Claire

Recently the internet has been buzzing with the news that governments all over the west and in several other parts of the world are suddenly recommending everyone stockpile emergency supplies.¹  

It’s quite possible that they’ve finally got a grip and realized that in a real crisis government emergency services are woefully inadequate to meet the demand in any significant way (Ha! ha! Just kidding. Never mind.) Or that they know something they aren’t telling us. But the most likely explanation is that they want to crank up the fear factor another few notches. Frightened people are easier to dupe and easier to control.

I’m not suggesting we ignore the advice. Whatever the motivation behind it, it’s good advice. I’m completely down with any and all preps you can reasonably make to keep yourself safe and warm and fed in an emergency. 

The changes happening in the world around us will be easier to weather with a buffer of supplies stashed to help you through. As I’ve said elsewhere it doesn’t have to be TEOTWAWKI for emergency preps to make sense. So do prep by all means, as much as you can, and as completely as possible but don’t let fear get a grip on you.

Take a few deep breaths, say a little prayer, sit for a moment or two in your mental “happy place,” or do whatever else it takes to step away from fear.  Then let’s take a closer look at what is possible and what is likely to be effective in keeping yourself and your loved ones safe in times of upheaval.

First of all, it’s not about spending your lifesavings on buckets of long storing food that you’d probably rather not eat. For one thing you may not have any life savings. Even if you do it’s better to be a little more strategic about how you spend them.

No matter how much you are willing and able to spend a pantry full of long storing food and water is only useful in a “power-down shelter in place” kind of emergency. Your whole investment could be completely wiped out in the event of a fire, flood, or earthquake. Having some emergency rations or quick mix instant meals on hand is good but anything you aren’t willing to eat when it’s not an emergency is going to sit and stale date on the shelf.

The key to being prepared is to think about how to increase the resilience of your existing personal food system.

Your personal food system is what you eat, how you get it, how you prepare it, and the equipment and technology you need to do it. A resilient food system certainly includes long storing shelf stable foods but it also includes the skills and routines that bring food into the house and what it takes for it to end up on the table or plate. Resilience is about having many ways to accomplish your goals.

Developing the skills and the practices that increase your capacity to manage for yourself in an extended grid down situation is the goal but the process of achieving that goal is one of incremental improvement not a panic driven poorly thought out spending spree. 

It’s useful to remember the permaculture mantra “Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can.” It may not be enough but it never is. Long term security is about having solid community connections and a shared local food system not how many buckets you can buy.

Start where you are: 

If you are already comfortable in the kitchen and regularly produce meals for yourself and your family you are ahead of the game. You probably already have a pantry of sorts and all you need to do is think about what you have and what you would need to keep it going if you couldn’t get out to the shops. 

If you are not a cook, if most of your meals are “grab’n’go,” takeout, or prepackaged selections from the grocery store it’s going to take a little longer to develop real resilience. But it’s likely that you also have at least some food reserves in your cupboards or freezer. 

In either case figuring out how you’re going to could cook what you have in a power down situation may be the critical improvement your system needs. No matter how much you love your instant pot it’s worth using your regular stovetop cookware as much as possible since it can be used on any heat source and practice is what keeps things manageable in a grid down situation. 

If you have a gas barbecue you may want to pick up an extra propane tank for it. If you don’t currently have an off grid cooking option you may need to do a little research to figure out which of the many possibilities will work best for you. I’m personally a big fan of rocket stoves and the little camp stoves that burn stick wood and small bits of biomass since that kind of fuel will continue to be relatively easy to come by in most places even in a longer crisis. 

Having more than one off grid option is a good idea. Resilience is ultimately dependant on building redundancies into the system. A little camp stove will quickly heat water for tea or coffee but isn’t going to cut it for bigger meals and more people. Still, it can easily tuck into a bag and come with you if you have to evacuate. Whereas a big barbie definitely will not.

Use what you have: 

This is where we get to talking about food stores. I’m going to break this up into a step by step process since it’s easy to get bogged down here and because making these practices part of your normal routine is the way to actually get to resilience.

1) Look at what’s in your cupboards right now. Pull it out and see what’s sitting at the back unused. Could you make a meal of what you have? Could you use up a few of those dusty old cans tonight? The question to ask yourself today and every day is “Can I make supper with what I have on hand?” If not, what would you need to add to make it work?

The related questions are “What’s in the fridge that needs eating?” and “How can I make that part of today’s meal?” This is the key to reducing food waste and avoiding science experiments and strange things growing in the corners.

It’s also a good way to reduce cooking chores. Make more than you can eat at one sitting. Get used to eating the same thing two or three times in a row. Eat it until it’s gone. Skip one day or two at the most. 

Leftovers are alway better used up as quickly as possible. After about 3 days in the fridge its lost a significant part of its nutritional value. After 5 or 6 days it’s probably not worth eating except as filler. After that? YMMV² and it should probably be avoided by anyone with a delicate stomach. 

Take another look at your supplies. How long would they last in a power outage? How many meals could you make if the stores closed tomorrow? You may already have a three day supply on hand. That’s pretty easy. 

Even most perishables will last for three days. The fridge will stay cold for longer if you keep it closed as much as possible. And you can use it as a ice box if you tuck a couple of frozen entrees for later in the week into it. They will thaw slowly and help keep it cold

Many of the things we normally refrigerate are fine for several days at cooler room temperatures. If it’s not freezing outside you can put everything in a box or camping cooler and put it out in the deck. If it is freezing you can use the same trick to keep your frozen food frozen. 

What does your stash look like once the perishables are gone? Can you still make meals with what’s left? If not are there shelf stable foods you could add to make it work? Where are the gaps? Make a list of all the different meals you could make with what you have. Make a note of any missing ingredients. Are there shelf stable items you could substitute for the missing perishables?

2) Make a list of all the shelf stable foods you use on a regular basis.

Rice, pasta, canned goods, crackers, whatever. If you have a complete list that includes proteins, carbs, fats and veggies that’s great. If not, where are the gaps? What shelf-stable foods you would actually eat could use to fill them?

You can brainstorm and add things that you don’t normally use but don’t buy stuff like that unless you have room in your food budget and a plan for how you’re going to eat it. Don’t just let it go dusty in the back of the cupboard. 

Do what you can: 

This list is your “sales” list. It goes into your shopping bag or wallet and comes with you every time you go to the store. Check your inventory before you go shopping. Make sure you have all of the items on your list on hand. If any of them are on sale buy more even if you already have some at home. If you have money in your budget buy a few. 

If storage space is limited you may want to set inventory minimums and maximums for each item. This will keep your stock balanced although it may also mean you miss out on some deals. Keeping the list with you and stocking up when you can is the way to gradually and strategically increase your food stores.

