fundamental problem to overcome in agriculture. In a natural ecosystem such as a woodland, trees and underbrush plants grow by soaking up energy from sunlight, absorbing carbon from the air, and piping up a variety of mineral nutrients from the soil through their roots. These vital substances become incorporated into the leaves, stems, and roots of plants, and, when eaten, become part of an animal’s body. When the animal later excretes, or dies and decays, these nutrients simply soak back into the soil whence they
came. A natural ecosystem is therefore a healthy circulating economy of elements being transferred endlessly between different accounts. But the nature of farmland is fundamentally different: you are encouraging growth for the sole purpose of harvesting and removing the products for human consumption. Even if you spread much of the leftover vegetative matter back onto the fields, you’ve still removed the portion actually eaten, and year after year the land is steadily depleted. So the very nature of farming necessitates that you are progressively removing mineral nutrients, bleeding the soil of its vitality. And particularly with modern sewage systems—our waste is treated to kill harmful bacteria and then discharged into rivers or seas—agriculture today is an efficient pipeline for stripping nutrients from the land and flushing them into the ocean. Vegetation needs balanced nutrition just as much as the human body does, and the three major plant foods are the elements nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium. Phosphorus is crucial for the transfer of energy, and potassium helps reduce water loss, but it is nitrogen, used in building all proteins, that is most often the limiting factor for crop yield. Unless you’re extraordinarily lucky, like the ancient Egyptians in the Nile valley, where the annual floods revitalize the land with fertile silt, you need to take action to address this fundamental deficit in the balance sheets.

Modern industrialized agriculture is astonishingly successful, with an acre today producing two to four times more food than the same land provided a hundred years ago. But the only way that farms today can function, growing dense monocultures on the same land and still producing high yields year after year, is by spraying potent herbicides and pesticides to maintain an iron-fist control over the ecosystem, and by the liberal application of chemical fertilizers. The nitrogen-rich compounds provided in these artificial fertilizers are created industrially by the Haber-Bosch process, which we’ll return to in Chapter 11. All of these herbicides, pesticides, and artificial fertilizers are synthesized using fossil fuels, which also power the farmyard machinery. In
a sense, then, modern farming is a process that transforms oil into food—with some input from sunshine—and consumes around ten calories of fossil fuel energy for every calorie of food actually eaten. With a collapse of civilization and the disappearance of an advanced chemical industry, you’ll need to relearn traditional methods. Today, organic produce is the preserve of the wealthy; in the aftermath it will be your only option.

We’ll come back later in this chapter to how you can maintain soil fertility over the years. Let’s start with the fundamentals of cultivating crops from the ground up.