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The cockroach of the globe, New Zealand. Photo: Getty Images
The cockroach of the globe, New Zealand. Photo: Getty Images

ScienceJuly 29, 2021

NZ tops list of societies likeliest to survive global collapse of civilisation

The cockroach of the globe, New Zealand. Photo: Getty Images
The cockroach of the globe, New Zealand. Photo: Getty Images

Renewable energy, food supply and an isolated spot in the world see plucky Aotearoa punching above its weight again. 

Turns out Peter Thiel and assorted billionaire doomsday preppers were on to something when they stuck a pin in the New Zealand map as location of choice for the apocalypse bunker. A new study in the journal Sustainability finds that Aotearoa’s relative isolation and ability to self-sustain in energy and food puts the country top of the list for survivors in the face of worldwide civilisational collapse.

With the world in a “precarious and perilous” state amid a soup of existential threats, New Zealand leads a small group of territories at either end of the world – Iceland, the UK, Tasmania and Ireland – judged best placed to adapt and prevail in the face of “large-scale failures”. These include those stemming from the climate crisis, energy collapse, upheaval of the financial system, or a pandemic that would make Covid-19 look like a mere warm-up.

Among the criteria used to assess which places are likeliest to survive are the security and renewability of the energy system, the self-sustainability of food production, the ability to isolate from the rest of the world, travel links within the territory, and the size and disbursement of population.

“We weren’t surprised New Zealand was on our list,” Aled Jones told the Guardian. “We chose that you had to be able to protect borders and places had to be temperate. So with hindsight it’s quite obvious that large islands with complex societies on them already [make up the list].”

The study looks at the risk of meltdown in terms of “de-complexification”: essentially a collapse in the societal scaffold that has been built up over time. Increases in complexity in recent centuries had seen “large increases in population, energy use and interconnectedness and has resulted in increasingly extensive and severe perturbation of the Earth System and the biosphere”, find the authors, Nick King and Aled Jones of the Global Sustainability Institute at Anglia Ruskin University in the UK.

The continue: “This perturbation has resulted in a wide range of effects and feedbacks on global human civilisation including (but not limited to) climate change, increased risk of pandemics, ecological destruction (manifesting as a sixth extinction event) and growing risks of systemic instabilities. In combination, these effects place complex human civilisation in a precarious and perilous position with regards to its future; the risk of an uncontrolled ‘de-complexification’ event (a systemic reduction in the overall complexity of civilisation at global scale) occurring may be increasing.”

New Zealand tops the list of catastrophe survivors by virtue of its “favourable starting conditions”, or “nodes of persisting complexity”. These are territories’ characteristics that “may feasibly allow them to retain localised, higher levels of societal, technological and organisation complexity”.

Using this model, the study came up with a shortlist of New Zealand, Iceland, Tasmania, the UK and Ireland. “This identified New Zealand as having the greatest potential to form a ‘node of persisting complexity’, with Iceland, Australia (Tasmania) and Ireland also having favourable characteristics. The United Kingdom presents a more complex picture and potentially has less favourable characteristics overall.”

The authors of the Sustainability paper are keen to stress that their work is intended to help forestall societal collapse. “This analysis … would be of limited value if it were simply a dispassionate analysis of what parts of human civilisation might survive a major, global scale ‘de-complexification’ in relatively unscathed forms,” they write. “Such an event would be bleak, tragic and history-altering when the loss of life, knowledge and cultural achievements, which would inevitably be attendant to such scenarios, are considered. As such, this analysis is carried out with the intent to aid the understanding of what contributes to making such events possible or probable and, therefore, to act as a component of the feedback, which may reduce the risk of them occurring.”

A 2019 study in the journal Risk Analysis suggested that New Zealand, along with Australia and Iceland, could offer “lifeboats” for a world facing a large-scale extinction event.

Nick Wilson of Otago University, a prominent public health expert in the recent Covid-19 crisis,  said then that “discoveries in biotechnology could see a genetically-engineered pandemic threaten the survival of our species”.

