Well. Time to eat some crow.

A couple of weeks ago I slagged Lana (and fellow NDP MLA John Horgan) for standing in the way of what we really need, which is rapid and decisive action on climate change and peak oil. Their party will, in fact, contribute to both climate change and our dependence upon oil by continuing to subsidize it.

That said, it is pointless, unfair, and ungentlemanly to harshly criticize well-meaning people who are trying to do their best in our broken system. Lana and John, both of whom I know personally though not well, are good people. I don’t agree with everything they do; I think subsidizing oil and gas is shortsighted and foolish.

But.

And it’s a very large but.

Our political system is broken. I have written as much elsewhere, and will do so again in my forthcoming book, The Way Home. (Tentatively subtitled: You Can’t Get There from Here, or, what you should be doing to protect yourself and your family against the coming economic, environmental, and social collapse. Cheery, no?)

I wish she would follow-through on some very important promises; at one point, she had asked Guy Dauncey and me to serve on an advisory group to help her with environmental issues. That never happened, and we could have been of some help. As an almost trivial example, Lana was “named “runner up” as Community Leader in the annual CFAX awards for her campaign to replace disposable plastic bags with reusable ones.” (Almost amusing, considering CFAX leans heavily toward climate change denial.) Had I been advising her, I would have suggested that instead all bags should be compostable. What’s the point in replacing disposable bags with ones that last longer but still ultimately end up in the landfill? That still sounds like disposable to me.

Had I been offering suggestions, I would have suggested that someone in the government go talk to companies that make compostable products and ask them if they would locate a plant in BC if a law were passed requiring all ‘disposable’ bags to be compostable. I bet they would. It’s a guaranteed market.

I digress.

The point is, why am I being so hard on a well-meaning person who is doing her best within a broken system? Lana understands the danger of climate change. She is, I have no doubt, working hard within our system, which includes that of her party, to do the right thing.

It is unlikely to be enough. Ideally, all the well-meaning people who ‘get it’ would go on ’strike, a la Atlas Shrugged.* If only all the Lana Pophams and John Horgans (and Brian Gordons) would go on strike, would refuse to serve a corrupt political system, surely the masses would be forced to confront reality, would rebel against the self-serving crooks who largely populate our political landscape, and finally start selecting people of wisdom over those of substance….

It is an idle and ridiculous dream at this point, and as someone committed to embracing reality, I must apologize to Ms. Popham (and Mr. Horgan). If Lana stepped aside, someone would rush to fill her place, likely someone much less worthy. I would infinitely rather have Lana as my MLA than that person.

I accused Lana of being an obstacle to the change that is necessary. That was unfair. In an ideal world, she would be. But we don’t live in an ideal world. All the wise people who ‘get it’ are not going to go on strike and force a confrontation with reality. We can’t even get it together enough to speak with one voice, never mind actually act in concert for the good of humanity and the planet.

So, all this said, I am glad that Lana is my MLA, and I apologize to her, publicly, for my harsh words.  Do I think her party, if elected, will do what is necessary to at least mitigate some of the coming damage due to climate change and peak oil? Sadly, no. But Lana is doing her best within a broken system, and I can hardly ask for more.

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* For those who have not plodded through Ayn Rand’s opus, the premise is that those who actually do positive things go on strike. In Rand’s view, these people are people like steel and railroad magnates.

Those of you who follow me know that I have recently ceased making posts urging large-scale reform. The reasons for that are fairly simple, but they involve a psychological hurdle to get over.

I have been communicating with James Howard Kunstler, John Michael Greer, and David Holmgren, all of whom I have interviewed, about a Wise Action Plan. The goal was for us to agree on this Plan and then publicly pronounce it in an effort to get some sensible action on peak oil and climate change. Initially, I urged a response that included a revitalization of rail, large-scale wind or solar farms, and other actions that require the federal government to take a strong leadership role.

While the others generally agreed such actions would be a good idea, especially if they have been started 20 or more years ago, two of the three thought they were a waste of time. They had two reasons for this:

1. It’s too late. We needed to be getting off oil while we still had a surplus. Now that we’ve hit peak oil, diverting any oil to build solar panels means there is less for cars or crops.
2. They ain’t gonna. What politician is going to do that, barring an emergency situation? (Emergency is here defined as rioting, fuel rationing, or other severe measures.)

To be fair to our politicians, it’s hard to get elected telling people their lifestyle is going to change drastically, including many of them giving up their cars. The problem is partly cultural; we want what we want, and we’re going to keep electing politicians who give it to us until that is no longer possible.

And to be brutally honest, most of us have bought into the idea of unending growth and improvement, that the market will find solutions to concerns like oil depletion, and that if it were really that bad, somebody would do something.

At that point, we will be well into the emergency.

It has been difficult for me to give up on the idea of leadership from above. I ran federally as a Green Party of Canada candidate last go-round, but wouldn’t do it again. Even in the fantastic unlikelihood that the Greens got a majority next election, they could not do what needs to be done. Still too many people will resist change, and this resistance will be encouraged and financed – by vested interests.

Think Globally, Act Locally

As a result, I’ve gone local. Leadership is going to have to come from the grassroots, from us, from those who understand the reality and are willing to take some action. I believe that every village, town, city, and region should create a Transition Initiative to get off oil.

This is acting locally, and it is vitally important for your survival. Local resilience is ‘in,’ and for good reason. When oil prices go up, imports of everything – including food – are going to get more expensive and harder to get. If you’re already shopping at the farmer’s market, for example, you have helped support a local farmer who will now support you as options in the supermarkets get scarcer and pricier.

This is my new Wise Action Plan:

1. Start or join a Transition Initiative in your area.
2. Reskill.
3. Develop personal self-reliance, which includes everything from starting a garden to insulating your house.

If we’re lucky and good, these local movements will take off, multiply like viruses, and infect the planet. These local movements will bond together and require their governments to do the right thing – to protect us. They will do this not by lobbying or influence-peddling, but by sheer strength of numbers.

The purpose of this site is to find a ‘green’ lever big enough to move the world to sustainability. I titled it Go Green or Die because, well, that is true, we must, and becauseI thought it rather catchy.

That said, I have come to realise that people will not see climate change and peak oil as the crises they are unless and until a social tipping point is reached, where likely we will go from denial to near-panic. Various things can push us toward this tipping point; this site is my own small attempt, as are my The Way Home presentations, but we are not there yet and we are already late getting started on addressing these crises.

