The Machine, part 2: what can you do if it really does break down?
Suppose it really is true... that the
accumulation of environmental, energy, and monetary crises catches up with us in
the next year or two, and we experience a significant decline or collapse? What
can you do?
Carla Emery, author of The Encyclopedia of
Country Living, has a succinct list of suggestions (scroll down to the
bottom of the page); while targeted at folks who already live in the country, I
think it is broadly applicable even in the
city.
1. Be frugal. Choose thrift over waste, spiritual over material. Get out of debt. Sell your mortgaged home. Use the equity to buy housing that you can own free and clear, "be it ever so humble."
2. Be healthy. Grow as much of your own food as possible without herbicides, pesticides or artificial fertilizers. Every year, try to make your garden bigger and more productive than the year before. Sell [or give away to friends - Kurt] your surplus food production. Drink pure water (filter if needed).
3. Choose sustainability. Install renewable energy substitutes for all propane-using appliances. If you burn wood, grow a woodlot. Learn solar cooking and get [or make] a solar cooker. Install a rainwater collection system with a storage tank. Install a compost toilet. Use all the homestead-produced humanure to enrich your soil. Save seeds, or let selected plants self-seed. Reject embalming and choose a "green" burial.
4. Be self-reliant. Store food. Feed your livestock homegrown food (vegetables, grass, hay) as much as possible. Ride a bicycle. Or a horse. Or drive a motorcycle, or hybrid, or electric vehicle (with batteries charged by surplus power from your private renewable energy system). Learn to use hand tools (versus power tools).
5. Be networked. Practice life-long learning. Get to know your neighbors and make yourself useful to them. Lobby for enlightened local zoning. Encourage development of renewable power in your community.
Ok, so perhaps you don't have livestock. Or perhaps your shady yard or your landlord make gardening impractical. There are still many, many suggestions in the list above that apply universally to anyone: choose frugality. Learn to use hand tools. Be self-reliant, insofar as possible. Practice life-long learning. And so on.
I also like the advice that a young Seattlite named Ran Prieur has for us, which he calls 10 very difficult things you can do to survive the crash and save the Earth . Number one on his list is Abandon the World:
...In the next five or ten years, the US military will be humiliated, the dollar will collapse, the housing bubble will burst, tens of millions of Americans will be destitute, food, fuel, and manufactured items will get really expensive, and most of us will begin withdrawal from the industrial lifestyle. SUV's will change their function from transportation to shelter. We will not be able to imagine how we ever thought calories were bad. Smart people will stop exterminating the dandelions in their yard and start eating them. Ornamental gardens will go the way of fruit hats and bloomers. In the cities, pigeon populations will decline.
This is not the "doom" scenario. I'm not saying anything about death camps, super-plagues, asteroid impacts, solar flares, nuclear war, an instant ice age, or a runaway greenhouse effect. This is the mildest realistic scenario, the slow crash: energy prices will rise, the middle class will fall into the lower class, economies will collapse, nations will fight desperate wars over resources, in the worst places people will starve, and climate disasters will get worse. Your area might resemble the botched conquest of Iraq, or the depression in Argentina, or the fall of Rome, or even a crusty Ecotopia. My young anarchist friends are already packing themselves into unheated houses and getting around by bicycle, and they're noticeably happier than my friends with full time jobs. We just have to make the mental adjustment. Those who don't, who cling to the world they grew up in, numbing themselves and waiting for it all to blow over, will have a miserable time, and if people die, they will be the first. Save some of them if you can, but don't let them drag you down. The first thing they teach lifeguards is how to break holds.
In other words, accept reality when it stares you in the face. Let go of illusions that we can fix the system with more technology, or cleaner politics, or inner spirituality. Don't stop working on any of those things, but recognize that our lifestyles and system are fundamentally flawed and unlikely to last. His other really important contribution, I think, is in step 4: think of yourself as being here to help.
...In the culture of Empire, we are trained to think of ourselves as here to "succeed," to build wealth and status and walls around ourselves, to get what we desire, to win in games where winning is given meaning by others losing. It is a simple and profound shift to think of ourselves instead as here to help -- to serve the greatest good that we can perceive in whatever way is right in front of us.
You don't have to sacrifice yourself for others, or put others "above" you. Why is it so hard to see each other as equals? And it's OK to have a good time. In fact, having a good time is what most helping comes down to -- the key is that you're focused on the good times of all life everywhere including your "self," instead of getting caught up in egocentric comparison games that aren't even that fun.
Defining yourself as here to help is a prerequisite for doing some of the other things on this list properly. If you're here to win you're not saving anything but your own wretched ass for a few additional years. If you're dropping out to win you're likely to be stepping on other outsiders, instead of throwing a rope to bring more people out alive. And as the system breaks down, people here to win will waste their energy fighting each other for scraps, while people here to help will build self-sufficient communities capable of generating what they need to survive.
In the real world, being here to help is easier and less stressful, because you will frequently be in a situation where you can't win, but you will almost never be in a situation where there's nothing you can do to help. Being here to win only makes sense in an artificial world rigged so you can win all the time. Thousands of years ago only kings were in that position, and they reacted by massacring all enemies and bathing in blood. Now, through a perfect conjunction of Empire and oil energy, we just put the entire American middle class in that position for 50 years. No one should be surprised that we're so stupid, selfish, cowardly, and irresponsible. But younger generations are already getting poorer and smarter.