Don’t worry too much about expiry dates at this point. They are usually quite narrow and most things will still be edible for a good long while after the expiry especially if the product is unopened. Expiry dates are useful for rotating your stock and making sure you are always eating the oldest stuff first. They are also important for revising and refining your list. Repeat these steps every few months for a while and once or twice a year after that.

Okay. This is where it becomes a bit more challenging for those who aren’t already comfortable in the kitchen.

3) Take  a hard look at the prepared foods that are a normal part of your meals. 

Ingredients are usually more affordable than ready to eat finished products and the more you can do yourself the easier it is to stretch your budget. The sooner you have a good stash of food you know how to use, the easier it will be to manage the fear porn without ratcheting up your anxiety levels (Never good for digestion or long term health). 

If you don’t cook you need to learn. Cooking is the quintessential human art.³ Everyone should be able to cook at least a little. Start now. Focus on foods you will actually eat. It doesn’t need to be elaborate. Think about what you’re currently buying that you may be able to make for yourself at home. You don’t have to become a culinary superstar. Simple foods and simple meals are the winners. 

As JMG⁴ has pointed out, every culture has it’s own version of “down home cooking” because in every culture there is a class of women (usually it’s women) who need to be able produce nutritious family meals quickly and on a small budget. This is exactly what we’re after. This is the type of cooking that will carry us through the long descent. 

Right now you can find recipes and tutorials for anything you want to make on the internet. There are YouTube channels that focus entirely on cooking from older cookbooks and vintage recipes. There are even channels that focus on historical eras where cooking over an open fire was the norm if that appeals to you. These are all likely to feature very thrifty “down home cooking” type of dishes. 

Don’t rely exclusively on the internet. Check your library for cookbooks suitable to your skill level. Copy or printout recipes that seem useful. The charity shops are chockablock with cookbooks right now too. Having at least some hard copy reference books is another level of security. 

4) Develop your skills. 

If you are an accomplished cook you may still need practice with a camp stove or barbecue or whatever off-grid cooking technology you have. Making things as easy as possible for yourself is important. You’re likely to be scrambling a bit when the power goes out anyway. Practice is what keeps everything working smoothly.

If you aren’t a cook, make a start. Take small steps but do take them. The problem with prepared food and emergency rations is that eventually they will run out. Skills are forever and no matter how big your budget or how much storage you can devote to buckets they will never give you the same kind of security.

If you are comfortable in the kitchen learning home canning and other preserving techniques is definitely worth putting on your to-do list. These are skills that will become even more valuable throughout the long descent.

5) Make sure your food inventory is stored in a variety of ways. 

Most fresh food, even the most perishable can last through the “72 hours” that gets tossed about if you can keep them cool. There are many fresh vegetables that are best stored at room temperature onions, garlic, potatoes, winter squash etc. Several others, carrots and other root veggies, cabbage etc will last for weeks at slightly cooler than room temperatures. All of these are part of your resilient pantry.

Frozen food is great for a short term crisis if you have a way to heat it up. It’s tastier and more nutritious than canned food but it’s vulnerable to power outages. A full freezer will stay frozen for about 2 days without power if you don’t open it. Most of it will take a day or two to thaw completely even at normal room temperature and you may be able to slow that down considerably if it’s cold enough to put it outside. Even completely thawed it’s still edible if it’s still cold. 

Dehydrated food is the ultimate for long term storage. It’s light weight and doesn’t take much space. It can be stored as individual ingredients or as meal kits, premixed sauces, and condiments. The down side is it’s completely useless if potable water is scarce. If dehydrated food is a significant part of your inventory make sure you have more than the recommended 3 or 4 litres of water per person per day on hand or a reliable way of purifying whatever water is likely to be available.

You can make your own if you have a dehydrator or in a low temperature oven with the door open. Dehydrating is probably the easiest food preservation method to learn but drying the food is only the first step. Figuring out how you will use it is harder especially when it’s easy to just restock your fresh food.

Check out the possibilities on offer in backpacking supply sites or your local outdoor stores for inspiration. There are also cookbooks aimed at backpackers and outdoor enthusiasts who want to make their own dehydrated meal packs. 

Canned food is the least appealing and least nutritious option and it’s heavy. But it’s also highly durable and it’s the most immediately edible of all the options. There are a wide variety of canned foods available either as ingredients or as prepared foods like soup and chilli and you can eat them cold directly out of the can if for whatever reason cooking is impossible. 

There are a number of websites and tutorials available online from preppers and homesteaders that will teach you how to can your own food either individually or as complete meals. It’s not a good option for anyone who doesn’t cook or is strapped for cash. It requires an investment in jars and specialized equipment but as mentioned above it is worth considering learning if you are able. It’s a better quality product and a great contribution to resilient local food system.  

Which brings us back the real challenge for lasting resilience: strong community bonds and local food systems. There is another permaculture principle worth keeping in mind while you are working through some of this. “Engage in long term and short term planning.” There are indications that these warnings may be timely even if they are just clickbait. So yeah, prep as much as you reasonably can and build up your skills, but start thinking about how you can improve your community connections and your local food systems too. (and here and here)

Be well.

 1 Turns out that it was based on a click bait Newsweek feature full of misinformation. The recommendations from most of the governments listed are long standing not recent.  

2 Humans have survived the millennia in part because we are willing to put almost anything in our mouths. This has been such an important part of our survival we have evolved systems to deal with occasionally eating things that are too far gone. If you no longer have an appendix be much, much more careful or keep a stash of high quality probiotics on hand.

3  Wrangham RW. Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human. Basic Books; 2009

4 John Michael Greer author of The Long Descent (2010) and many other books that are useful for understanding what happens when empires fall and civilizations come apart. https://ecosophia.net/ and https://ecosophia.dreamwidth.org/

You know the world I mean. The sustainable fantasy world where we all live in harmony with nature. 

If you’ve read much of my blog you’ll know already that I believe that this world is not something we can attain in our lifetimes. It’s not going to come about through some dramatic mass transformation of humanity into some kind of spiritual super organism. It’s going to come about as those of us who are willing and able to adapt lean into hard times and figure out how to live with in our means in a contracting economy. 

The planetary constraints we’ve been ignoring for the last few centuries will force the shift. Most of it, for most people, will be involuntary. Even those of us who can see what’s happening and are trying to get ahead of it will be scrambling most of the time. 

That doesn’t mean we should forget about the world to come. Quite the opposite. We need to keep the world we want to create in mind while we are scurrying about downsizing, weatherizing, and figuring out how to keep body and soul together without it costing the earth. 

Making that world real is the Grand Quest of our age. Our mission is to bring the fantasy a little closer to reality; to prepare the ground for the seeds of the future; to shift things enough that the next generation can build on what we have learned and preserved, and carry the Quest forward.

