The story will go like this. Eventually, life in the cities becomes untenable. Chains of value and exchange between town and country – built up over centuries – will break down. Not everyone can flee. Those who can will head for the countryside. Far more habitable.
As the hum of civilization recedes, the wreckage comes into focus. The centuries-long hollowing out of the countryside becomes unavoidable. Industry, as we understand it, starts in the small gap between urban and rural, widens it to a chasm. It digs into the earth, scrapes it out, and builds on top of the dirty, cavernous nothing it leaves behind.
The first elevators, the first technology that lifted us safely upward into buildings, weren’t used in skyscrapers. They were used in the mines, sending men and boys, hundreds at a time, deep down into the earth to haul buckets of minerals back up with them. Tons of rock and earth that should have stayed there, burned and spewed into the air.
That’s where the new/early/modern towns were built, on top of winding, maze-like caverns leading miles down into the crust. When there was nothing left to dig up, that’s where they were left. Many of them anyway. And many of them will be where people return to as they flee the faltering cities, once woven into their own intricate networks of place and people, now just a faint echo.
Consider the abandoned mining settlements of Northern Appalachia. Sewell, West Virginia, where the coke ovens and the houses still stand, but neither have been used or lived in for decades. Kings Station, Ohio, where coal production stopped in 1910, but the sturdy industrial structures can still provide ample shelter. Even the few remaining homes on top of the subterranean hellfire of Centralia, Pennsylvania might be a suitable place to wait out the world’s slow unravelling.
Or think of the small towns of Yorkshire and North East England. The towns already half empty from the closure of the mines. The places “redevelopment” skipped over in the wake of deindustrialization, punctuating the rolling moors and dales. Seaside villages that have tumbled into the North Sea as the clay soil eroded.
It’s not much, and many of the homes will be little more than ruins. Some have remained standing, even if they are in various states of disrepair. In terms of basic shelter – from the elements, from the collapse of a top-heavy civilization – they’ll do. Those who grew up with the irrepressible urge to escape, to run to the big cities and never return, will now find themselves running back to the suffocating quietude of brick row houses and the aimless indolence of a never-ending Sunday.
Describing these people will be difficult, like trying to summarize bits of paper thrown into a gust of wind. Beyond statistical grouping or sociological trends. In any event, there won’t be much of a statistics or sociology to sum them up. Just a vast trickling something that is.
Most of them won’t be looking to “start over,” still less to rebuild. More to find a place where they can forget. Where they won’t be burdened with the memory of lives that buckled under the weight. And, just as important, where a dying world can forget them. A chance to wait out the end in something like dignity.
Bees hold the blueprint of a society. Not our society, but certainly a society. Its shape has been embedded in their genetic instinct over the eons of evolution. The hexagonal cells, stacked on top of each other: wax molded into a precise pattern millions of times over for a single hive. It’s all designed to an exact specification, providing for the various roles necessary to maintain it. A place for honey and pollen storage, for safe passage of foragers and drones, for the queen to lay her eggs. A hive of bees even knows how to keep the exact temperature needed for it to thrive.
Then the work that goes into maintaining that hive and its place in a vast and intricate ecology. Honey isn’t just a byproduct adopted as a condiment by humans. It is a vital, high-energy food source, perfectly fit to the bee’s metabolism. It is a misconception that bees fly from the hive to collect pollen. They fly out to collect nectar, naturally produced by flowers; the pollen that gathers on bees’ legs and bodies, deposited from flower to flower, is another crucial incidental of botanical evolution. It is the nectar that’s turned into honey, stored in the bees’ stomach, brought back to the hive, regurgitated and dissolved in enzymes, then fanned by the bees’ wings to evaporate excess moisture. Thus it’s transformed into the familiar sticky substance.
Think of all this. Actually think about it and sit with it. How perfect was the sequence of events in the natural selection that such a precise, delicate, wondrously intricate balance could be struck? Between plant and animal, yes, but even internal to the animal. And, significantly, designed and constructed by the animal. In considering this, are we considering all the uncanny valences? What are we watching when we do?
Bees cooperate instinctively. They need to if they’re to maintain their highly complex social structure. Bees also dream, at least according to some researchers, replaying memories when they sleep. This means consciousness, of a sort. Some research suggests they suffer a form of PTSD, and that the spreading catastrophe of colony collapse isn’t merely due to pesticides and pollution, but from the psychological stresses experienced by the bees themselves as industrialized agriculture continues to march along.
It’s the dismal upshot of the Anthropocene. When the bees are dying, as they are right now, it’s more than society that’s in trouble, whatever that means. It’s the very ontology of building, a collapse of the organic infrastructure necessary for a large swathe of complex collective life to survive.
In other words, we will not be the only species that leaves behind what had been an infrastructure, the networks of rooms and tunnels, the scaffolding of interwoven lives, sitting silent and still. Remnants of a dead world with only itself left to experience it.
Header image is public domain, from the US Department of Agriculture.
Worms of the Senses
Seeing
The Big Lebowski, directed by Joel Coen, screenplay by Joel and Ethan Coen (1998)
Hangmen Also Die! directed by Fritz Lang, screenplay by Lang, John Wexley, and Bertolt Brecht (1943)
News from Home, written and directed by Chantal Akerman (1976)
Adolescence, directed by Philip Barantini, screenplay by Stephen Graham and Jack Thorne (2025)
Hearing
Loscil, Plume (2006)
Calexico, Algiers (2012)
Múm, Finally We Are No One (2002)
Reading
Psychogeography, by Merlin Coverley (2006)
Nineteen Seventy-Seven, by David Peace (2009)
A History of Pan-African Revolt, by CLR James (1969)
Gaza Faces History, Enzo Traverso (2024)