A BRIEF SYNOPSIS

CONTENTS

pachacuti: mankind in the coming re-genesis

In form, pachacuti is fiction. It chronicles the lives of a few key characters from the 1960s to the 2080s, a century dominated by environmental and social decline, the collapse of civilization and re-emergent pockets of primitive society in the aftermath. In function, it is a documentation of current environmental matters and an exploration of our society's incapacity to deal with them.

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It is 2065, in a small post-collapse Pachacuti community. The first radio contact for thirty years has stirred the remote New Zealand islanders from their primitive daily routine. Transmitted by a sister community in the Caribbean, it brings the promise of long awaited expansion and the immediacy of personal risk. It prompts ten year old Evan Fenton to query his origins and his grandfather Elder Fenton, to blow the dust off their plans for the future.

A century earlier, in the 1980s it was a very different world. The Australian Adam Strong was a gifted graduate biologist, sidetracked by a self-destructive passion for volunteer relief work and the personal conflict of having both religious and scientific teachings. Andriess Bakker was an industrialist with a zeal for alternative energy technology and Diederik Bushnell was a perfectionist IT designer with ideals too high to survive in modern commerce. Nuala O’Fallain, was an Irish agnostic and humanist, early mentor and older woman to Strong in his none too gentle social debut. Rowan Cafferkey was a fiery Irishwoman, passionate defender of the world’s poor and Strong’s eventual wife, rescuing him from a downward spiraling battle with ‘the black dog’ of depression. Their personal stories include romance and enlightenment in outback Australia and county Ireland, tragedy and conflict in sub-Saharan Africa and national pride in the industrial development of post-war northern Europe.

Gathered together in Bonn as the 2012 UN conference fails to establish agreement on environmental action, the group realizes that the pace of climatic change outstrips society's ability to adapt and economic collapse amid global social chaos is now unavoidable. Together they set about developing a personal escape strategy, a plan that quickly becomes the foundations of a new social model and develops into a scattering of pachacuti communities that will re-emerge from the Great Collapse. They will be divided geographically but united in a common ideal. The Pachacutis shun the trappings of capitalism and the dogma of blind religious faith. They embrace species survival as their common bond and knowledge as a communal goal rather than a commercial tool. They found their methods on science and reason, their development on needs not wants, and their democracies on true equality, while around them the ever-changing environment demands submission and constant adaptation.

The final chapters follow these future Pachacuti communities through decades of global chaos and the story closes with ocean voyages that bring their people together in Panama, a planned re-emergence phase that aims to organise and recruit other remnant pockets of humanity into the Pachacuti way of living.

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