The Three Things Every Sensible Person Should be Doing for their Future (But Few Are)

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you can’t avoid hearing predictions of doom and gloom. Climate change, “peak oil,” fisheries collapse, economic meltdown, ocean acidification, ocean dead zones, spreading deserts, water wars…the list seems endless. If even a fraction of the forecast catastrophes come true, it’s going to be a challenging future – especially if you are unprepared.

I have put the three things you should be doing now up top, and the justification following, because many of you are well aware of the challenges we face.

Be Prepared

It is all-too-likely that one or more of these catastrophes will occur. When is anybody’s guess, but the odds seem high that it will be within the lifetime of anyone under 50. Given that, every sensible person should be doing three things:

1. Educate yourself on the “Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century” as they have been called, and do what you can to prevent them. This means getting politically active – carefully. As our democracies have declined, so has protection for basic rights. You don’t want to get yourself labelled a terrorist.

2. Build as much potential for self-reliance into your life as possible.

• A house that remains habitable without cheap and reliable external power
• A yard suitable for growing some vegetables
• Real books in case TV and the Internet become less reliable, especially ones on saving seeds, growing crops, and other do-it-yourself pioneer stuff
• Stock up on items of importance that may become hard to obtain, like medicine for diabetics or condoms

Necessities like shelter (including heat in cold climates) and food are most important, of course.

3. Join up with likeminded people in a community capable of self-reliance for necessities. It is exponentially more difficult to make it on your own. Share the labour and reduce the work required to live well. It is also very risky to go solo. Imagine that the deer eat half your crop. (Or hungry neighbours who didn’t bother to prepare.) Or you break a leg.

It’s also much more pleasant to live in a community. We are social animals; you can only play solitaire so many times before you’ll start wishing there were some other people around to talk with, to swap with, and just to be with.

Why Prepare for the Worst?

There are a lot of people predicting that our current civilisation is unsustainable – including me, of course – meaning a contraction is coming. And, unfortunately, not all these people can safely be dismissed as nutters. You could easily and justifiably ignore me, for example…except that I am basing my predictions on the work of some very well-qualified people. I say the things I do is because of what these experts say.

Let’s take concerns about climate change, for example. Some people dismiss the climate scientists, but that seems rather arrogant and foolish – especially for people who have no climate science credentials themselves. I would never claim to know more about what’s going on with climate than the scientists working in the field, but almost all the people publicly denigrating the climate scientists are bloggers and opinion columnists; they don’t know what they’re talking about and don’t have the sense to listen to the people who do. Many are paid by oil, coal, and auto interests.

Others write off the Peak Oil crowd, but based on what? Obviously the oil will run out someday, and the smart thing to do would be to prepare for that. We are not preparing, so perhaps peak oil will occur far in the future? That was the position of everyone except the peak oil crowd until recently, when the highly influential International Energy Association recently admitted they had based their predictions of future supply on bullshit and wishful thinking. Suddenly, the peak oil crowd was revealed to be more grounded in reality than the MBAs pretending the oil would last forever.

Or ocean acidification, a by-product of all that carbon we’re pumping into the atmosphere that the fossil fuel companies prefer to refer to as “life.” (From their ad: Some call it pollution, we call it life.) Do you really want to believe coal executives and the PR companies they pay over scientists? Seems dopey to do that. And risky, when the ocean scientists are saying acidification is wiping out vital marine life.

And how about pollution? Ocean dead zones? The collapse of the ocean fisheries? To dismiss these things as ’scaremongering’ is to say science is garbage and something, God perhaps, will save us. Again, not a wise position.

Finally, there is the financial crisis we are still attempting to emerge from. It was very recently that some rather highly placed people were terrified about a worldwide economic depression. People like former President Bush, who was so concerned that he said, while dumping hundreds of billions into the economy, “I have abandoned free market principles to save the free market system.” Nothing has changed to prevent another economic meltdown. If anything, we have set the stage for the next financial/economic collapse: no laws were changed and we bailed out the people who caused the last one – and paid themselves obscene bonuses in the process.

What that means, of course, is that our democracies have become sufficiently corrupted that they no longer represent – or protect – we the people, but once again answer first to a wealthy elite. And the rich have a very poor record of doing the right or even wise thing when it comes to survival.

If You Cannot Prepare

Reality just is. Meaning, if you are not prepared and disaster strikes, it won’t matter at all that you wanted to prepare but couldn’t afford to, or were only partway there. Or that you’re a senior, or a single parent, in a wheelchair, diabetic, or whatever. You’re in for a hard time and your prospects are not good. This is one reason I stress joining a community. Everyone has something of value to offer and in return gains support from the community.

Dmitri Orlov discusses the collapse of the Soviet Union and how a similar meltdown would likely affect the United States (and therefore Canada). People living in high-rises had to walk up dozens of flights of stairs. With groceries. And small children. To apartments with no heat, occasional electricity, and often no water.

Most Canadian and American houses are literally garbage. The current design life of a house is about 70 years, after which it is intended to be bulldozed into a dump and another disposable house put in its place. This may serve the building industry, but it sure won’t work in difficult times. This also means that millions of houses will start falling apart in years to come, and if you are in one of them…at least the Soviet apartment blocks were built to last.

Cob house

The reality is that most of us will not be prepared for a collapse. The vast majority will not see it coming, and many of us who are working toward security won’t be there yet for various reasons. So there will be a lot of hungry, cold, angry people, at least for a time. They will be a severe threat to anyone who did prepare, simply because there will be so many of them.

In the end, you can only do what you have time to do. Life is short, and you can’t spend all of it worried about what might happen when. Life is always a balance between preparing for the future and living in the present; too much of the former and life passes you by. Too much of the latter and your life may be shorter and your future quite unpleasant.

All you can do is your best.

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