The choices we make will have an impact on what’s possible in the future. With that in mind I want advocate for choosing wool specifically and for seeking out and choosing natural materials generally. 

This is a contentious topic. Our current relationship with the animals that provide us with food and other important products is an abomination. Those who have very understandably recoiled in horror at the massive suffering and ecological disaster that is industrial meat production have spent decades making the case for avoiding meat and animal products on environmental grounds.

In this issue like many others the choices on offer are limited to two equally problematic extreme positions. Business as usual ignores the moral and ecological disaster that is industrial farming and rejecting animal foods and other animal products altogether just lands us in a different environmental quagmire.  

Both options are based on the illusion of human exceptionalism. The first is the  arrogance of exploitation. We can do whatever we like because our needs come first. The suffering we cause and the damage done doesn’t matter. 

The second is false humility and suicidal empathy. Our needs come last. We are undeserving. We need to limit ourselves and make ourselves small. The error here is thinking that this is the only ecologically sound option. It’s not. 

Animal foods and animal products are not the real problem. 

The problem is Industrial Ag. Both animal and plant production using these methods are ecologically disastrous. A plant based food system that relies on industrial mono crop production and global  commodity supply chains is not better for the environment.

As I have written previously 

Industrial Ag is inherently destructive. It displaces all the other plants and animals that inhabit the space. It poisons the air and water and exhausts the land. Industrial food production is an energy sink.⁴  It’s just as extractive as strip mining⁵ and clearcut logging and the scale is mind boggling. Turning all these resources into global commodities serves the few at the expense of everyone and everything else.

4 It takes c.7 calories of fossil fuel energy to deliver one calorie of food to your plate. https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Energy-expended-in-producing-and-delivering-one-food-calorie-Approximately-73-calories_fig1_303895662

5 An estimated 75 giga-tonnes of topsoil is dislodged from cropland every year. https://doi.org/10.1130/B25899.1 Every meal we eat costs about 10kg of soil.

Worse, rejecting animal products means relying more heavily on industrialization to produce synthetic alternatives and that causes even more undesirable environmental impacts.

If you are vegetarian for religious or health reasons or what ever other personal reasons you may have, great. I respect your choice and support your right to choose. But if you are doing it because you think it’s a better choice for the environment I would invite you to think more deeply about the impact of that choice. 

There is a third option 

The shift to regenerative agricultural practices is one of the biggest and most promising changes happening right now. It has already had a dramatic beneficial impact on vast acreages of land all over the world and on farmers. Its benefits have been proven again and again. 

Regenerative systems of production using animals in rotation with plant crops are spreading organically, farmer to farmer, as farmers and ranchers all over the world realize the benefits to the land and to their own livelihoods. 

Holistic Range Management, using grazing animals like sheep and cattle to restore land and reverse the desertification has been one of the few real environmental wins of the last few decades. 

Unfortunately most of the wool and the other animal products available to us are still products of the industrial system but choosing wool is still the best ways we can support this transition.

Supporting local farmers and ranchers is essential even as economic contraction starts to pinch. The pressures on farms and farmers, particularly on small family farms, from climate change to land grabs and battles over water rights, is another one of our many complex and potentially disastrous problems.

Choose Wool

The positive impacts of choosing wool and natural products including other animal products cannot be overstated. 

The manufacture of synthetic clothing, even plant based synthetic, is an ecological nightmare that consumes vast amounts of water,¹ pollutes the air, and endangers the factory workers and the communities that live nearby. 

There’s also the problem of the micro plastic pollution it generates when washed. 

If synthetics make up any part of your wardrobe I highly recommend you seriously consider investing in a “guppyfriend” wash bag  to contain the micro-plastics these clothes inevitable produce.

Oil based synthetic fabrics easily absorb the oils from your skin and they are difficult to clean even with hot water and harsh detergents. They become permanently stinky fairly quickly. Once a synthetic garment is unwearable it’s garbage forever.

Worse, when you’re sweating and your pores are open your body will readily reabsorb hormonally active chemicals from these fabrics. This isn’t just a problem for women. Endocrine disruptors can affect your energy, mood, libido, stress response, and blood sugar levels. Many of them are estrogenic which means they can have a feminizing effect on boys and trigger early onset puberty in girls.²

Wool is the quintessential high performance fibre. It outperforms any synthetic fabrics in every way. Synthetic fibres are “quick dry” but have almost nothing else to recommend them.

Wool is naturally odour resistant and breathable. It absorbs the sweat and toxins coming out of your skin and wicks them away from your body. 

It’s fire resistant and it stays warm even when it’s wet. It lasts much longer than other kinds of fabric too and its end of life uses include insulation, stuffing for cushions, and mulch in the garden.

It’s the ultimate easy care fabric 

So much has been made of the fact that wool isn’t easy to wash that we’ve forgotten that it rarely needs washing. Most wool garments do fine with regular airing, brushing, and occasionally, spot cleaning. It doesn’t get much easier than shake it out and hang it up. 

A wool base layer set can be worn for a week without noticeable odour and they go into your regular laundry. The wool in washable base layers is very thin and can break easily. If your laundry detergent has enzyme based stain removers they will act on the wool and weaken the fibres since wool is also protein.

Heavier weight wools are a bit more difficult. On the rare occasions when they actually need to be washed use cold water and set your washer to a “gentle” or “hand wash” cycle. Wrap them in a towel to gently squeeze as much water out as you can and lay them flat on another towel to dry.  

Hot water, vigorous agitation, and wringing or twisting are techniques for making felt. Unless want to make felt or you have something labelled “superwash” don’t do that. “Superwash” wool doesn’t shrink in the regular wash even in hot water because the wool fibres have been treated with plastic to prevent it.

The biggest challenge with wool is preventing moth damage. Putting sachets of lavender, cloves, cedar, or other strong aromatics in your drawers will deter them. These need to be replaced or refreshed seasonally. Putting your woolies into the freezer for a couple of days when you first get them and in the spring before you put them away in a for the summer will keep them safe.

Last of all I just want to offer a gentle reminder that if climate anxiety, political uncertainty, or the insanity of the wide world is causing you distress, a big cosy sweater is way better than an emotional support chicken any day. 

Stay warm! 

1 Despite the many comparable problems with the manufacture of natural fibres their one huge advantage is that they biodegrade easily at the end of their useful life.

2 A quick search brought up a number of articles. https://sashuthelabel.com/blogs/clothing-and-your-health/how-synthetic-fabrics-affect-your-hormones-and-what-to-wear-instead

One is in an area that has been park for a long time. Most of it is regenerating second or third growth temperate coastal rainforest but fruit trees and shrubs from when this whole area was farmland still remain as part of the mix. 

The other is in an area that was privately owned until a year or so ago. The recently acquired land is an expansion of the existing park. 

