Touted as the hundred year project, visionary architect Herman Sorgel’s project was insane, even by Nazi standards, and would have created a new supercontinent, limitless renewable energy, millions of hectares of new farmlands and development opportunities. All of it by doing one thing - damming the Mediterranean.
The VOLKSHALLE (People's Hall) as rendered in the Man in the High Castle. The Volkshalle was yet another Nazi project that never saw the light of day. But if realised, it would have been the epicentre of the Nazi Reich.
Recently, I had wrapped up the second season of the Amazon Prime original series 'The Man in the High Castle'. The series is a dystopian alternate history fiction set in the 1960s, showing a world where the Nazis have won the Second World War and have conquered much of the world, thus establishing the Nazi Reich. Despite the dark setting, we are able to see the stunning advances made by the Nazis in science, medicine, infrastructure and technology. In one of the episodes, a fictional character mentions Atlantropa, and how it would define the Nazi legacy and influence human development for centuries to come. That set the wheels turning for me. Combined with a new book on sustainability I was reading, I knew I had struck gold for my next piece. I could not help but envision – Would this project have been humanity’s best possible solution for our sustainability issues?
21st Century Problems
Nine and a half billion people. That’s the number of people that will be living on earth by the year 2050. If you feel the Mumbai local trains are crowded now, talk to me in 20-30 years when the city’s population is expected to double to 42 million. But even in this scenario, your biggest concern will not be the crowds, but the strain on resources the world will be facing at that point in future. This might seem like one of those dystopian scenarios one might see in a doomsday movie. But, and as much as I hate being the preacher of doom here, it is the truth. The facts, predictions and models pertaining to the same are rather unsettling. Currently, humanity is facing four big challenges that are vital to our sustenance and survival on this planet.
The first of course is the climate, or rather the climate change we’ll be facing in the coming decades. The rising carbon dioxide levels are increasing the global temperatures and thus, melting polar ice caps and rising sea levels, making substantial changes in long-established climatic conditions, wind-ocean currents and destroying the delicate and fragile ecosystem that supports us. Despite creating climate accords and pacts, many countries are more interested in pursuing short term economic benefits and rapid, unsustainable development. A large number of prominent coastal cities like San Francisco, Tokyo, Shanghai etc. will have sizable chunks of their current land area under water by mid- century. Remember what I had mentioned above, about Mumbai train crowds in 2050? Well you can forget about that because at this point, a good chunk of south Mumbai will be submerged under water, so chances are that the daily commute will involve a boat ride to office (how cool will that be?).
The second most important problem we’ll be facing is energy. And strangely, it’s not quite a lack of it, but its viability vis-à-vis the environment and sustainability. Take a look at this table below, it shows the EROEI (Energy Returned on Energy Invested) values of various fuels:
EROEI of various renewable and non-renewable energy resources. Notice the decline with respect to different time periods, for the same energy source.
As you can see, the economic feasibility and energy outputs of the fossil fuel trinity is the best there is and for all our talk on renewables, seven out of every ten calories consumed on earth still are fossil fuels. Going by the current estimates, we have an estimated 53 years, 52 years and almost 150 years worth of known reserves of oil, natural gas and coal respectively. So, we have enough energy to see us well into the 23rd century, and this is keeping in mind the increasing population and consumption patterns. So what exactly is the problem?
The problem sadly, is tied to environmental damage. Forget centuries, we can’t afford to continue burning fossil fuels over the next 20 years. The increasing carbon dioxide levels will cause irreparable damage to our planet.
The third problem we’ll be facing is in regards to water. There will be so many people on earth that the rate of water demand will far outstrip the water replenishment rate. This estimate also assumes the industrial and agricultural products that consume water per person. Large sections of society will face varying levels of water shortages or scarcity, depending on their locations, living standards and privileges.
And the final problem we face is in regards to food. Agricultural production is the single largest consumer of water in the world, with industrial usage coming a distant second. Since we’ll be facing water shortages too at this point, feeding our population will become a source of concern worldwide.
Enter the Nazis and Herman Sorgel
A modern Infographic representation of the proposed Atlantropa project. The project is massive in scale, even by today’s advanced technical standards.
The Atlantropa project involved damming the entire Mediterranean Sea and creating more land area for a whole host of infrastructure and development projects, altogether providing employment to tens of millions of people. But the entire project was easier said than done. The project was supposed to take place in three phases and involved the construction of three dams - the first one across the Strait of Gibraltar, the second one across the Dardanelles, and the third and final one between Sicily and Tunisia, each containing gigantic hydroelectric power plants producing colossal amounts of electricity enough to power the whole of Europe, Africa and at least half of Asia. In its final state, the Mediterranean would be converted into two basins, with the western part lowered by 100 meters and the eastern part by 200 meters, thereby reclaiming a total of 66 million hectares from the sea – an area larger than the country of France. Later plans for Atlantropa included two dams across the Congo River and the creation of a Chad and Congo sea. The completion of the project in its entirety would have taken 150-200 years, creating vast new commercial and trade opportunities, not to mention millions of new jobs, farmlands, cheap and abundant electricity and would vastly improve connectivity between the Continents through the laying of Rail lines and roadways across the Dams. In one fell swoop, the project attempted to solve the problems of world peace, unemployment, energy shortages, food scarcity and living space, all the while keeping climate damage minimal.
Would it be possible?
The project was envisioned at a time when middle-eastern oil and other fossil fuel reserves were yet to be discovered and utilised. While excellent on paper, the economics and logistics of running such a massive project is unthinkable. The resources needed and involved would be astronomical. Keeping all of it going for close to two hundred years is next to impossible. And ironically, the mass industrial mobilisation involved in the construction would offset the same climatic emissions and damage that they hoped to prevent with this project.
Then there is the political feasibility of such a project. It would only be possible in a dictatorship, where all sides of the Mediterranean have been conquered and are under the control of a single person or government, a possibility if the Nazis were successful in their conquest for power. Dams are also known to cause widespread ecological damage. A project of this scale would destroy entire ecosystems.
Despite all of this, one can’t help but wonder that if this project was even partially realised, would we be able to generate power, food and water for the next two billion without compromising our climate?
Georgie Sam Shibu
References-
2) Sustainability: a Comprehensive Foundation (Theis and Tomkin, Eds.)
Commentaires