Just for the record, I’m not a ‘heat-free blogger.’ I do keep the downstairs of my home 45 degrees at night, that is true, but it usually never dips below 50. It’s also true that DH and I moved down stairs onto a make-shift couch/twin bed in the music room, and shut off the heat upstairs. He braves the cold, showers and dresses up there, but again, it is seldom actually gets down below 48 even when the heat is off.
I’m not that brave. I’ve moved my clothes down here, and grab a shower downstairs as well. But in the daytime, when I feel chilled to the bone, I’ll crank the heat up to 64 from the 58 I leave it at. When it gets dark, it automatically goes up to 64 for another few hours, just so we can get dinner going, and socialize before bed. Then it automatically goes down to 45, but, as I said, it’s never lower than 50, and more often 52 because my house is well insulated with double-pane windows.
I’d call it “refreshing” to travel from an exceptionally warm bed with a down comforter (and a man from Southern Italian roots who’s a blow-torch of heat…) out to the “cold air” to run to the bathroom at night. My feet and legs are also often outside the covers during some periods to “cool off.” I also have two cats and two dogs to join us in bed, if we’re really feeling chilly!
Yes, I’ve developed a different relationship to the cold, than I had last year. Last year I was wimpy, expecting some sort of award for bearing the cold. This year, honestly, it is just ‘life,’ and not a particularly hard one at that. In fact, when the wood furnace is going full-throttle, and it gets hot in this house, I don’t feel very good physically. I’ve learned that I can always get warm, but not so when it’s too hot. My face goes flush, and I feel ill. I’ve come to really appreciate the delight of an intense heat source, like the corn stove I have in my clinical office. Standing in front of it directs a blast of heat: deeply penetrating heat.
A few years ago, when I told a class (in context) that I kept my house below 50 at times, one student expressed genuine concern that it “wasn’t healthy.” This is so relative. In the dead of winter, on my honeymoon years ago, the weather in Boston shot up to the high forties to low fifties, and people began wearing shorts and tee shirts. And how many of us run out to our gardens on the first warm day, delighting in the ‘balmy’ 50 degree weather?
It’s also true that if I’m fighting a cold or flu, I don’t let the temp drop below 64. Fighting a cold gets into your bones, and it’s hard to warm up when you’re feeling ill, in a cold house.
If you aren’t used to keeping a cool house, but want to be, start at night, and wear a soft hat if you need to, for a while. You’ll adjust to not needing one, and eventually prefer it cool. In the daytime, have a sweatshirt with a hoodie, and if you get cold, wear it up around your head. You’ll warm up quickly, and if you don’t, jump in and take a hot shower.
More and more, though, I’m thinking we Americans have got to get over this idea of “central heating/air conditioning,” and instead consider comfort only in the rooms we’re in. Have you seen these neat tables that have a heater attached underneath them with a blower? You put a large blanket over it, your feet (in a kimono is best because the heat shoots up your whole body) under the table, and there you sit and socialize, all cozy warm. They are called kotatsu.
Well, that’s my fifty cents on home heating, but really, it’s hardly a hard luck tale of “Psychologist on Ice.” I’ve just come to expect that I’ll wear a tee, a shirt, and a sweater in my house, and if I don’t and claim I’m cold, I need to dress warmer. It’s been a very cold winter here in the hills, with many days hovering around 0-5 degrees. That’s cold. Inside my home, it’s still a warm place to be.
This semester, I’m teaching in two graduate psychology programs, both specializing in Marriage and Family Therapy (MFT). Both courses, which I’ll talk about here, beginning with the first one, take up a lot of time to prepare for and teach, and they’ve kept me away from talking to all of you.
But this morning I thought to myself, as I reflected on a lecture I gave last night: Why does it have to be so? I bring my Big 3-E awareness into my classroom, why not do the reverse? So, taking the risk of boring you all to tears, I’ve decided to talk about these courses (selectively, of course) as they inform my understanding of my work in the Big 3-E field.
First, let me describe the first course to you:
Discourses in Psychopathology
The first course attempts to introduce first-year MFTs to the DSM IV-TR-the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. Unlike a typical Psychopathology class, however, MFT’s don’t think about problems as existing within people, but rather between people, their families, their communities, their regions, countries, and ultimately their world and the times they live through. This poses a tension that I’ve spoken about in The DSM Trilogy earlier in this blog. Try as they might to put “mental illness” under the subheading of “physical illness,” the fit remains a poor one. There are no blood tests or similar physical ways to test if someone qualifies for a particular psychiatric diagnosis and the effort to fit problems like these into discrete categories were pressured by governmental agencies, the US census, big pharm, managed care and similar forces.
Theoretical Wars on Labels
However, a tension exists, because this book, a clinical “cookbook” of terms and definitions, written in plain English, is what’s used among mental health professionals of all types to communicate with each other. While during the early years, MFT’s waged a good war to suggest an alternative vision, the forces mentioned above won out. We now all speak DSM, whether it describes how we see things or not.
Benefits and Limitations of Categorization
There are helpful aspects to this approach: categorization helps to aid memory, manipulate information, and conduct research. But the limitations of categorization is that it becomes reified. Reification is like the impression a butterfly makes when it gets covered in resin. It’s not a butterfly, because it misses its movement, its life. Reifying something leaves us with all the impression and outline of the idea, but we’ve had to kill it and harden it in order to hold it in our hands, and measure it. You lose important aspects when you categorize and label. You can too easily mistake the label as “the real thing.” People “become” the label (e.g. “I’m a borderline…”) Human beings live and function in relationship to their environment and to the people and culture they come in contact with and grew up in. Labels have limits, and the map isn’t the territory.
Big Job for New Students
So my mission is to both encourage students to become familiar with, read and work with case material, using the DSM, as well as have them do so while understanding it’s power to label and pathologize, normalize abnormal behavior within that label, and its extreme limits in capturing the human condition and human dilemma.
New graduate students are a nervous bunch typically, and the DSM offers the hope that they can finally know something tangible. The DSM is quite seductive that way, because it has neat descriptors including guidelines such as “3 or more of the following” which qualifies a person for this or that diagnostic label. Also, psychology isn’t like nanoscience in that everyone believes because they have a psychology that they know quite a bit about it. If anyone picked up the DSM who could read an evening tabloid, they could understand it and think they could use it to diagnose themselves or others. This is the danger.
Mary is Depressed
So part of my job is to put doubt into the hearts of these eager students that they or anyone else is actually doing much when they diagnose someone. I ask them over and over “Why do we say ‘Mary is depressed?’” and they respond “Because Mary reports or shows the symptoms that have been labeled as ‘Depression’.”
One clever student asked “But what if Mary omits some of the symptoms she’s feeling, when she’s reporting them to the professional, so they don’t add up to the diagnosis of ‘depression?’ Does that mean that the person doesn’t get help? I know that happens…” and indeed it does. Fortunately, a skilled professional can ask questions, which allows him/her to determine whether her hopeless or helpless emotional state is accompanied by things like low sex drive, problems sleeping or eating, and the like. But what does that label leave us in the end? Is ‘depression’ like a kidney disease or iron deficiency? They learn that it is not, despite the fact that this syndrome causes pain (and even death by suicide) to those suffering from it.
Mary Shows Depressive Signs
I suggest that instead of saying “Mary is depressed” they say instead: “Mary shows depression.” Framing in this way leads to logical questions such as “who does Mary show depression to? Does she ever not show depression? How does she show depression?” and the like. “Having” depression is a frozen state that exists as part of you. “Showing” depression is an active external act. The difference is more than semantics to beginning clinicians. It is a world-view that leads them to contextualize, rather than reify, Mary and her mood.
Value-Clear not Value-Free
The DSM attempts to be “atheoretical” as to etiology. This means that it takes no position as to how “pathology” arises, or what maintains it, except where there is a clear family history of the disorder. My job is to help the student to understand that there IS no such animal as “atheoretical.”
Every phenomenon we can study emerges from a theory, and all theories have biases. The most dangerous biases come from folks who claim they are “value-free.” If you don’t believe you have a bias, you are unlikely to take a look at what they are and to examine how they might be misleading you or pointing out things that aren’t so.
Genetic Predisposition or Inevitability?
And I ask “If a person has a parent or grandparent with a diagnosis of depression, does this mean that every offspring will be given this same diagnostic label? If not, why not? If there is a genetic component to depression, why are some relieved of suffering from this syndrome?” We are taught to think “They have a family history of this diagnosis” and not “They have family members who do not experience these symptoms.” The glass is both half-full AND half-empty. Pre-dispositions aren’t either inevitable nor explanatory.
‘Brain Fag’ and Shrinking Penises
So one way I try to help students see the relational-bound nature of diagnosing is to point out psychiatric conditions in what are called “cultures-bound syndromes.” My favorite is “brain fag.” Brain fag (to quote one research article) is “A very common psychoneurotic syndrome occurring among the students of southern Nigeria … The symptoms are such as to prevent the student from carrying on with his work and include various unpleasant head symptoms accompanied by inability to grasp what he reads or what he hears in a lecture, memory loss, visual difficulties, inability to concentrate, inability to write, etc.”
Koro is another of these, where a man fears his penis is shrinking and retracting into his body. We see Koro in China, Malaysia, and Indonesia and, horrifying to its sufferers, it often strikes groups of men.
And what’s an example of a culture-bound Western syndrome? Anorexia nervosa, and bulimia nervosa, two eating disorders thought to be brought on by standards that are media-encouraged and permeate culture-wide.
Tomorrow, I’ll talk about the course I’m teaching in Family Life Cycle. Write to you then!
A frequent reader was surprised that I had a garden!
I’ve been in the dirt most of my life, picking dandelions, because my brothers didn’t LIKE dirt!
Last year, we grew radishes and carrots, peas, potatoes, squash-winter and summer, turnip, lots of tomatoes (most didn’t make it because of the blight) strawberries, blueberries, blackberries, elderberries, beets, we have a HUGE asparagus patch, rabbi and asian greens, lettuce, Swiss chard, Egyptian onions (walking onions), and we planted a few nut trees. I also grow a lot of herbs, many perennial, and mint for teas.