And that brings me to the main point. We cannot count upon governments or corporations – large organizations led by people with a strong vested interest in business-as-usual – to wake up and take action on climate change and peak oil in time.

I have come to accept this, and I won’t say I found it easy. I ran as as Green Party of Canada candidate in the last federal election, and as a Green Party of British Columbia candidate in the last provincial election. Clearly I recently thought that action at the national or provincial level was possible; I no longer think so.

It would be a long story to explain all my reasons why, but perhaps a small, real example will help illustrate. In the last provincial election, Lana Popham was one of my opponents as the NDP candidate. She seemed as ‘green’ as me; in talking with her, she clearly understood the threat posed by climate change. Her family runs an organic vineyard. She cycles everywhere.

I nearly withdrew to give her a clear run, but was persuaded otherwise. She won anyway. What has been the result? Her party formed the Opposition, and made her Agriculture Critic. The leaders of the NDP have her spending her time and energy and goodwill campaigning to get bicycles exempted from a new tax.

And that is just a tiny example of why change is unlikely to come from above. It rarely does, really; those entrenched naturally oppose change.

I came to realise that it is up to us. “We are the ones we have been waiting for,” as the song says. We must at least work to save local areas as best we can, to make them sustainable and self-reliant. Done alone, that will not ultimately stop or save anyone from climate change. It will only buffer against the coming oil shock and allow life to continue in a somewhat civilised manner.

The best route I’ve found so far is Transition Initiative, which every town and city and region should be doing. It’s a grassroots movement to make the local region more self-reliant, less dependent upon oil. There is no head office, no Executive Director. There are only guiding principles and local examples.

This is all a long way of saying that I’ve joined my local Transition Initiative. That is where the action is going to come from. The movement has caught on and has spread like wildfire, which gives me hope for wider action. It would be wonderful if ultimately there were thousands and thousands of Transition Towns, and these millions upon millions of people joined forces to end dependence on fossil fuels.

This journey has allowed me to create The Way Home presentation that ends on a positive, optimistic note. I was trained by Al Gore to deliver the An Inconvenient Truth presentation, which I did 40-or-so times to a few thousand people in total. One thing that always bothered me was the lack of realistic solutions offered. I don’t mean just the “Change your lightbulbs” ’solution,’ but even writing to your elected representative is largely a waste of time at this point.

Transition Initiatives do offer hope. I am going to re-do this site in the next few weeks to reflect the path we must take. Yes, we must ‘go green or die.’ But that message is not inspiring change. In an attempt to communicate the extent of the threat, it inspires fear.

What we need is the truth, which is that things are bad. We have not responded appropriately to warnings from experts, and we are going to pay a price for that. Ok, so what do we do? Reality must be faced, and realistic action must be taken. That is the focus of the Transition Initiative, and also of the new look of this site, which will become The Way Home.

I’m sure s/he must be asking itself the same question at this point, given what we’ve done to the planet. I suspect it was boredom. After 65 million years of the dinos, God had had enough. S/he needed something new, fresh, exciting to rejuvenate its creative energy. After awhile it must have been like having the fish tank screen saver on your computer. Very cool…but for 65 million years? So, fire a meteor into the earth, presto-blammo, dino-die-off, now taking applications for new species or new variations on old species. Must be creative, like Me.

Now, after only 1 million years, humans have developed the capability to kill God, or any concept of the sacred, both figuratively and literally. We are destroying the planet, which is our source of life, because to us no life is sacred, every life has a price or a use for someone else. The dinosaurs lasted 65 million years and it took a meteor to wipe them out. We’ve been around 1/65th of the time and are wiping ourselves out. Who had the tiny brain, again?

Life is sacred, not just mine but yours, too. I have no right to kill or exploit you in order to enhance my own life. And you will similarly respect me or I reserve the right to defend myself by whatever means necessary. When capitalism or communism or fascism or any other ‘ism’ permits this exploitation, that system is immoral, destructive, and ultimately self-destructive.

This basic truth, that life is sacred, has been lost, killed, sold.

God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we, murderers of all murderers, console ourselves? That which was the holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet possessed has bled to death under our knives. Who will wipe this blood off us?
– Friedrich Nietzsche

As we lose respect for others, and for that which created and sustains us, so we lose respect for ourselves, and we decay into moral lassitude, on a path to destruction but too drunk to care.

Not everybody is like this, of course. There are many people more aware of reality, and more moral. I believe the vast majority of people contain an innate degree of conservatism, meaning our natural preference is to move slowly and cautiously forward. That’s our history; generation after generation saw little change.

And when changes did come, often they were bad. A new oppressor, perhaps. Invasion. Some mysterious disease.

As a result, most of us fear change. We were bred to maintain the status quo. Unfortunately, much as we fear change we fear not to reproduce, and inevitably this puts a civilisation in a predicament. So far, no civilisation has escaped this predicament, and now it is our turn.

However, we have something no previous civilisation had: we know that they existed, and roughly what happened to them.

We also know how to avoid the predicament: live sustainably. Live within the limits set by God and nature, and you and your heirs will prosper. Destroy that which God and nature have provided, and barren will be your earth.

I deliberately phrased some of this article in Biblical-sounding prose to remind us of where most of us got our first concept of the sacred: in a church or synagogue or mosque or some holy text. Those with an allergic reaction to the word of concept of ‘God’ may be offended; that is their choice. I was once that way, but it doesn’t make sense to throw away the lessons of the past, including moral teachings, because one doesn’t like the source.

We have killed God and put The Almighty Dollar in its place, and we have the morals to match. We have embraced the Seven Deadly Sins and made them virtues. Prudence and thrift and “waste not want not” are quaint relics that we believe are better replaced with Greed is Good.

There is a part of all of us that understands the concept of the sacred, and thus worships life. Spiritual leaders like Jesus and Gandhi sought to get us to expand that consciousness to other aspects of our character, to other people, even animals.

Jesus shielded the prostitute and kicked over the tables of the money-lenders; we do just the opposite. We judge harshly those we fear, like prostitutes and drug dealers, to evade the reality that we go much easier on crooked CEOs and banksters because we benefit from the system they represent. We are complicit in our own entrapment.

We can avoid the predicaments of overpopulation, resource scarcity, pollution, peak oil, and even natural climate change like ice ages by simply living sustainably. For example, if we know that large areas of the earth get covered by ice every 20,000 years, we don’t put billions of people in those areas.