Neither tree has been cared for in any serious way for a long time. The one that was on private land is smaller and in slightly better shape than the one that has been part of the park for the last couple of decades. 

Both are infested with walnut husk maggot pest and there may be some codling moth too. It’s common on the apple trees around here.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. 

A Collapsenik Goes Gathering

I went out with a friend a few weeks ago to check it out. I had seen the walnuts on the ground while out walking the previous day. So out we went with our bags and our baskets, and our blissful ignorance. 

Disappointing. To say the least. Part of that is on me. I’m the kind of person who tends to go for it with more enthusiasm than information and do the research afterwards.

Most of what we picked up was infested and inedible and processing a huge volume of mostly wormy walnuts got me a couple of handfuls of edible nuts. 

Processing walnuts is a chore and processing maggoty walnut is worse.

I haven’t been back yet but I’m still wondering if I could learn to distinguish the walnuts that are more likely to be intact. Those that are obviously infested are easy enough to spot. 

Processing them would still be a big job but a mature walnut tree can produce an abundant crop of amazingly nutritious and delicious food. 

In my mind the trees are potentially a valuable community resource. Did I mention delicious and nutritious?

The research.

Two potential pests. Most likely the walnut husk maggot. The signs all match. And in either case the remedy is the same.

1 Remove all the infested fruit

2 Rough up the ground around the trees to expose overwintering bugs to predator. 

3 Apply a variety of sprays … Most of which sounded non-toxic and relatively inert as far as their impact on the rest of the ecosystem … 

But honestly, I stopped reading at that point.
Rejuvenating infested walnut trees seems to be a frustratingly long and complicated process.

The trees are on public land and the parks department can only be counted on to do minimal maintenance. They’ll come along at some point to pick up the rotting fruit. Even if they were willing to take on the chore of restoring these trees they don’t have the budget. 

Convincing anyone in local government to devote money to the project would be like convincing water to defy gravity.

The local non-profit fruit tree gleaning program has their, mostly volunteer, hands full. This valley is rich in fruit trees on public and private land and an absolutely obscene amount to apples, grapes, plums and other fruit would go to waste without their efforts.

What am I saying!?! An absolutely obscene amount of fruit does go to waste in this valley. It would be much, much worse without their efforts.  All of which is to say any increased capacity would be well used doing more of what they are already doing.

Generating interest in restoring the walnut trees doesn’t stand a chance. Even if I could get the government and the parks department to agree, the process would take several years of effort without much reward. 

Then there’s the challenge of processing the crop once they were restored. Not an insurmountable obstacle but considerably more difficult than getting apples pressed or making grapes into raisins.   

And still, the thought of those trees …
For a collapsenik they are like an itch that cannot be scratched. 

Establishing “The Society for Walnut Restoration and Rejuvenation” is a non-starter.

So? 
Just sit with this until the urge passes?

And why can’t the damn trees produce a decent crop on their own!?!

It’s that last question that produced the “Aha!” moment.

The key phrase is “on their own.” 

These trees are not part of an intact ecosystem …

More Research 

Walnuts have been cultivated and spread by humans since at least the early bronze age. They apparently originated in Asia and were spread by humans across Asia and into Europe. It’s thought that the Romans brought walnut to England and northern Europe about 2000 years ago.

It could have been much earlier. In a 2017 research report scientists “confirmed the presence of walnut in glacial refugia in the Balkans and western Europe.” 

Walnuts have obviously being a winning crop for humans for a very long time. 

Somehow I can’t imagine a bronze age farmer doing all the work to keep them viable that modern agriculture practice deems necessary. 

If it was that much work they wouldn’t have taken them and spread everywhere they went throughout most of Asia and Europe and eventually into the Americas. 

What’s the missing piece? 

Imagining a permaculture solution gave me the answer. Pigs! 

Or rather wild boar. 

Wild boars survived as part of the ecosystem of the English countryside until at least the 14th Century. They may have survived much later.  And running domestic pigs though orchards on the commons probably continued into the 18th Century.

Boars and walnuts. Walnut, pigs … and apples (I haven’t forgotten the codling moth.)

Running pigs through orchards after the low hanging fruit has been picked is an established permaculture practice. It’s a a viable biological system  for maintain an orchard of long lived full sized fruit trees without massive industrial scale equipment for pruning and picking.

Running pigs under those trees would accomplish the most important items on that list. The pigs would be quite happy to cleanup the fruit, and their sharp little hooves would rough up the ground and expose the overwintering pests to birds and other insectivores. 

And they would be ecstatic if they were moved to another spot the next day to do the same thing again.

Best of all, feeding maggoty walnuts to pigs  turns a disgusting waste product into a food producing resource. (Permaculture principle: Get a yield.)

Huh! 

Try selling that to the local government! 

It’s not going to fly.

The lesson is not just there’s a better way. Although that’s a good one. 

The lesson is about what happens when an ecosystem gets broken. 

Ecosystems are co-evolving communities of plants and animals.

Every time a link gets broken something stops working. 

Humans are generalists and niche hoppers. We are uniquely talented at being able to step in to supply ecosystem services that have disappeared because something is missing. Some crucial connection broken? Some link that we never even thought about when it was working? We've got it.  

We’re good with solutions. We improvise. We figure out work arounds. We throw money and labour at the problem. And we get results. Sometimes.

But every broken link means more work, more energy, more intervention and more incentive to reach for the chemicals. 

And really … the best thing to do … is to re-establish the links.

Can we still be friends if we disagree? 

Can we engage in a discussion about our differences without feeling threatened?

Can we be good neighbours to folks who don’t share our political views? 

Because if we can’t…, 

If the answer to these questions is “no…” 

If people’s opinions¹ put them beyond the pale … 

Or make them less worthy of compassion or respect …

Then we can forget about “building community” and try to get on with our lives as best we can without it.

If the answer really is “no,” you have to ask yourself what is more important to you building community or ideological purity. 

Because that’s the choice.

Getting everyone on board into one big movement to effect large scale change has been the pipe dream of the environment movement for more than 40 years. 

It didn’t happen. It won’t happen.

The idea that we could just educate everyone about the seriousness of “the problem” and that we could then all agree to act in one specific way was never sound. 

Not everyone agrees. Ever.

We world we have inherited has many, many problems of every imaginable kind. 

Everyone sees this differently. 

Everyone sees different problems as the most important or urgent. 

Everyone sees different root causes. 

Everyone has different ideas about the best way to remedy the situation …

Or the action that should be taken …

Or not taken. 

Or they don’t see it at all. They just feel abstractly that things were better when… And there’s nothing to be done. It’s just life grinding ever onward.

We need community.

The slow downward slide of decline can get faster and rougher without much warning. Reducing your dependence on complex industrial systems only gets you so far without other people around you.