Some of Ran's other suggestions include learning skills, finding your tribe, getting on some land, and making a conscious effort to save part of the Earth.
Catherine Austin Fitts has made it her life's work to tell people that our money system is part of the problem. In a way, I think that she is also telling us to let go of the world as it is mythologized by the mainstream media. She likens the dominant paradigm of how money works to a parasitic tapeworm, and she encourages each of us to disengage from the tapeworm in her essay "Coming Clean: Building a Wonderful World from the Inside Out." For a woman focused on money in our lives, she starts out in a surprising direction: Be Divine.
Pray and meditate or otherwise connect into divine love, intelligence and energy
Envision the world you want to invent and live in, and your role in creating it
Create and practice affirmations to make it so
Give praise and thanks for the blessings in your life
Although she covers many excellent points, among them building community, respecting nature, unplugging from corporate media, being aware of how our surroundings and homes nurture us, it is in the financial sphere that her advice really hits home: vote with your money.
“Voting with your money” starts with reviewing all of our transactions to see where changes can reflect a more integrated understanding of our best and highest self interest.
Many of us appreciate that government and business corruption is a problem. Yet we continue to “vote with our money” for the very banks and companies that facilitate and engage in these corrupt practices.
Steven Lagavulin's excellent blog, www.deconsumption.com , has an essay on what you can do to prepare for the future society in which we no longer live in consumption mode. Not surprisingly, he echoes many of the same themes of the prior writers: get your financial house in order, start moving towards a sustainable lifestyle, strengthen your network of friends and community, start thinking about flexible responses to crises that may develop. He also goes further, and recommends that those with resources consider a purchase of arable land - in the long term, land that generates food will be high demand. I also like the way that he ends his essay, which I will reproduce below:
Perhaps the best advice I know is to sincerely strive to more and more fully appreciate the life you have right now. It’s difficult to become aware of all the ways is which our society and lifestyle are out of balance without feeling anxious, angry, cynical or just helpless. As material progress goes, we're living in the greatest era in human history, and have a lot to be thankful for. Just because consumption has to end doesn’t mean we’ll be returning to the Stone Age. Man has shown a remarkable adaptability to changing conditions of life, and if you could speak to someone living in the "Dark Ages" I’m positive they’d feel every bit as complacent about their lot in life as anyone you speak to today. Everything is relative. But there is truly transcendent wisdom in the adage: "Hope for the best. Prepare for the worst. Accept whatever comes."
1. Be frugal. Choose thrift over waste, spiritual over material. Get out of debt. Sell your mortgaged home. Use the equity to buy housing that you can own free and clear, "be it ever so humble."
2. Be healthy. Grow as much of your own food as possible without herbicides, pesticides or artificial fertilizers. Every year, try to make your garden bigger and more productive than the year before. Sell [or give away to friends - Kurt] your surplus food production. Drink pure water (filter if needed).
3. Choose sustainability. Install renewable energy substitutes for all propane-using appliances. If you burn wood, grow a woodlot. Learn solar cooking and get [or make] a solar cooker. Install a rainwater collection system with a storage tank. Install a compost toilet. Use all the homestead-produced humanure to enrich your soil. Save seeds, or let selected plants self-seed. Reject embalming and choose a "green" burial.
4. Be self-reliant. Store food. Feed your livestock homegrown food (vegetables, grass, hay) as much as possible. Ride a bicycle. Or a horse. Or drive a motorcycle, or hybrid, or electric vehicle (with batteries charged by surplus power from your private renewable energy system). Learn to use hand tools (versus power tools).
5. Be networked. Practice life-long learning. Get to know your neighbors and make yourself useful to them. Lobby for enlightened local zoning. Encourage development of renewable power in your community.
Ok, so perhaps you don't have livestock. Or perhaps your shady yard or your landlord make gardening impractical. There are still many, many suggestions in the list above that apply universally to anyone: choose frugality. Learn to use hand tools. Be self-reliant, insofar as possible. Practice life-long learning. And so on.
I also like the advice that a young Seattlite named Ran Prieur has for us, which he calls 10 very difficult things you can do to survive the crash and save the Earth . Number one on his list is Abandon the World:
...In the next five or ten years, the US military will be humiliated, the dollar will collapse, the housing bubble will burst, tens of millions of Americans will be destitute, food, fuel, and manufactured items will get really expensive, and most of us will begin withdrawal from the industrial lifestyle. SUV's will change their function from transportation to shelter. We will not be able to imagine how we ever thought calories were bad. Smart people will stop exterminating the dandelions in their yard and start eating them. Ornamental gardens will go the way of fruit hats and bloomers. In the cities, pigeon populations will decline.