That would be planning ahead. This, by the way, would have kept us to a much smaller population centred around the equator, except for the Inuit. Of course, we didn’t really figure out the cycles of the ice ages until fairly recently and we had already carved up the planet into nations by that point. But at least we could agree that countries affected by the ice age need to plan accordingly, and as some of them are likely to disappear entirely (like Canada and the Scandinavian countries, for example) they should start planning for their demise. Preferably by attrition, meaning to let the population naturally decline to zero sometime in advance of the ice age.

The situation described is roughly the reverse of the one we do face under climate change, with the countries close to the equator likely to be wiped out and the northern ones – well, benefitting from warmer and shorter winters, but starting to pay the price from wild storms, wildfires, and water shortages that are going to get much worse soon.

But we don’t think 20,000 years ahead, and we don’t think even 100 years ahead now. Many of us think in very short terms indeed: executives quarterly, workers paycheque-to-paycheque; our houses are built to last 70 years. No need to worry about any signs of them being around come the ice age.

We don’t even consider our children’s future any more. Nothing is sacred. We consume everything and leave nothing for our children, not even hope. What kind of parents are we? Our family lines deserve to die out.

We don’t have to end this way. We can rediscover the sense of sacred within ourselves. And we must exert our right to restrain those who would harm that which is sacred: life; creation itself.

A word of warning: To many, the Mobilisation Plan given here will seem extreme, even ridiculous. It calls for a radical restructuring of our economy, how we use energy and where we get it, how we transport things, including ourselves, how we grow our food, build our buildings, and even govern and educate ourselves. Radical it may sound, but necessary it most certainly is, and the sooner we implement something like it the more of civilisation we get to keep.

To those people who think this plan too ‘radical,’ I would suggest two things: First, what you or I think is entirely irrelevant in the face of reality. If the reality is that declining oil supplies will wreak havoc on our civilisation, then no amount of scoffing will prevent it. I would suggest you acquaint yourself with reality before deciding upon a sensible course of action. I will admit that it was only a few years ago that I would have considered this plan extreme, but I have been busy educating myself about the truth of our situation. This article assumes that you have done some research already and are aware we face multiple crises; you know I am not scaremongering, but simply confronting reality.

Second, if you are willing to think sensibly about our current economic model, that is what you will find to be ultimately insane. And you will realise that one reason such ‘radical’ changes are needed now is because we did not make smaller changes earlier. We are like the smoker who has ignored doctor’s warnings for a long time, and now faces radical surgery and possibly even death as a result.

Here are the things that must be done in developed countries, particularly Canada and the United States; you can see why we’re unlikely to do them – there will be great resistance from vested interests and the majority of unaware people. As a result, we will likely suffer greatly.

Energy

• Redirect all oil subsidies to conservation and renewable energy
• Immediate 10-year plan for energy self-reliance; no more imported oil, even from “friendlies”
• Redirect a portion of existing energy to create renewable energy; eg: take 10% of hydroelectric and dedicate it to making wind turbines

Our entire civilisation is built on “cheap oil.” This cannot be overemphasised. Oil is in virtually everything, from food to pharmaceuticals, from cars to houses. As the price of oil goes up, and it is, so will the price of virtually every single thing we need or want.

We should have been ‘getting off oil’ years ago. Back then, when the warnings first started coming in about peak oil and climate change, we had decades to make a gradual transition to an economy that used much less energy thanks to conservation, and where that energy we did require came from renewable, clean sources. Now, we are in trouble and must move very rapidly.

Transportation

• Passengers, mail, and parcels: high-speed electric rail
• Redirect all road and automaker subsidies to electrified local rail (light rail, streetcars) and long-haul rail; develop high-speed on/off loaders for freight trains
• Ban private jets; ban short-hop flights; phase out medium haul flights; ban air freight
• Overseas and long-haul flights must be off oil in 5 years or they’re grounded
• Shipping, from cruise ships to freighters, must be off oil in 5 years

Every single one of our transportation choices is entirely dependent upon oil. The recent oil price spike (up to $147 per barrel just before the recession) started to get people thinking about the cost of commuting everywhere, but it was nothing compared to what is coming. Because we transport everything by oil-fueled means, and because so little is produced locally, oil price increases will drive up the price of everything from food to iPods.

Government

• End all subsidies for anything that uses fossil fuels, including farming
• Completely open government up to scrutiny; no need for Freedom of Information requests
• Ban all lobbying; end the revolving door between government and business
• U.S.: withdraw entirely from the Middle East (including Israel) over the 10 year ‘get off oil’ plan; downsize the military to strictly national defence; use demobilised personnel to rebuild the national rail system, net-zero housing, etc.

Government is not the problem, but it is a big part of it. Any business subsidy favours that business and distorts the market. Had we never subsidised oil (in the form of tax breaks to oil companies, free roads for trucking companies, and foreign occupations), we would likely be driving electric cars and riding electric streetcars now. We would be eating organic foods. And we would not be dependent upon hostile nations for energy.

However we did, and we also did not forbid pollution; we allowed companies to use the atmosphere (and everywhere else) as a dump. In doing so we dug ourselves into a big, dark hole, and we do not have time for ‘the market’ to figure a way out. That is why I have called for subsidies to renewable energy and conservation, because we now need to overcome years of going in the wrong direction.

Government must be made entirely transparent. Every report, minutes from every meeting, budgets – all must be made immediately public (and readily searchable). Corporations must also be brought to heel; many are so large that they have more power than our elected representatives. Only by doing these two things do we have a chance of keeping these new subsidies from becoming as big and permanent a problem as the ones they replace.

Economy

• Move to a stable and sustainable economy – abandon the growth economy to the trash heap of history where it belongs
• Stabilise population now; more people need more resources
• Break up large companies; replace organizations that must be large with co-operatives with strict rules on size and influence; no business can be allowed to become To Big To Fail or large enough to influence government
• Ban advertising aimed at children; make all advertising non-tax-deductible
• Re-localise as much as possible, from decision-making to farming; decisions should be made by those affected, not remote capitalists or bureaucrats

The whole idea of a continuous growth economy on a finite planet is insane. Unchecked growth in the body is a cancer; in a segment of the economy it is a bubble. When the entire economy must grow constantly, then the entire economy is a bubble. This includes population, which must be stabilised in every country as quickly as possible. In developed countries, where population is only growing because of immigration, population can be stabilised immediately.