Every year, we’ve been trying to add a few new raised beds, perfect our composting, and add “nitrogen fixers” that will keep working year after year. You can also see that some plants I’ve listed just keep reproducing year after year, without our having to plant them. The berries, asparagus, Egyptian onions, trees and herbs fall into this category. We also have “volunteers” that come back, like mustard greens, that are becoming our “weeds.” Hooray for edible weeds!
We’re grown hot peppers before, but the sweet peppers like it hotter than we can offer, and many times we have to bring in the tomatoes to ripen. We lust for a greenhouse, and have been collecting old windows in anticipation. In the meanwhile, I’ll start putting down “tunnels” of gauzy fabric designed just for this purpose, to keep in the heat and keep out the bugs.
In years past, we’ve grown melon, beans, broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower, kale and brussels sprouts. I’m going to plant all of them again this year, especially the kale and brussels sprouts. I really missed going out and dusting off the snow to harvest them this past December.
Here’s the powerful feeling about gardening: you MISS the things you don’t plant and eat. They become like dear friends you haven’t seen in a while and want to see again. You might start out seeing them all like a crowded dance hall full of people. Soon, though, they develop names and faces (and tastes) that you miss and look forward to seeing again. You notice that some really like you and want to grow big and proud. Others fail to show up some years, but the next year, they grow to beat the band!
I was complaining about some lemon balm that died two years in a row on my garden. My now late-friend Pat said “I’ll give you some that will stay around and you won’t be able to get rid of it!” She did, and I now have a hardy plant who’s seeds I circulate. You can see it in the “after” picture below.
Form groups of people who love to garden. They’ll have raspberry bushes they are dying to pass along to you, or advice to share about how to be successful in your area. No matter whether you have acres or a small balcony, take up the company of plants and learn how to become a good steward. They’ll reward you for your patience.
So let me show you an example of what an “impaired” gardener can do…
This is what the front yard USED to look like:
Old front yard
Then, we got rid of the grass, dumped extra soil, and we got this:
Of course, you have to be willing to put up with this: (the soil was HORRIBLE that got delivered. Full of rocks we needed to remove, and hardly any dark, rich, fluffy stuff you look for. The guy who delivered it felt bad when he dumped it, and gave us a great break on it. We spent years getting it to improve, but it happened!
During
But even that first year, with lousy soil, we got this:
Zucchini!
And we turned it into this:
Drying Zucc's
Here’s what I fell in love with this year:
Italian Rose Bean
I hope she’ll come to my corner of the dance hall and dance with me!
If you are a Do-More Doomer, and you live in a cold climate, January and February are seed-picking times. It is a time to comb through catalogs or online for inspiration or solace that no matter how cold it is, or short the days, or how long the snow has covered the ground, Spring is on its way.
It lifts the spirits to select seeds, but for the beginning gardener, or one, like myself, who has for so long placed myself in the category of “gardening-impaired” or even “special needs gardener,” it used to be an overwhelming task. I’d start by selecting catalogs that offered open pollinated seeds. That eliminates quite a few. I’d even focus on heirloom varieties, and that cut it down as well. But still had an overwhelming variety to choose from. How to pick?
One sure way to kill the joy of gardening for the beginner is to pick too many of each kind of crop, and choose too many varieties in each. To do so means madly running from one reference book to another, wondering whether the Ph of one goes with the Ph of another, etc. It can easily be discouraging when you forget to water 40 seedling starters and nothing germinates.
I know. I’ve done it.
This year, I’ve discovered something that surprises me, that I’m passing along to you: Despite making repeated mistakes in my gardening attempts, despite calling myself “gardening-impaired” and the like, just the act of trying to grow something over the years has given me knowledge that has started to build.
Nothing. I’ll repeat: Nothing is as good a practice as selecting something to grow and putting it in the ground. I don’t care if you’ve selected a tropical plant and put it into the semi-frozen ground on March 1st. Your failure taught you something. There is something deep-down inside us that can’t accept watching a plant, a living thing, fail to grow, and there’s something deep inside us that is absolutely thrilled to see something take off, growing to beat the band. That first success, which for me was squash, hooks me and kept me going.
I’m one of those gardeners that “forgets” plants and related chores. I assumed that it was a permanent condition, but it’s not. What I realized is that just like learning to check your email, you need to get into a rhythm to introduce some new routine. It takes 21 days to establish a new habit, and after that, you stop thinking about having to remember to do it. You just do.
A friend of mine said something profound to me at dinner last night. She is one of those gardeners who I always thought was made to grow things. She’s regular in her habits anyway, and is quite pragmatic. She said “I’ve studied all these types of ways to grow plants, permaculture, and lasagna, and square foot growing and intensive feed, and you know what? Now’s the time to develop my own method of gardening.”
She wasn’t saying she was going to start a movement and write a book. She was saying that she was at the stage where she simply accepted what has worked for her, in her own garden, and is going to do things her way, regardless of what the ‘experts’ think about it. That’s a great place to be. She’s not growing okra or endive. She’s not growing anything, no matter how “healthy” if she doesn’t have a positive association with it. She likes eggplant to eat, but its just too cold here, and too temperamental to grow it. Gourd are pretty, but they don’t get an inch in her garden, either. What about spaghetti squash, she asked me? “Yes!” I exclaimed, “I ignored it for months, and it still kept growing and lasted for months in my cool bedroom!” I told her how to prepare it. No garden berries, though and no matter how enthusiastically someone endorses kohlrabi, it’s not growing in her garden, at least this year.
A few years ago, I sat in a lecture by a woman that had come out from Oregon to talk to us at Dave Jacke’s Forest Gardening seminar. She showed pictures and said something outrageous. She showed a picture of herself tossing lettuce and other greens around her front yard. She just flung them freely. There were no neat rows. She didn’t take a string and use a tool to draw a straight line in the soil. She said she was creating the “weeds” she wanted to grow all around her.
Next, this gardening rebel let her plants overwinter, and Heaven Forbid! she allowed the broccoli and cauliflower to mix! This gardening free-thinker was unapologetic. She was willing to taste the results and let the mating happen as it will.
I never forgot that woman’s talk, because she appealed to the rebellious and lazy side of myself that just didn’t want to have to find string, and hammer in stakes to make straight lines. The way she talked, she made gardening sound, dare I say it, “fun.”
If you are, like me, a believer in your inherent limitations to grow something; if you believe you LACK thumbs, never mind a green one, take heart. If you like food, and you like to see the true miracle of things that are little becoming edible food all by themselves, with only minimum help from you, pick up a seed catalog and just read it, like a good novel. Don’t even read it, become a toddler and just look at the pictures. If you find a picture you just keep starring at, THEN you can read the caption. Grow it because you are attracted to the way it looks (even if you KNOW it won’t look like that in YOUR garden, or believe it won’t.) Stop panicking that you have to grow it all this year, or you’ll starve to death. Grow one or two or three things that you are drawn to because they look so pretty in the seed catalog and it lifts your spirits to look at it.
The more I hang around gardeners, the more I pick up little facts that seem so elementary to other people. I wanted to learn it all, and well, before I dared to risk failure. Well, I’ll tell you, that’s a big mistake, so don’t do it. Just pick something you like to eat, or something that has really big leaves to fill your garden, or something that’s just pretty or pretty cool, and go for it. You are going to learn something from the experience. You are going to increase your ability to distinguish one thing from another. You are going to start increasing your familiarity with your land, and with your soil, and grabbing a hand full of soil is going to give you a sensory experience. Hang out at gardening shops and grab the soil there, and notice the difference. There will be no tests at the end. No one will mark you down for forgetting to harvest the stuff at the end, or refusing to eat it because you don’t like the taste. Just compost it all.
This year, for the first year in 4, I’ll be planting flowers and maybe even that melon that tastes “bland” but smells great. I’m going to make tremendous mistakes, and not care. I’m going to start seedlings too early or too late, and watch them grow. I’m going to “waste” electricity with broad-spectrum lights hovering over treasured little green babies. In other words, this year, I’m going to have fun.
Don’t like it? Sue me or report me to the gardening police.
Dear Peak Shrink,
Not sure how I arrived at this point. All my life I have been “aware” something was wrong, but I was told to stop thinking that way…I was born in the early 60’s…I was adopted and had a sense of not fitting in. I just went on believing what was out there. The dominant culture took me over and won. I was part of the system. I have been through some very tough times lately, and have come to some very important places in my life. I took the red pill and feel awake while other around me are fully asleep. I found many that think like me, but only on the web. There are one or two people that have some understanding of what is going on, but are not being listened to here. I find myself very alone.I want to do the thing that resonates inside me for my family, but they don’t want to hear it at all. They give me that “look” that I know is not were they are listening but judging. How to I do what is needed? For them.
Homesteader in Paradise
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Dear H in P,
The first thing you need is a plan. Don’t worry if it isn’t the “right” plan, because plans change. That’s a given. Write down a plan, then break it down into manageable pieces. Most people over-estimate what they can do in a year, but UNDER-estimate what they can do in 10 years. Lay out the pieces you want to accomplish in 2010, and assume you’ll make modifications along the way. Assess your current situation, skills, debts, resources, location, food storage, etc carefully. Look squarely at it, unflinchingly.
If you have few supports in ‘real life’ then accept this as a given for right now. You’ll probably be surprised to learn how many people actually think the way you do, but have been silenced by the same pressures you feel. Once you decide the types of skills you need to develop, you’ll have more opportunities to find those who share your worries and concerns. Get very concrete, and start conversations with the one or two that think as you do. Anticipate the sort of changes that you’ll see in your neighborhood, and ask yourself what you can do to impact those events.
Don’t assume that everyone in your family has to “be on board” for you to act. There are many things you can do, once you set your mind to it, that can be framed in a way that most people can understand. For example, storing food can be framed as “buying in bulk to save money.” Learning carpentry or gardening is a useful skill. Paying off debt can be “good commonsense.”
The most important lesson you’ve already learned, is that you can stand apart, be ‘different,’ and it won’t kill you. You can ‘think differently’ and everyone doesn’t have to agree with you.
When I pointed out that hard times were coming, almost 4 years ago, I didn’t make a big deal of it. I just said it, and said the kinds of things I thought would happen, then dropped it. Now, to those I told, they look at me differently, because they know I was right. No one has said “You were right!” but they don’t have to. Don’t try to push your agenda on them. Allow it to be enough to know you what you know, and begin to make the changes you believe have to happen. Take yourself “heart attack” seriously, but don’t insist that other people agree with you. And keep in mind the advice to put on your own oxygen mask first, and then attend to the people around you.