The social safety nets provided by government institutions and the relative wealth of abundance industrialism are both eroding. The illusion of independence and autonomy they provided will not last. 

In a crisis the people you are going to need to rely on are your neighbours and coworkers. The people who are actually close by when disaster strikes. They are by definition the people you didn’t choose.

Human survival is a group thing.

People have been living in groups since long before climate change caused the primeval forests to disappeared and left us trying to figure out how to live on the savannah.² Since before we started on the long slow journey to becoming anatomically modern humans.

These have never been groups of our own choosing. They have always contained people who are difficult, contrary, and “too stupid for words.” Any community you are a part of will include people you don’t like and don’t get on with. 

We’ve lived in small closely related family groups and larger collections of random individuals. We’ve lived and worked with others forever. Our survival has always been a group thing. Ten thousand years ago or more we started living in cities.

The word “civil” comes from the same root as “city.” A “civilization” is large scale community that features a significant part of the population living in cities. Words  and phrases like please and thank you, excuse me, and you’re welcome were invented to make living in cities among strangers easier. Civilization starts coming apart when civility is more than we can manage.

Being polite, being civil to the people you meet and interact with doesn’t require much effort and it’s good practice. 

Being able to disagree on important issues and still be civil is harder but it’s even more important. 

Cancel culture has severely damaged our ability to connect and maintain good relations with the folks around us. It has struck at the heart of our already tenuous social circles and made discussing our differences much more difficult. 

We are well beyond intolerance and the thing is we have to get back; back past tolerance and all the way to acceptance. We have to believe that it’s possible for thoughtful intelligent good hearted  people to come to different conclusions about things.

You can’t wait until you need help. 

Building social capital is never quick. Trust is the currency of community. It takes time for trust to build and it’s easily damaged.³ Trust is essential for any kind of collective action. 

If you are part of an activist group building relationships of trust within the group is always more important than your official goal whatever that may be. If your relationships are strong whether you achieve what you set out to do or not you have a group that can move on to the next project, or refocus on another goal.

If the group fractures because you can’t talk, and listen, and accept that other people have their own ideas. You’ve failed. The social capital built up is destroyed and you have to start again from scratch with a new group. 

Developing strong social bonds and a culture of mutual aid depends on valuing a diversity of opinions just as much as we do any other diversity. Building resilience in the face of our crumbling social and economic systems means working with the people around you. It means building solid connections with the people you live and work with everyday.

The future is bound to be more geographically constrained. Fast affordable travel is one of the many benefits of cheap abundant concentrated energy. And it’s the most difficult to replace with passive and renewable power systems that don’t cost the earth.

If you are serious about reducing your ecological footprint or in collapsing now before the rush accepting those constraints will get you further than almost any of the other things you could do.

As the oil age winds down travel will become more expensive, more difficult, and more risky. Long distance communication is also going to become more difficult. Building community resilience necessarily needs to focus most on the people who are physically closest. That means your primary community isn’t going to be made up of people who all agree with your politics and your world view or share your values. 

You have accept and be comfortable with the fact that not everyone sees the world as you do and that even if they do, they may have different priorities about how to respond or where to focus their attention. 

So back to the question. Can we talk? 

Because the answer is more important than you may think.

1 Opinions not behaviour. Behaviour is a whole different thing. 

2 Somewhere between 4.2 million and 3.5 million years ago depending on which sources you consult.

3 Trust is damaged by people’s behaviour. By not being reliable. By being rude and inconsiderate. By hurling insults, making moral judgements, or dissolving into incoherent rage when presented with contrary opinions. 

If you’ve read my previous posts in this series you’ll know that I’m fully aware of how bad things could get. My view is that collapse isn’t a single event but a series of downward steps spread out over the next couple of hundred years any one of which can feel like total collapse to the people who experience them. 

Most of the time what we actually experience is decline.2 It’s a frustratingly slow tedious process that has many irritations but nothing to grab onto. No point or event that you can identify and say “this is it.” It’s just ordinary existence with increased frustration, loss, and general cussedness. More of a “death by a thousand cuts” than a single tangible event.

Many people simply can’t see it. Or they can only see extremes. If it isn’t an apocalypse it must be okay. Nothing to worry about.

Many cannot even imagine anything other than a future of infinite technological progress and abundance. Evidence to the contrary is dismissed as a temporary glitch in the system. 

Others do see it but they cling to the belief that someone will come along and fix it and we’ll still get the future we’ve been promised all along. 

Even if the people around you see the predicament as clearly as you do they may respond with avoidance. Remember the stages of grief from Elisabeth Kubler-Ross? Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and finally Acceptance. You can’t just jump from denial to acceptance.

Wherever the folks around you land, if you’ve reached acceptance, you have to be able function in the world we have while living with the awareness that industrial civilization is coming apart. 

Those of us who understand that collapse is an inherent unavoidable reality in an unsustainable system must still keep on doing the best we can in a slowly deteriorating world. We know it has to come apart but we have only general ideas about what might happen and not a clue about when and where and how. 

You have to find a way to keep your balance with your feet in two worlds.

We still live in a world with lots of conveniences and comforts and an abundance of stuff. The fact that the slow process of decline means that most of that is likely going to go away over the next two or three generations is not obvious. There’s a basic contradiction between the world we inhabit and the world that’s coming.

If you embrace the mantra “collapse now and avoid the rush” it means foregoing many of the conveniences and comforts on offer now. The fact that many of those conveniences and comforts come with their own frustrations and irritations and may not actually satisfy us or improve our lives helps but it’s sometimes hard to see. 

One of the things we don’t normally do is spend time thoughtfully evaluating the technologies on offer to see whether the new stuff is really better than the old stuff. It’s even harder to look at your current set up and deliberately decide to give it up in favour of simpler and more durable technologies that may require more effort and more skill to use. Self denial is hard to justify when the changes are so slow and we are still surrounded by so much.

So, yeah, living in two worlds with two apparently conflicting realities isn’t easy.

In some ways the fantasy of fast collapse is appealing because it’s easy to skip over the actual horrors and traumas it entails and it’s even easier to exaggerate the benefits of everyone finally getting on board. (There’s also the naughty pleasure of having finally been proved right!)

The reality of the long descent, is that it will take several generations and many periods of crisis for us to get down to lasting stable sustainable level of technology and consumption that will allow the seeds of a new civilization to sprout. 

This is frustrating for those of us who see our civilization bleeding from all those little cuts. And it’s even worse when we think of all the ecological damage that is still being done and will continue to be done as industrial civ flails around desperately grasping at anything that might keep things going a little longer. 

It seems like it would be easier if we could just rip the bandaid off and get it over with.