Unregulated capitalism is as much as disaster as the so-called socialism that led to the Soviet Union. As history has clearly demonstrated on more than one occasion, capitalism sooner-or-later devolves into crony capitalism, where one or a few companies control large market segments – and exert far too much influence on government cronies.

As corporations and governments increase in size and centralise power, people become pawns for profit. Decisions must be made by those who are affected by them, not just those who profit from them.

Food and necessities

• Relocalise farming starting immediately
• End all farm subsidies except those transitioning small, local, family farms to organic
• Enact trade protection for necessities; limit food imports to luxury items

Almost all our food is grown on massive factory farms. Every piece of farm machinery runs on oil or a derivative. Irrigation pumps run on gasoline. Fertiliser is derived from natural gas, also in decline. Pesticides and other agro-chemicals, without which industrialised farming cannot exist, are petrochemical based.  All transportation – trucks, trains, ships, and aeroplanes – run only on oil products.

Oil price increases will ripple through the system raising food prices dramatically. The only food that is immune from this effect is locally grown, small-scale organic, and we know how much that costs. We are ‘eating oil,’ and as the price of oil increases, so must the cost of our food.

There is no advantage to international trade in food, except to the multinationals receiving subsidies to do so. The United States has a population in excess of 300 million; is there really any economy of scale for food that is not possible in a market of this size?

Any country not self-reliant for necessities is vulnerable and prone to war: see: current U.S. involvement in the Middle East; any empire in history.

Shelter

• Change building codes effective immediately to net-zero energy; use current best practices until we develop more ways to build sustainably
• Plan to abandon cities like Phoenix

We can build houses and office buildings right now that require no net energy to construct or heat. It is also true that building codes favour current, grossly inefficient methods of construction. We should end this favouritism immediately.

Some cities, particularly those in the American Southwest, are completely unsustainable without a reliable supply of cheap oil. Phoenix is the poster child for this; it essentially consists of 4 million commuters living in the middle of a desert. All food, water, and energy must be brought from far away. Mass transit is not even possible because the city is so spread out. We either begin a planned rampdown of cities like Phoenix or oil shortages will do it the hard way.

Education

• Launch major research programs into sustainable building
• Educate people, rather than indoctrinate them

Our current educational system is dysfunctional, to be kind. It is really designed to train children to be obedient factory workers and unquestioning consumers, and in that it has succeeded all too well. A glance at the number of intelligent idiots (and many not so intelligent) who unquestioningly believe Fox News tells the story. Here we have a supposedly advanced society where citizens allow themselves to be rebranded as consumers, where they believe talking heads rather than scientists on matters of science like peak oil and climate change, and where economic ideology is still taken seriously despite decades of being just plain wrong.

Suggested books if you want to learn more

Lester R. Brown has proposed a plan in much more detail. It is available for free download or can be purchased.

The first two books discuss peak oil and its consequences. The second two books are plans to at least mitigate some of the crisis we face.

The Shootist was John Wayne’s last movie – with Ron Howard as a badly behaved teenager, no less! – but this post is neither a movie review nor a reminiscence of John Wayne. The film was made in 1976, set in 1901. There are some aspects of civilisation that wouldn’t be harmed much by going back to that era – yes, all the way back to 1901. I don’t mean the gunslinging. But watching the movie, assuming the set was halfway authentic, they did some things right.

They built houses that today we would say have character. Beautiful craftsmanship, hardwood floors, incredibly detailed ceilings, fine furniture made of real wood and that would last many lifetimes if treated with some respect. Compare that to the crap we have today; you can’t tell me that IKEA is better than the furniture they had. Our houses are marginally better insulated and truly ugly, inside and out, compared to what our forebears built.

The house where Wayne was a boarder: gorgeous, solid wood everywhere, but the bar where the final scene plays out was magnificent. Stone outside, elaborate woodwork inside like you simply cannot get today, unless you spend a fortune and can find someone with the skills to do it. Inlays and insets, crown mouldings to make anything Home Depot sells look bland and cheap in comparison. And the bar certainly didn’t seem to suffer from any shortage of alcohol. Variety was more limited, I suppose; no wine spritzers.

The same day, I dropped my wife off for a meeting at The Union Club, built almost 100 years ago in 1913. Beautiful craftsmanship. Barring major earthquake or other disaster, and with decent maintenance, the Union Club building will still be beautiful in another 100, or 300, years. Same for the Odd Fellows building in Victoria, and countless other houses, commercial buildings, and other buildings from that era. Even my sister’s house, circa 1911, which was built as a tradesperson’s house and is small – 2 bedrooms, 1 bathroom, 900 square feet – has more character and more quality than much of anything you’ll see today.

How did we go from a generation that experienced all this beauty and quality first-hand – to what we build now? Why didn’t we build on that craftsmanship and our appropriate technology to continue to make houses and buildings (and bars) that looked and felt like that and had decent insulation, solar heating, a non-wood-fired cooking stove? We used technology to make everything cheap, in every sense of the word.

The town in The Shootist even had a horse-drawn streetcar – but it was being electrified the next year. Electrified streetcars, in 1901. We’ll be lucky if we get that today before the oil runs out.

If we had to go ‘back’ to that level of quality, the world would be a better place, our cities and towns would be far more beautiful, and just maybe we would be better people for it. Our environment does have some effect upon us; perhaps we don’t value what we have because everything is disposable. We even think the planet is disposable.

Resources

The first two books are from James Howard Kunstler, whose biting analyses of all that is wrong with American architecture, if such even deserves the title, are contained in the first book. Check out Kunstler’s “Eyesore of the Month” for examples of “Architectural Abortions.” The second book contains his suggestions for better buildings and restoring community.

The third book is a collection of essays, drawings, and examples of New Urbanism, a school that seeks to rebuild community and has become famous doing so. The final book is the classic “A Pattern Language,” in which the authors describe their findings from studying buildings all around the world. They discovered certain patterns that are followed in all cultures – and so building in ways outside these cultures may express the architect’s ego but produce a house that is forever uncomfortable and ‘not quite right.’

Most of us don’t fit into your convenient categories. I am, however, conservative, and liberal, and libertarian, and communitarian, and a social democrat. Everybody is right…partly. Nobody has the whole puzzle, but each group/ideology has a piece or two. Unfortunately, we have been effectively polarized into competing camps, so now each group is trying to force their ideology on the other rather than seeing the commonalities. Or even, hard to accept, I know, learning from each other, because none of them has “the” solution, although you would never know that from talking to them.

