Guest Post GW in Canada – Wednesday, April 20th, 2011

I recently read this article posted on another website that I write a regional blog for, CollapseNet, and it says so many things that are in my heart and mind, and says them so well, that I wanted to offer it here. You may not agree with everything John is saying and I don’t necessarily see everything exactly as he does but I felt his writing about our disconnection with the production of things and each other was simply brilliant. I hope you do too…..I’ve added italics to sections or paragraphs that I resonate deeply with, to words that fit my feelings so closely I could have written them myself. Thanks for reading….Iris

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I’d like to share some more thoughts with you. They’re a little scattered as they touch on many issues. But the common thread running through them, I think, is how I’m trying to make sense of what is happening today in this collapse-world we are facing.

In my last post, I described a curve representing my diminishinganxiety and a rising sense of ‘serenity’ thanks to some basic preparations I have in place, such as a food and water supply. Since then, I realize there is more to it than that – there isn’t just one emotion or state but rather a whole range of states, feelings and emotions. I see my mood; attitude and perspective evolve and fluctuate – not unlike Brent Crude –subject to my speculations about the future.

I follow the unfolding events as closely as I can, as we all do, but there is so much going on now, it is difficult and time-consuming to follow everything in detail and understand things properly – the terrible events in Japan, the unfolding MENA situation and other crises and protest around the world.

It is also difficult, or impossible, to see how things will develop beyond a few days’ time. I realize I’m seeking to establish a timeframe in my mind for the moment things will unravel – perhaps this is an attempt to reassure myself. Will it be in two weeks (a nuclear conflict in the Middle East), two months (oil and food supply chain rupture globally), or in two years (as Mayan proponents would have us believe)?

But I can neither establish a timeframe, nor reassure myself completely. Between reading drafts, I caught Carolyn Baker’s article on Uncertainty, which is especially poignant for me now.  And in a sense, and quite perversely, I catch myself feeling almost ‘impatient’ for IT to happen, whatever IT is. The wait is agonizing. In some ways I just want it to be over and done with.

So strange a thought to have – impatient for the economy and society to collapse? Then I think about how we are poisoning the planet, and I think if only we could just stop – stop cutting down the rainforest, stop polluting our drinking water with pesticides, stop burning oil for electricity so that factories can make Barbie dolls. But I know we can’t, because we are all in the System and the System has its own rules, its own power and will keep going until it breaks. The break will be painful. We are all on this ship. You could ask the captain to change course (if there were a captain), and if there were, he’d have to listen to what everyone wanted, and most people just want to keep going in the same direction. You could jump off, but that water is cold, and you might not make it. Safest to run aground and climb down off the wreck, perhaps.
In preparing for the coming time, I envisage different scenarios for how things will disintegrate: will it be like Croatia or Rwanda where members of different ethnic groups kill neighbors they lived alongside for years? Will it be a slow or rapid transition?

One thinker I saw recently on Youtube said that in a very short period, all oil supply will stop abruptly, and suddenly all movement and contact between countries and regions will cease – cut off from each other – no trains, planes, telephone – just bicycles and horses. Back to the Middle Ages, with unchangeable iphones on the shelf and fuelless cars parked in the driveway. That could be ‘okay’ if it were handled in the right way, and people reacted calmly and intelligently, working together. The pessimistic part of my mind that had until now only imagined scenarios of doom and gloom is now making way for other types of scenario. The Japanese have shown us that dignity, solidarity, community, calm and caring can prevail over panic, selfishness, inhumanity and chaos. We can choose how we react to this.

I saw a video posted on Collapsenet the other day of a woman, interviewed on a national US news channel, who’d been preparing. She had a year’s supply of food, wind up radio and so forth. “But won’t everybody bang down your door?” asked the interviewer. “Well everybody knows where I live, and I’ll just share it with them.” This kind of altruism is salutary and will help us get through this humanely.

As I say, my thoughts are a little scattered, but there is so much to get one’s head around. Everything we know, the society we grew up in and way of life we’ve all got used to will soon come to an end. That’s a big one to deal with…I can understand why some people don’t want to face up to it.

I recently had the courage to write a long letter to my mother and sister explaining how I see things in the future, and I talked to my brother directly, too. They didn’t run away or call me crazy as I feared, but listened. They didn’t necessarily agree, but they were receptive. They know me to be quite sensible and I think this helped them take me seriously. Maybe I’ve sown some seeds, and as things unfold, they’ll start to come round.

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A ‘shift in consciousness’ is often referred to these days, and I’ve wondered what that meant.

