The March Hare: Winter 2007 Issue 51

Planning and Village Design • Ten Years On • Caterpillar • Preparedness • Juan's Bio • Nature Corner • Dancing Letters

Preparedness

By Ted Sterling

Most of my adult life I’ve believed that major and sometimes rapid changes in the ecological and cultural status quo are inevitable in my lifetime. Accordingly I’ve spent much of my energy preparing myself for life after those changes, when I believe every person or group of people will need to return to the self-reliance that was once commonplace in our culture, providing for themselves everything from food and shelter on down to health care and entertainment, and acquiring the rest within a small radius of home. I believe this is how people ought to live, and I’ve long struggled to understand why people so readily trust that the market will continue to provide, often caring no more than how cheaply a desired item can be had. What follows is a look at this issue, and an assessment of where I am in my own quest for preparedness.

Many things are said about our culture of consumption. That we in the US consume more per capita than any other nation’s citizens is now a well-established fact, 5% of the world’s population consuming 20-30% of available resources. The more specific issue that isn’t often looked at is that of the extreme dependency of most people, whether rich or poor, on essentials of life that come from far beyond their locality. Where once every village had its own specialists (blacksmith, cooper, etc.) and the majority of the populace was composed of highly self-reliant families, now we’ve ceded control of our most basic needs to the market, without any apparent concern for the extreme complexity and energy intensity of the lines of supply. With the increasing focus on peak oil, fossil fuel dependency, climate change, globalization, and so on in the media, it’s not unreasonable to look down the road at different future scenarios and wonder whether a majority of the population might find itself in a lifeor- death struggle should any cataclysmic collapse of existing energy flows happen too quickly.

Look in your cupboard, and in your fridge, and take stock: what are the most locally produced foods you have on hand? What is the average distance traveled by the foods you eat? How long do you think local supplies of food would last in the event of a rapid breakdown of the transportation network? Do you or your neighbors keep seed on hand? Do you have any farming or gardening experience? Now consider your home: where did the basic building materials come from? What is the most locally-sourced material used in your home’s construction? Could you or your neighbors build or repair it yourselves? How comfortable would you be in your home if the public electrical, gas, oil, or water grids ceased functioning? Now consider what else beyond food and shelter you rely on heavily in your life, and follow the same line of questioning. Consider also whether you possess the skills, machinery and materiel necessary to produce any of these items or services for yourself, and if not, how far you’d have to go to find somebody who did. How long could you sustain yourself with locally available goods and services in the event of a rapid, sustained crash in oil supply, such that you couldn’t buy fuel, and the fuel required to keep the intricate national and international movement and distribution of goods was also lacking?

This doesn’t look likely to happen tomorrow. You may not believe we’ll ever see such a crisis, that technology will prevail. But a sober examination of our current level of dependency on imported fuel, the volatility of political and social realities in oil-producing regions, global ecological decline, climate change, and numerous other factors suggests that if several of the wrong things happened at the same time, we could realistically find ourselves in quite a pinch. How sustainable are our lives? What should we each consider doing to maintain access to the essentials of life in case the world gets much bigger in a hurry, with distances much more difficult to bridge?

Sustainability is a central feature of Dancing Rabbit’s mission, along with education and demonstration of sustainability for the wider culture. I live here in part because two dozen or more people cooperatively reducing their impact is easier to achieve and sustain than an individual or couple trying to resist the consumer stream. So how prepared are we here to persevere if major change does arrive? How much of a stretch is it for us to derive all our essential needs from our own land and labor or from friends and neighbors within a reasonable walk, bike, or horse ride? And what kinds of knowledge, equipment, and goods might we want to acquire while most anything we could want is still available in the world as it stands?

At the moment it looks challenging. Our 25 members and residents are strong in a diverse range of skills and experience that would help meet our basic needs. We do grow much of our produce, and buy much of the rest locally. As a group, though, we do not yet produce staple foods (beans, grains, etc.) in any consistent or significant way. While some seed is saved from the plants we grow, most is purchased. There are no farm animals currently kept for food, fiber, traction, transportation or any other purpose. In the shelter arena, we are doing all the design and construction ourselves; basic construction relies on reclaimed lumber, straw, earth, sand, lime and other minimally processed goods often acquired quite locally; but most of us still rely to some extent on manufactured construction materials produced far away. Some of the most commonly used are metal roofing, fasteners and other hardware, tools, and doors and windows. Plastic cisterns and drums are frequently used for rain water catchment and irrigation. Five gallon plastic buckets are almost universally used here for everything from water storage to construction and humanure.

Given time, we’re likely to continue in the direction of increasing self-reliance. But few now remain in our area (or anywhere) who have the skills, experience, and tools to meet these needs on a human scale, with local materials, and without the aid of tractors, chainsaws, electricity, or other modern forms of mechanical assistance. We have lots of information contained in a range of books, but book knowledge will only get you so far if you have not acquired a skill through cultural means, passed down person to person through each generation. I have worked on small organic farms and been a gardener in eight states and for more than a decade now, and I have never yet seen anybody able to meet his or her entire food or fiber need, or even minimal staple food needs, through human power alone; and very few along the way did it with only animal power.

I do not necessarily expect we will see a wholesale reversion to pre-industrial technology or a return to the Stone Age. But how confident are you of the status quo? In the event of a political, military, financial, environmental, energy or other crisis of global proportions, in a world whose nations are increasingly interlinked in all those arenas, how long do you think we will remain atop the prosperity heap, where any need or desire can be met in exchange for some green pieces of paper? Will there ever be a consequence for our nearly thoughtless consumption of historically unprecedented quantities of every conceivable resource? Economically and politically we act imperially; and every empire to date has failed sooner or later.

Humanity persists, if often passing through centuries of struggle between periods of greatness. But in every previous instance, the basic building blocks of human technology have remained. When societies have failed, farmers and other primary producers have always persisted at some level because they’ve possessed those technologies and the skill to reproduce and use them.

The age of fossil fuel has now lasted long enough and been so powerful at disseminating the technologies reliant upon it that even the most remote and formerly self-reliant local cultures have, with few exceptions, forsaken the tools they had developed over hundreds of previous generations. That displacement of human labor and skill by machinery, along with the brutal consequences of a global economy, has so altered or gutted most such cultures (which is to say just about every culture) that few if any would survive any significant calamity and be able to re-disseminate the essential assets of human existence without enormous setbacks. And in essential assets I speak not of coffeemakers, but of plows, harnesses, winnowers, seed, small oil presses, blacksmithing skills, the ability to train a horse, and so on.

Planning and Village Design • Ten Years On • Caterpillar • Preparedness • Juan's Bio • Nature Corner • Dancing Letters