What I want, and what I think most Canadians and Americans want, is what works and what’s fair. I don’t care what your theory says if it doesn’t work or if it requires screwing people over. If it has been tried and failed, let it go. Politics is not religion, requiring blind faith in the unknown; we have lots of failed experiments to not repeat, and even a few successes. Take the pieces that work from each ideology and toss the rest.

Here are some of the useful core values of each group; I ignore the perverted values and logic that many people in each group have adopted.

Libertarians and Conservatives

There is a truth at the core of Libertarianism/Conservatism that we should all respect: Individuals have rights – this was the great truth that the Founding Fathers of the United States of America brought into the world. “We hold these truths to be self-evident….” Those truths were not at all self-evident to most people at the time, but thanks to the example set by the U.S.A, they now are. Before that time, it was ’self-evident’ to the ruling class that they had the right to do whatever they damn well pleased.

Unfortunately, the Americans have spent the last 200 years trying to eliminate the rights of individual humans and give them to corporations instead, and have finally succeeded with the recent decision by the U.S. Supreme Court that corporations are people. Except, of course, that they are quite obviously not.

The Libertarians and Conservatives have also noted, quite correctly, that most governments are corrupt. This is not new: “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely” was said in 1887. It is a lesson the conservatives keep trying to tell us, but that liberals largely ignore.

In the health care debate in the United States, conservatives commonly claim that the government is far too corrupt and/or incompetent to be trusted to run health care.  They are quite correct. The United States government cannot be trusted, and public health care will certainly result in a ‘healthcare-industrial complex,’ just as the U.S. has long had a military-industrial complex, an energy-industrial complex, and now even a prison-industrial complex. That the healthcare-industrial complex may be somewhat better than the current mess is not good enough. This is why conservatives argue for small government.

Flowing from this, subsidies are also bad. They do distort the market, and they do become permanent. Once any subsidy is put in place, a vested interest automatically arises to defend it, whether it’s for farming or steel. One of the reasons we are facing the deadly issues of peak oil and climate change today is because we have subsidised oil for many years.

It is important to note that subsidies can take many forms; this is often overlooked by today’s conservatives. Building highways with taxpayer dollars is, in effect, a subsidy to the oil, auto, and trucking industries at the expense of the most efficient mode of transportation: trains. The massive U.S. military presence in the Middle East is an indirect support to the oil companies.

Liberals and Communitarians

Liberals realize that social stability is only possible if there is a large and secure middle class, and ideally no poor. There must be opportunities to build a secure life, or people will get restless; people with nothing to lose are very dangerous. Thus the liberals have many government programs to help the poor and disadvantaged.

These programs are far less likely to create vested interests to support them, because the poor are not nearly as organised and certainly nowhere near as well-funded as corporations receiving subsidies. Furthermore, the more successful the programs to lift people out of poverty, the fewer poor people there are. The reverse is true with corporate subsidies; the more we give them, the more they spend on perverting government to get more.

Communitarians – not communists – know that the community also has rights. That is, a group of people living in a certain area have rights that take precedence over, say, a rich investor or global corporation seeking only profit. If you can’t do something with the agreement of the local people, then you can’t do it – no matter how much money you will make or how you justify it with your theories.

Socialists

Socialism in the sense of Communism, where the state exerts overwhelming centralised control over the economy, is dead. It has failed so obviously that no sensible person seriously considers going that route today. Every time it has been tried, a murderous dictatorship results.

Social Democracy

Social democracy is a mix of markets and reasonably honest government regulation. Government is kept honest by decent electoral systems like proportional representation and openness. (Why should a citizen have to file a freedom-of-information request? Why, in this age of the Internet and when all documents are on computers anyway, aren’t all government documents automatically posted publicly, from meetings of minutes to detailed budgets? The only reason is because someone is trying to hide something.)

Social democracy as practised in the Scandinavian countries, Germany, and a few others, seems by far the most workable system so far. It helps explain why Denmark and Germany are the world’s leading manufacturers of wind energy, for example, or why the European Union follows the precautionary principle rather than allowing corporations to test their products on an unwitting populace, or why their economies suffered considerably less during the recent U.S.-caused meltdown.

Do What Works in Reality, Not What Sounds Good in Theory

To listen to Libertarians and Conservatives, deregulation is The Answer. Get the government out of the way, they say. But it is long past time to admit that deregulation of powerful corporations leads to big problems. We have plenty of evidence; let’s stop pushing that failed theory. It didn’t work in reality.

And, unfortunately, while I am normally dead-set against subsidies, there are times when they are necessary – during a war, for example. The market will not defend your country from invasion. In our case, we face peak oil and climate change, both threats that exceed the danger of any war except nuclear. Had we not subsidised an oil economy, we probably would not be in this situation now, but we did, didn’t we?

Ideally, we could simply stop all subsidies to fossil fuels and the market would then favour wind, solar, conservation, etc. Unfortunately, we don’t have time. Peak oil appears to be happening about now, and we must do something about it now. We need a World War II-level of mobilisation to rebuild our railways, to revamp our suburban style of living, and to move to non-fossil fuel-based agriculture. If we wait for the market to fix this, we’ll be back in the Bronze Age and there will be mass suffering.

Even more unfortunately – Liberals, I’m talking to you – our governments are too corrupted by vested interests to be trusted with this scale of expenditure and control. Look at the billions thrown at the banking sector, or the much smaller amounts given to the auto industry. The wise thing to do would have been to let the auto companies fail and put the money into rebuilding the train system.

So, if I am to be true to reality, I have to admit that we are stuck. We do not face a problem, we are in a predicament. Problems have solutions. Predicaments may not. We have allowed our governments to become too corrupted to do what must be done to save us.

The result is almost certain to be a crash. Unless some Winston Churchill-like figure arises and leads us to a better future, we will have to go through a crisis. What will emerge post-crisis is impossible to say. Could be something that works; could be a dictatorship.

We are currently enduring a recession that some have argued is a depression, and others are warning that a collapse is on the way. What is the difference among them, and what does it mean to you?

We all know what a recession is: unemployment rises as the economy contracts, various businesses retract, some go bankrupt, and usually within a year or so there is a full recovery, meaning all those lost jobs are regained.

