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How to Survive
the Crash and Save the Earth
1. Abandon the world.
The world is the enemy of the Earth. The "world as we know it" is a
deadly parasite on the biosphere. Both cannot survive, nor can the world
survive without the Earth. Do the logic: the world is doomed. If you stay on
the parasite, you die with it. If you move to the Earth, and it survives in
something like its recent form, you can survive with it.
Our little world is doomed because it's built on a foundation of taking from
the wider world without giving back. For thousands of years we've been going
into debt and calling it "progress," exterminating and calling it
"development," stealing and calling it "wealth," shrinking
into a world of our own design and calling it "evolution." We're just
about done. We're not just running out of cheap oil -- which is used to make
and move almost every product, and which gives the average American the energy
equivalent of 200 slaves. We're also running out of topsoil, without which we
need oil-derived fertilizers to grow food; and forests, which stabilize climate
and create rain by transpiring water to refill the clouds; and ground water,
such as the Ogallala aquifer under the Great Plains, which could go dry any
time now. We're running out of room to dump stuff in the oceans without killing
them, and to dump stuff in the atmosphere without wrecking the climate, and to
manufacture carcinogens without all of us getting cancer. We're coming to the
end of global food stockpiles, and antibiotics that still work, and our own
physical health, and our own mental health, and our grip on reality, and our
will to keep the whole game going. Why do you think so many Americans are
looking forward to "Armageddon" or the "rapture"? We hate
this shitty world and we want to blow it up.
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.
2. Abandon hope.
I don't mean that we stop trying, or stop believing that a better world is
possible, but that we stop believing that some factor is going to save us even
if we do the wrong thing. A few examples:
Jesus is coming.
If you believe the Bible, Jesus told us when he was coming back to save us. He
said, "This generation shall not pass." That was 2000 years ago. Stop
waiting for that bus and get walking.
Technology will save us.
If it does, it will be something we don't even recognize as "technology"
-- Permaculture or orgonomy or water vortices or forest gardening or quantum
consciousness or the next generation of the tribe. It will not be a new germ
killer or resource extractor or power generator or anything to give us what we
want while exempting us from being aware and respectful of other life. Anything
like that will just dig us deeper in the same hole.
The system can be
reformed. Yes, and it's also not against the
laws of physics for us to go back in time and prevent the industrial age from ever
happening. Ten, twenty, thirty years ago the ecologists said "we have to
turn it around now or it will be too late." They were right. And not only
didn't we turn it around, we sped it up: more cars with worse efficiency, more
toxins, more CO2, more deforestation, more pavement, more lawns, more
materialism, more corporate rule, more weapons, more war and love of war, more
secrets, more lies, more callousness and cynicism and short-sightedness. Now
we're in so deep that politician’s right of Nixon are called
"liberal" and the Green Party platform is both totally inadequate and
politically absurd. Our little system is not going to make it.
Also, there's a time lag between smokestacks and acid rain, between
radioactivity and cancer, between industrial toxins and birth defects, between
atmospheric imbalance and giant storms, between deforestation and drought,
between soil depletion and starvation. The disasters we're getting now are from
the relatively mild stuff we did years or decades ago, before SUV's and
depleted uranium and aspartame and terminator seeds and the latest generation
of factory farms. Even if we could turn it around tomorrow, what's coming is
much worse.
We're not strong enough
to destroy nature. Oddly, this argument almost always
invokes the word "hubris," as in, "You are showing hubris, or
excessive pride, in thinking that by lighting this forest on fire to roast a
hot dog, I will burn the forest down. Don't you know humans aren't capable of
burning down a forest? Shame on you for your pride."
In fact, we've already almost finished killing the Earth. The deserts of
central and southwest Asia were once forests -- ancient empires cut down the
trees and let the topsoil wash off into the Indian Ocean.
In North America a squirrel could go tree to tree from the Atlantic to the Mississippi, and
spawning salmon were so thick in rivers and streams that you couldn't row a
boat through them, and the seashores were rich with seals, fishes, birds,
clams, lobsters, whales. Now they're deserts populated only by seagulls eating
human garbage, and nitrogen fertilizer runoff has made dead zones in the
oceans, and atmospheric carbon dioxide is increasing oceanic acidity, which may
dissolve the shells of the plankton. If the plankton die, it's all over.
Maybe we can't kill absolutely everything, but we are on the path to cutting
life on Earth down to nothing bigger than a cockroach, and we will do so, and
all of us will die, unless something crashes our system sooner and only kills
most of us.
