- Beck, Glenn and Harriet Parke.
Agenda 21.
New York: Threshold Editions, 2012.
ISBN 978-1-4767-1669-5.
-
In 1992, at the United Nations Conference on Environment
and Development (“Earth Summit”) in Rio de
Janeiro, an action plan for “sustainable
development” titled
“Agenda 21”
was adopted. It has since been endorsed by the governments of
178 countries, including the United States, where it was
signed by president George H. W. Bush (not being a formal
treaty, it was not submitted to the Senate for ratification).
An organisation called
Local
Governments for Sustainability currently has more than
1200 member towns, cities, and counties
in 70 countries, including
more than 500
in the United States signed on to the program. Whenever you hear a
politician talking about environmental “sustainability” or
the “precautionary principle”, it's a good bet the ideas
they're promoting can be traced back to Agenda 21 or its progenitors.
When you read the U.N.
Agenda 21 document
(which I highly encourage you to
do—it is very likely your own national government has endorsed it),
it comes across as the usual gassy international bureaucratese you expect
from a U.N. commission, but if you read between the lines and project
the goals and mechanisms advocated to their logical conclusions, the
implications are very great indeed. What is envisioned is nothing
less than the extinction of the developed world and the roll-back of the
entire project of the enlightenment. While speaking of the lofty goal
of lifting the standard of living of developing nations to that of the
developed world in a manner that does not damage the environment, it
is an inevitable consequence of the report's assumption of finite resources
and an environment already stressed beyond the point of sustainability that
the inevitable outcome of achieving “equity” will be a global
levelling of the standard of living to one well below the present-day mean,
necessitating a catastrophic decrease in the quality of life in developed
nations, which will almost certainly eliminate their ability to invest in
the research and technological development which have been the engine of human
advancement since the Renaissance. The implications of this are so dire that
somebody ought to write a dystopian novel about the ultimate consequences
of heading down this road.
Somebody has. Glenn Beck and Harriet Parke (it's pretty clear from the
acknowledgements that Parke is the principal author, while Beck
contributed the afterword and lent his high-profile name to the project)
have written a dark and claustrophobic view of what awaits at the end
of The Road to Serfdom
(May 2002). Here, as opposed to an incremental shift over
decades, the United States experiences a cataclysmic socio-economic
collapse which is exploited to supplant it with the Republic, ruled
by the Central Authority, in which all Citizens are equal. The goals
of Agenda 21 have been achieved by depopulating much of the land, letting
it return to nature, packing the humans who survived the crises and
conflict as the Republic consolidated its power into identical
densely-packed Living Spaces, where they live their lives according
to the will of the Authority and its Enforcers. Citizens are divided
into castes by job category; reproductive age Citizens are “paired”
by the Republic, and babies are taken from mothers at birth to be
raised in Children's Villages, where they are indoctrinated to serve the
Republic. Unsustainable energy sources are replaced by humans who
have to do their quota of walking on “energy board”
treadmills or riding “energy bicycles” everywhere, and
public transportation consists of bus boxes, pulled by teams of six
strong men.
Emmeline has grown up in this grim and grey world which, to her, is way
things are, have always been, and always will be. Just old enough at
the establishment of Republic to escape
the Children's Village, she is among the final cohort of Citizens to have
been raised by their parents, who told her very little of the before-time;
speaking of that could imperil both parents and child. After she loses both
parents (people vanishing, being “killed in industrial accidents”,
or led away by Enforcers never to be seen again is common in the
Republic), she discovers a legacy from her mother which provides a tenuous
link to the before-time. Slowly and painfully she begins to piece
together the history of the society in which she lives and what life was like
before it descended to crush the human spirit. And then she must decide
what to do about it.
I am sure many reviewers will dismiss this novel as a cartoon-like
portrayal of ideas taken to an absurd extreme. But much the same could
have been said of
We,
Anthem,
or
1984.
But the thing about dystopian novels based upon trends already in
place is that they have a disturbing tendency to get things
right. As I observed in my review of
Atlas Shrugged (April 2010), when I first
read it in 1968, it seemed to evoke a dismal future entirely
different from what I expected. When I read it the
third time in 2010, my estimation was that real-world events had taken
us about 500 pages into the 1168 page tome. I'd probably up that number
today. What is particularly disturbing about the scenario in this
novel, as opposed to the works cited above, is that it describes what
may be a very strong attractor for human society once rejection of
progress becomes the doctrine and the population stratifies into
a small ruling class and subjects entirely dependent upon the
state. After all, that's how things have more or less been over most
of human history and around the globe, and the brief flash of liberty,
innovation, and prosperity we assume to be the normal state of affairs
may simply be an ephemeral consequence of the opening of a frontier
which, now having closed, concludes that aberrant chapter of history,
soon to be expunged and forgotten.
This is a book which begs for one or more sequels. While the story is
satisfying by itself, you put it down wondering what happens next,
and what is going on outside the confines of the human hive its
characters inhabit. Who are the members of the Central Authority?
How do they live? How do they groom their successors? What is
happening on other continents? Is there any hope the torch of liberty
might be reignited?
While doubtless many will take fierce exception to the entire premise
of the story, I found only one factual error. In chapter 14 Emmeline
discovers a photograph which provides a link to the before-time. On
it is the word “KODACHROME”. But
Kodachrome was a
colour slide (reversal) film, not a colour print film. Even if the
print that Emmeline found had been made from a Kodachrome slide, the print
wouldn't say “KODACHROME”. I did not spot a single
typographical error, and if you're a regular reader of this chronicle, you'll
know how rare that is. In the Kindle edition,
links to documents and resources cited in the factual afterword are
live and will take you directly to the cited page.
November 2012 