A depression is like a permanent and worse recession. Unemployment is much higher and may become the new ‘normal,’ and many businesses go bankrupt. In the last depression, government spending in the U.S. in the form of the New Deal and massive spending for the war ended the Great Depression. It scared the pants off many people, not least the rich, because there were so many people with so little to lose that there was a serious threat of socialism.

A collapse is like a depression on steroids. Jobs are lost and businesses go bankrupt, of course. Population also declines as birth rates drop and people die younger. (Russia’s population growth rate has gone negative post-collapse and the country’s population is declining. Thanks to Redditor bigtoe416 for the correction.) A collapse is more than simply an economic setback, as often the society loses the ability to sustain itself at its current population and complexity due to the loss of one or more key resources – combined with the loss of credibility of the leadership and the dominant ideology.

This last is a key point. Rulers maintain their position by claiming the ability to be masters of the current system that is providing for all. If the system ceases to provide, then the system and the leaders are likely to be swept from power. Jared Diamond, in his book Collapse, suggests that this happened in previous collapses. To use the Mayans as an example, it is likely that those at the top claimed the power to influence the gods to bring the rains that in turn brought a bountiful harvest. When drought hit the region and the rains failed to come for several years, starving people lost their faith in the rulers and the entire civilisation collapsed.

In our case, another depression could easily mean the end of capitalism and the current crop of rulers; a collapse would certainly finish it. This was one reason governments around the world were so eager to throw money at the recent bank collapse; had a worldwide depression ensued, those at the top would now be fighting for their political, financial, and possibly actual lives.

Resources

The books below discuss collapse from various points-of-view. Diamond and Tainter studied the collapse of previous civilisations. Ruppert looks at a likely coming collapse due to the end of cheap oil. And Kunstler’s book is a novel describing a likely post-collapse United States.

In previous articles, I discussed various collapse scenarios and why they are likely. Here, let us consider how to prepare as best we can.

Unless you’re 85 years old, a partial or complete collapse within your lifetime is a good possibility. Even if we somehow dodge this outcome, we must still move to a sustainable way-of-living very soon; oil and natural gas are running out, fisheries are collapsing, climate change is happening, and so on. What to do? The possibilities include total self-sufficiency for the individual, joining a lifeboat community, or positioning yourself as best you can within an existing community.

The Hermit

Becoming Jeremiah Johnson or Grizzly Adams is still exceptionally difficult, not very practical, and inhuman in that it ignores the fact that all humans, including you, are social beings.

First, you would need your own shack in the woods or small farm. Next, it would have to be somewhere nobody knew about or was likely to find, because there’s no way you can defend your property and goods indefinitely. And finally, you would need mad survivalist skillz, everything from growing/catching/preparing/preserving your own food, to cabin-building, to medical knowledge, to making your own cloth and clothes, etc, etc.

Yes, you could do it, but do you want to? And you must accept that the risks are very high; if your seeds for next years’ crop get mouldy, for example, then what? Or if marauders, human or animal, decimate your crops? A simple infection or broken leg could be the end of you. And what of human contact, companionship, love?

The Lifeboat Community

This is an appealing idea; form a community of like-minded people with complementary skills and ride out the collapse with some measure of comfort maintained.

John Michael Greer suggests that most such communities are unlikely to survive. Some will be swamped by desperate, unwanted, and forceful newcomers, but the main reason is that Greer sees collapse as a decline punctuated by periods of partial recovery. Everyone is willing to endure the hardships that lifeboat living entails when times are tough, but as soon as it looks like a recovery is underway, people will opt to return to more comfortable ways of living.

Find Your Community

The third possibility is to prepare as best one can within an existing community. A collapse does not mean that the world ends, but Wal-Mart might no longer be open for business and you wouldn’t be able to drive there even if it was. However, there will still be cities and towns and farms. Which of these is best for you, and what should you do within each?

First, large cities are best abandoned. This applies especially to insanities like Phoenix, Arizona (where I once lived), with a metropolitan population of over 4 million people and not a single sustainable farm in sight. Everything has to be shipped in, including drinking water via canal. If you live there, get out now. Most large cities are going to be in large trouble because so much must be shipped in or out, including food, water, energy, and waste.

Towns are a far safer bet, especially those established way back when, as they were likely largely self-reliant for necessities at one time and could be so again. Not nearly as much food is needed and it doesn’t have nearly as far to travel to get to you – or you to it. They also tend to be safer because people know each other, are easier to govern, and you can get around without a car.

Farms are a personal choice; if you like the farming life, go for it. Just keep in mind that there may not be fuel for tractors and pickup trucks, the lack of which makes farming much more work and more isolated. Back in the day, farmers used to come to market once a week or so, by horse. It was a trek; they couldn’t just hop in the truck and zip out to rent a movie or pick up Tampax. As this collapse is likely to be caused by peak oil, meaning oil price spikes and shortages, today’s farmers may be in the same position as yesteryears’.

Be Prepared

Wherever you live, you need to be prepared. Remember California’s rolling blackouts? That sort of occurrence is very common post-collapse. In the worst case, power will be off more than on, or even give out completely. I currently live in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, and much of our electricity comes from hydroelectric dams – on the mainland. It arrives via undersea cables. While the dams may continue to operate for years even after an economic breakdown, that long supply line may mean problems for Victoria.

The point here is that many things we currently take for granted, like flipping a switch and a light goes on, or doing laundry whenever we feel like it, deserve some thought. You can install a personal windmill or some other means of generating electricity, and I would encourage everyone to do so, but it’s unlikely to generate enough to run an electric dryer or stove, or possibly even the furnace fan – which burns natural gas that is either no longer available or prohibitively expensive.

To prepare adequately, think necessities first: food, shelter, clothing, knowledge, trade.

Food

If you are in a town that was once self-reliant, the odds are good that farmers will grow food and somehow get it into town. This may not be reliable, and it may be expensive – and cash may not an accepted medium of trade. (I wrote a previous article that alluded frequently to trading the use of one’s body for goods, or prostitution, as something that happens during difficult economic times. I was half-joking and some people didn’t get it, but the fact is that in an economic collapse, cash is not much use. This has happened time-and-again during collapses from pre-WWII Germany to the post-Soviet Union Russia to innumerable developing countries.)