This is not the "doom" scenario. I'm not saying anything about death camps, super-plagues, asteroid impacts, solar flares, nuclear war, an instant ice age, or a runaway greenhouse effect. This is the mildest realistic scenario, the slow crash: energy prices will rise, the middle class will fall into the lower class, economies will collapse, nations will fight desperate wars over resources, in the worst places people will starve, and climate disasters will get worse. Your area might resemble the botched conquest of Iraq, or the depression in Argentina, or the fall of Rome, or even a crusty Ecotopia. My young anarchist friends are already packing themselves into unheated houses and getting around by bicycle, and they're noticeably happier than my friends with full time jobs. We just have to make the mental adjustment. Those who don't, who cling to the world they grew up in, numbing themselves and waiting for it all to blow over, will have a miserable time, and if people die, they will be the first. Save some of them if you can, but don't let them drag you down. The first thing they teach lifeguards is how to break holds.
In other words, accept reality when it stares you in the face. Let go of illusions that we can fix the system with more technology, or cleaner politics, or inner spirituality. Don't stop working on any of those things, but recognize that our lifestyles and system are fundamentally flawed and unlikely to last. His other really important contribution, I think, is in step 4: think of yourself as being here to help.
...In the culture of Empire, we are trained to think of ourselves as here to "succeed," to build wealth and status and walls around ourselves, to get what we desire, to win in games where winning is given meaning by others losing. It is a simple and profound shift to think of ourselves instead as here to help -- to serve the greatest good that we can perceive in whatever way is right in front of us.
You don't have to sacrifice yourself for others, or put others "above" you. Why is it so hard to see each other as equals? And it's OK to have a good time. In fact, having a good time is what most helping comes down to -- the key is that you're focused on the good times of all life everywhere including your "self," instead of getting caught up in egocentric comparison games that aren't even that fun.
Defining yourself as here to help is a prerequisite for doing some of the other things on this list properly. If you're here to win you're not saving anything but your own wretched ass for a few additional years. If you're dropping out to win you're likely to be stepping on other outsiders, instead of throwing a rope to bring more people out alive. And as the system breaks down, people here to win will waste their energy fighting each other for scraps, while people here to help will build self-sufficient communities capable of generating what they need to survive.
In the real world, being here to help is easier and less stressful, because you will frequently be in a situation where you can't win, but you will almost never be in a situation where there's nothing you can do to help. Being here to win only makes sense in an artificial world rigged so you can win all the time. Thousands of years ago only kings were in that position, and they reacted by massacring all enemies and bathing in blood. Now, through a perfect conjunction of Empire and oil energy, we just put the entire American middle class in that position for 50 years. No one should be surprised that we're so stupid, selfish, cowardly, and irresponsible. But younger generations are already getting poorer and smarter.
Some of Ran's other suggestions include learning skills, finding your tribe, getting on some land, and making a conscious effort to save part of the Earth.
Catherine Austin Fitts has made it her life's work to tell people that our money system is part of the problem. In a way, I think that she is also telling us to let go of the world as it is mythologized by the mainstream media. She likens the dominant paradigm of how money works to a parasitic tapeworm, and she encourages each of us to disengage from the tapeworm in her essay "Coming Clean: Building a Wonderful World from the Inside Out." For a woman focused on money in our lives, she starts out in a surprising direction: Be Divine.
Pray and meditate or otherwise connect into divine love, intelligence and energy
Envision the world you want to invent and live in, and your role in creating it
Create and practice affirmations to make it so
Give praise and thanks for the blessings in your life
Although she covers many excellent points, among them building community, respecting nature, unplugging from corporate media, being aware of how our surroundings and homes nurture us, it is in the financial sphere that her advice really hits home: vote with your money.
“Voting with your money” starts with reviewing all of our transactions to see where changes can reflect a more integrated understanding of our best and highest self interest.
Many of us appreciate that government and business corruption is a problem. Yet we continue to “vote with our money” for the very banks and companies that facilitate and engage in these corrupt practices.
Steven Lagavulin's excellent blog, www.deconsumption.com , has an essay on what you can do to prepare for the future society in which we no longer live in consumption mode. Not surprisingly, he echoes many of the same themes of the prior writers: get your financial house in order, start moving towards a sustainable lifestyle, strengthen your network of friends and community, start thinking about flexible responses to crises that may develop. He also goes further, and recommends that those with resources consider a purchase of arable land - in the long term, land that generates food will be high demand. I also like the way that he ends his essay, which I will reproduce below:
Perhaps the best advice I know is to sincerely strive to more and more fully appreciate the life you have right now. It’s difficult to become aware of all the ways is which our society and lifestyle are out of balance without feeling anxious, angry, cynical or just helpless. As material progress goes, we're living in the greatest era in human history, and have a lot to be thankful for. Just because consumption has to end doesn’t mean we’ll be returning to the Stone Age. Man has shown a remarkable adaptability to changing conditions of life, and if you could speak to someone living in the "Dark Ages" I’m positive they’d feel every bit as complacent about their lot in life as anyone you speak to today. Everything is relative. But there is truly transcendent wisdom in the adage: "Hope for the best. Prepare for the worst. Accept whatever comes."
Posted: Thu - April 21, 2005 at 01:36 PM
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Published On: Mar 26, 2006 12:30 PM
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Published On: Mar 26, 2006 12:30 PM