Does that make sense?
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Dear Peak Shrink,
Thank You so much for the reply.
Yes, that makes a whole lot of sense to me. I have always been making our “little homestead” as efficient as possible without saying too much to those around. I have been saying things like those you suggest. I put in a wood stove a few years back to offset the cost of our gas bill. I have my grandfathers bow saw and many hand tools that no one else wanted. My problem is this: my wife (whom I adore) has a job offer in a large city) we currently have a house that is small 1000 sq ft, has 2 acres of land and a stream on it. Along with deer, many trees and a large amount of wilderness around us, we have managed to pay it off. We do have some debt but not a mortgage. Our city is about 100k with farmland and we live in a smaller community about 10 mins to the farmland area. If she takes this job we have to move from our possible safe little community to a large urban city.
I am wondering how to tell my wife that our best place to be is here, and to continue working towards less financial commitments. We have a good neighborhood of a few doctors and small hobby farms as well. Seems perfect for us. We also have the potential for a greenhouse on our property. I don’t want to give all that up. We already know how to preserve vegetables, do our own carpentry, electrical, garden, filter water.
Any suggestions how to approach my wife on peak oil and have her believe it is real?
BTW , You are the first person I have ever written to on the internet. I found your website through a few links (not sure what ones) and found solace in your words. I am truly grateful for the time you took to write back.
I only hope I can find the peaceful way to tell my wife (met in high school a zillion years ago) that we can find a new togetherness in this next quest in our lives.
She is an Autism Spectrum Disorder Consultant (yes, with caps..lol) and is truly a soul of the earth. She does not like bad news like peak oil. We have our teenagers, two malamutes and live in [Northern Canada]. I hope we can stay here and face peak oil and what it will mean for us, our children, and our community together in a real spirit of altruism.
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Didn’t get back to him fast enough, so our contributor wrote again!
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Dear Peak Shrink,
OK Christmas is over. Time to reflect on the latest. I wish for my wife to at least do some investigation into my belief in peak oil. Her father was a newspaper man and did very well financially. The kids believe he is some master at figuring out what to do financially because he did so well in the 80’s and 90’s. They don’t know it was because cheap energy allowed many to do well then. He has never once mentioned the possibility of anything changing. They (he and my Mom-in-law) still snowbird to [warm USA state].
I think he believes I am always worrying too much. If he was supportive, maybe his daughters would listen. I seem to be all alone in this. I know that there are tough times coming and want to prepare, but I am like a three wheeled car. Most people I know are moving out to work in the Alberta tar sands. Our economy has taken a big hit here (Northern Canada) already (we were once a thriving population built on wood products and paper mills). I have family in British Columbia and it is a very beautiful place to live. Toronto is where my wife is looking to relocate to. That means a big mortgage for us. We are in our 40’s. No time to pay it off now. How do i get my wife to believe me? I think we should stay put.
Hope you are doing well. I don’t expect a reply, just writing this out helps me put things into perspective.
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Here are my thoughts:
Your wife wants to move to a place you don’t want to go, and buy an expensive house you don’t want to own. Forget the issue of Peak Oil. You have a legitimate difference of opinion right there! Moving and assuming a mortgage is a major commitment not to be taken lightly, and usually requiring mutual agreement.
How would things change for you, if your wife “believed” in PO? How would she act differently? What would she DO differently?
I’d get away from trying to convince anyone of anything, and focus specifically on what you want from her. If you want her to listen to you, even if it makes you and her anxious, and you know it is a lot to ask, say so. If you want her to stop spending money and save more of it, say that. And be prepared to give a listening ear back. Actually listen attentively to what she has to say about the move and the new home. See if you both can get behind the DREAM she’s aiming for, and see if it can be met another way. Many people can’t listen unless they feel really understood by the person. Her job sounds like it involves understanding people who’s behavior can be quite confusing, and learning how to influence it in a positive direction. She probably could use a bit of listening to, as well. The opposite of listening isn’t talking, it’s waiting to speak. Really listen to the dream behind her words, and articulate that back to her.
Sounds like a newspaper man knows how quickly a thriving business can turn around. Newspapers are dying left and right here. They’ve gone the way of the button, once the zipper was introduced. Don’t worry about trying to get him on board. Just talk to him about how smart he was to be in the right business at the right time, and how different it is for talented guys, just like he was, to be starting out today. Agree that no one can predict the future with 100% accuracy, but that’s what most of us are required to do anyway, if we get a clear signal that change is demanded of us. He can probably talk about a time when he made a bold move that everyone else thought “wouldn’t work” but it did. Ask him about how he managed to pull it off, when his was the minority opinion, and he was risking a lot. All successful men, in addition to being in the right place at the right time (oil’s a given) also thought differently or were willing to make tough choices. Don’t try to convince him of Peak Oil, just hear him out about how a truly successful man must listen to and heed his own counsel, after carefully considering the facts. That will come in pretty handy to remind him of, later.
I guess what I’m suggesting to you is that you, too, are forced to be your own man and make your own choices that are of a minority opinion. Your father-in-law can tell you how tough that is sometimes, perhaps.
Everyone needs to have a dream. It sucks to struggle to find one in a time of collapses-economic, energy, and environmental ones…but we still have to have some, and they have to be grounded in the future we see happening, not one we wish for or one of exaggerated fears. Your wife knows, by the very changing area around her, that people can destroy the very natural world that provided them an income only a short time before. She perhaps can see that a doubling of the world’s population, at a time of dramatic climate shifts, spells trouble. You may agree with her that while eventually things will “straighten out,” they’ll be “winners” and “losers” before they do. The capacity to accurately assess the direction things are going in will make the difference which one your family ends up as, (although I doubt either of us would agree that “winners” are the best descriptive adjective for those surviving well…)
So, here’s a New Year’s challenge: Paint me an accurate picture of a future you’d want to live in, that includes your wife and kids. Make it 5, 10, and 20 years into the future, and describe what’s different and what changes are going to be required of you. Emphasize how you’ll get the basics, and how energy limits will impact you. The limitations on this requires it to conform to what you know about the three big E’s, and make it as specific as possible. How will the economy change? What environmental changes do you see happening around you? How are people getting around? Where do they get their food? Where are you living and why? Start out each story saying how old you and your family members are, just so you can consider their life span changes (you don’t need to send those to me, that’s just for your own figuring…) Throw in one or two items that would appeal to your wife on some level, and identify these.
Up for the challenge?
Dr. K
‘Peak Shrink’
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I’m working, right now, on H.P.’s dream with him, helping him to clarify and articulate the details.
Stay tuned for the finished product!
A detour from my normal post, folks. Pardon my ramblings, here.
Lost Church
Got a call early Sunday morning telling us that the church building we attended burned to the ground (and still was burning…)
Now, I know the “church” is the people and everything, and I’m not the sort to believe in “relationships” existing in an institution or structure, instead of in the people inhabiting it, but boy, that church building was 170 years old.
DH and I were invited, and went to the “other” Congregationalist church in town that morning, and heard an outpouring of warmth, shared sadness, and a collection for our congregation. Later that day, we went to a service held in our parish house, at the foot of the hill. The church was on a tiny street, on a hill, and with way, way too little parking for the modern congregation.
The parish house had been filled throughout the day, since early that morning, as people brought food, fed firefighters and police force, and fed our own hungry souls with each other’s company. The place always drew people in times of great sorrow or hardship. A year ago, when we lost electricity in the town for a week, the parish house came alive, offering shelter, a hot meal, and running water. Now, it was one moving creature, with people showing up and leaving, moving furniture around, and rearranging it for the 3 o’clock service. We’d offer food to the firefighters that showed up for a break, and shouted “thank you!” as they left to head back up the hill to the smoldering chars.
Some of us just stood by the entrance to the tiny street that was blocked off by emergency vehicles. We could see what used to be our church there. Some talked to each other in hushed voices, while others just tried to stay close to the minister, as if to gain solace from his physical presence.
The minister is no ordinary religious leader, but a reluctant soul who volunteered a few Sundays when the last minister left. Despite a lack of formal training (which he later made up for) he inspired people so deeply with his words, they begged him to take the reins. He was a shepherd, and a published poet at the time. He was a lumberjack, and now the father of three grown men. He grew up in the city, but made his home in the country years before and never looked back. He’s tall, handsome, with a huge chest and arms, a sensitivity and depth, a humble way and a reassuring manner, that makes him irresistible as a preacher.
It wasn’t until the minister started to recall the items in the church that we lost, that I started to feel the absence.
I mostly missed the memory of how the sunlight showered in the huge windows and spilled onto the pews we sat in, and how I could look out and see the changing seasons. I miss the extreme simplicity of the structure, and the plain wooden pews. I forgot about that grand piano on the pulpit, and that beautiful quilt–the healing quilt–that was blessed by all of us, and went around the congregation to anyone who was ill and needed comfort. I missed the bell, and how you grabbed onto a rope and pulled it. The kids used to love to do that. I liked how dumb it was that it had no bathroom, only fairly recently got something other than two wood-burning stoves to heat it, and had “new” hymnals that were much older than I am. It also had photocopies of a variety of songs that were put into blue binders. Sometimes the songs were missing in some of them, so you had to scramble for another one to see if that had the song in it.
I liked the way that the pews were painted white and brown, and had a section where it was hard to reach, so each one was a bit different–some with more white, some with more brown. I liked the cushions too. They were the ancient maroon “velvet” with buttons, stuffed with old straw and horse hair. It had a podium where the minister would stand, but there was no microphone, except the one for people who were hard of hearing that he’d wear, and sometimes forget to turn off when he sang. The acoustics were great, so there was no need for anything except his deep, clear voice. It had a tin ceiling painted white, and lights placed there in a way that never made the place very bright in the evening. There were three sections for seating, and we always sat on the right as you walked in. There were two doors going in, and one in the back, but only the ‘chickens’ used that back door when they were late.
