Forum: Story Ideas

Any plans to finish and post it? ;)

Exactly. Because I feel that it's actually happening (and not only in the UK) it's a very interesting subject for new stories.

One of the problems, or issues anyway, that I see with a slow collapse is that a lot of the causes for slow collapse end up reaching a tipping point, whereupon suddenly that slow collapse becomes a quick collapse.

I agree, but we're talking about concepts for fictional stories. There's a few things that occur world wide and and don't cause a sudden collapse. The biggest one I mentioned before is the general pollution of air and water. There's no solution for that until the whole world cooperates to solve it. Ain't gonna happen because the biggest polluters are generally also the poorest.
Pollution slowly creeps upon the world and is killing the environment. The result (in the long run) is a decimation of the world population simply because people die in an unlivable environment, infertility, and non-productivity because of illness.
But even a fast collapse born out of a slow collapse is a different scenario than the existing PA stories. It supports many problem areas different from a classical PA.
And there's possibilities for stories that try to stop a slow collapse. Describing how and when it is recognized and what is tried to solve it. Example: Take the article about India. Assume that it gets worse and 750 million people die. That will get the attention of the world and maybe they recognize that they could be next. Even the US and Europe have to pay attention because no money can buy clean air for the whole population of the country when dirty air keeps coming from other parts of the world. Same for clean water. Technological solutions (==money) can only go so far. Again, many possible scenario's for good stories. I agree that politics like in the US will slow down any solution because no politician will support it. Let the next one take the downfall. That is, if he can still breath ;)
You see, many different angles to approach for multiple different stories.

3: Western United States - general stupidity in elected officials. (Hey, let's quit logging and stop clearing forest areas, so underbrush can grow up, then build houses in the middle of those areas, then complain because forest fires are worse due to high underbrush growth.)

You left out decades of over-aggressive fire protection prior to that as well, because we wanted to log it, rather than see it burn. Or simply because we thought forest fires in general were bad and should be stopped at any cost. Even if the ecosystems for said forests revolved around being burned down every so often.

Even if the ecosystems for said forests revolved around being burned down every so often.

No, not burned down. Burned regularly, but not burned down. A ground fire will not kill mature, healthy trees. That takes a canopy fire. If ground level fires occur often enough you will never build up enough fuel for the fire to spread to the canopy.

No, not burned down. Burned regularly, but not burned down. A ground fire will not kill mature, healthy trees. That takes a canopy fire. If ground level fires occur often enough you will never build up enough fuel for the fire to spread to the canopy.

Agreed. A lot of people miss that point.

No, not burned down. Burned regularly, but not burned down. A ground fire will not kill mature, healthy trees. That takes a canopy fire. If ground level fires occur often enough you will never build up enough fuel for the fire to spread to the canopy.

That area would need to burn every few years in that case, and even then, there would be enough "lack of intensity" to the fire at that point that even comparatively young trees have a chance to survive.

That area would need to burn every few years in that case

That will vary slightly with the population of browsing wild life. More browsers = less brush development at ground level and you can go longer between burns.

enough "lack of intensity" to the fire at that point that even comparatively young trees have a chance to survive.

Is this supposed to be a negative?

Is this supposed to be a negative?

If you're creating a mass deforestation from wildfires scenario, yes?

Trees surviving low intensity fires don't deforest very well.

We're supposed to be having an energy crisis, and at the same time, a water crisis in a lot of the world. Fine - here's a solution. Build a nuclear reactor far enough back so it doesn't get hit by a tsunami, and then use that to power desalinization plants.

This gets into some of the political ass-hattery of the 1970's that continues to haunt us to this day, especially as it relates to Nuclear Power.

Cheap and clean energy wasn't on the agenda for many people involved in those groups. As they were afraid of what we as a species would do with abundant energy that had few to no draw backs. No need to conserve, no need to be concerned about lot of other related things because the solutions are inexpensive to implement. (Because the energy needed to do so is inexpensive)

Solar is starting to become cheap, but it isn't quite so clean as many want to bill it as being, given all of the heavy metals involved in making solar panels. It also comes with a number of draw backs(reliable availability, etc).

Wind Power actually is a fair bit cleaner than even solar, but it likewise has its own set of issues to contend with as well. It also is starting to become cheap, but it has reliability issues. Which means you're talking about power storage, much like you would be with Solar, and that means dealing with Batteries, which means dealing with heavy metals and other substances that are typically highly toxic--certainly plenty of draw-backs to be found there if you bother to look.

I wonder why there are not more stories using the concept of a slow collapse. If the story started towards the end of the collapse you would have almost the same situation as with a world wide disaster but with better preservation of the few resources left for far fewer people. Maybe with a description in the first few chapter how the collapse started without anyone noticing and how it grew. Ultimate survival of the fittest? Not by fighting but because of having the best, most healthy physical body?

I'm a technologist/futurist at heart. So "slow collapse" due to environmental factors fails near the onset.

Also, pollution in general is a weird metric. How do you define it? Many these days now view CO2 as a pollutant.

Pollution has become much worse in Asia, and likely will become so in Africa in time unless steps are taken, but it has become much better elsewhere in the world. Unless you count CO2 as a pollutant, but CO2 is in no danger of reaching levels likely to directly cause problems for humans anytime in any kind of predictive timeline, as you would no longer be measuring it in PPM. (What it does to climate in the interim, which is an indirect means, is another matter)

The technical ability to address most forms of pollution in the third world exists, and it largely revolves getting them off the more basic forms of biofuel and onto a electric grid or a natural gas supply instead. Mostly so they stop burning things(in inefficient ways) for heat or light.

You also start placing scrubbers on all those coal fired plants that China and India have been building over the past 20 years. You don't seriously believe that China was building those plants to conform to US Emission standards do you?

Those upgrades don't fix CO2, but it takes care of a significant portion of Asia's "Brown Cloud" problem. Which by extension takes care of most of the pollution related health issues.

Other "Slow events" which take a decade or more to play out also lend themselves well to adaptation/engineering solutions to address. At least so long as the area in question is allowed access to the resources(and political will) to address the situation at hand.

Sudden onset droughts and/or deluges are another matter, but even those can be adapted to if the will exists to do so. That's an engineering challenge. The Western US in the late 19th and well into the 20th century is a model of that with the large scale dam projects that were built for the purpose of holding back the "deluge" water events so they had water to last through the drought events. (It just happens that demand is starting to exceed available supply even against the long-term trend at this point)

But that pushes things back to "engineering challenge" as there are other places to obtain water, and in the case of the Colorado River for example, many places that place demands on upon it DO have access to other water sources, the Colorado was simply more convenient at the time(Hello, LA)

I'm a technologist/futurist at heart. So "slow collapse" due to environmental factors fails near the onset.

You're looking at it as real life problems/solutions. I sketched a scenario for a different kind of PA story. There's a significant difference.
I agree that there are a lot of technical solutions to many of the pollution problems but someone has to pay for them. I doubt somebody else is gonna pay for scrubbers in India and they most certainly can't afford them or have other priorities.