He told the Herald in 2019: “Though carriers of disease can easily circumvent land borders, a closed self-sufficient island could harbour an isolated, technologically-adept population that could repopulate the earth following a disaster.”

A resilience strategy could operate “like an insurance policy”, he said. “You hope that you never need to use it, but if disaster strikes, then the strategy needs to have been in place ahead of time … Resiliency planning could also take account of other threats, such as a nuclear war in the Northern Hemisphere, which New Zealand is also relatively well-positioned to survive.”

Disappointingly, neither of the research papers makes reference to singer Jason Kerrison’s 2012 plan to build an ark to survive the end of the world.

josie

ScienceJuly 23, 2021

Post-viral cacophony: The cough that won’t quit

josie

The flu’s back, baby, and we’re more on edge about it than ever before. Here’s why you might sound like you’ve got Covid-19, even when you don’t.

It started with one guy, three weeks ago, sucking down Lemsip and declaring he had a “post-viral cough”. Now the air is filled with a cacophony of mucus, reminding us that contracting the lurgy is just one “post-viral” sneeze away.

We’ve made it halfway through winter without going into lockdown, and the flu is back at it again. Half the people at your workplace have a cough or a sniff. Some are taking sick days, some are working from home, and some are denying they’re sick at all.

Dr Lynn McBain, a GP and head of the Department of Primary Health and General Practice at the University of Otago, Wellington, says people with viruses are most infectious in the first three days of their illness – but they can still be infectious for longer.

“The common cold is infectious probably up to about a week,” she says. “The one that’s around a lot now is RSV – that’s been affecting a lot of young people. It’s most infectious in the first three days but could be up to eight or 10 days.”

She says some of these post-viral claims are correct – a cough can last for eight weeks after a virus has ended. “The infection itself does cause inflammation in the airways, and inflammation can continue after the actual infection has cleared,” she says. Hence the cough. But, she cautions, you can prolong that post-viral inflammation with poor throat care. 

“The lungs become more sensitised, so it would take less to make someone cough after they’ve had an infection,” she says. “People who smoke or vape are putting irritants in their lungs every single inhalation, so they will be more likely to have an ongoing cough after infection.”

And for the love of God, sneeze into your elbow and not your hand.

It’s not just the nicotine fiends who are out there perpetuating the wheezy nightmare: cold air, pollen, pine, fires, and post-nasal drip are all things that can set off a hacking fit if you’ve got a sensitive throat. McBain recommends trying to stay in a temperature-controlled environment, and using a nasal spray or rinse to dry up the drip down the back of your throat. Basically, a little discipline – an airway diet, if you will – can speed up a rough throat’s healing.

She says you can’t do any permanent damage by coughing – it’s a symptom, not a problem in itself. “Sometimes that ongoing cough is a sign there’s something in the lungs,” she says. “After two or three months, depending on the person, you do need as a doctor to think ‘hmm, I hope that smoker doesn’t have anything else going on’,” says McBain.

Going back to work after a virus is usually safe, but McBain says it’s important to acknowledge the changing times. “These days, when they first had the virus, hopefully they had a Covid-19 swab done,” she says. “Appropriately, people in workplaces are concerned.” A cough is one of the symptoms of the dreaded “long Covid”, so that’s something to bring up with a doctor if you’ve been unlucky enough to catch a bout of the number one public enemy.

So you’ve had your nasal swab, you’ve waited a cautious eight days, and you’re feeling fine – you just can’t stop barking. Should you go back to work? If you enjoy your cough, maybe a brisk walk from the winter morning air into a heated office is a good idea, yeah. If you work in some sort of dust factory, even better.

It’s not infectious, but to truly exorcise the ghost cough, the formerly ill (currently disturbing) should consider staying home and taking care of themselves a little more. And with 10 days of sick leave, that might be possible. If you’re all out of leave, no worries – the only harm these coughs are doing is shattering any moment of peace our seasonal-affective-disordered minds have managed to find.

Lemsip guy was not approached for comment as he is clearly still viral.