I remember the first time we were late, and we’d walk in to face the entire congregation, as it was set up with the door and pulpit in front. Afterward, people came up to us saying “don’t feel bad, everyone is late sometimes, and everyone feels that way.” (embarrassed)
The furnace was so noisy, sometimes it had to be shut off, so the minister could be heard. It was a trade-off, because the huge windows (single pane, of course) made it cold in winter, but somehow not too hot in summer. It was that furnace that caused the fire, according to investigators
The last time I was there was at Christmas service, where I sang in the choir. Next, children sang African songs in some African dialect, and were incredibly cute. Afterward, hand-held candles were lit and the houselights went out, and carols were sung by a packed house. I’ll never forget the magic of that night, or how happy I was to sing with a group once again.
It was tiny. It was a classic New England church–bare, without even a Cross. Everyone who entered, regardless of their religion, or lack of religious beliefs, were to feel welcome. As one friend put it: “The church was plain and unadorned. It was the perfect canvas to display the beauty of the people who walked through the door.”
There were no preliminary rules for what you needed to believe when you walked in there. But oddly, there appeared to be an equal rejection of hymn books that had to be “politically correct.” Perhaps that’s why the ones we used were either very VERY current, or from what seemed like the turn of the century.
There was spirit in that building, and it was filled with a history of every person, from the time when those before us would show up in horse-drawn wagons or walk. The next one will see that same phenomenon, if they rebuild, which everyone says will happen, because we have good insurance and a bunch of carpenters just itching to get started. They’ll put the bell back up, too, I’m sure.
A church is not the people–many of our fellow parishioners said that during the 3 o’clock service– when we listened to the guitar and solos, and rocked and swayed and moved that parish hall with a mixture of grief and fellowship. Our collection that afternoon went to the Haitian relief effort and we were reminded of what real loss truly was. After the service, we ate some more, moved among ourselves in the overflowing parish house, (with a bathroom and kitchen) and hugged people.
And although it was “just a building,” I was moved to tears as we sang and swayed and held hands at the end, as we did at every service, awkwardly, since it was build in a day when no one was suppose to touch. Because it was not really just a building, it was a location filled with memories, many more for those who had been there for decades, than for me. People spoke at one point in the service of getting married there and burying their husband there. They spoke of baptizing their children there, and those children growing up and bringing their children to be baptized there. They spoke of memories, and the passing of time, the passing of their lives and the lives of those they chose to live among. A church is just a building, the people are the church, but despite myself, I feel a deep sadness for the loss of that structure, and for all the folks that can no longer relive the memories of their lives that took place in it.
But I’m equally moved by the spirit of togetherness that I’ve seen. One man in town told the minister, ‘I have 100 acres of woods and a sawmill. Tell me what you need.’ With that kind of spirit, there isn’t much we need that can’t be ours.
Dear Peak Shrink,
Please don’t use my name in this post, if that can be avoided.
I learned about Peak Oil a few years ago, but it has only recently dawned on me that it is really for real, really happening, and really not good, especially taken together with all of the other peaks, and environmental degradation. I am fairly hopeless, especially as all of my skills are pretty standard tech civilizational, and because of the topic that seems to be third-rail on some of the more compassionate peak oil forums, which is to say: overpopulation and the inevitable struggle that will ensue between people who are now of good will, as things deteriorate.
This has really caused me a lot of pain, because it is so out of whack with everything I was raised to believe about life. I’ve also been reading some of the Reg Morrison stuff about the evolutionary basis of spirituality/mysticism, and this has left me feeling that the spiritual refuge, which is something I generally lean on, is just a bunch of lies. But I have ordered the book “Sacred Demise” and I’ll see if that has anything to offer me.
All of this is just about trying to cope with this intermediate time–dealing with the anxiety of knowing sh*t is coming before it’s actually hit the fan, but in a moment where you can still walk down the street, drink a bottle of wine, listening to a ballgame–all of the things I love.
I sometimes have moments of terror when I get an intimation of what things will be like when it actually starts to unravel full throttle. I have to confess, and maybe this is why I don’t want my name mentioned most of all, that it makes me wonder how I could kill myself with the least amount of pain and terror, rather than suffer things I can’t even imagine.
In the meantime, I don’t feel like I’m getting much joy out of life, nor to I feel I am either preparing for, or forestalling the inevitable. Some talk-backer on this site referred to this kind of conversation as being like scared ducks pooping in a lake, and that made sense to me. This kind of talk doesn’t seem like it’s building anything, but just trying help us manage the fear and uncertainty. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that, necessarily.
It has also occurred to me recently that “feeling good” is a part of the problem–when we are feeling good, we think everything is a-ok. So I feel like I’m not allowing myself to feel good, and even wonder about the efficacy of sharing my feelings with a group like this, that seems like a support group, because if I feel supported then I’ll relax my guard, but then I wonder–why not relax my guard and just drink in some pleasantness while it can still be had? I’d bet anyone dealing with this stuff is familiar with this particular mindf*ck.
The hardest part might be that I got married a month ago, to a wonderful woman who I love very dearly, and who really wants to have children. I love her a lot, and she is the most important person in my life, and it is very clear to me that she has not begun the journey toward seeing how bad things actually are, and does not want to. I have mentioned my concerns to her, and she has found some fairly conventional ways to assert that they are unfounded, though at the same time she does seem willing for me to explore agricultural and foraging information and such. But it has already put a strain on our relationship, which is hard for me to bear. I think, in the end, if we are able (we are in our mid-to-late thirties) we will have a child, because I do not want to lose her, when it comes down to it. And, if we have a child, I will bear the guilt for as long as I live of whatever suffering comes to that child in these times we’re heading towards, because I knew better. So this feels like a crucifixion. I know everyone else must be going through similar shit. It’s all crazy, and feels very unreal. I think we’re going to get more experience of the feel of unreality.
Thanks for listening.
Grim Newlywed
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Dear Grim Newlywed,
I never use names in my post. No worry.
Here are some of my thoughts on what you’ve written, and hopefully you’ll have responses to them. I prefer dialogue rather than monologue, anyway.
I guess I always ask myself specifically what a person is hopeful or hopeless ABOUT. If you are hopeless that the future isn’t going to be looking like the present, that’s sensible. But there is a lot of “bad stuff” that makes this present not so great, anyway. Something has to give, and Peak Oil looks like as good a thing as any.
Hope,as a general concept, is over-rated. If you take action, you need a lot less hope. Seriously assess your current living situation. What did your city or town look like in the 1850’s? How many people? How did they get their food? What work did they do? Then ask yourself whether that place will weather the changes poorly or not. Remember, your assessment is not simply for you and your current lifestyle. You have mentioned having a child. Think about how your grandchildren will live. And the grandchildren of those you love.
It is easy to think in black and white, all or nothing at all terms. Try to think about things over a time-line and to anticipate what changes are next. Your gift of knowing about PO and believing it will make you prophetic to those who either don’t know about this stuff or refuse to believe it. Put into action changes that are both simple, cost little or nothing, and solve multiple problems.
>>This has really caused me a lot of pain, because it is so out of whack with everything I was raised to believe about life.
Yes, the attitude adjustment is a long-ongoing process. I think it takes two years of knowing and believing it, to find a sense of equilibrium.
“overpopulation and the inevitable struggle that will ensue between people who are now of good will, as things deteriorate.”
GN, we will definitely see a shift as people get poorer, and those in the city are forced to move or die an earlier death, perhaps by rising sea levels. But I’ve been inspired by the writings on the Great Depression, and try to draw some lessons from them. I’ve read stories from people who said their parents gave them NOTHING for the holidays, and other stories where the parents gave their child a “dream gift” of refreshing an old doll with horsehair and flour sack clothes. Personal resources are going to be the turning point for how grim things get, I believe.
>>…especially as all of my skills are pretty standard tech civilizational
I can tell by your writings that you are an intelligent man, and what you need to develop new skills is a willingness, motivation (and PO should provide that) and time.
Ask yourself what your ancestors did generations before oil, and see if you have interest in any of that. Take up “hobbies” you enjoy. Pick something quite different than what you do for work. If you work with your mind, try working with your hands. That sort of thing. You may find it a big help to your mental health to learn something new and get physically moving.
>>…this has left me feeling that the spiritual refuge, which is something I generally lean on, is just a bunch of lies.
I don’t know his work, but I like what AA says about Higher Power: You don’t need to believe in a Higher Power, you just have to believe YOUR not IT! I find that tremendous hardship connects people to things that are more meaningful, while prosperity and wealth causes many to feel adrift. As I live among domesticated animals and birds, and grow a garden, I’ve come to believe that the entire planet Earth has profound wisdom and when smart men and women paid attention to it, they learned something.
When I lived in a city, I was so profoundly disconnected from the rhythm of life, and I still, having grown up and lived in cities most of my life, am recovering from civilization, as Chellis Glendinning says. If you feel no relief in your spiritual path at this moment, my hunch is that you are listening to your head and not your heart. The fact that you lay yourself down at night and rise in the morning is not a lie, but it is a miracle of sorts. This civilization we are all a part of is NOT life. It is a brief blip of time in the history of humanity. Our intellects as well as our emotions can remove us from deeper understanding.
I haven’t read “Sacred Demise,” (but I’d like to…) I’ve met Carolyn Baker. She comes from a Jungian background, that inform her politics.
There is a guy who’s been writing about the link between spirituality and evolutionary psychology. I found his writings compelling: Experimental Theology He’s a research psychologist trying to integrate theology with data from the experimental social sciences. He writes interesting stuff. If you do, scroll down the right-hand side of the page until you get to his section: Theology and Evolutionary Psychology. Those articles, to me, were most interesting.
>>it makes me wonder how I could kill myself with the least amount of pain and terror, rather than suffer things I can’t even imagine.
I think you should make a serious examination of your assumptions here, especially in light of the fact that you are considering having a child. You have many, many options available to you to mitigate the impact of what is coming in your own life and in the lives of those you care about. You can’t do everything. You aren’t a miracle worker…but you can make intelligent, rational choices based on what you know and what you predict is likely to happen. To not take action is insanity. If you remain frozen, and you don’t act on what you know to be true, you may feel increasingly bummed out. If you keep focusing on suicide, you need to get some help, GN, from someone trained to help you get some perspective. People who are unsuccessful at killing themselves are glad they didn’t do it. If that thought is bouncing around as more than an extremely occasional idea, please get some help.
>>This kind of talk doesn’t seem like it’s building anything, but just trying help us manage the fear and uncertainty.