Russian families managed to grow a great deal of their own food in private gardens, as did Americans and the British in Victory Gardens; you should prepare to do the same. As John Michael Greer points out in The Long Descent, you don’t have to grow all your own food right now. What you should be doing is getting over the steepest part of the learning curve now. Start a garden on your own land or in a community garden or wherever and grow an organic garden. It takes some skill to grow food, and then to preserve it so you don’t give yourself botulism, and to save seeds for next year, and so on. Start small now and master the essentials.

Shelter

Ideally, you want a house that gets most of its heat from passive solar. You can get great strides in this direction by attaching a solar greenhouse to an existing house; even older, leaky houses can get a lot of heat this way. Insulate and weatherstrip to keep that precious heat.

Clothing

If you can make your own, you’re in good shape. Likely you can recycle existing clothing until someone figures out how to make cloth again, as cheap imports from China will not be available.

Knowledge

Buy books now that will be useful post-collapse. The best gardening, craft, and other books may well disappear rapidly from bookstores and libraries when times start to get tough. My personal policy is to borrow books that are useful now from the library (see the books listed in the previous article), and to buy books that will be useful if the Internet or the electricity become less reliable.

Trade

I left this to the end, but you need to think seriously how you will make yourself useful following a collapse. Web designers, retail clerks, insurance salesmen, marketing executives, and all manner of other jobs will cease to be of value. Farmers, obviously, will always have something to trade. What value will you add?

Certain skilled trades will be valuable; if you can make or repair furniture, for example. Or if you know how to build a solar greenhouse, or raise draught horses, or use herbal medicines…these sorts of things will continue to be of value as long as any sort of community exists.

If you don’t have any useful skills, you’ll either be dead or a peasant. Post-collapse, most of us will be either peasants or tradespeople. Most of the professions will be useless, even lawyers and investment bankers. Executives may be worse than useless as they attempt to cling to positions of power and prestige; they will want to remain on top of the heap while others do the real work, but this is unlikely to work out once everyone realises managers add no value.

Various thinkers, including me, have posited that a collapse is coming. I would very much like to believe I am wrong, but the only arguments against seem to consist of character attacks along the lines of “You’re crazy,” or simply “It will never happen”-type wishful thinking.

Maybe, but until someone has reality-based reasons for why there will not be a collapse, I’ll stick with the evidence. The primary reason for the impending demise of our civilisation is that we, as a society, have chosen to believe what suits us over accepting reality. (See The Wisdom Deficit: How Very Intelligent People and Our Own Wishful Thinking are Leading Us to Disaster for a fuller explanation.) The questions that remain are: When will the collapse begin, how quickly will it unfold, will anything useful be done to prevent or mitigate the damage, and what should you be doing now?

To answer these questions, it is useful to get perspective from other thinkers, and I have chosen James Howard Kunstler, John Michael Greer, and Guy Dauncey as proponents of three different models of collapse. Let’s go in reverse order, as they go from merely change through serious collapse.

Transition to Sustainability

I recently interviewed Guy Dauncey on our radio show and questioned him about a collapse – and he believes absolutely not. He does see major changes coming – changes that some people will regard as a collapse of sorts, but that Dauncey believes will produce a better world. For example, while Dauncey acknowledges the end of oil and climate change will cause serious problems, he also believes that the decline will be slow and that leadership will arise and lead us to a future powered by renewable energy – and that uses much less energy.

For example, while Dauncey sees electric cars as a realistic possibility, not everyone will have one; the age of commuting from suburbs is over. Communities will be restructured as walkable, trains and public transit will be resurrected, and food will be grown locally and organically.

To many people, the loss of their car and the end of our car-based society will be seen as a collapse. Certainly countless people will have to change jobs, not by choice, but because their former career is now irrelevant. Transport truck drivers will be useless without transport trucks; highway police will not be needed if there are no highways. More people will be picking fruit and vegetables – we won’t be able to fly in people from developed countries to do this any longer. Someone who goes from the post-collapse (and arguably currently) useless position of Vice President of Mergers and Acquisitions to fruit-picker might well decide that a collapse has occurred.

In his own words:

I don’t dispute all the obstacles, and nor the power of the vested interests (the coal and oil companies) to sabotage and delay all they can – it’s always been this way, throughout history. And humans have always organized to work together to overcome them.

Negativity kills creativity. If we sucker down to the believe that collapse is inevitable, we switch off the critical parts of our collective immune system that is determined not to allow this to happen.

I admire Guy’s optimism and determination to believe we can and will get out of this mess by reinventing what civilisation means, but I think he has overestimated two factors: the determination of those at the top to hold on as long as they can, and the refusal of almost everyone else to take any action until a crisis has actually occurred. And that is where the idea of a long descent comes in.

The Long Descent

John Michael Greer sees a collapse occurring over centuries, with successive crises punctuated by periods of partial recovery. He sees civilisation, technology, and population being lost in irregular steps downward. Where Dauncey sees much hope in renewable energy to prevent this, Greer believes that the loss of oil will be fatal to our current civilisation.

In theory, Dauncey is correct, as there is more than enough energy available from wind, solar, tidal, and especially conservation to meet our current needs many times over. Greer sees the very high EROEI (Energy Return on Energy Invested) of oil and compares that to the much lower return from renewables, and he sees no way to continue powering our current, massively energy-hungry society. Dauncey would not disagree; where they part ways is what will be done about this.

Where Dauncey sees leadership arising/people coming together to radically restructure society and solve this problem, Greer sees it as a predicament that will not be confronted until we are in mid-crisis – by which time it will be too late. Greer expects oil price spikes that will wreak havoc on the economy, followed by an increased interest in renewables and conservation, causing a reduction in demand that allows the price of oil to drop and a partial recovery to occur. Dauncey would say that this crisis will drive us to find solutions; Greer says this will begin to happen and be derailed as oil prices decline and we go back to our wasteful ways, setting ourselves up for the next oil price spike and economic crash.

Greer points to the oil crisis of the 1970s as a scenario that is likely to be repeated. Oil prices spiked and availability dropped, leading to a serious program to move to renewable energy and conservation, but the leadership of the time – the Great White Hope and Republican Saviour Ronald Reagan – elected instead to go all-in on oil. This may someday be seen as a betrayal of the United States; where Reagan and successive leaders could have got the U.S. free from imported oil, they made a decision to make the nation dependent upon foreign oil. Greer points out that the United States is still a very major oil producer, and that if Americans used oil at the same rate as Europeans, the U.S. would be exporting oil.

