Above: Recommended reading...
I'd give away my copy, but it's too heavily dog-eared.
"Chance favors the prepared mind." - Louis Pasteur
On top of my SUV ownership, I buy plastic toys/games/etcetera to entertain/distract my kid. There, my secret is out. After swearing my offspring would live a childhood populated only by hand-crafted "Made in Vermont" toys, I've now got a house overflowing with an insane amount of plastic stuff.
In my heart and with a nod to my inner granola girl, I'd love to leap off the grid and insist that my son only watch television as long as he's willing to pedal a bike to generate energy to run it. The junk? Jettisoned. We'd live off the land, just like my grandparents did. Oh, and I'd manage to look fabulous doing this by the way with homemade personal care products.
Alas, with hubby's work and a major investment in what my late mother-in-law described as "a real fine house," this scenario is a distraction. To borrow a phrase from Popeye, "I yam what I yam!" Li'l Mrs. Middle America. Yet each day--in an effort to engage myself in the process of weaning myself off my over-reliance on the petroleum industry--I make a point to admit to myself this simple fact: my current lifestyle is unsustainable.
See, I'm not stupid. Those fossil fuels are gonna run out. It's the 7-11 rule: If you put more straws into the Big Gulp, the soda just goes away more quickly. (Don't think about this analogy much or it'll fail... but I still like it.) With this darn drought and San Antonio busting at it's seams, we might see end of water soon, too. A few hundred miles away, a country is on the verge of exploding, potentially creating all kinds of socio-economic fallout (and violence) in my own 'hood.
Nevertheless, while I've got enough optimistic faith in humanity's ability to pull itself out of a jam, I can't quite swallow the "we're five seconds from Armageddon" mindset found on society's extremes, left and right. As I learned in my college days, millenialists tend to bemuse folks rather than persuade.
Maybe it's narcissistic of me, but I think that author David Holmgren had me and my over-educated, mildly neurotic kind in mind when he wrote "Future Scenarios: How Communities Can Adapt to Peak Oil and Climate Change" (White River, VT.: Chelsea Green, 2009). Bless his li'l Aussie heart, the permaculture pioneer gives folks like me a nifty breakdown of four possible futures resulting from the simultaneous declines of oil and our climate. I'm not going to go into detail about them because, frankly, I think you should read the book. Suffice it to say that these scenarios range from cataclysm to more subtle changes that all yield the same result eventually: TEOTWAWKI.
What I value about Holmgren's book is that, for him, TEOTWAWKI is not necessarily the same as Armageddon. One of the models suggests something akin to a granola girl's nirvana, complete with participatory democracy (or, less optimistically, neo-feudalism--which might hold some appeal for the Society for Creative Anachronism crowd). Another model involves a shift to new, innovative energy sources that keeps much of our current way of life intact. The other two models are, frankly, hair-raising.
Having laid out these four futures, Holmgren describes how these models may emerge "nested." In other words, as change arrives, we will experience different outcomes and need to adopt different strategies depending upon where we reside on the planet.
This, for me, was the biggest take-away:
If TEOTWAWKI is looming, then we have to recognize
that we don't really all live in the same world in the first place.
Allow me to give a simplistic explanation: ask a gardener for advice on the Internet, and she'll want to know in which zone you reside. That's because I can plant things in Zone 8b weeks before my pal could plant the same variety in, say, Zone 5. Another example: Because the national evening news comes on at 5:30PM here in the Central Time Zone, it's less central (pun intended) to middle America's lives because we're usually commuting while it's on the tube.
These things are trivial in light of the grave realities Holmgren suggests we might face, but they do remind us that solutions to save us from ourselves cannot be cookie cutter. They have to be regionalized, localized. Pitch a fit all y'all want about the Mexican avocados in your North Carolina grocery store, but the reality is that part of Mexico is, in fact, pretty close to me. Which is why as that nation falls apart, I have reason to be alarmed right now, not in some imagined future. Big City could run out of food soon if (when?) Mexico explodes.
These things are trivial in light of the grave realities Holmgren suggests we might face, but they do remind us that solutions to save us from ourselves cannot be cookie cutter. They have to be regionalized, localized. Pitch a fit all y'all want about the Mexican avocados in your North Carolina grocery store, but the reality is that part of Mexico is, in fact, pretty close to me. Which is why as that nation falls apart, I have reason to be alarmed right now, not in some imagined future. Big City could run out of food soon if (when?) Mexico explodes.
To his credit and as the title of his book suggests, Holmgren offers a collection of rather general strategies for each of his four models. For me, these suggestions are starting points for consideration and discussion by specific communities. As such, this book should be required reading for a range of politicians, business leaders and concerned voters--even the ones that roll their eyes at the mere suggestion that global climate change is happening.
Did you notice something? I skirted around Holmgren's discussion about peak oil. That's unfortunate because the author does a fine job of outlining the problem, attending controversies, and conflicting POVs. Yet from where I sit it's the other matters...water depletion, the world's population explosion, financial instability, a crumbling infrastructure, and food insecurity/safety issues...that we'll feel first here in Central Texas.
That doesn't get me off the hook from my need to curtail my cavalier use of fossil fuels. Nope, far from it. And yet I'm not sure that all of us wandering off into the backwoods to bake cookies in our new, homemade solar ovens is going to do it, either. What this book... and my own self-reflection... is making me wonder while driving down I-10 is how we tackle bigger questions:
Do we have enough time/resources/strategies to educate hordes of people--the ones that aren't "members of the choir"--to nurture the communal bonds, life skills, and stockpiles in preparation for whatever the future may hold, including an extended recession?
And how do we start to do that in an appealing way, one that aims to seduce people into the fold rather than dragging them kicking and screaming into discussions about where we're headed. We can't be preachy. Or strident. Or holier-than-thou. And we have to kind of make it, well, enjoyable (which is not exactly the same as "fun").
Finally, let me add a little something by way of a footnote. My academic credentials include a couple of history degrees from (cue the bugles!) The Greatest Public University in America. From the pursuit of these degrees, I learned a few essential lessons, including this: TEOTWAWKI is the only real constant. Any sense of cultural or social homeostasis is temporary.
Some people may find that terrifying. Personally, I think it's reassuring. Perhaps Holmgren would agree.
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