Is it a full realization of what we are doing to our planet, leading to a radical change in behavior?
Is it about working towards a closer relationship with the Earth?
Is it about going back to our roots, a way of life we used to have?
Or taking elements of those past ways of living, mixed with current ways of living, in a Venus Project type environment?
Is it about reconnecting with each other and with ourselves? Re-establishing local communities?

I’d like to digress a little if I may, before returning to the question above, because I wonder how it is that we arrived at this point.
Collapse is a rupture; an external or internal shock causes it – a dysfunctioning of an organism or structure. Healthy organisms do not just break down and die. So something that is underlying in the way we are living, or the way we view the world, has been eating away at us, at our foundations. Of course, peak oil is real, but is it not the symptom? Something within us allowed us to get to this point, knowingly.

I think the answer has something to do with connection and disconnection.
Technology is wondrous, but it creates distance. From a human point of view it surreptitiously allows us to accept the idea that it is okay to be far away from the ones we love – so long as we can call them or email them from time to time. The telegram, train, radio, motorcar, telephone, plane, television, and internet allow us to travel physically and on the ether – they help us keep in touch, but they also create geographical distance between people.

I recently started using Skype video conferencing with family members after resisting it for some time. It is actually quite brilliant in many ways. The person is almost in the room with you – almost, but they’re not. The advert for Skype shows four people –each, alone, in one corner of a computer screen – celebrating somebody’s birthday ‘together’, and each wearing a paper hat and holding up a candle. There is something quite sad about that I feel. Most cell phone and internet technology advertising tells us that by using their product, we’ll ‘stay connected’ with the ones we love. We’re anything but. It is only an illusion, or an inadequate semblance of proximity we once had.

I’m not saying everything was rosy when we all lived in villages together – there was surely much feuding and conflict. But to be able to draw a fair comparison, we’d need to look at what the feuds were about (property? ownership perhaps?…) – but in any case the relationships were real and tangible.

It’s occurring to me more than ever, the faster things get, and the more electronic things become, how human interaction is decreasing. It’s insipid.

I take my own products from the supermarket shelves (as opposed to the grocer of olden times who would get them for you) I can self-scan my shopping without the need for a cashier, get in my car (in my own private space) drive through the toll (the human having been replaced with a machine) etc etc etc. In fact I could almost go through the whole day without speaking to a single person if I wanted, all in the name of efficiency.

To return to the question above – is consciousness shift necessarily about going back to the Middle Ages or Primitive Living, and is that the only way to live and respect the planet? I really don’t know.

Many native peoples today still have this relationship. In Europe we began to lose it once we ceased to be hunter gatherers. The Celts still had it, a deep respect for and relationship with Mother Earth then came the Romanization and civilization of Europe and the process of urbanization, civilization and disconnection continued. The more people there are around, the less we know each one of them.

But surely we haven’t come this far, ten thousand years of human history to wind up back at the beginning? Not that that bothers me personally necessarily. I could quite happily live without the car, internet and phone, if everyone else did. As I mentioned previously, I’ve been working on primitive skills for some time now, to help prepare for collapse: trapping, tracking, hide tanning, primitive cooking techniques, flint napping, bow and arrow making, edible and medicinal plants and so on.

But the whole venture seems a little pointless in a way – to have come all this way, to end like this. To re-learn what we once knew and then forgot.
If we manage to learn the right lessons from all of this, turn it around, live in harmony once more like our ancestors did, will our children’s children’s children forget and repeat the same mistakes we are making?
We need to somehow weave these lessons into the very fabric of what we pass onto the next generation. Some failsafe way of making them remember.

After my family’s recent move from the city to the country, we’re fortunate to have a local farm production outlet nearby. It’s really something to meet the people who grow the fruit and veg I put on my plate, who rear and breed the livestock for the meat we eat.

More than ever, I am of the opinion that unless we can see where things come from, who made them and what with, I believe we cannot fully appreciate their true value. If this is the case, we subsequently lose respect for, and begin to take these things for granted.

The distance I mentioned above is not therefore just about relationships between people and people, but between people and things…

I have never yet been in a true survival situation, but I often practice the individual skills necessary to be able to cope in one, for example shelter building and fire-making. There are many ways to make fire without modern methods, but, making a simple bowdrill fire by friction typically requires the use of a knife and ready-made cordage. When I go for a walk in the woods, I take these two basic things with me, for I know I can always start a fire relatively easily.

At advanced survival courses at the Tracker School, we are encouraged to practice making our own knives from flint or stone, and our own cordage from plant material. I can and I have, but I know just how hard it is and how much work is involved to make my fire-starting kit. To find the right rock, to nap it into a ‘blade’, to cleave a branch in two for the fireboard, to carve a notch with this dull stone ‘blade’- to find nettle plants, to cut off the stinging leaves, to leave the stems to dry for three days, to pound the stems, remove the pith and retrieve the fibers, to weave them into string, to begin the fire-making friction process, then have the string snap on you sometimes, and have to do it all again! It is time-consuming, painful and laborious, but incredibly satisfying and rewarding.