In this, I think Greer is more likely correct than Dauncey, because Greer takes into account American culture and the corruption of politics. At the Earth Summit in 1992, George H.W. Bush stated that “The American way of life is not negotiable.” This was repeated by former Vice President Dick Cheney shortly after the attacks of 9/11. Every U.S. president from Reagan onward has preached this gospel either overtly or simply through his actions; as a result, the American people have been hearing for decades that conservation is unnecessary, that they can continue to drive and shop like there is no tomorrow, and that no adjustments to living arrangements will be required.

(To be fair to Dauncey, he – and I – point to the pre-World War II mobilisation of industry that occurred exceptionally rapidly. Government was also quite corrupt at that time, and vested interests equally determined to protect their profits and prestige at any cost to the nation and people. However, the crisis was obvious and there was plenty of energy to deal with it. Now the U.S. government is largely corporate-controlled, which Dauncey fully acknowledges, and oil – our most vital form of energy – will be in short supply and very expensive.)

This brings us to our final scenario of rapid and total collapse.

Sudden Drop, Fast Stop

Where Greer sees humanity stair-stepping down into a de-industrial world, Kunstler expects the collapse to occur fairly rapidly and leave few untouched. He describes this in his post-collapse novel, World Made by Hand, in which government has become useless and essentially ceases to exist, industry of all sorts collapses, and we revert very quickly to a pre-industrial state.

Kunstler sees corruption and delusion at the top as a serious problem, in that leaders will not tell the truth to the American people, and thus no constructive action will be taken until the first oil shock hits. Further, he sees the high number of American “morons” as a major impediment. These are people who refuse to face reality and will be extremely angry when they can no longer afford to drive or heat their homes or buy cheap crap at Wal-Mart, and they will be looking for someone to blame.

Looking at the current insanity in the U.S., it is hard to disagree. Take the Tea Party wingnuts on the right, add the deluded souls who thought Obama – the Great Black Hope and Democratic Saviour – would be any different than any previous President, consider that every one of them thinks “the American Way of Life is non-negotiable,” stir in a corrupt media populated with people prone to encouraging violence, add an oil shock, and the recipe for disaster is ready to bake.

Kunstler calls the result The Long Emergency because we will face an emergency situation that will last for a long, long time. Greer likewise does not see anything like our current civilisation and technology rebounding any time soon, if ever. The idea of putting a man on the moon will seem like a fairy tale to our great-grandchildren.

Where Lies Reality?

Who is most “right” will be revealed with time. All agree that what we currently consider civilisation will end. Dauncey expects we will rally together to replace it with a more sustainable economy. Greer and Kunstler also see sustainability happening – because there will be no other choice. Anything unsustainable will simply cease to exist: Go green or die, baby.

Where they differ is what standard of living that will exist. Dauncey sees a massive push to renewable energy enabling the continuation of something close to our current standard of living, albeit largely without cars. Greer and Kunstler see the end of most technology and a reversion to a conditions similar to those that existed prior to the Industrial Revolution; most of us will be peasants or tradespeople. There may be some ‘nobility’; Kunstler describes a scenario in World Made by Hand where a wealthy landowner ‘employs’ numerous people – as peasants and tradespeople – on his large farm/village. These people willingly trade their independence for security.

Greer and Kunstler also see a significant reduction in population as likely. What they mean by this is that a lot of people will die younger than they would have. Diabetes, for example, will once again be a death sentence as insulin becomes unavailable. So will many infections, as antibiotics disappear and drug-resistant germs spread. Depression will cause many more to commit slow suicide through alcoholism and foolish decisions, and without a social ’safety net’ or strong community, these people will simply die. There is plenty of evidence for this from the former Soviet Union, where birth rates plummeted by 40% and death rates rose by 40%.

Personally, I prefer Dauncey’s scenario, where we transition to a green economy and nobody has to die off.  I believe it could happen, although many peak oil theorists would disagree, because they think that we needed to start the transition years ago. However, like Guy Dauncey, I think a WWII-scale mobilisation could take us where we need to go quickly enough, provided there was sufficient support from the population-at-large – and we neutralise vested interests. We would have to write off a lot of sunk costs, like suburbs and Phoenix, redirect all available energy to making new sources of energy, conserve like mad, and many people would have to give up certain luxuries they currently feel very entitled to.

The likelihood of this happening, though, is slim. Greer persuasively argues that it has not happened in previous civilisational collapses; at first, the problem is small and distant, and thus easily ignored. This is a shame, because small changes early would save civilisation. Eventually the danger becomes unignorable, but by then major changes are required and nobody, especially the elites, want that, so wishful thinking is substituted for realistic action and, sooner or later, a crash happens.

What To Do?

A collapse is, by definition, somewhat chaotic. All three thinkers mentioned here suggest that managing the transition to the new order is by far the best plan. It currently seems unlikely that we will do that, so the ‘transition’ is going to be bumpy. How to protect yourself and those you love as best you can is a difficult topic, so I will cover it in another article.

In the meantime, we should all be doing what we can to push our glorious leaders to speak the truth. Greer makes the very valid point that we are in this position in part because we have taken our democracies for granted. We think casting a vote every few years is sufficient to sustain democracy, but clearly it has not been. The time is now to get politically involved, and I do not mean to waste your time attempting to get the latest flavour of saviour elected. We need every single elected politician speaking the truth and representing the people, regardless of political party.

As this will take time and be opposed with billions of dollars by vested interests, you must start speaking the truth, and you must start preparing for collapse as best you can.

Resources in this article

Here are the books mentioned in this article. I have two of them on my bookshelf, but to be honest, they were purchased some years ago before I had thoroughly investigated the likelihood of a collapse. While all the books are excellent and will greatly help you understand the possibility and danger of a collapse, I now borrow such books from the library and reserve my purchases to books that will be useful post-collapse.

Guy Dauncey’s The Climate Challenge: 101 Solutions to Global Warming (The Solutions Series) – Jammed full of what we need to do. If you want to know what can be done, this is the book for you; Dauncey is an expert in energy.

John Michael Greer’s The Long Descent: A User’s Guide to the End of the Industrial Age. A persuasive argument that decline is inevitable and will happen very soon.

And two books by James Howard Kunstler, both currently ‘bargain priced’ at Amazon. First, The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century. And second, World Made by Hand his novel depicting a post-collapse United States, or, in reality, the tiny, very local piece that is able to be experienced in the absence of aircraft, cars, and trains.