The R Word
Why apocalypse resilience isn't about bunkers
Welcome to the Good Apocalypse Guide, a Substack by me, Alex Evans, about how we can survive and thrive during the liminal times we’re living through, and unlock a breakthrough rather than breakdown future. It’s free to all, but supported by reader contributions, so if you enjoy it then please consider supporting the work to make it sustainable.
The market for underground bunkers in the US is humming right now.
So says a long and hilarious piece in the New Yorker (“from the outside, this hole in the ground looked as if it could be the home of a paranoid hobbit”), which my friend, longtime writing partner and fellow apocalypse maven David Steven, of whom more anon, sent me.
My idea of apocalypse resilience used to be pretty similar. Survival = self preservation (emphasis on self there) = stockpiling + steel doors x semiautomatic weapons.
Not any more. And not just because of the chapter in World War Z - the book as opposed to the film, another of David’s discoveries - where a bunch of tech bros hole up in a fortified mansion in the Hamptons, livestream their boujie end times lifestyle, and are promptly overrun by less fortunate people desperately seeking shelter, followed shortly thereafter by many, many zombies.
It’s taken me 20 years and a whole series of wake-up moments to get here, but nowadays my idea of resilience is very different. Here’s the story - the first part of it, anyway (more to follow in the next post).
Darfur, 2005
Did you ever see that movie Charlie Wilson’s War?
For the first 40 minutes, it’s a straight up comedy, and very funny with it. Charlie, played by Tom Hanks but based on a real life Texas Congressman, is living the 80s dream: booze, women, parties, jacuzzis, various combinations of the above.
But then comes a jarring scene where Charlie and his aide visit a refugee camp on Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan. Suddenly, the whole tone of the film changes.
The camp is vast, stretching far into the distance. The stories the refugees recount are unimaginable: limbless kids telling how the shiny thing on the ground looked like a toy. At one point, the camera cuts to the aide. She looks stricken.
I know exactly how she feels.
Back in 2005, I was a Special Adviser to Hilary Benn, then Britain’s Secretary of State for International Development. I was young for the job and cocky with it - delighting in political gossip, trips to the UN, and being in meetings with everyone from Tony Blair to Bob Geldof.
And then I went with Hilary to Sudan’s Darfur region, right in the middle of a genocide in which 200,000 people died. I’d read news coverage, diplomatic cables, intelligence briefings. I thought I was pretty well informed.
I had no idea.
As the Médecins Sans Frontières doctors took us round the camp and introduced us to a few of the one and a half million displaced people in the province, I just felt completely overwhelmed.
And then, ashamed. Ashamed at being able to visit this scene of unimaginable suffering as though on some kind of school day trip - and then hop on a plane back to my safe, privileged life in the rich world, with someone offering me a hot towel and a choice of wines.
When you’re faced with a real apocalypse, daydreams about retreating from the world behind steel doors start to seem not just embarrassing but, well, sociopathic. I started to think about what it would take to protect not just me, but all of us. About collective resilience.
Watford, 2008
Three years later. David and I were working at NYU’s Center on International Cooperation to develop a project on the idea that we were entering a ‘long crisis’ - a time of acute uncertainty and turbulence, resulting from the fact that an interconnected world allows risks to spread just as fast as opportunities.
It was perfect timing. The global financial crisis was just beginning: Bear Stearns, the US investment bank, had collapsed, while Britain had just experienced its first bank run in living memory. Extreme weather was spiking and global food and oil prices were surging to record levels, meanwhile, leading food producing countries all over the world to suspend exports.
Governments were worried, and 10 Downing Street had asked David and I to present a paper on our work at a summit meeting of progressive political leaders like Bill Clinton, the EU’s foreign affairs chief, the head of the IMF, and a dozen heads of government that Gordon Brown was hosting at a grand hotel in Watford, outside London. Our message to them: in the long crisis, the most important job for governments is to build resilience.
Think of the long crisis, we suggested, as a stretch of rapids on the river.