During the long periods of relative stability or, slow bleed, (to carry on the metaphor) people will always do their very best to convince themselves that the “new normal” is really just “normal”. The way it’s always been and always will be. 

This is generally not hard to do and the brief period where “everyone finally gets on board” usually only lasts until the rubble stops bouncing. Most people will go back to seeing things their own way and clinging to whatever beliefs give them the most comfort as soon as they can.

The good news is that whether you believe in fast collapse, or the long descent, or hope that someone somewhere will solve it all so we can go back to the endless progress and abundance of the Star Trek future, what you most need to do right now doesn’t change.

The other good news is that barring a personal crisis or a larger black swan event in your region, the slow periods of relative stability give you time to develop a plan, build up your reserves, learn some useful skills, and get ready for the next period of crisis. The point is that even as a fully fledged collapsenik the best thing to do is to prepare for your most likely near term challenges. 

Instead of preparing for a future where there is no power, no gas, and no food at all prepare for outages, shortages, service interruptions, and price hikes. Prepare for ice storms, tornadoes, and whatever extreme weather events are most likely in your part of the world. These things happen whether or not it’s TEOTWAWKI.

Oil, gas, and electricity prices are going to bounce around but they are all going to be trending upward. Prices of everything are going to be trending upwards because everything in an industrial civilization depends on the availability or scarcity of cheap energy.

Being frugal makes sense whether Western Civ collapses or not.

Cutting your expenses, reducing your energy demands, and conserving your resources  makes sense even if the economic contraction is temporary. Things may get better and they may not. Either way living within your means, staying solvent, and being financially risk averse is a good strategy.

Whether it’s just prices going up or the supply chains going down, keeping a pantry, an inventory of shelf stable foods you will actually eat, is great strategy. If you have money or if you can get your expenses under control and get far enough ahead that you can shop the sales and buy in bulk when that’s an option that’s a win. 

Adopting a DIY attitude and learning to do things for yourself is good practice no matter what life flings at you. It’s a win-win. Most things take practice, sometimes many years of practice, to get good at them. Start now. Build real skills.(and here) Focus on the ones that save you money now. If and when the SHTF you will need them. 

If you are considering training for a real job in the secondary economy  pour through the trade school offerings to find something that actually suits you. If it’s something that people want or need badly enough that they are still willing to pay for it despite economic downturns, that’s a bonus.

Become a problem solver. It’s good practice.

The future is emergent. We can only see the broad outlines of what will happen. We can’t ever know the when, where and how for sure. That means two things. 

First it’s totally legit for you to focus on the possibilities that most concern you and for other people to focus on what concerns them. 

We can’t agree on what will happen or what the best response will be. It’s actually better if we don’t.³ We can’t know what will work until we’ve seen it working. Do your own thing but pay attention to what other people are doing. If it’s working for them it might work for you too.

Second stay light on your feet. Don’t get too attached to your plans. Life will throw you a curve or many curves. No matter how good your plans are, no matter how brilliant your strategy, you may need to throw all out and wing it. 

Learning to respond to the real situation is essential. 

Pay attention to what is. Don’t let yourself pushed in to a panic by the spectre of fast collapse. Don’t let yourself be deluded by those who tell you there isn’t a problem or by your own desire for things to be different. 

Be suspicious of anyone who says they can fix it and be especially wary of scapegoating. No one person or group is solely responsible and blaming others or targeting any designated out-group is an ugly distraction.

The things you do today shape the world around you a little and the things you do tomorrow shape it a little more. Focus on taking responsibility for yourself and be patient. Keep the future you want to create in mind and have compassion for those that don’t share your worldview. 

1 https://substack.com/home/post/p-212211050

2 This, like many of my ideas, is taken from the work of John Michael Greer https://ecosophia.net/ 

3 https://archdruidmirror.blogspot.com/2017/06/dissensus-and-organic-process.html

We live in a time of rapid change and uncertainty. The 50 year failure of the environmental movement has left us with a tangle of interconnected problems. Ecosystem destruction;  freakishly high levels of pollution of the land the water and the atmosphere; and resource depletion combine to create a looming crisis of epic proportions. We are faced with increasing political and economic instability and it’s clear that there will be no large scale co-ordinated efforts to address any of it.

This blog is about what we can do, as ordinary people in families and small groups, to create lives worth living; to build a future worth having; and to be a force for renewal and regeneration in our much depleted world.

This is the third strategy. Third on the list of actions that can be done by you on your own or in collaboration with a few others to help manage your trajectory in the rough downhill slide of industrial civilization and western culture. The basis of all of these strategies is an attempt is to draw on our quintessentially human strengths to help us get through the current crisis and prepare ourselves to be as flexible as possible in the face or whatever the future throws at us. 

Working with our hands is the first of these strategies that is based on uniquely human characteristics.¹ Our nimble fingers are unmatched in the animal kingdom. Our close relatives also have opposable thumbs but the big difference between humans and chimps or bonobos is that we have traded strength for dexterity. We are comparatively weak but we are highly skilled at manipulating the objects around us and altering the material world to suit our needs.

Working with your hands is not second best, not inferior to “thinking” jobs or management jobs. If anything, according to Matthew Crawford,² only working with your brain is limiting yourself and giving yourself an artificial handicap that doesn’t make you smarter or serve you in any way. In his 2009 best selling book “Shop Class as Soulcraft,” he points out that the popularity of DIY activities and hands on hobbies was not initially driven by economics as much as by a quest for satisfaction in a world of jobs and activities that doesn’t really provide it.

It may be that finding satisfaction in a world that devalues handwork is difficult because we’ve turned our backs on a fundamental part of what makes us human. Our hands and brains evolved together in continuous feedback loops of physical skill and mental agility. Working with your hands increases your mental capacity and, as Crawford points out, it’s never really a choice of working with your hands or working with your brain. It’s a choice of working with your hands and your brain or just with your brain.

Over the last few generations the trend of pushing our children and young people toward university career paths and bolstering our sense of superiority by sneering at people who work in the trades has resulted in a massive oversupply of qualified people for a limited number of jobs in management and high tech. There were never enough jobs available for all the people who were told to “learn to code” and worse, these are the very jobs that are being eliminated in the race for global dominance through AI. 

The mass movement of young adults into expensive training programs in the hope of jobs that turned out to be mostly imaginary has landed many talented intelligent people in a hellish limbo of huge debts and no viable way of making a living. The flip side is a very real shortage of skilled workers in the trades that actually keep society functioning. 

If you are someone who has been caught in this trap, take heart. The tradespeople and other folks who do the real work of holding society together are aging out and retiring. Building real skills may be a good career move. 

According to Crawford people who already have a 4 year degree are the fastest growing demographic in the student body at community colleges. He quotes figures for successful completion of the programs (95%) and subsequent employment (98% in the first year after graduation) that make it clear that following the trades path is a winning strategy.