So when I go out with a knife and a piece of string, I know the value of these two things in a way that I never did before, and I know how much easier my life just got by having them. With my knife I can whittle wood into tools and trap parts, cut cordage, skin and gut an animal, carve a digging stick and endless other uses. Try doing all that with your fingers and fingernails and you realize how indispensable these things are and how far we’ve come with technology, and how dependent we are on it.
And when I’ve slept out in my shelter, no sleeping bag in -1°C, in a pile of leaves, boy do I appreciate coming inside the next morning, a hot shower and a cup of steaming cocoa heated up in the microwave!

I’m not saying we necessarily have to experience extreme hardship to appreciate what we have, but going without and experiencing difficulty certainly help us to. Always having things easy – light at the flick of a switch, food at the opening of the fridge, or a phone call to the pizza delivery guy, a car to go wherever we want whenever we want (and endless gasoline to run it) certainly diminish our ability to see what it took to bring those things to us.

I have a mobile phone. Who doesn’t today? But I don’t know how it was made, what parts are inside. If I crack it open, I don’t understand how it is put together nor what the function of each part is. Even the assembly line worker (if human) doesn’t know beyond their particular stage of the manufacturing process how to make a complete mobile phone. And I imagine that even the designer(s) probably can’t make a phone with their own hands from start to finish.

The increased complexity of things and of systems is leading us further down this road of not knowing where things come from, nor how they are made. We only ever know part of the chain. And this lack of knowledge impedes our ability to see the effects of our actions on the world, which are further down the chain (pollution etc) or further up the chain (pollution etc also) – by buying a particular product, we are not only creating demand for products yet to be made for other people, but also causing harmful industrial practices ‘upriver’ that are associated with them, which we are often unaware of.

I teach English as a foreign language. Some time ago I had a student who sold electrical household appliances for a large firm. He went to visit their supplier in China and during the factory visit he saw workers dipping components in acid baths with their bare hands. When I bought my washing machine, I didn’t see this part of the chain. If I had been fully aware, I wouldn’t have bought it. But what can you buy today that doesn’t have some unethical practice attached to it? And if I’m totally honest, even knowing that, I still buy electrical products, because my need for them (plus the fact that I am not confronted with the reality of the consequences) is stronger that my vague notion that someone somewhere might (or might not) be suffering as a result.

Many farmers spray GM crops with pesticides for sale to people in far off places who they’ll never meet. If they sold those products locally and their neighbors and family started getting sick, they would be unable to continue using those methods from a moral and ethical point of view. Again we are back to the question of disconnection. On CollapseNet, it is said that we will return to a local resource-based economy. What will or should it look like?

I don’t think that we have to go back to a point on the road where we are pre-civilization (primitive skills and living is not for everyone) but perhaps a scenario in which we know how to work the land, know how to work metal, leather, build houses from local wood, rear livestock, cook our own food and so on would be a good place to be again.

Perhaps the road doesn’t have to be a straight line that leads to another place, but a loop, or a spiral– all the things we (mankind) have learnt in all the fields of knowledge, we can keep with us on our journey, our walk, which leads us back to where we began, where we live simply and in balance with nature once more….
What do you think?

I’d like to correct the word I used previously – ‘serenity’. I prefer to say that in place of panic, incomprehension and unawareness, I feel a heightened awareness of the current state of affairs and the current instability in the world (heightened compared to myself before, not to others who are more informed and aware than I). And a feeling of alertness, readiness and preparedness. Ready as best I can, for who knows how this will play out, who will survive and who will not. Luck will play its part, and some skilled, prepared people might find themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time, whilst others who didn’t see any of this coming, may do just fine, adapting to the new set of circumstances they suddenly find themselves in.

So no guarantees just increased likelihoods. But as I feel more ready, and less worried about myself and my family, I have started to look outwards more. When I pick up my daughter from school, I see all the other seven year old boys and girls, their teachers, their mums and dads. Are they unaware of what is coming? And how will they cope when the food runs out. And I feel terribly sad inside. Should I tell them? I couldn’t bear to see those children suffer.

I know some difficult choices will have to be made by all of us. In a violent social breakdown scenario, we will have to choose between leaving our neighbors behind, and staying to help them, which would mean sharing what we’ve put aside for our own kids to help others. I know I can keep my family going for two months on what we have. Or I could feed my street for five days. But then what? And what about the next street? Difficult choices lay ahead…