Here’s the point of what I do: Yes, bad things are coming. Yes, it will be an extremely rough ride. Now, do you believe yourself and start doing something? Or do you ignore what you believe and feel anxious and upset? Managing the fear is not enough. You have to DO SOMETHING. You have to take ACTION. You have to take yourself as seriously as a heart attack. You can’t get caught up in whether this is the “right” or “best” thing to do. Start with small steps, and avoid drastic life changes without the counsel of people you trust.
And you have to have enough perspective to realize that things unfold, at varying rates. You have to have some clue as to what the signs and symptoms MEAN. If you ignore what you know to be true, you are going to feel crazy, and perhaps start acting that way. “Not acting crazy” in this sense, means removing yourself from the tracks when you hear the train coming.
As far as the ‘talk-backers’ go, 5% of the population are sociopathic or sadistic and they enjoy inducing paralyzing fear in other people. Besides, ducks and geese poop in the lake to lighten their load to fly. That’s why they digest things so quickly, to be able to take off when they need to. If you are scared, you might want to do make some movement of your own. Perhaps that’s what you are doing in writing to me. I agree with someone who wrote on the LATOC forum that we’re got mostly Armchair Doomers out there, and some have rather elaborate fantasy lives, filled with excitement, revenge, hot babes that they “get” with a can of beans and a toothless smile…that sort of thing. Don’t let them scare you.
>It has also occurred to me recently that “feeling good” is a part of the problem–when we are feeling good, we think everything is a-ok.
Now you are on to something. When we feel good, we can continue to act “normal” and continue to buy and get into debt and don’t notice how dramatically different things are now then they were 10 years ago. But feeling good isn’t actually the problem. We can “feel” good or “feel” gloomy, but these are just emotions that exist on a bodily level. Do we become brain-dead when we “feel good” or do we just enjoy the good sensations? Do we ignore what we believe to be true, deep down, or do we just go on auto-pilot? Feel good or feel gloomy, but take action, then self-correct. If you find that you just bought a lot of crapola over the holidays, return it! Or stop buying now!
>>So I feel like I’m not allowing myself to feel good, and even wonder about the efficacy of sharing my feelings with a group like this, that seems like a support group…
You can tell how serious you are by the people you talk to about which sorts of feelings. For example, if your mother was all happy about you getting married, and your father was against it, and you talk to Mom, it suggests that you want to feel better about the marriage. If you talk to Dad, you may be looking for the doubter’s take. Notice who you talk to about what, to get some clue about what types of opinions or support you might be wanting.
When you talk here, you are talking to people who are likely to share a particular set of stories and beliefs. They are a rare group, as groups go. If you said “It’s all going down!” to a group of dentists or engineers, you’d get completely different feedback, especially if they were expecting their first child! No one here is going to say “It’s crazy to worry about the future!”
>>because if I feel supported then I’ll relax my guard…
My friend calls that need to keep up her guard “fresh hate.” I think you mean that you need to stay motivated to actually DO something, instead of just talking about it, and YOU DO!
>>…why not relax my guard and just drink in some pleasantness while it can still be had? I’d bet anyone dealing with this stuff is familiar with this particular mindf*ck.
They are quite familiar with it, as am I. So what you might be missing is that right now, you can do everything you need to do the “easier” way (but not as easily as you might have four years ago). The longer you wait to start changing things, the rougher things will get.
Timing IS important. When resources are abundant, you can get quite a bit done. When gas is $4 a gallon, you start feeling the limitations…or when you lose your job. Drink in pleasantness, by all means. That is your right as a human being on this earth. But don’t just do that. Recognize that you are at a unique point in history, and next year you’ll have less to work with than you do this year. Just ask the person who was “thinking” of moving their stock portfolio, but didn’t. How do they feel?
>>The hardest part might be that I got married a month ago, to a wonderful woman who I love very dearly, and who really wants to have children. I love her a lot, and she is the most important person in my life…
I am very happy for you. Having a good spouse is essential in surviving what’s coming. But you have a big job to do. If she loves you as much as you love her, you must see eye-to-eye on this very important matter of the future. Your shared vision and goals for the future will bring your house in harmony. A divided vision and working at cross-purposes will bring nothing but heart-ache.
>>it is very clear to me that she has not begun the journey toward seeing how bad things actually are, and does not want to. I have mentioned my concerns to her, and she has found some fairly conventional ways to assert that they are unfounded, though at the same time she does seem willing for me to explore agricultural and foraging information and such.
It is scary to face what you have been facing. You love her and don’t want to scare her. But she must, if you are to have a harmonious life, be willing to investigate adequately. It is not enough for you to be the “preparer.” It isn’t enough for her to allow you to be the “eccentric.” On the other hand, don’t expect her to want to sign up for your future if you tell her “We’ll be lying on a gutter eating our own flesh!” She’d be silly to want to join you in that vision. So, your job, if you choose to accept it, is to outline what you see calmly and rationally to her.
Outline what the limitations and positives are, and what steps you think have to be taken to avert the bad things you see coming. In other words, you have to envision a future worth living in, but that’s only the first step: You have to figure out how to go step-by-step into that future WITH her. And you have to help her to understand that she’ll be giving up a lot to change her lifestyle, and that you understand and sympathize with that. And she will. And you will. And she is the other side of your ambivalence helping you to stay the same – frozen with indecision. I’ll have more to say about this stuff later.*
>>But it has already put a strain on our relationship, which is hard for me to bear.
This strain will, unfortunately, be the first of many. Be clear about how you want to be and act towards her when you disagree about something, and remain true to that way. But understand that you do neither her NOR you a favor by allowing her to be the bright side, while you remain the dark side. You need her optimism. All is NOT lost for those with the courage and wisdom to act. She needs your vision of a future that YOU find worth living in. She’ll be willing to tolerate the pain if it will lead to positive growth, not just more pain.
>>I think, in the end, if we are able (we are in our mid-to-late thirties) we will have a child, because I do not want to lose her, when it comes down to it.
That is a popular, but terrible reason to be a father. If a woman told you that she was going to have a child in order to “keep her man” would you applaud? I doubt it. You’d say any man who’d pressure her into having a child isn’t worth keeping. If you make a conscious decision to bring a child into this world of strife, you had better be fully prepared to provide a decent future for them.
>>And, if we have a child, I will bear the guilt for as long as I live of whatever suffering comes to that child in these times we’re heading towards, because I knew better. So this feels like a crucifixion.
It is a crucible, not a crucifixion. It is a trial, pressure that will either crack you or transform you. I hope the latter. If you believe yourself, if you actually DO know better, than I’m curious to know just what you plan to do. Is your plan to keep those children and grandchildren safe and happy, or face into your conscience and work with your wife on a different (childless or perhaps adoption) plan for the future and suffer her deep disappointment at not having a biological child?
>>I know everyone else must be going through similar sh*t.
You are definitely not alone in this,, and that’s why you want your story heard. You want to know that other people are dealing with this and are working through it. You want to know that this is something a person CAN work through…that it is something a marriage can survive.
>>It’s all crazy, and feels very unreal. I think we’re going to get more experience of the feel of unreality.
Actually, GN, I think the opposite. I think we’ll increasingly have the feeling of things getting very very real. The only “unreality” will be the stories they tell us on the television news. These will be increasingly out of whack with what our own lives and the lives of people around us tell us. That’s why we all need to Shut that TV OFF!
I am interested in your response to what I’ve written, and in knowing more about the details of your situation, if you care to share.
If not, I’ll thank you now for this most interesting letter. I’m sure it will resonate with many of my readers, especially the marital issues piece.
I wish you great wisdom and strength in the future.
Best,
Peak Shrink
P.S. Baseball doesn’t need fossil fuel. Are you on a team?
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* I’m working on, what I believe to be, an important post on marriage between what I call “Convinced Spouses” and “Skeptical Spouses.” I will outline the types of issues that are common, to this type of marriage, but this post will do more. It will attempt to describe the sorts of emotional shifts that need to happen in both people for healing and reconciliation to begin. It will be directed at the general reader, as well as the professional couple’s therapist.
I’m inviting people who may be interested in reviewing my drafts, and commenting on them, to contact me. I’m particularly interested in reviewers who find themselves in that sort of relationship dynamic (Convinced/Skeptical). If you’d like to be a reviewer of this piece (and don’t worry, I’ll be hitting up the ‘usual suspects’) write to me at peakshrink AT peakoilblues DOT com.
Here’s a sample:
Strained Social Networks
The Convinced Spouse may now merely “endure” the “endless chatter” about “trivial things” that captivate the interests of their mutual friends. Social activities like new purchases, dining, vacationing, and other leisure activities now seem like a dreadful waste of time. If the Convinced Spouse does go along, the “false smiles” it may be obvious to the sensitive Skeptical Spouse. Obviously, one can’t ‘insist’ that the other enjoy themselves, but the lack of true pleasure often taints the fun of the Skeptical Spouse. Fights may follow. What was once an area of mutual pleasure and joint renewal and refreshment has now become filled with tension.
If new Peak Oil social networks are created, these prove to be equally “alien territory” for the Skeptical Spouse. If they found one person full of “doom and gloom” talk, now they must tolerate a hornet’s nest full of them…
Hi Peak Shrink,
After years of reading, processing, talking, thinking, feeling….about peak oil, global climate change, extinction, overpopulation, overshoot (which seems to cover it all), I thought I was in a pretty good spot. I was accepting the good with the bad, preparing in my meager ways, talking about it to anyone interested and mostly, again able to sleep at night.
Big drum crash.
My 10 year old. He’s starting the process, less healthily, and I living through it again with him. It started last spring when he wrote a book report on Thor Heyerdahl and read Thor’s warning about the state of the world. Thor had made ocean trips in his little Kon Tiki in the 40’s and redid them in the 70’s. The difference in the amount of pollution, trash, dead animals….astonished him and he wrote about how the oceans wouldn’t be able to survive such abuse. He then said something on PBS about habitat destruction and apes going extinct, then he learned about g.c.c. in school.
He’s anxious and saddened. He’s crying and is sometimes inconsolable. He said that it didn’t matter what happened to him, it was the planet he was worried about. Grandma’s little talk about “how what happens here on earth doesn’t matter, it’s what happens when we go to heaven,” really scared him. Now he thinks all Christians are crazy.
