The veneer of civilisation: lessons from childhood, comedy and Wall‑E

When I was a kid, I had a book called When the City Stopped, by Joan Phipson. The story stayed with me not because it was sensational but because it treated a small, believable failure – an extended strike by electrical workers – as a way to show how quickly ordinary life can unravel. Traffic gridlock and crashes due to failed traffic signals, petrol bowsers that wouldn’t pump, taps that stopped running because pumps needed electricity, food rotting in failed freezers. 

Through the children’s eyes, I watched civility get broken at the edges: queues thin into panic, rules bend, looting begins, hospitals try to cope as generator diesel supplies run short, individualism overtakes collective good. 

Reflecting now in the shadow of the Covid pandemic, what is clear is ‘the essentiality’ of essential workers; their power in this case, pun intended, to literally switch off the city.

It was a primary reader, so it ends well, of course, but the image stuck: civilisation is not invincible, it’s a surface that depends on a lot of quiet, fragile arrangements.

A suburban joke taught me something ugly and useful

Decades later, watching the Australian outer-suburban satire Kath and Kim, I laughed as Kath described her kitchen renovation, mispronouncing the timber cabinet finish as “monogamy” and declaring that what one needed was a “veneer of monogamy”. 

The joke is silly, but it landed for me in a surprising way. Civilisation often looks like a veneer – polished, ordered, plausible – over messy realities. You can buy a finished surface that looks the part, will get you compliments, and make daily life comfortable, until it chips or cracks, and you see what’s underneath. The joke made me think of how easily polished comfort can mask an absence of skills, absent maintenance, or brittle institutions, supply chains, and food systems.

And is our democracy a veneer? On the surface, we have the trappings: free and fair elections, equal participation, separation of powers, rule of law, and a media independent from government control. Yet when citizens call for action on issues like climate and biodiversity, social safety nets, or confronting the military-industrial complex, it’s often vested interests – not public will – that shape policy.

Wall‑E and the moral of convenience

Pixar’s masterpiece Wall‑E gave me the third image: a planet left to rot while humans live on a ship, softened by convenience and drowned in screens aglow with advertising and vapid entertainment. The film is a parable about what happens when ecological collapse meets cultural collapse: when habits and comforts replace capacities and commitments. 

There’s a common theme in collapse literature: an interplay of environmental degradation, spiralling inequality, the decay of community relationships, civic disengagement, and an over‑reliance on spectacle and distraction, all weaken the social fabric we need to respond to crisis. Ring any bells?

What about over-reliance on technologies? Outsourcing our “thinking” to AI and big tech. Heck, outsourcing our relationships, our knowledge, our culture, and even what passes as fact.

These aren’t abstract risks; they change how people behave when things go wrong. Convenience makes us less practiced in doing without. It also makes us less practiced in doing. 

Inequality makes us less willing and/or less able to cooperate. Many studies show an inverse relationship between wealth and empathy. Distraction steals the political will to invest in hard maintenance and preparedness.

Why our cities make a disaster of small failures

Think back to the power cut in When the City Stopped. The cascade is instructive because it is mechanical and believable: grid down, pumps down, traffic signals out, public transport stops, refrigerated food rots, air conditioners out, medicines spoil, hospitals using reserves, deliveries collapsing. Add to that modern features that make us uniquely exposed:

• Cashless payment systems
• Most of us don’t grow food, mend roofs, fix mechanical equipment, or purify water. We’ve outsourced many basic skills
• Supply chains run on reliable energy, integrated data systems, tight margins, and narrow sourcing.
• Supermarkets and the distribution centres that service them don’t carry months or even weeks of stock; it’s days or hours
• Rising urbanisation has concentrated people where systems amplify both efficiency and fragility
• Inequality means half the Australian population is one paycheque away from catastrophe, while a few hide behind private security and gated enclaves.

Slow shocks are harder to see coming: the proverbial frog in the pot on the stove. And yet they are already here.

Those features mean a climate shock that hits several major breadbasket regions at once is not just a price spike on the news. It’s a lived reality for millions, who suddenly find the veneer flaking.

What a multi‑breadbasket failure looks like in practice

Imagine extreme heat and drought in several major grain‑producing regions in one season, or maybe it’s that in one location and a harvest-wrecking flood elsewhere. Perhaps, savage storms destroy key logistics infrastructure. For example, this year, Japan has had to buy rice from overseas due to prolonged heat impacts on their rice crop. Prices have soared; schools have reduced rice servings; and restaurants are charging more.