Although there are many different routes you can take, ultimately it’s the river - not you - that decides the speed and direction. There’s no option to hit pause while you rethink strategy or reverse direction. There’s real danger, too: get it wrong, and the boat can hit the rocks or capsize, with everyone on board tipped into the torrent.
But the rapids don’t last forever. If you manage to stay afloat, there’s a calm, shaded pool at the other end where you can finally pull the boat up on to the bank and draw breath.
To get there, everyone in the boat has to paddle together. Which means cooperating as a team, looking out for vulnerable members of the crew, anticipating what might be coming up round the next bend, and having a plan ready to deal with it.
This last point was especially important, we underlined, because as the economist Milton Friedman once put it,
“Only a crisis - actual or perceived - produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable.”
Two months later, Lehman Brothers collapsed and the financial crisis began in earnest.
No one was ready with a plan.
New York, 2011
It was my dream job, and I just felt completely dispirited. I’d been seconded from NYU to work in the UN Secretary-General’s office as the writer for a ‘High Level Panel’ on global sustainability, comprised of heads of government, foreign ministers and CEOs.
I’d hoped they’d come up with big ideas, and then champion them in the run-up to a major summit due to take place in Rio the following year. Instead, what I saw was a perfect example of the so-called ‘G Zero’: a world in which no leaders are prepared to think beyond their national interests or show vision on tough global issues.
On the other side of the world, though, something far more interesting was happening. With the cost of living setting new records and frustration with corruption boiling over, the ‘Arab Spring’ was gathering pace - in Egypt, managing the incredible feat of toppling Hosni Mubarak, the country’s long time authoritarian leader.
It was a vivid example of something else David and I had been thinking about in our work - how ‘paddling together’ in the long crisis is about much more than just what politicians do in summit meetings, cabinet rooms, or crisis response centres. Instead, it’s about all of us.
Take climate change. Policies and summits might be what the headlines focus on - but ultimately, they’re just a means to affect the spending, investment, and behavioural decisions of countless individuals like you and me. How we get around, how we heat our homes, whether we eat meat, how our pensions get invested.
Or look at pandemics, where (as Covid-19 would spectacularly demonstrate a decade later) the individual decisions of billions of people - whether to observe lockdowns, whether to wear masks, whether to get vaccinated - have ripple effects that extend around the world.
It’s not just our actions that have political consequences in the long crisis, either. Our beliefs and opinions do, too: both in how they influence others, especially in an age of social media, and in how they create the ‘political space’ within which politicians operate.
Look at political populism, which both feeds and feeds on feelings of grievance, tribalism and division - or terrorism, which seeks to trigger public fear and rage as a way to bait governments into actions that undermine their own legitimacy. (So spectacularly did Al Qaeda succeed in this on 9/11 that Osama bin Laden later commented that “it seems as if we and the White House are on the same team shooting at the United States’ own goal”.)
The feelings of ordinary people can even make war between states more likely, as leaders play to their publics’ desire for national prestige (or, conversely, their feelings of shame and humiliation) - just as we see today in Xi Jinping’s regular threats to attack Taiwan, or Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
But as I sat in that High Level Panel meeting in New York in 2011, thinking about the protestors in Tahrir Square, I was reflecting on how the opinions, emotions and actions of ordinary people also have the power to shape our collective future and build collective resilience in much more hopeful ways.
I didn’t know it then, but this would end up being the focus of my work over the next decade and a half - in research with David, as a campaigner, and now at Larger Us - and would make me feel more hopeful about the future than I’d felt in years. More on that in the next post!
3 other Substacks I enjoyed…
Elizabeth Oldfield (friend, chair of my board, author of a fab new book which we talk about on the next edition of the Larger Us Podcast) wrote this lovely piece on why we need to have hospitality at the front of our minds during apocalyptic times.
Micah Sifry has been one of the most consistently thoughtful, wise and insightful writers I’ve come across on Israel and Palestine, and this recent article of his on why and how we should focus on building lifeboats in troubled times was no exception.
And lastly, this one is leftfield but goodness I loved this essay by Ellie Robins on how our medieval ancestors approached reading as compared to how we do it today. Don’t just read the words, she suggests. Do it like the monks would have done: put them into your mouth and chew them.