Looking For The Uncrowded Country
By Peter Goodchild
20 June, 2011
Countercurrents.org
A couple of fridge magnets might hold the following desiderata: a place in the country with a couple of hectares of forest for firewood, another hectare for a garden, and a nice muddy beach for clam-digging (well okay, at least one of those three); and a small income or a large savings account as a buffer to the occasional but inevitable need for cash (until all dollars become Confederate dollars).
How fast things will decay is a debatable point. Personally, I would put my money on "faster" rather than "slower." There's a problem with perception: although the world's economy is collapsing rapidly, because it's all on a mammoth scale we don't notice it happening. Yesterday I mailed two boxes of used books, each of which was light enough for one person to carry easily. I sent them from here in Oman back to Canada by the cheapest parcel post, no registration, no insurance. The cost was $180 Canadian. Later I may have to use a car to get those books and bring them somewhere else in Canada . The cost of gasoline may be greater than the cost, a few years ago, of the books. Nothing is cheap anymore, even if there aren't many people who register all the implications of that fact. It's true that collapse is not essentially an economic matter, since economists live in an unreal universe, but the economics of daily life should at least act as a signal.
Then one must deal with the enigma of concrete farmland. Finding a place in the country is central to surviving the next few decades, but the best land for gardening is both crowded and expensive. To a very large extent, where we need to live is not where we can live.
Canada 's province of Ontario serves as a good illustration of this bind, although my own years of living there are part of my reason for focusing on that area. Roughly speaking, the province has 13 million people and 1 million km2 of area. But the province is commonly regarded as consisting of "northern Ontario " and "southern Ontario ," more or less divided by the 45th parallel. Northern Ontario is about 6 times larger than the south. The division reflects many things, all interrelated. Partly it is history: the south was the area first settled by Europeans. Partly it is geology: northern Ontario is part of the Canadian Shield , mostly barren rock. Partly it is population: in contrast to area, the population of the tiny south is 12 times larger than that of the north. And partly it is agricultural: nearly all the good farmland is also south of latitude 45. To get to most of that usable land, one would have to dig up a fair amount of asphalt and concrete. Yes, there are pockets of farmland still in use, but to buy a few hectares one would have to pay a considerable price.
One of my own favorite computer games, therefore, has been to wade through the online maps of the Canada Land Inventory, created from the 1960s to the 1980s (again, a sign of lost abundance). I compare these maps of agricultural and hunting land to the properties available at real-estate Web sites. I also compare them to various forms of demographic data, in particular to information on unemployment and depopulation; in a sense, I am profiting from the misfortunes of others: parts of Saskatchewan and the East Coast are losing population because of emigration to the relatively wealthier provinces. As a result, however, some usable land becomes available to intrepid "survivalists" with their shovels and hoes and collections of doomsday literature.
A constructive, non-fatalistic response to what I call "the coming chaos" might also include a reading of three particular documents by Ferguson , Lee, and Pimentel, on the topics of foraging, farming, and the social consequences. I prefer them to hundreds of other books and documents that present various viewpoints on those topics.
In "Energy flows in agricultural and natural ecosystems," Pimentel explains, among other things, some of the basic facts that would underlie any practical form of agriculture that does not rely on fossil fuels ? although, yes, any form of agriculture is ultimately destructive to the soil. Much of what he says is contrary to the conventional wisdom (or nonsense) offered by armchair gardeners, particularly in terms of the amount of land needed. Pimentel's article is rather brief and dry, but it provides a good starting point for any realistic appraisal of the limited agriculture that will be possible in the coming decades.
Ferguson 's "Birth of war" is the best response I have seen to Hobbe's dictum that human life in early times was "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." I think my recommendation of Ferguson 's article is not on the basis of my own preconceptions or prejudices, because for a long time my reading was based on the assumption that Hobbes was right.
Lee's article, "What hunters do for a living," like those of Pimentel and Ferguson , can be juxtaposed by many writings that make the opposite claim, or at least lead to opposite conclusions. That is to say, there are writers, including professional anthropologists, who basically assert that a foraging (hunter-gatherer) life is one of hard labor and near-starvation. Again, though, I should explain that my own conclusions come after a lengthy examination of the opposing theories. I eventually came to agree with Lee's statement (on his first page) that "with a few conspicuous exceptions, the hunter-gatherer subsistence base is at least routine and reliable and at best surprisingly abundant."
REFERENCES
Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada . Canada Land Inventory.
http://sis.agr.gc.ca/pls/meta/web_maps?mapgroup=all&lang=en
Ferguson , R. B. (2003, July/August). The birth of war. Natural History. http://iweb.tntech.edu/kosburn/history-444/birth_of_war.htm
Lee, R. B. (1968). What hunters do for a living, or, How to make out on scarce resources. In R. B. Lee and I. DeVore, eds., Man the Hunter. Chicago : Aldine Publishing. http://artsci.wustl.edu/~anthro/articles/lee_1968_1.pdf
Pimentel, D. (1984). Energy flows in agricultural and natural ecosystems. CIHEAM (International Centre for Advanced Mediterranean Agronomic Studies). http://ressources.ciheam.org/om/pdf/s07/CI010841.pdf
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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