How to get to the end of the world

THURSDAY, MARCH 17, 2011

How to get to the end of the world?

I’d like to think I’m not a doomsayer. But I wonder how many of us can look at Japan’s woes at the moment and not see the beginning of a domino effect that will have reverberations we haven’t even begun to think about in the coming months and years. And even if we had, it’s altogether possible we actually can’t begin to imagine the far-reaching results of this tragic trio of disasters.

Japan is the world’s third largest economy. That in itself is a major concern. A third of Japan has been shaken and blasted by water to a crumbling soggy pile of splinters.

This island nation that sits as a sentinel to Asia permeates our life in a way we’ve never stopped to think about overly much. After the second world war, when Japan had its military teeth pulled, the powers that were at the time made the utterly effective decision that if Japan couldn’t rule the world by force, it could do a damned good job of doing so in the commerce sector. Which, in the ensuing 60 years, is exactly what they have done to a degree no other nation can even begin to compare. There is not one area of our lives where we do not use something that has not been designed and built in Japan. From the myriad of cars to the tiny computer chips that run everything except our bodies these days, Japan has a role in it somewhere.

It has its fingers in many international pies and there’d be few countries out there that have not seen some kind of investment from Japan in one way or another.

So if we look at the three pronged attack it suffered earlier this month; the earthquake, the tidal wave and then the subsequent nuclear crisis – where to from here?

The doomsayers who talk about the end of the world in 2012 do make me laugh – there is as many tales of what that might mean in how that would be achieved, from natural disasters to Raelians, that it’s a bit like shopping at a gypsy fair – there’s a bottle of snake oil for everyone.

Yet… the thought occurs to me that we have become so utterly dependent on technology that in an instance like this, where a great big hole has been blasted in the middle of one the world’s leading nations in this vital industry, we could become highly unstable in terms of our current civilization – and the ‘end of the world’ as we know it, just may well be around the corner. Hard call, you think? Maybe not.

Where is the money coming from to rebuild Japan – and rebuild the niche it fills so completely? Insurers world-wide are already paying out very large sums of money from such disasters in the past decade as Hurricane Katrina, Aceh, Haiti, the Queensland floods and yes, even the 30 billion dollars worth round about here in Christchurch. Our finance minister said, before the Japan event, that we were needing financial help from the rest of the world. Fair call, we don’t, being the small nation we are, have the kind of money needed to rebuild the city to the degree the city fathers would like to see it happen.

Insurance isn’t a bottomless pit. There has to come a time whereby there is not enough money in the pot to continually pay for all the disasters and people cannot afford the premiums hurting insurance companies are imposing on them to cover those shortfalls. What happens then? How do the Japans and Christchurches of this world get rebuilt? We have a great credit crunch on – one can print money as often as one likes, but the more one does this, the less it means until you get to a point where the great unwashed realizes that it has no value whatsoever. That means banks go under, foreclosures can’t happen, trade and commerce suffer, unemployment is everywhere, government tax-based coffers can’t meet the national budgets in any way, shape or form, – and what do you have? You have a civilization balancing on the brink of destruction.

Is that where we are? Or the point we are coming to?

It seems to me the recipe for global derailment is already sitting on the workbench. What happens in the next few months is, in a large degree, likely to have a major impact of a type so devastating that I don’t believe we fully understand the potential ramifications. It is only going to take one more major disaster – and think about this: Australia provides much of the world’s sugar, wheat and grain requirements – all washed away this summer. Japan provides, as mentioned, far too many things to count them all – and we still won’t know whether or not there can be a recovery here after the atrocious triad of a week ago.

In the Middle East, the uprising and unrest is at unprecedented levels, largely thanks to the US’s perhaps unnecessary involvement which has created a wolf of war called democracy.

This is a sobering period of time we are entering into and I firmly believe that our politicians have to think very long and hard about how they are going to steer our isolated little rowboat through these troubled times.

There has to be a swing towards focusing on the internal economy, rather than the export one; has to be a plan for ensuring that no matter what, our small Pacific fruit bowl can survive and look after its 4.5 million inhabitants without the need for international consumer products that just may stop arriving.

It’s time, I believe, to start think about self preservation a little bit more than we have been.