Think about it. This path offers many different possibilities. There are a wide range of jobs in the secondary economy (the economy of real goods and services) and many potential ways to use them to earn a living. These are jobs are that cannot be offshored, done remotely, or by AI. They need people who are willing to show up.  

Our cultural prejudices against manual labour and real work has led to a devaluation and gradual rejection the basic hands-on skills of living, managing a household, maintaining the physical structures that shelter us, and keeping the tools and equipment we use daily functional. Almost all of these formerly ubiquitous skills have been outsourced to the “market’ so they could be sold back to us at profit. 

The basics of self care (cooking etc) have been forgotten, the domestic (household) economy has been gutted, and we have a huge population of people who are more than 2 generations away from any familiarity with even the simplest of domestic arts or shop craft.

If you are skilled in any of what I’ve termed the basics of living there may be a niche for you in helping others either as an expert offering services to those who don’t have the skills or as an entrepreneur producing and providing some real goods of value or as a teacher/knowledge keeper passing on the skills other people never had the opportunity to learn. 

For those of you who aren’t in need of a new career building up the tangible skills of providing for your own basic needs is the primary strategy for giving yourself flexibility and resilience in the face of an uncertain future. As mentioned in Your Niche in periods of stability being a specialist works great but in periods of instability and change generalists have an advantage. 

Since we are living in two worlds so to speak, needing to function in the current system while preparing ourselves for the inevitable crises, shifts, and changes as it comes apart, the winning strategy may be having a single area of expertise and broader set of other skills that reduce your dependance on hiring expensive expertise. These additional skills build up your range of possibilities. They may even serve as potential sidelines or as a fallback if your main field doesn’t pan out.

The current chatter among politicians and manufacturers about bringing manufacturing back to the west is a response to rising shipping costs and supply chain fragility. Neither of these issues are likely to go away so it’s probable that opportunities in the secondary economic will continue to expand for some time. 

More importantly building real skills is an investment in yourself. A skill once acquired is yours for life. Building real skills is good self-care. Whether it is cooking your own meals or fixing a lamp the knowledge that you can shape some small part of the world around you to suit your needs is powerful. There is an ease and confidence that comes with the awareness that the world of things is knowable, fixable, manageable. 

1 Spending most of your waking hours outside is a universal in the living world and it turns out growing food is not uniquely human either. https://ecosociosphere.in/how-do-ants-farm-secrets-of-insect-agriculture/

2 Crawford, Mathew B., Shop Class as Soulcraft: an inquiry into the value of work, ( 2009) The Penguin Press. 

3 https://www.gyre9.com/post/onshoring-in-manufacturing-why-the-shift-back-home-is-gaining-momentum

It isn’t just our thinking that holds us back. Grow Food Everywhere is more than insurance and a fall back in hard times. Grow Food Everywhere strikes at the heart of food as a commodity and threatens the current practice of generating wealth by squeezing the life out of the world.

Food as a commodity underpins our whole predatory socio-economic system. The rich and powerful benefit from maintaining food as a commodity and the political-economic arrangements that flow from it. If you could gather a significant portion of your daily calories from a local park or boulevard your useless monotonous job wouldn’t have as much of a grip on you. You’d be less likely to put up the petty indignities and disrespect that come along with it. 

Grow Food Everywhere is a radical shift. It’s a rough and ready approach to DIY micro “restoration,” guerrilla gardening,¹ and edible landscaping. It’s taking on the challenge of restoring the damaged land around you and seeding it with useful species: food, medicine, even timber if there’s room. (Everyone likes planting trees.)  Undertaking this quest is means following your own path and finding your own way. Grow Food Everywhere is the best way to restore local biodiversity, and you get food!

Grow Food Everywhere is practical hands-on response to the ecological destruction that threatens our world. It calls on each of us to “start where you are, use what you have, do what you can.” Planting things that can feed you, heal you, and provide you with the raw materials for many useful projects is good for you and for the planet. It increases your resilience and flexibility. It builds up a skill set you can use wherever you find yourself. And it’s the best possible antidote to eco-grief and despair.

If you have access to land you win. You’ll want to fully develop the area around your house before you move on (Start Small Stay Close). If you have a kitchen garden you are partway there. Look around the rest of your property at what is currently growing and think about how much of it is actually useful. You don’t need to make dramatic changes but keep the “food, fibre, fuel” mantra in mind when you are “editing” or considering new additions.

If you are renting, edible landscaping is the ultimate stealth gardening. Adding a few edibles to existing flower beds is easy peasy. Chives, garlic chives, welsh onions are easy to grow perennials that have beautiful flowers pollinators love. Scarlet runner beans have gorgeous flowers and dramatic colourful pods. You can eat them when they’re young and tender or let them mature and dry them for later. Magnolia peas are similar: shelling peas with wonderful purple flowers and pods. Plant in clusters placed at regular intervals. Make it look like part of the mix.

If you live in an apartment, you may be limited to container gardening. Rosemary Morrow² has done some fabulous work on permaculture design for high density urban areas. Her book The Earth Restorers Guide to Permaculture is sadly out of print but there are lots of other resources for whatever scale of growing is available to you.³ 

There are also allotments, although, generally they have waiting lists. You may have to start your own, or ask around for someone who has yard space or would like help in their garden. Collaboration  strengthens community bonds and builds social capital. Participating in a community garden is a great way for someone who is just starting out to tap into a wealth of expertise. 

If you’ve thoroughly explored all these options and are ready for adventure, keep your eyes open when you are out walking. You are looking for two things: First, places you could drop a few seeds and have them grow easily (plant seed where they will grow) and second the wild-ish weedy places nobody notices or cares about (site repair).

Checking out what’s already growing will give you clues about what kinds of plants will do well in those spots and what you could add that will blend in. You’ll probably find some interesting stuff already established.⁴ Many ornamentals are also useful. You may spot something you could eat, make into tea or medicine,⁵ or gather for art, craft, or building supplies. If your wanderings take you through residential neighbourhoods and you find fruit or nut trees over hanging property lines that’s a win. 

If you are planting pick your spots. The better you match your plants to the existing conditions the better they will survive with minimal care. Herbs are less fussy about the soil than veggies. They are more drought tolerant once established too. In parks and public areas native plants or ornamentals are more likely to pass unnoticed. Many “native” species were cultivated by the cultures that preceded us because they are useful.⁶

The worst areas, the spots where only a few straggly plants struggle to grow are prime spot for remediation.⁷  Restoring damaged land takes longer but that is what is it’s about. Micro-restoration is central to becoming a keystone species. The best part about these areas is if you get something growing there no one will care. If you’re careful no one will notice. Many valuable medicinals like St John’s wort are weedy and indifferent looking and will easily grow unnoticed in neglected patches.

