Toward A Post-Oil Community
By Peter Goodchild
05 January, 2008
Countercurrents.orgThere are some puzzling aspects to the fact that it is hard to put together a cohesive group in terms of dealing with future issues. While politicians, business leaders, and the news media all have coherent, cohesive social groupings, the sort of people who intend to navigate the Dark Ages are scattered to the four winds. Obviously something more is needed, some concept of community, even if "doomers" can be as factional as Marxists.
Yet we should not despair about the apparent lack of control. In the fifth century it was the Romans who were disciplined and organized, but it was the barbarians who won. The Internet was purposely designed as a decentralized network that could withstand nuclear attack. Today’s highly centralized cities can be defeated by a half a dozen terrorists. Decentralization will allow future communities to survive.
For as long as the Internet is around (and the electricity that keeps it going), it may be that cyberspace is more useful than ordinary space. That is to say, perhaps one could start with the simple idea of keeping a list of names of like-minded people that one finds on the Internet. That would probably an easier device than immediately trying to set up a 1960s-hippie-style commune, with all its attendant problems — the men discussing philosophy while the women do the housework. And so, for example, I find myself encountering the same names from one year to the next, and I half-consciously tend to keep track of their whereabouts in cyberspace.
But, yes, I also find myself keeping track of their physical location. It seems to be the same general parts of the earth that turn up in these conversations. There even seems to be a correlation between the level of apparent "awareness" of my correspondents and their geography. It may not be entirely a coincidence that these places where my correspondents live are ones I myself have sometimes thought of as nice places to inhabit. Great minds think alike, I suppose — or at least the great minds of aging hippies.
It may be that the "tribes" of the future will largely evolve as they want to, with or without our conscious attempts. For example, the "family" would be an obvious starting point. Although that is not to say that one must regard the traditional western family as sacred — on the contrary, a good look at any anthropology book will tell us that the "family" can have some rather broad definitions.
And at the same time, along the lines of the "self-evolving" group, there is also another theory that may be worth considering: that there is nothing that can be done about those who are apathetic. Future-oriented conversations tend to divide rather neatly along the lines of those people with "survivor" mentality (a very small group), and those people with "victim" mentality (a very large group); by the latter I mean people who are willing to complain but unwilling to act. It is probably not a good idea to become involved with people of victim mentality. Dealing with lethargy can be quite a strain on one’s time and energy, and neither party gains anything from the conversation.
Unfortunately, it seems that there are many younger people in particular who have such victim mentality. There may be some validity to the common expression that "young people are rude, lazy, and demoralized," even if that statement ignores the cause of the problem. (And repeating such a statement, in any case, might be regarded as an indication of my own incipient old age.)
In order that they and their parents can keep up with the Joneses, young people are likely to be given a car, a cell phone, a computer, and an apartment — so that they can acquire a B.A. after several years of attending useless courses with pretentious titles. After graduation, those same young people are then tossed into a world of exactly the opposite sort. They suddenly discover that the employment opportunities are not quite as vast as they had been led to believe. There are certainly plenty of jobs available, but they pay only minimum wage, and the employers do not like to hire young people who never worked during their school days. If the future appears bleak and empty to recent graduates, there are some fairly tangible reasons.
These young people cannot have the physical and emotional strength to face the future if their parents have raised them as perpetual incubator babies. If the parents think the world is coming to an end every time their children have a minor cold, then how will either the parents or the children respond when the world really does come to an end? In that respect, there may be something to be said for living in a rural area. Up north here, where I live, no one is considered out of action who still has one arm and one leg unbroken; any medical condition of a less serious nature is not worth considering.
Benumbed and benighted, these recent graduates are certainly not ready for the bizarre future that now awaits them, a world unlike anything their parents encountered. Any twenty-year-old who has never gone to bed hungry is precisely the sort of person who will be unlikely to find a meal in the year 2030. It is the young people who have previously had to fight for survival who will have the stamina — both physically and psychologically — to fight for survival in the future. The soft will not live long. It’s the wolves that will eat well, not the lap dogs.
The average young person of the twenty-first century is going to be facing a world that bears a closer resemblance to "Mad Max" than to "Mary Poppins." I often suspect that the average American of the mid-twenty-first century will be speaking more Spanish than English, since it is in the poorer Latin-American nations that young people have to grow up quickly. Perhaps a few language lessons would be good insurance for an Anglophone.
As for the rest, the best one can do is to keep one’s nose to the grindstone. Even those who merely do what they honestly believe is worth doing may find they have imitators, on the principle that actions speak louder than words. That is to say, sometimes it is best just to set an example. I myself might occasionally do something, and a nearby twelve-year-old might look at it and say, "Wow, cool." Even such monosyllables give me reason to hope. Two boys across the river from here have developed an interest in archery. Does it have some great cosmogonic importance, or is it just a game to them? Or is there any difference?
"Where to go" after the oil age depends on many factors, but the most important question is one that is frequently overlooked: How will we obtain food when agri-business has no hydrocarbons for fertilizer and pesticides, and none for cultivating the crops or transporting them? Answer: unless we plan on living off a basement of canned goods, we will have to grow our own food.
One of the most common misconceptions is that we can grow all our own food on 1,000 square feet per person. That 1,000 square feet would only be enough to supply us with green vegetables. But we don’t live mainly on green vegetables, we live mainly on grains.
A hardworking adult burns about 1,800 million kcal per year. Corn (maize) yields about 2,000 kg per hectare, or 6.9 million kcal. One person, therefore, would need about 0.26 hectares of land, which is 51 m by 51 m. In Imperial measure, that’s 28,000 square feet. For wheat, multiply that land requirement by 1.4. Whatever way you look at it, it’s a fair amount of land.
It is generally cheaper to buy land with a house on it, than to buy land and put a house on it later. The exception may be the "fixer-upper"; beyond a certain stage of decay, a house is not really a fixer-upper but a tearer-downer. An unfixable house can easily ruin a marriage.
If, on the other hand, you regard Armageddon as more of a spectator sport than a personal problem, then you should be looking for a house with about 30,000 square feet of floor space, and a bar to go with it. If you have that kind of money, perhaps you could do whatever you liked. Admittedly, you might need to hire armed guards, but again it’s only money. You would, of course, be assuming that money will actually be a meaningful item of exchange in the future.
My own choice would be a place where population density is low, but where the soil and climate are still reasonable. Many parts of North America might be suitable, at least if one avoided the Boston-New-York-Washington megalopolis. Almost any country, in fact, has good locations that would reveal themselves after serious perusal of a map. It is the hidden pockets of habitability that one should look for, the places that are easily overlooked. For example, here in Ontario there are places within an hour’s drive from Toronto that are far more suitable than places that are two hours away, simply because of what might be called accidents of geography — perhaps in the past there was nothing there to interest miners or farmers, so the land was unexploited.
There are also many pro-and-con questions related to "proximity to neighbors" one should look into. Having close neighbors makes you less of a target for predators, but then you have to hope that the neighbors aren’t worse than the predators.If at all possible, try to move close to someone you know and trust. As mentioned above, that generally means someone related to you by blood or marriage. Even "close friends" can be less "friendly" as time goes by, whereas family members have the saving grace of being more predictable. As they say, the devil you know is better than the devil you don’t.
Peter Goodchild is the author of Survival Skills of the North American Indians, published by Chicago Review Press. He can be reached at [email protected].
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