You wind up with a cascade of events leading to widespread shortages. Markets experience price surges that governments try to dampen with inadequate supports. Layer on energy stress in major cities – air conditioning demand so high that parts of the grid fail – and you have refrigeration failing in warehouses and supermarkets. 

Hungry bellies lead to angry and increasingly desperate people. Social services overload. Police and emergency services are stretched thin. People start to queue for basics. Trust frays. In some places, community organisations and mutual aid step in; in others, the gaps are filled by opportunistic actors.

Or perhaps not. The same shock could cement community bonds and democratic institutions, or it could strip them back and reveal predatory behaviours and violence. The veneer peels differently depending on how thickly the society is built in the first place.

Two routes out of a shock

When the veneer is scored, I imagine two distinct outcomes.

1. The thickening route. A shock exposes problems; people and institutions respond by building redundancy. Renewable-powered resilient microgrids keep hospitals, refrigeration, and water pumping running. Local food systems scale up through cooperatives and community gardens. Citizens who know basic skills — repair, food preservation, water treatment — become linchpins. Transparent governance and social protections blunt panic and deter opportunism.

2. The thin‑veneer route. Shortages, blackouts, and sudden unemployment ripple through communities with weak social safety nets. People with resources retreat; those without are left exposed. Misinformation spreads, policing becomes heavier‑handed, and social trust erodes. The story moves toward fragmentation and aggression.

All the technology in the world, hoarded by a few at the expense of the many, will only hasten decline, not buffer it. The deciding factors are social and political: equity, trust, preparedness, and the willingness to invest in non‑sexy maintenance and redundancy.

What practical resilience looks like

I’m a practical guy. I manage projects; I get things done. But I know that underpinning every great project are people and relationships; care, thoughtfulness, and redundancy. So I think of resilience in the same terms:

• Neighbourhoods where people know and look out for one another. Urban environments are designed to promote genuine interactions rather than screen-based exclusion
• Distributed renewable energy and microgrids to contain outages and preserve critical services locally
• Diversified and localised food systems plus strategic reserves to reduce simultaneous exposure to distant breadbaskets
• Skills education that restores basic food production, repair, sanitation, and first aid across the urban population
• Stronger social protection to prevent scarcity from tipping people into destitution and opportunistic crime
• Robust civic institutions that maintain the rule of law and legitimate dispute resolution during stress
• Trusted public information that counters disinformation and helps coordinate response
• Improved identity security, privacy, and AI controls
• A citizenry and government well versed in critical thinking

Some of these are boring, transactional things – maintenance budgets, redundancy in energy and water systems, training and seed banks – but they are what thickens the surface and makes it less likely to tear. And they’re more likely to come when governments are less beholden to vested interests and are given more time to plan and assess the outcomes of their actions, rather than lurching from one election cycle to the next.

We don't need to wait for disasters, or even understand that many are coming, to build resilience. These steps are simply good governance for a good society. 

An ending I can live with

I won’t end with a technocratic checklist or a doomsday tableau. I remember the relief at the end of When the City Stopped: the workers return, the mother is found (having been injured in a car crash), and life resumes. That ending matters because it’s a lesson in contingency: crises are survivable when contingency is planned for, and people act together.

So here’s the soft, practical pitch I keep returning to: the veneer can be thickened. It is built by people who fix things, who teach their neighbours to save seeds, who show up for local emergency meetings, and who value maintenance as much as spectacle. 

If you want one small, personal step, learn one practical skill this year: how to purify water, how to grow and tend a fruit or vegetable crop (even if it’s growing in pots in your window), how to sew or repair clothing, how to identify edible natives and those to avoid. Even better, learn from First Nations people who have experienced their land in all its moods over millennia.

If you want a civic step, get involved in your community. Join a group, start one, be aware of, and resist the subtle influence of corporate sponsors. Pressure local councils to fund redundancy in energy, water, and food logistics and to prioritise social safety nets. Encourage State and Federal governments to fund them adequately as the front line of resilience and adaptation.

The choice is collective and political, but it’s also stubbornly personal. The greener, safer, more resilient civilisation I hope for is made of small practices repeated by many people, looking out for one another. If we start with that, the veneer becomes less fragile, and as the climate crisis deepens, the story we tell our children will be about how we kept each other going, not about how we lost our way.

illuminem Voices is a democratic space presenting the thoughts and opinions of leading Sustainability & Energy writers, their opinions do not necessarily represent those of illuminem.

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