(I’m appropriating the title of this post from the masturbation fantasy that was The Invisibles, by Grant Morrison.)
The good news about everything that is unsustainable is that, by definition, no matter what we do, it will eventually stop.
On the face of it, this can sound terrifying and depressing. At least it did for me. My lifestyle, like that of most people who spend time on the internet reading blogs like this, is really comfortable. I have ready access not only to nutritious food but to a variety of nutritious food that was beyond my parents’ conception when they were my age, and still regularly boggles them. I have the option to have a doctor treat my illnesses. I can jump on a bus and then a train and be in the next city pretty much any time I feel like it. I can either walk down the street and pay someone to make machines make a cup of tea for me, from tea grown in a region where human people are still doing the painstaking work of tending, harvesting, and processing tea plants, or I can make natural gas pumped out of the earth at great expense heat water so I can make tea “myself”—as if PG&E, the natural gas mining and refining industry, and the US federal government were not all helping me, let alone the same far away tea-picking laborers—at a cost of pennies. I really like tea. Not only tea, but chocolate. When the unsustainable stops, who will bring us chocolate? This is no idle question, but points directly to the obstacles standing between us and making changes before we are forced to.
Lierre Keith, here:
I think the biggest reason otherwise radical people don’t want to face the necessity of ending industrial civilization is privilege. We’re the ones reaping the benefits. We’ve sold out the rest of life on earth for convenience, creature comforts, and cheap consumer goods, and it’s appalling. … And what’s been frustrating to me for twenty-five years is conversations with people who agree, who know the planet is dying, who’ve done civil disobedience, who’ve wept over the destruction. And when I say, “We’re going to have to learn to live without electricity, without cars,” they say, “But I like the convenience. I like having a car. I like air conditioning.” I don’t know what to do with these people. That was worth destroying the planet? Their hesitation isn’t even about real survival needs like food. Nobody has once said to me, “But what will I eat?”
Recently I got onto a bus to get to the next city, as I am privileged to do in relative convenience and comfort, a ride that often takes about 45 minutes on the bus and then the light rail. On this day, the bus had been late, and I was anxious to make an appointment. Since I usually leave a little extra time for contingencies, I thought I might still make it, but it would be close. As the bus continued along its route, I learned from the conversations of the people around me why it had been late—there was a marathon I hadn’t paid much attention to that had closed the center of the city; the light rail station was inaccessible, as was much of the bus route. My anxiety increased; how would I make my appointment on time? I felt an enormous amount of frustration with the bus driver, with the marathon organizers, with the city, with the transit administration. As the driver came upon roadblock after roadblock (about which, through some snafu, she’d been given incorrect information) I began to feel empathy with her. Here she was doing a hard job under difficult circumstances. Not only had she been hugely inconvenienced and given the wrong instructions, it was already the day when the bus routes were being changed so she was driving a new route for the first time to begin with, she was driving an eight ton vehicle in traffic with other drivers similarly confused and frustrated, and to top it off her passengers were angry at her, too. As she made a decision and we turned off the route altogether, I accepted that I was not going to make my appointment on time, or indeed at all, and I let go of that stress and worry. I realized how privileged I was to live in a world where for a tenth of my gross hourly wage I can get on a bus and let someone else drive me to where I need to be, and at what cost to other people, human and otherwise. As soon as I accepted that being late was not under my control, the factors that actually are under my control came to light—I could at least choose not to cause myself further suffering by fighting needlessly or being in denial about my situation.
The reason I tell this story is to point out the process of shifting my emotional state from an ineffective and painful one to an effective and comfortable one began with acceptance, proceeded through compassion for others, and resulted in a more pleasant journey. The realization that there was no way at all to make my appointment on time actually freed me from a lot of distress. It is not hard to be patient. It is hard to be impatient. It is not hard to learn to live a new kind of life. It is hard to be dependent on a way of life that is no longer possible.