He’s a smart little boy and I am working on getting him into counseling but don’t want a counselor to downplay his fears. He has voiced that he fears the monkeys will be all gone before he can grow up and save them. I think it would be a mistake for him to hear that his concerns aren’t real or aren’t realistic. I live in that world, where some co-workers couldn’t care less about the environment and think it’s all nonsense to be concerned. I was recently told that peak oil can’t be true because “she never saw anything about it on t.v. and she watches a lot of t.v.” I don’t think that my 10 year needs to get into those differences yet.
What do I ask the therapist about possible treatments that could avoid some problems for him? Can I ask about her religion? Can I ask her how she gets her information? Can I ask her not to diminish his fears, but instead to try to help him cope with them?
I use to see my upcoming role as food provider, heat provider…..I now see that sanity might be a big call for the coming years. I need to keep myself mentally healthy so that I can help my children cope with their grief, sadness and fears. Scary times for us means scary times for them, no matter how well we think we are protecting them.
I’d love to hear thoughts.
Worried Mom of a Sensitive Child
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Dear W.M.S.C,
Such a touching and thoughtful email, W.M.S.C. Thank you for writing.
We can look at your son from many perspectives, but perhaps the
developmental perspective is a good place to start. At ten, he’s acutely aware of the moral issues of right and wrong, and this age tends
to dwell on the wrong. They have a strong sense of justice and can have
a strict moral code. Your son has directed these developmental
challenges toward the Earth, and, being a sensitive kid, he feels very
deeply about it, as do you. You clearly have to intervene if his fears
are interfering with his eating, sleeping, schoolwork, socializing,
athletics, or friendship networks. As his parent, I would support the
feelings of injustice he’s articulating, and the depth of his capacity
to feel things as deeply as he does. And, I would want to expose him to
the types of social action that’s happening around the world to heal and
repair it. Greenpeace USA has some inspiring (and some are
silly/serious) videos about the work they are doing to stop the sales of
red list fish. 350.org is a great site. I’m sure you are letting him
know that people are trying to do things, so that he can take the time
he needs to grow up, because he’s going to be needed, too. The goal
isn’t to offer him false hope (you know that sickens me, if you read my
site…) The goal is to let him know that he isn’t alone–it doesn’t
fall all on his shoulders to take action. Does he have friends that
share his concerns? Do they take on kid-level projects?
As far as therapeutic help, I’d suggest you both go, and head to someone
who can teach you both stress management, relaxation training,
meditation and the like. Figuring out how to control anxiety and
overwhelming sadness is a skill we all could use getting better at.
Practice it together at night, or whenever he’s upset.
If you can’t console him when he’s crying, don’t try. Just be with him, and share those feelings of sadness with him. Help him to accept them for what they are –feelings that exist in his body, and reassure him that
expressing them is a good thing. He’s a strong boy for having such
strong emotions, and he’ll grow up to be a strong man who will fight for
the oceans and the apes with all of his might. He knows some things,
tell him, but there are other things still to learn. We know a lot
about a lot of things, but not everything.
Finally, I’d suggest having him do more research on groups like Roots
and Shoots or related groups that direct his energies toward other kids who are doing things. If he doesn’t have a group of friends who think like he does, he can correspond with kids that do. Writing out his thoughts is great therapy, demonstrated to be so by research. Taking action is really important, even if you, as an adult, aren’t certain that a particular direction will ultimately “change things.” He’ll be learning important socialization and community action skills, if he’s not doing so already.
He has a part of the picture, but really not all of it. He said he isn’t concerned about himself, but he misses the fact that he IS a part of the planet, as much an animal as any other, and if other animals deserve a place here, so does he.
You’ve always been a sanity-provider, W.M.S.K. That’s what parents are. If you see a lot of symptoms I’ve described above, I’d suggest starting
with the relaxation training, and then get him more active with kids who
feel as he does. If that’s not helpful, check AAMFT and find a good
marriage and family therapist to go to, and take the entire family. I
prefer it, at least as a first step, to individual work with kids. That
way, if you are in the room, you can ask whatever you’d like (you can,
anyway, before you go in…) and monitor what’s happening.
I’m happy to offer other ideas, if you’d like to offer more details on
your situation. He sounds like a great kid. You’re lucky to be able to
parent him. And I feel lucky to live on a planet with him. We need
more like him.
Thanks again for writing, and continue to share if you’d like.
Best to you and yours,
Dr. K
Here’s a video to watch. Notice that this 13 year old girl mentions a world population of 5 billion. That was in 1992. She’s now 31 and today the world’s population is 6.7 billion…
Girl that Silenced the World
And this:
Cancel Catalog Campaign
Is it a waste of time to encourage children to be actively engaged in speaking out and direct their energies in these types of efforts? What do you think?
Do you have children who are deeply upset by the big 3 E’s? Write to me at Peakshrink AT peakoilblues DOT com
With 10% of people in the USA receiving food stamps, J.P. Morgan wants to see the other two-thirds who are eligible get their fair share as well. J.P. Morgan is the hired Santa Claus “responsible for processing over 130 million transactions and handling over $3 billion in funds in the U.S., the large majority relating to government programs.”
Thank you, J.P. Morgan.
And not only in the USA. They save money “by administering SNAP, unemployment and other benefits, pension and entitlement payments to approximately 12 million cardholders in approximately 30 states and territories, the United Kingdom and South America.”
If you are now unemployed, and too poor to qualify for a J.P. Morgan/Chase credit card, don’t worry. You may instead qualify for a handy dandy “credit card light” “Electronic Benefits Transfer” where you can get Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly the “Food Stamp Program”), Special Supplementation Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC), Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) and child support payments.
It’s nice to know that you’ll always have a friend in J.P. Morgan/Chase, through good times and bad, whether rich or poor. As they like to say:
“The right relationship is EVERYTHING!” (with gov’t that is…)
Hi Dr. McMahon,
First of all thank you so much for your website. There are countless resources out there about the troubles we face from climate change and peak oil. Yours is the only I’ve found that addresses what its like to be a compassionate, emotional human during such a crisis. Your website has really helped me.
Thank you.
I’m a 24 year old artistic type with lots of dreams for my life. As you well know the modern artistic lifestyle is completely dependent on the excesses of our current civilization (as are many other lifestyles). My working mediums are photography and film which stand almost no chance of survival. Art in general will most certainly be experiencing some difficult times ahead.
I’m not a religious person so I’m fairly accustomed to the search for meaning, but now that my career goals have gone away I feel like I truly have nothing. I’ve had life long ambitions that are now completely gone.
I’m not a hardcore survivalist and I understand that our society won’t completely disintegrate in a matter of seconds. But certainly it will be reduced to the point where I will become obsolete and my life might be in jeopardy if I don’t change who I am very soon.
I don’t want to take up too much of your time so my questions are these:
Is it crazy to try and pursue my artistic/career goals with the little time we have left? Suppose our current society really starts to break down in 5 years, that still leaves me some time. Is it stupid to stay on my current path Would I be living a complete lie like everyone else? Should I start hunkering down right now?
I realize how terribly selfish these questions are. It makes me feel sick and guilty that I want to turn my back on the truth. This is probably a feature common to those in my generation. If something is boring or scary then we just turn on the tv and ignore it.
I apologize if these questions have already been answered on your website. I’m certainly depressed about our situation but also hopeful. Assuming humanity survives our coming crises, perhaps we will be the better for it. Any guidance would be extremely appreciated.
Thank you again, Doctor.
Sincerely,
Life Questions
*********************************
Dear Life Questions,
Your letter touched me deeply, and I was reluctant to respond without thinking on it a while.
(1) Is it crazy to try and pursue my artistic/career goals with the little time we have left?
It is easy to get into an “all or nothing” mindset around these issues. Without your art, who are you? If you are like most artists, you create because you must. Artistic expression always has been a part of our culture, and always will be. You may choose to expand the types of medium in which you work, but it will stay a part of you. It must, if you are truly an artist.
There is going to be a lot to capture in the years ahead. There will be a lot to say that is best said in photography or film. I can’t comment on your skills and talents, and I don’t know the industry, but if you are planning to make a career out of it, you need to know it inside and out, and to know how economic hard times will effect it.
(2) Suppose our current society really starts to break down in 5 years, that still leaves me some time. Is it stupid to stay on my current path? Would I be living a complete lie like everyone else? Should I start hunkering down right now?
Again, these are not “either/or” questions. Focus on the decisions you must make WHETHER the culture breaks down in 5 years or NOT. You will find that even following this criteria, you’ll have plenty to do. I have no idea where you are professionally. I’m not sure if you are a student, or currently working in the field, and making a good income. If you are a student, I don’t know if you are yearly getting deeper in debt or have the resources to pay for your education. These are important questions that will direct my answers.
If you are currently making an income doing your art, by all means continue, until you have something equally lucrative to replace it. With an income, you can begin to experiment with developing other skills, and gathering some of the essentials you need, . Look to develop skills in central areas of life, and get physically fit. Learn techniques to manage your stress.
I’m not sure what you mean by “hunkering down.” You should evaluate where you are living, where you get your food, electricity, heat, water, etc. Each area is going to present special challenges, some more pressing in some areas than in others. You might live in a city, but have a huge extended family around you. This is going to be a different situation than a man who lives without family in a city, but has family in a rural area who will welcome him home at some point. Take yourself “heart attack” serious, LQ, and make plans, but don’t kill that humorous or artistic side. Lay it all out for yourself. Put it down on paper. Design a situation (in a movie script, if you want) and play out the possible logical consequences to each of the choices you make, that alters the scenario. Ask someone else, who doesn’t have your understanding of PO/Climate change/Economic collapse, to give you an alternate ending that’s believable. You need new ideas, where ever you can find them. In addition, you also need other people around you to validate your reality and who are actually doing things that you think are constructive. People on the internet aren’t adequate. You need real belly-to-belly interactions.
“I realize how terribly selfish these questions are. It makes me feel sick and guilty that I want to turn my back on the truth. This is probably a feature common to those in my generation. If something is boring or scary then we just turn on the tv and ignore it.”
These aren’t selfish questions. They are the questions of an entire world/generation. If you don’t answer them for yourself, you are expecting someone else to just “take care” of it, and that’s not smart. Watch the amount of time you spend doing “mindless” activities to distract yourself, and get a handle on it. Don’t expect you are going to know what else to do with yourself without trying new things. Never let your art drop completely, just integrate it into other things you are doing or learning.