3. Drop Out.
Dropping out of the present dominant system has both a mental and an economic
component that go together like your two legs walking. It's a lot of steps!
Maybe you notice that you hate your job, and that you have to do it because you
need money. So you reduce expenses, reduce your hours, and get more free time,
in which you learn more techniques of self-sufficiency and establish a sense of
identity not dependent on where you get your money. Then you switch to a
low-status low-stress job that gives you even more room to get outside the
system mentally. And so on, until you've changed your friends, your values,
your whole life.
The point I have to make over and over about this process, and this movement,
is that it's not about avoiding guilt, or reducing your ecological footprint,
or being righteous. It's not a pissing contest to see who's doing more to save
the Earth -- although some people will believe that's your motivation, to
justify their own inertia. It's not even about reducing your participation in the
system, just reducing your submission and dependence: getting free, being
yourself, slipping out of a wrestling hold so you can throw an elbow at the
Beast.
This world is full of people with the intelligence, knowledge, skills, and
energy to make heaven on Earth, but they can't even begin because they would
lose their jobs. We're always arguing to change each other's minds, but nobody
will change if they think their survival depends on not changing. Every time
you hear about a whistleblower or reporter getting fired for honesty and
integrity, you can be sure that they already had a support network, or just a
sense of their own value, outside of the system they defied. Dropping out is
about fighting better. Gandalf has to get off Saruman's tower!
4. You are 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.
5. Learn skills.
Readers sometimes ask for my advice on surviving the crash -- should they buy
guns, canned food, water purifiers, gold? I always tell them to learn skills.
You know the saying: get a fish, eat for a day; learn to fish, eat for a
lifetime. (Just don't take it too literally -- there might not be any fish
left!)
The most obvious useful skills would include improvising shelter from materials
at hand, identifying and preparing wild edibles, finding water, making fire,
trapping animals, and so on. But I don't think we're going all the way to the
stone age. There will also be a need for electrical work, medical diagnosis,
surgery, optics, celestial navigation, composting, gardening, tree propagation,
food preservation, diplomacy, practical chemistry, metalworking, all kinds of
mechanical repair, and all kinds of teaching. As the 15th century had the
Renaissance Man, we're going to have the Post apocalypse Man or Woman, someone
who can fix a bicycle, tan a hide, set a broken bone, mediate an argument, and
teach history.
Even more important are some things that are not normally called skills, but
that make skill-learning and everything else easier: luck, intuition,
adaptability, attentiveness, curiosity, physical health, mental health, the
ability to surf the flow. Maybe the most fundamental is what they call
"being yourself" or "waking up." Most human behaviour is
based neither on logic nor intuition nor emotion, but habit and conformity. We
perceive, think, and act as we've always done, and as we see others do. This
works well enough in a controlled environment, but in a chaotic environment it
doesn't work at all. If you can just get 10% of yourself free of habit and
conformity, people will call you "weird." 20% and they'll call you a
genius, 30% and they'll call you a saint, 40% and they'll kill you.
6. Find your tribe.
We minions of Empire think of ourselves as individualists, or as members of
silly fake groups -- nations, religions, races, followers of political parties
and sports teams, loyal inmates of some town that's the same as every other. In
fact we're all members of a giant mad tribe, where the relationships are not
cooperative and open, but coercive, exploitative, abusive, and invisible. If we
could see even one percent of the whole picture, we would have a revolution.
You may feel like you want to do it alone, but you have never done it alone. To
survive the breakdown of this world and build a better one, you will have to
trade your sterile, insulated links of money and law for raw, messy links of
friendship and conflict. The big lie of post apocalypse movies like Omegaman
and Mad Max is that the survivors will be loners. In the real apocalypse, the
survivors will be members of multi-skilled well-balanced cooperative groups.
I think future tribes are already forming, even on the internet, even among
people thousands of miles apart. I think the crash will be slow enough that
we'll have plenty of time to get together geographically.
7. Get on some land.
This might seem more difficult than the others, yet most people who own land
have not done any
of the other things -- probably because buying land requires money which
requires subservience to a system that makes you personally powerless. I
suggest extreme frugality, which will give you valuable skills and also allow
you to quickly save up money. You probably have a few more years.
If you don't make it, it's not the end of the world -- oh wait -- it is the
end of the world! But you still might know someone with room on their land, or
someone might take you in for your skills, or if you have a tribe one of you
will probably come up with a place in the chaos. And if not, there will be a
need for survivors and helpers in the cities and suburbs. So don't force it.