There are many edible flowers like borage and calendula that pollinators love that can add colour and micro-nutrients to salads and sandwiches. Wild herbal teas like mint,⁸ lemon balm, red clover will grow easily and naturalize readily. Any kind of clover is a great addition to the mix. Like peas and beans they are nitrogen fixers. They improve the soil and pollinators love them.

You may notice a pattern here: heavy on the condiments and flavour enhancers; light on the calories. That will shift over time as Grow Food Everywhere becomes normalized. In the meantime remember you are not planting a garden so much as establishing a foraging habitat for yourself and the other creatures who are drawn to it.

Becoming a keystone species, weaving ourselves back into the web of life, is a Great Quest that’s likely to span several generations. Like the search for the Holy Grail it will offer unique challenges to everyone who takes it up. How it will unfold is a mystery.

1 Just kidding. I’m not suggesting you do anything illegal. Don’t even think about taking a shovel next time you go for a late evening walk.* It’s best to scout things out thoroughly first. (Observe and Reflect.)

2 www.bluemountainspermacultureinstitute.com.au/

3 Pro tip: Always look for gardening resources from you own bioregion or from areas that closely match your climate. 

4 Suburban foraging is definitely a thing https://surburbanforager.wordpress.com/ and http://www.suburbanforagers.com/https://

5 Do your research before you start experimenting. You are your own OSH committee. Self reliance is the prime directive.

6 All of the areas Europeans have spread into in the last 3 hundred years were previously managed by the people we displaced. The plants they grew or fostered may not be familiar or preferred but people are much less likely to object to you planting “native” species. 

7 See “Earth Repair” by Leila Darwish https://earthrepair.ca/  and “Mycelium Running” by Paul Stamets and anything else you want to know about mushrooms at Fungi Perfecti https://fungi.com/ 

8 Do your research. Some of these plants are very vigorous and can spread quickly. Mint is a prime example of a plant that requires frequent heavy harvesting. If you are not super keen on using it it’s better to skip it. 

*Also, better to show up in first thing in the morning wearing hi-vis clothing.

There are many good reasons to grow your own food as much as possible and there are numerous resources to help you get started. In the context of this blog and the goal of becoming ecologically savvy participants in the ecosystems we inhabit growing food takes on even more significance. Growing food is one of the best ways to learn more about ecology and about your unique ecosystem. But that is only one aspect of it. Grow Food Everywhere is about more than just gardening. It’s about rethinking our place in the world.  

The obvious benefits of growing your own food are improving your own health and your own food security. Growing your own food also has an impact on some of the bigger issues. Growing food reduces the pressure to expand farmland into wilderness areas* and if widely adopted it is the best possible response to world hunger.

Gardening can feed the world more effectively than Industrial Ag ever will. Small Scale Intensive Systems (SSIS)** give the highest yields of any food production systems. There is significantly less waste too. The food you grow yourself doesn’t have to meet the standards of unblemished beauty that is expected of food for sale. The food you grow yourself goes directly onto your plate. No supply chains, no middlemen, no conglomerate food processing plants, no outbreaks of the deadly microbe du jour. Maximum freshness; minimum adulteration.

Industrial Agriculture and specifically the chemical intensive “Green Revolution” approach is always promoted as necessary even if it’s a necessary evil because we have to “feed the world.” In reality the world feeds us. Vast acreages of farmland in areas of the world where poverty makes food security a serious life and death issue are devoted to cash crops for export. We don’t need to feed the world. We need to learn to feed ourselves.

But like personal food security the impact on world hunger is just part of the story. Grow Food Everywhere centres on a fundamental debate about who we are and how we participate in the world around us.

Simplistically it’s a question of whether we have the right to modify the environment to create habitat for ourselves and for the plant and animal species we want and need to provide for ourselves. I would argue that we do but right or wrong we do modify the environment. We have drastically modified it to serve industrial production and mass urbanization with devastating consequences to the natural systems that support life. Right now the tech-bros are building data centres at a phenomenal pace to speed up their fantasy of the AI future with zero concern for the impact on people or planet.

We have attempted to counterbalance the inevitable destruction inherent in industrial systems by setting aside conservation areas and, despite the fact that previously protected areas are now under threat of exploitation, many people still devote hundreds if not thousands of hours to restoration projects. Almost universally these projects are aimed at recreating an idealized version of untouched wilderness based on the way we imagined they were when we first noticed them.

I have enormous respect the people who do this work and I don’t want to diminish their achievements in anyway. But the ideal of “untouched wilderness” clouds our thinking*** and in some cases has led to situations where the people who have lived on the land for 100’s of generations are threatened with eviction from their ancestral homes.

This is a huge thorny issue**** because sometimes it is the people who are the problem. People who are at risk of starving do not conserve. People who cannot feed their children will always sacrifice the long term good for the meal they need today. Conservation is a luxury of wealth. We can easily see this here in the rich west where we are talking about opening up our national parks and remaining wilderness to mining and other extraction projects to stave off the inevitable decline in our standards of living a little longer.

Grow Food Everywhere is a third option. It’s an alternative to the division of land into human use areas that can be trashed and conservation areas that exclude human activity. It is based on the idea that human productive systems do not have to be inherently destructive. That we can, and should, include the consideration of human needs into restoration projects and into the management of the wild-ish areas all around us. 

This is a radical idea. It is a fundamental change in our thinking and there are many powerful forces that oppose it. Growing herbs in a sunny window, getting an allotment garden plot, or encouraging people who have access to land to grow veggies as well as ornamentals are more subversive than they seem. 

Next Grow Food Everywhere: Weaving Ourselves Back Into The Web.

*To be very clear permaculture defines wilderness, zone 5, as places where people don’t go. The ethic “Care of the Earth” means confining our activities to places that have already been impacted by human activity and further to areas that we can actively improve. Any place we cannot actively improve should be left to regenerate on its own. Guidelines for occasions where going into the wilderness cannot be avoided include complete restoration as part of the project plan.

**As contrasted with Large Scale Extensive Systems (LSES) which require very little time, energy or other inputs once they are established. The best known examples are probably Food Forests but restoration that includes production for human consumption can be done in any kind of ecosystem.

*** All of the areas colonized by the European diaspora were already being managed by the people living there. Just as importantly for this discussion, ecosystems are never static. They are dynamic living arrangements composed of many interactive forces. They change and respond to changes and recalibrate and rebalance. Even without human intervention they go through dynamic cycles of destruction and renewal.

**** They are all thorny issues. Solutions and clear categories of “good” and “bad” ideas don’t exist. Some ideas are better than others but any intervention into a complex systems is going to have unintended consequences. The most we can ever hope for is a somewhat equitable distribution of the costs and benefits.