Never give up dreaming, LQ. Just recognize that dreams can and do transform. Start somewhere, and do something every day. You don’t have to go from 60 mph in your artistic endeavors to 0 mph. Try to find a way to broaden your interests to correspond more closely to what you believe is coming. You, and your generation have to live it, live through it. If that reality makes most of you veg out and sink into escapism, that’s understandable. Temper that tendency in yourself, and create a new dream where you get to express that sensitive, emotional artistic side of yourself in ways that keep you on track for where you think the world is headed. Create options for yourself, instead of plans, because no one can accurately predict the future. Think in terms of “if this happens, I’ll do this. If that happens, I’ll do this other thing.” If you find yourself thinking in extremes, break the pattern. The ones that will best prepare for the future are the flexible people among us, and the ones that can handle the tremendous pressure and tedium of a slow grinding decline, combined with sudden downward spins. Expect things to change in unexpected ways, and stay nimble. Play ball on running water. Don’t commit too heavily to a future that locks you in, economically, time-wise, or skill-wise. Develop many ‘hobbies’ (the way some people prefer to refer to them to others…). Keep your options open, and diversify them as much as you can.
That’s my best advise, friend. If you want to share more specifics, I’m happy to offer you more detailed notions.
Thank you for your kind words, and thank you for your efforts to heal and repair the world. We need you.
All of us do.
Fond regards,
Dr. K
Part Three and Four:
Community, inclusion and social tolerance
As champions of rebuilding community, permaculturalists tend to emphasize the positives of closer associations with, and reliance upon, our neighbors. However, it is wise to remember that small, self-reliant communities can also have their downsides if we do not explicitly endorse cosmopolitan values. The necessary return to self-sufficient community life holds two dangers for minorities and women: the persecution of people within a community and intolerance towards strangers from outside the community.
Inside a community, social norms may be narrow and stifling. As people who grew up in small, traditional communities oftentimes know, everyone knows your business and feels entitled to tell you how to live your life. Anyone who stands out as “different” may be subject to ostracism and persecution.
The Amish illustrate the dangers of in-group social policing. First, I want to emphasize that I very much appreciate many of the characteristics of Amish society: their simplicity of living, their care for the land, their pacifism, and their live-and-let-live attitude toward outsiders. However, it is also well-known that the Amish practice shunning against members who transgress their values. If someone is truly violating basic norms of decency, such as abusing a child, shunning may be entirely appropriate. It is good to keep in mind that the Amish have no formal system of police, courts or law. Shunning is the only method they have to deal with those they view as troublemakers. As we return to localized community life, we, too, may have to revive local methods of social control. On the other hand, shunning someone who simply doesn’t “fit in,” for whatever reason, is a form of violence. I know from personal experience in school just how emotionally damaging shunning can be. Shunning can kill.
Transition Culture activist Sharon Astyk wrote a March 2009 blog entry on her Casaubon’s Book Web site entitled, “The Role of Religious Communities in the Long Emergency.” The essay discusses how existing, self-reliant religious communities may serve both as blueprints and disaster response centers during times of crisis. Astyk says that while she and her husband are observant Jews, they have never had a problem getting along with their conservative Christian neighbors in their rural farming community.
“(R)eligious communities are going to have a large and powerful role in the future — one that ideally, we’d begin shaping and preparing for today. This is one of the reasons I’m never so delighted as when I’m asked to talk to religious communities — because in many ways, I think that they provide an existing infrastructure that is potentially powerfully adaptable to the life we will be living. The whole project of Adapting-In-Place involves using what you’ve already got — and one of the tools we have is religious infrastructure, which provides things that few other institutions in our society do. … (T)he reality is that there are few secular institutions that are prepared to fill the needs that people have at moments of crisis — this is what religious communities tend to do very well — they offer people access to familiar, structural ways to deal with events that change your world. ”
I agree with Astyk on her first point. Existing, functional communities, of whatever kind, will become centers of learning and assistance during the coming decades. However, I have serious reservations about her belief that religiously-based communities are automatically a good thing for everyone. It all depends on whether or not a group’s beliefs include the valuing of diversity and cosmopolitanism.
Some of the blog commenters took issue with this point, too. One commenter stated, “I am actually rather afraid of ending up “the only gay in the village” surrounded by a pitch-fork (bible, torah, qur’an) wielding group of people, out for a scape-goat….Is this the flip-side of the coin (community vs. exclusion)? How do you view these fears and what would we need to do to prevent a reversion to earlier forms of religion in case tshtf (the shit hits the fan)?”
I have had both good and bad experiences with religious communities, depending upon whether or not the members hold a cosmopolitan world-view. I have been working for the last few years on GLBT equality. The group of people I work with is diverse, GLBT and heterosexual, religious and non-religious. It has been a joy to work with liberal Christians who worship at “open and affirming” churches (churches that accept GLBT people as full and equal members). On the other hand, our main opposition has come from fundamentalist Christian churches whose theology includes the belief that being gay or transgender is a sin — and the sin must be hated.
In 2008, the city of Flagstaff held a series of public forums on our group’s sample non-discrimination ordinance. I was appalled to hear person after person from these fundamentalist churches get up in front of their neighbors and claim that gay people are perverts and pedophiles and that hiring GLBT people violated their value system. The disgust and hate was palpable. The threat of violence hung thickly in the air. Those of us leading the effort to pass the ordinance watched our backs as we returned home from those meetings.
Our local Planned Parenthood clinic is a target of another group of Christian fundamentalists. They illegally harass patients and employees with bullhorns, stick their heads through open car windows and charge into the clinic waiting room to proselytize. As a permaculturalist, I strongly support efforts to stabilize and lower population through contraceptive use and safe and legal abortion. I also strongly believe in the right of women to control their own bodies. I am among the one-third of women who have had an abortion. I help organize weekly support rallies in front of the clinic. During times when the anti-choice protesters are not present, we hold signs of simple affirmation such as, “I support Planned Parenthood” and “Honk for women’s health.”
In both cases, I have little trust in such people to treat me in a decent and caring manner, much less as an equal in a democracy. Would they help me in an emergency? If local law enforcement broke down, how would they behave towards their GLBT or non-Christian neighbors if they knew nobody was watching?
People of color experience another form of persecution within their own communities — racial profiling. In 2007, the American Civil Liberties Union held a racial profiling forum in a Flagstaff neighborhood with large populations of Native Americans and Hispanics. I had heard rumors of police unequally enforcing bicycle safety laws based on race. The forum left no doubt that this was in fact a significant problem. One man described in detail the trauma of being stopped by police and harassed for simply walking back to his own home after dark (a policeman told him he was “walking on the wrong side of the street”). Another speaker confirmed the ubiquitousness of being stopped by police for “WWI” — Walking While Indian.
There are many examples of the dangers of xenophobia towards outsiders. For example, during the crisis of the Black Plague in 14th century Europe, up to one-third of the population died within a few desperate decades. Without the knowledge of modern science, people fell back upon a familiar scapegoat — the Jews. Jews were accused of poisoning wells in Christian villages. Christians banded together to burn down Jewish villages. Thousands of Jews were murdered.
In spring 2009, swine flu originating in Mexico was in the headlines. Here in the U.S., anti-immigrant right-wingers chose to scapegoat poor Mexican immigrants for the epidemic. Never mind that the mutated virus appears to have originated in an American-owned Smithfield Confined Animal Feeding Operation housing nearly one million hogs, with large manure lagoons that provide a perfect breeding ground for pathogens.
Incorporating human rights and social justice into our work
Human beings are capable of living egalitarian lives without fossil fuels. Many hunter-gatherer societies testify to the fact it is possible, though not inevitable. Human nature includes both cooperative/altruistic and competitive/“us versus them” tendencies. Our empathetic and cooperative tendencies must be consciously cultivated in everyday life if we are to create a non-violent, democratic future without fossil fuels. It will take constant vigilance to remind people that diversity can strengthen communities.
Transition Initiatives are taking tentative steps to be socially inclusive. For instance, the 2008 Transition Cities Conference in Nottingham, UK included a Diversity Workshop with the theme, “Connecting beyond the comfort zone.” The Transition Handbook author Rob Hopkins summed up some of the key issues that arose during the workshop as including:
• Beyond white, accents, middle class, ‘usual suspects’
• ‘We’ as opposed to ‘them’
• Working with different faith communities
• Social justice, poverty and discrimination
• Discomfort/curiosity
• Celebrating difference
As David Holmgren points out in Future Scenarios, we don’t know what the far side of energy descent will look like. We can only work from where we are now and use our knowledge and skills to help ease our communities down the path of Transition in the most humane ways possible. We can begin the process by searching for common ground rooted in a sense of place. Conceptions of human rights as developed during the Enlightenment are sure to change along with everything else. As nations break down into smaller bioregional entities, the burden of protecting the rights of women and minorities will shift from the State to local governments and other community associations, in other words, to us. We must learn to stand up for one another and to solve problems without resorting to scapegoating and violence.
This year I have begun to organize people interested in Transition issues in my neighborhood. Naturally, I began by reaching out to people I already knew and liked — people who share my values. Politically, I know that about 80 percent of the voters in my precinct can be categorized as liberal or progressive. However, the other 20 percent are not. As we work to establish a neighborhood association, we increasingly interact with neighbors who do not share our core beliefs and values. We are learning as we go along.
A few ideas: when you do community organizing around Transition issues, reach out to people with differing religious and political views, of different races and ethnicities and economic classes than you, and especially to stigmatized minorities like immigrants and GLBT people. Make a special effort to include “invisible” people like the elderly and mentally and physically disabled. Include explicit discussions about diversity, inclusion and social tolerance during neighborhood potlucks and other community activities. Don’t be afraid to admit your own biases and stereotypes. Remind yourselves frequently that you are creating new cultures that draw upon the creativity inherent in diversity.
What human rights concerns are most important in your community? Are racial divisions preventing deeper community ties from forming? Are immigration and border security issues leading to expressions of hate and physical violence? Are the religious “culture wars” creating animosity between neighbors? Are gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people legally protected against discrimination in employment, housing and public accommodations? Are local permaculture projects inclusive of people with physical disabilities?
It is tempting to focus on similarities and shared interests and avoid areas of disagreement. However, ignoring community divisions is counterproductive. I agree with Mohandas Gandhi that true peace and harmony cannot be attained until a conflict is brought into the open and dealt with in an assertive, nonviolent manner.
