In The Times today, there’s an article with the title, “Four meals away from anarchy”. It jogged my memory because I watched a film yesterday, Leave the World Behind, which is currently in the news media and which stars one of my favourite actresses, Julia Roberts. The theme behind the film is that there are just three stages to the end of your world or the country where you live.
Those three stages are:
- Isolation through a cyber attack which disables communications and transportation. The phones don’t work and the Internet is down. Navigation systems fail. Ships start to crash into the shoreline and Tesla cars on autopilot pile into each other. Nobody can communicate with anybody else and we have the beginnings of chaos.
- Synchronised chaos is the next stage in which the population is terrorised with “covert attacks and misinformation.” To achieve synchronised chaos, in the film, there are ear piercing sounds across a wide area, pamphlets rain down from above indicating the end of the world and the bemused/confused people head towards the hills and their bunkers stocked to the gunwales with food and water and provisions to allow them to survive the next year underground.
- The third stage is chaos as signified by civil war and collapse. Everything starts to go entirely wrong because nobody is pulling the strings any more. There is no government and people just have to survive which leads to chaotic anarchy and self-survival. This ultimately destroys the country.
That’s the film and in the article there is a very similar theme in which a cyber attack devastates the electricity supply in Britain or I presume any other country which plunges the country into darkness and destroys all the infrastructure that we rely upon such as broadband Internet, satellite signals, credit card usage, petrol pump usage, traffic lights, sewage systems and electric pumps for water supplies et cetera. Just everything depends upon an electrical supply which isn’t there anymore.
If every facet of an economy needs a reliable power supply and they don’t get it society breaks down within the space of four meals.
The goal of the article is to encourage people to be self-reliant, self resilient and to ensure that they have their own private supply of energy through battery systems for example. Or I guess you can buy your own generator to provide electricity to run your television, radio and basic essentials.
What’s this got to do with the human-to-animal relationship?! Well, I don’t think it needs explaining because although the situation I described above is very much about people and how it affects people, whatever affects humankind also affects animals particularly in this instance our companion animals who are so reliant upon us.
As for the wild animals, I suspect that the catastrophe outlined above would be good for them because it would help nature to once again rule over the planet rather than being destroyed by humankind which has been described as a disease by Sir David Attenborough. It is hard to deny that his description is accurate.
P.S. I forgot to add that this is a really good film. I recommend it and I am very hard to please 🙂 .
