Essay

Cosy Catastrophies

9 September 2026

Lately, I’ve been reading a lot about the end of the world. Because, whilst it gives me something to do in an evening after work, it also does put my problems into a slightly easier perspective. But as I read, it’s easy to spot the pattern in a pair of books: Day of the Triffids fancies cities being overrun by mobile plants, whereas The Death of Grass glimpses at how virus can devour farms overnight. The two being linked by abundance and absence of the fundamentals, a narrow balance between tolerances. And yet, in the real world, we face both of these dualities and imbalances driven by lack of investments, resilience and apathy dating back to the publication of the novels in question.

What strikes me from reading about the end of the world, these cosy catastrophes are often given as a series of vignettes. Our heroes live away from the cities where the destruction is real and only venture in for supplies. There’s no account of the slow decline, just a haunting description of another layer stripped away since the last visit. This continues until the buildings crumble, and finally the option to even visit the city is taken away.

The best explanation I can see of why this works is because we, as people, are very bad at noticing gradual change. That creates a problem of urgency and response. And whilst people are being forced to take notice through restrictions, it’s always focussed individuals who then have to rally and lobby for others to care about the situation. In my previous post, I explain why I feel the mechanisms that have worked well for biotechnology have not worked for agri and climate. The way of modern scientific funding is selling a dream, or at least a 20% chance of a dream, but what we need is something to save us from a nightmare.

Despite warnings of larger costs for not converting, averting crisis still doesn’t sound as convincing as an addressable market for a disease area. Your return on an investment was everyone didn’t die. That is a story that is harder to tell and harder to sell. But the underlying fragility of the current system is being exposed all the time: Ukraine exported 50% of the world’s sunflower oil before the war, and now the world has woken up to 30% of the world’s nitrogenous fertiliser being shipped through the Strait of Hormuz.

When threatened by war, disease, or even a lack of understanding the real issue, it’s a real crisis. Suddenly, it becomes clear how these chains, while cost-effective, have major risks. An outcome of the crisis of 2026 will mean people going hungry in the global south and food prices spiking in the UK.

Which brings me nicely into another feature of apocalypse literature: the lengths our characters go to, to live life as normally as they can, and the slow transition to self-sustainability. Of course they can’t go back to how things were, but because of our entrenched patterns of behaviour, and a lack of understanding of the fundamentals, it just becomes impossible to start again. Characters loot tinned foods and petrol in the early days before eventually starting to grow food and building some sort of society. The problem is that where the fundamentals like farming are provided, we don’t have to learn how it is they come about until we have to. I like to use a similar analogy about how computer literacy was so much higher when computers were new, and now that computers are ubiquitous, they may as well be magic boxes in our pockets.

We have seen the emergence of resilience being built, so hopefully it’ll never have to come to it, but these fall into two different camps: managing disaster and mitigating it. Hybridised seeds aim to grow plants that can withstand the current droughts, and those to come, whereas alternative sources of protein aim for a weaning off the impact farming has on the climate. Both have their own challenges in regulation, scale-up and commercial uptake. As you may have noticed, managing the disaster becomes a necessity, while the other which prevents further damage is seen as a bougie premium choice. More importantly, both are required.

This tendency for climate-tech and agri-tech to defend our position and our lifestyle is exactly what science fiction authors observed decades prior. There’s no easy way for us to reverse the patterns that we have learnt, but where the survival of our characters depends on this re-education, it shows it can be done. Maybe then, there’s a possibility that we can behave in the same way.