Getting Out of Dodge: A Choice of Routes
By Peter Goodchild
21 July, 2011
Countercurrents.org
One must consider the options about town and country life as industrial society creaks to a halt. Probably most people would start by crossing out the geographic extremes: (1) Daniel Boone wilderness adventures and (2) living in a downtown boarding house and taking the bus once a month to visit one’s welfare worker. The edge of a small town, or something like that, might combine the best of all the variables. It's somewhat a case of "six of one and half a dozen of another," however: many of the possible "lifestyles" (a terrible word) have pluses and minuses, but the totals are roughly the same for each case. The deciding factors might be such things as the following:
Financial assets would determine how much money one can put down to acquire property.
Age eventually becomes a limiting factor: clearing 100 acres of forest with a double-bitted axe may not be a practical choice after one has reached retirement age.
Personality is a less tangible element. In particular, there is the question of how much need one feels for social interaction and intellectual stimulation. I remember the shock (or embarrassment?) I felt at the sight of the term "the idiocy of rural life" when I first encountered it in Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto.
One's "love of nature” is an even more intangible factor. I knew one person in Toronto who never accompanied the family on trips out of the city because of the problem of having to endure "nature smells.” I knew another who would stop the car, get out, and say how wonderful it was to be out of the city “because there’s so much nature out here.”
Slightly out of that entire spectrum, but perhaps more important, is one's particular expectations of the future, and specifically one's forecast for "doomsday." My own simple arithmetic, based on that of the major studies, is that annual oil production will fall to half of peak production around 2030, and therefore everything else in industrial society will be cut in half by that date. (The situation will not be worsened, incidentally, by any increase in global population by that date, since the excess population will have succumbed to famine.)
Using that year 2030 as a focus, however, one could say that those who were born before about 1950 will be old enough and presumably smart enough to get out of Dodge by that time; in any case, they won’t be able to run very fast, so it all becomes rather academic. Those who were born before that date, on the other hand, will be too clueless, because decades of watching TV will have done to their brains what a microwave oven does to a package of instant noodles. Either way, the matter will have been settled. Perhaps there will be a modicum of in-betweeners with the muscles of the young and the brains of the old. Nevertheless, I am inclined to be smugly optimistic about my own birth date of 1949, and to assume that I can wave my hand like Louis XVI, saying, “Apres moi le deluge,” and just hope I don’t get drowned as I’m speaking.
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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