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Collapse: The Enigma Of Town And Country

By Peter Goodchild

09 July, 2011
Countercurrents.org

In these early years of systemic collapse, as population soars and petroleum and other natural resources go into decline, the question is not so much "how" to live one's life, but "where." At the risk of oversimplification, the question can be reduced to the common term "town and country," or more accurately "city and wilderness and a few points in between." There are good arguments for various choices, although I shall not consider suburbia, which in the future will entail the worst of everything, in particular great expense and a total reliance on automobiles.

Pure wilderness is tempting. The Cochrane Southwest Unorganized Area, in northern Ontario, for example, consists of 553 square kilometers and a population of zero. There would be no serious problems with water, firewood, game, and fish, and probably even arable land. Once a house or cabin had been built, money would be almost unnecessary; all houses in Canada must adhere to the Canada Building Code, which requires electricity and plumbing, which in turn require money, but in remote locations there is less enforcement of these laws. And a time will come when no laws will be enforced. The long, harsh winter would be the main drawback, requiring the cutting and stacking of a great deal of wood. In addition, such a location would only suit a physically fit person who enjoyed long-term solitude. Another catch with wilderness life is that the distance to any settled area is so great that it cannot easily be covered without a motorized vehicle; if a long journey were ever necessary, the "simple life" might no longer be simple.

On the other hand, in a world with diminishing fossil fuels an argument could be made in favor of living in the center of a big city. The public transit system might be good enough that there is no reason for buying a car. For that matter, one can generally get anything needed simply by walking. Renting an apartment may be better than buying a house; why spend thousands of dollars on a house if one has no intention of reselling it later or passing it on to one's descendants? The most common disadvantage of such a location may be the problem of noisy neighbors. A longer-term and more serious danger is that the center of a city is "ground zero" for any form of systemic collapse when it has truly arrived: food, water, fuel, and electricity would suddenly vanish. Cities have always been the weak spots in any form of widespread disaster.

Between those two extremes might be a location in a small town, or on the outskirts of one. An ideal property might be one that had a few hectares of land for vegetable gardening and for the sustainable harvesting of firewood, and with a well or at least a river for supplying fresh water. House prices and property taxes in such rural areas are much lower than those in a city, although higher than those in more remote locations. Shops, doctors' offices, and post offices might be within walking distance. The company of good neighbors might be valuable, especially in times of trouble. There might be electrical power, telephone connections, and perhaps even a municipal water supply, although all these "mod cons" defeat one's purpose of disconnecting from a collapsing economy. The main advantage of small towns is that, although they can sometimes be hit by the same kinds of shortages as cities, they are generally more self-sufficient.

As with pure wilderness, small towns can nevertheless present the irony that the distances make the use of motorized vehicles quite addictive: this problem is caused largely by the fact that modern small towns often replicate "urban sprawl." In earlier centuries, towns and villages had a radial structure, with the houses and shops in the center and the farmland at the perimeter, allowing greater self-sufficiency with less traveling.

In a rather complex manner, there is a further touch of irony, if not a genuine self-contradiction, in "getting away from it all." The most visible aspect of systemic collapse is the disappearance of one's own finances: the frightening imbalance between one's expenses and one's earnings, even after cutting back on what used to seem necessities -- everything from gasoline to education now seems an unaffordable luxury. Abstract theories of either economics or ecology seem tangential when staring at one's empty wallet. The irony is that by leaving the city one might be dealing with smaller earnings and smaller expenses, but at the same ratio: if the ratio is not changed, no advantage has been gained. Rural poverty and urban poverty are thereby the same, merely on different scales. Any genuine solution must therefore include shifting that balance. Eventually the money economy will collapse, and those who live furthest from the cities will do best: in general it was farming families who managed to get by during the Great Depression of the 1930s. It's the waiting that may kill us: the problem is not that the global economy is collapsing, but that it is not collapsing fast enough.

There is a final matter to consider: particularly in the affluent west, most of us have lost the ability to make choices about the future. We neither know nor care what the next few decades may bring. We may have some vague intimation of storm clouds on the horizon, but our fears are quickly dispelled by the glib fantasies of the mainstream news media. We must start to give up our mobile phones, TVs, computers, cars, and other toys, before we have forgotten how to live in a non-electronic world. We must rediscover how to live as a part of Nature, not in opposition to it.

Peter Goodchild is the author of Survival Skills of the North American Indians, published by Chicago Review Press. His email address is odonatus{at}live.com



 


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