I know one person who is really and truly physically dependent on the continuation of civilization as we know it. He depends on a respirator to breathe. The respirator runs on electricity provided by a battery that must frequently be swapped for a fresh one and recharged. The idea that he should entrust his survival to daylight-only solar photovoltaics, to intermittent wind power, or even to microhydro, probably seems frightening to many people. The idea that he must currently entrust his survival to the dwindling availability of oil and coal from war-torn regions and fragile ecosystems and the brittle, outdated electrical grid is even more unsettling. I haven’t reconciled my objections to the use of oil and coal electricity and the existence of the outdated grid with my love for him and gladness that he is still alive and in the world. I don’t feel I need to. His life is in constant danger, whether from a storm or an earthquake or a passing cold virus or from a general decrease in available electricity. A just society would prioritize his need over my desire to refresh my Facebook feed every five minutes. Anyone who is about to use my friend and others like him as a reason to be outraged with me for saying that we must cut our electricity use to drastic lows must confront the fact that they are being hypocritical—why not simply be outraged that so many people are allowed to simply waste as much electricity as we can afford to buy, given the fact that it is heavily subsidized by the government, when its use to support the lives of people who are disabled and ill is clearly so much more important? Still, the thought of creating a change in society that will create more difficulty and inconvenience for people who, more than anything else, are disabled by society’s lack of care for them is a troubling one. But societies without access to industrial resources have cared for their disabled and ill for thousands of years. And in some but not all cases we know that industrial society is actually causing disability and illness. Given that our consumption of oil, gas, and coal is unsustainable, meaning that it will stop, and we don’t have the ability to foresee accurately when this will occur, doesn’t it make sense as a way of supporting all people who are dependent on this infrastructure to a greater or lesser degree to make plans now for when it begins to fail?
Once we have accepted that our lives as we know them are dependent on a fragile infrastructure that is going away more rapidly than we’d like to believe, once we have accepted the need for change, then we have only to answer the question: How are we to do this? How are we to prevent avoidable suffering for ourselves and fellow beings?
- First, waiting until the infrastructure collapses by itself to take action will increase suffering. We know this. If we do not work to create some alternative to grid power for my friend, when the grid goes down, he’ll die. If we do not work to establish resilient local food networks for our communities, when global food distribution is disrupted, we will go hungry. If we do not radically change our civilization, when we are unable to sustain it in the face of the environmental devastation we’ve wrought, we will all suffer and many of us will die. Some of this suffering may be unavoidable. But planning in advance can help prevent much of this suffering.
- Second, we have the knowledge and skills we need available to us right now to do what we need to do. We do not need to wait on the uncertainties of technological innovations that may or may not be forthcoming. We do not need to wait on the discovery of oil and gas reserves that may not be there. We do not need to wait on the development of such contradictions in terms as “clean coal” and “safe nuclear.” We have had this knowledge and skill for thousands of years, and we can improve upon it in ways that do not disrupt the living networks we depend on for our sustenance.
- Third, there are networks of people who are eager and willing to share these skills and their own resources in the service of the planet. None of them are perfect. None of them are offering you a 2500 sq. ft. country manor, an IRA, an HMO, or a luxury car. Most are not offering a full-time job with benefits. What they are offering is networks of community support and the opportunity to share and have enough. If you imagine and envision a new way of life for yourself that you think is sustainable and resilient, and you aren’t finding a way to create that for yourself alone, I guarantee that there is someone out there who has a similar vision or will cosign yours that you can work with. The trick is getting in touch with them, and getting over our brokennesses enough to be able to work together.
- Fourth, these other ways of life are not miserable existences of drudgery and pain. That’s fear talking. Oh, they can be if you like. If your life now is a miserable existence of drudgery and pain, you’re sure to bring that with you, until you heal it or change it somehow. If you are going to perpetually resent grinding grain by hand to make flour, there are other options—a wind or water mill to grind grain, for instance, or having someone in the community who likes that work do it in trade for some of the grain or other necessary staples. Or don’t eat it—it’s often healthier not to, anyway. There are lots of other starchy staples you can substitute for wheat bread—a big barrel of potatoes, for instance, or a patch of quinoa. We need to get beyond judging our fair share of work based on the 40hr standard, that’s all—some of us will be working less, others more, at any given time, based on our strengths and what there is to do. You can probably expect to have more free time, and more community to enjoy that free time with.
What do you need to be able to make the changes we’ll all need to make to survive, now, before it gets too hard? Is the future unbearable for you without chocolate? Experiment with bay nuts or whatever your local equivalent is. Is the thought of being without health insurance—the well-intentioned Obama plan notwithstanding—unbearable for you? Start talking to your local providers and see who occasionally does work on trade, or would be open to the idea. Can you not imagine life without the internet? Try getting into ham radio. Are you physically dependent on electricity for getting around or for your urgent medical needs? Trade skills with an off-grid alternative energy technician.
The good news is that while there are real problems and challenges to changing your lifestyle, they can all be dealt with. They are all less severe than the problems that inhere in our current industrial civilization. Some of them are harder to answer than “where am I going to get my chocolate?!” but they are all less frightening than the end of the planet’s ability to support life.
Let’s use the comments to talk about some of our personal roadblocks and their potential solutions.