If you do get land, the most valuable thing it can have is clean surface water,
a spring or stream you can drink from. Acceptable but less convenient would be
a well that doesn't require electricity, or dirty surface water, which you can
filter and clean through sand and reed beds. At the very least you need the
rainfall and skills to catch and store enough rainwater to drink and grow food.
(The ancient Nabateans did it on less than four inches of rain a year.) Then
you'll need a few years to learn and adjust and get everything in order so that
your tribe can live there year-round, even with no materials from outside. With
luck, it won't come to that.
8. Save part of the
Earth. When I say "the Earth," I
mean the life on its surface, the biosphere, as many species and habitats as
possible, connected in ways that maximize abundance and complexity -- and not
just because humans think it's pretty or useful, but because all life is
valuable on its own terms. We like to focus on saving trophy animals -- whales,
condors, pandas, salmon, spotted owls -- but most of them aren't going to make
it, and we could save a lot more species if we could put that attention into
habitats and whole systems.
So how do you save habitats and whole systems? You can try working through
governments, but at the moment they're ruled by corporations, which by
definition are motivated purely by short term increase-in-exploitation, or
"profit." You can try direct physical action against the destroyers,
but it has yet to work well, and as the world plunges to the right I think
we'll see more and more activists simply killed.
My focus is direct positive action for
the biosphere: adopting some land, whether by owning or squatting or stealth,
and building it into a strong habitat: slowing down the rainwater, composting,
mulching, building the topsoil, no-till gardening, scattering seed balls,
planting trees, making wetlands -- a little oasis where the tree frogs can hide
and migrating birds can rest, where you and a few species can wait out the
crash.
Tom Brown Jr. mentions in one of his books that the patch of woods where he
conducts his wilderness classes, instead of being depleted by all the humans
using it for survival, has turned into an Eden,
because his students know how to tend it. Some rain forest environments, once
thought to be random wilderness, have turned out to be more like the wild
gardens of human tribes, orders of magnitude more complex than the soil-killing
monoculture fields of our own primitive culture.
Humans have the ability to go beyond sustainability, to live in ways that increase
the richness of life on Earth, and help Gaia in ways she cannot help herself.
This and only this justifies human survival.
It requires a new set of skills. A good place to start is the
Permaculture
movement. Sadly, in the present dark age the original books are rare,
but can still be found in libraries, and many of the techniques
are simple. A quick search on the internet will point you in the right
direction for courses, projects and other Permaculture people in your
area. What it comes
down to is seeing whole systems and paying attention and innovating, driven by
the knowledge that sustainability is only the middle of the road, and there's
no limit to how far we can go beyond it.
9. Save human knowledge.
When people of this age think about knowledge worth saving, they usually think
about belief in the Cartesian mechanical philosophy, that dead matter is the
basis of reality, and about techniques for rebuilding and using machines that
dominate and separate us from other life. I'd like that knowledge to die
forever, but I don't think it works that way. Humans or any other
hyper-malleable animal will always be tempted by the Black Arts, by techniques
that trade subtle harm for flashy good and feed back into themselves, seducing
us into power, corruption, and blindness.
Our descendants will need the intellectual artefacts to avoid this -- artefacts
we have barely started to develop even as the Great Bad Example begins to fall.
In 200 years, when they are brushing seeds into baskets with their fingers, and
a stranger appears with a new threshing machine that will do the same thing
with less time and effort, they will need to say something smarter than
"the Gods forbid it" or "that is not our Way." They will
need the knowledge to say something like:
"Your machine requires the seed to be planted alone and not interspersed
with perennials that maintain nitrogen and mineral balance in the soil. And
from where will the metal come, and how many trees must be cut down and burned
to melt and shape it? And since we cannot build the machine, shall we be
dependent on the machine-builders, and give them a portion of our food, which
we now keep all for ourselves? Do you not know, clever stranger, that when any
biomass is removed from the land, and not recycled back into it, the soil is
weakened? And what could we do with our "saved" time, that would be
more valuable and pleasurable than gathering the seed by hand, touching and
knowing every stalk and every inch of the land that feeds us? Shall we become
allies of cold metal that cuts without feeling, turning our hands and eyes to
the study of machines and numbers until, severed from the Earth, we nearly destroy
it as our ancestors did, making depleted uranium and polychlorinated biphenyls
and cadmium batteries that even now make the old cities unfit for living? Go
back to your people, and tell them, if they come to conquer us with their
machines, we will fight them in ways the Arawaks and Seminoles and Lakota and
Hopi and Nez Perce never imagined, because we understand your world better than
you do yourself. Tell your people to come to learn."
December 19, 2004
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