Authentic community life cannot exist unless people are honest with one another about who they are and refuse to sanction prejudice and discrimination.
During my city’s discussions about the human rights ordinance, the opposition accused advocates of the ordinance of “bringing division and tension to Flagstaff where there was none” — an emotionally painful lie that intimidates many people from speaking up. It’s a tactic used repeatedly through the centuries to silence supporters of social justice. Don’t fall for it.
One way to ease the process is to help your neighbors learn to differentiate between ideas and people: It’s OK, even useful, to have vigorous political and theological discussions, something Americans tend to avoid out of fear of offending others or losing a superficial sense of belonging. On the other hand, it’s not OK to stereotype and discriminate against people because they belong to a particular religious or cultural group.
The moral courage to speak up in defense of our fellow human beings requires inner strength. The most difficult acts of moral courage are not those involving a “right” versus a “wrong.” Moral courage is most necessary during situations that pit a right versus a right. Group loyalty is one such right. Many people avoid confronting prejudice and discrimination because it might require the need to transcend group loyalty and criticize one’s own neighbors, friends or family members. Such situations are emotionally wrenching and can put you at personal risk of becoming a target yourself.
Vow to never be a bystander when you witness stereotyping, prejudice or discrimination. The apathy of bystanders can lead to a loss of faith in humanity — something that is crucial to successful energy descent. Speak up whenever you hear someone making a slur or bigoted comment about a stigmatized minority. Victims of harassment and violence say that knowing that bystanders knew what was happening and yet chose not to intervene is highly traumatic. As Holocaust survivor, writer and human rights activist Elie Wiesel says, “To remain silent and indifferent is the greatest sin of all.”
“Come out” as a member or ally of women and stigmatized minorities. As GLBT people can attest, coming out is not a one-time event. It is an uncomfortable process that lasts a lifetime. However, making yourself visible humanizes you and the group you are defending.
The Southern Poverty Law Center has an excellent publication that discusses how to confront prejudice and intolerance called “Speak Up! Responding to Everyday Bigotry.” It is available for download at www.tolerance.org/speakup/index.html.
Lisa Rayner is a permaculturist and Transition Town community organizer in Flagstaff, Arizona. She is the author of the permaculture book Growing Food in the Southwest Mountains, The Sunny Side of Cooking solar cookbook and her latest book Wild Bread, www.LisaRayner.com.
© 2009/2010 Lisa Rayner
Summary:
It’s time for permaculture activists to extend their reach beyond the physical landscape and even invisible structures like community currencies and neighborhood organizing. Energy descent presents us with the specter of reversals in human rights gains since the Enlightenment. Beautiful, productive permaculture landscapes won’t be worth much to their human inhabitants unless we work now to protect democracy and minority rights during an era of resource scarcity and social turbulence. My vision for the future does not include feudalism, warlords, slavery, pogroms or witch-burnings.
Permaculture Ethics and Human Rights
Permaculture began as a foresighted response to the needs of energy descent. Initially, permaculturalists focused on food production. As the movement has evolved, it has begun to merge with the Transition Culture movement. There is an emerging awareness of the social side of descent culture among permaculture activists. Transition Culture spurns individualist survivalism and emphasizes the need for neighbors to work together to make our communities more resilient. The Transition movement is rooted in community.
As high-energy societies like ours descend from the peak and experience accelerating levels of economic and political instability, we are at risk of losing centuries-worth of human rights gains. It’s a well-known fact that resource scarcity leads to conflict and the mass migration of refugees, which in turn have an unfortunate tendency to inflame xenophobic, in-group/out-group tendencies in human nature, with a resultant scapegoating and persecution of minorities.
Permaculture is well-suited to take on the mantle of human rights in the Transition Era. Permaculture ethics include “Care of People” and “Share the Surplus,” which encompass the psychological, social, political and economic dimensions of human life. Permaculturalists have an opportunity to bring to the table new approaches to social justice issues. Permaculture practitioners value diversity and the opportunity to work with the inherent characteristics of all living beings. We understand that to impose conformity is to work against nature. We also know that each function is supported by many (diverse) elements, and that there is much creativity to be found in the principle that the problem (of diversity) is the solution.
Just as the time is now to implement core permaculture strategies such as creating soil, planting trees and building water catchments, it’s also the time to work on repairing human relationships at the community level. Ideally, these elements ought to be in place before a local crisis occurs. The aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 demonstrates the chaos and suffering that can happen when a community lacks such social resiliency.
As we work to make our communities thriving places full of food forests and restored wild landscapes, I want to ensure that all the people who live in those places experience freedom and equality. My vision for the future does not include feudalism, warlords, slavery, pogroms or witch-burnings. I fear a return to a world in which women lack control over their bodies and lives, and where religious, ethnic and sexual minorities are socially shunned, economically marginalized or at risk of physical violence.
My fear is not an abstract concept based on news reports or the academic study of human history. It stems from multiple experiences of exclusion, intolerance, and emotional, physical and sexual abuse. I’m a bisexual, atheist woman who stutters. Throughout my school years, I was the target of ostracization and bullying by my peers. I endured years of daily fear and depression and survived two suicide attempts when I was 18. As an adult, I survived sexual assault and domestic violence. I will live with post traumatic stress disorder for the rest of my life. As a permaculture practitioner, my vision for the future includes me, as well as others who know what it’s like to be a target of victimization and exclusion. Because of the experiences I have lived through, I know that my work to establish a working local food system and a relocalized economy is not enough. I also volunteer my time working for expanded human and civil rights.
Our Debt to the Enlightenment
Despite the downsides of the European Enlightenment, such as extreme individualism and global capitalism’s valuation of monetary gain for a fortunate few at the expense of exploited peoples and ecosystems, the Enlightenment also brought good developments for much of humanity, most notably a belief in cosmopolitanism — a philosophy of social tolerance and inclusivity towards traditionally oppressed religious and social groups. The Enlightenment began in the 17th century and blossomed during the 18th century. It transformed feudal European societies in which Church and State were a single entity into semblances of democratic ones, however imperfect they continue to be. It ended the religious terrorism of the Inquisition and the bloody, protracted Catholic-Protestant wars of the Reformation. It expanded civil rights and liberties and promoted religious ecumenicism. It instituted a conception of secular democracy that allowed members of ethnic, racial, and religious minority groups to begin to view themselves with dignity and to dare to envision themselves to someday become full and equal members of society.
The last few centuries has seen the unfolding of a succession of human and civil rights victories in societies which adopted Enlightenment values and political systems:
• freedom of religion, thought, speech, and the press
• the ending of indentured servitude and chattel slavery
• the gradual expansion of voting rights, first for non-propertied Christian white men, then men of color and lastly women
• labor and children’s rights
Today the gains continue with the movements for equal rights for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people, immigrant rights and members of unpopular minority religious groups like atheists and Wiccans.
However, the expansion of civil equality is not inevitable. Martin Luther King, Jr. made famous a quote by 19th century abolitionist Theodore Parker: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” It’s a nice sentiment, but civil rights gains have never been given to anyone simply for the asking. Expanded rights have been obtained at great cost to the lives and health of generations of social justice activists. Many of these civil rights movements took decades to come to fruition. Many are not fully completed today. Furthermore, not everyone living in modern secular democracies accepts the cosmopolitan world view. Religious fundamentalists and other ideologues continue to promote belief in the absolute truth of their particular religious or ideological teachings and the idea that their holy texts should be the law of the land.
Moreover, peak oil theorists have pointed out that expansions of human rights happened concurrently with the Industrial Revolution, as Western societies first harnessed coal, and later petroleum and natural gas. The wealth gained from the expanding use of fossil energy allowed an ever greater percentage of people to participate in society in ways heretofore only experienced by members of the aristocratic classes. As they did so, the common people began to demand full inclusion in political and economic life. As remaining supplies of fossil fuels dwindle, the economic pie will contract. Globally, the “haves” will do everything in their power to protect their wealth from the “have-nots.” Moreover, during times of crisis, human beings have a tendency to fall back upon traditional religious and cultural beliefs that are not necessarily supportive of human diversity.
History demonstrates that reversals of rights happen on a regular basis. Wars erupt, political regimes go out of power and civilizations collapse:
• After the United States abandoned Reconstruction in the South, black people lost newly-gained rights like equality in public accommodations. The institution of Jim Crow laws forced blacks into “separate and unequal” lives under threat of race- and religion-based terrorism for another 100 years.
• Jews and gays enjoyed many new freedoms in Weimar Germany, only to end up in concentration camps within a decade after Germans elected Hitler to power.
• The 1994 Rwandan genocide shows how quickly neighbors can turn on one another in horrifyingly violent ways.
• After the 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States, the Bush Administration rolled back numerous constitutional rights and endorsed the use of torture.
• During the first few chaotic days after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, local law enforcement and communications systems collapsed. White supremacists took advantage of the breakdown and shot an unknown number of black men, simply for being black.
• Today, women and girls in Afghanistan and Iraq have lost recently-acquired freedoms to go out in public without a male relative or to attend school. GLBT people are being executed by death squads.
Since Barack Obama became president of the United States, we have witnessed a series of murders by right-wing, anti-government zealots, including the killings of Mexican immigrants by border militia members, a security guard at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the assassination of a high-profile abortion provider, and the killing of random women by a fundamentalist Christian.
The Southern Poverty Law Center reports that:
“Almost a decade after largely disappearing from public view, right-wing militias, ideologically driven tax defiers and sovereign citizens are appearing in large numbers around the country. … A key difference this time is that the federal government — the entity that almost the entire radical right views as its primary enemy — is headed by a black man. That, coupled with high levels of non-white immigration and a decline in the percentage of whites overall in America, has helped to racialize the Patriot movement, which in the past was not primarily motivated by race hate. …”
“‘This frequently happens when elections favor the political left and the society is seen as moving toward greater social equality or away from traditional societal hierarchies,” Chip Berlet, a long-time analyst of the radical right at Political Research Associates, said in a June newsletter. “In this scenario, it is easier for right-wing demagogues to successfully demonize liberals, immigrants and others.”
The need to protect the values of secular cosmopolitanism will be essential during the chaos of energy descent. First, humans have a tendency to associate with others of similar characteristics, interests and values. Throughout human history, it has been easiest for people to identify most closely with kin groups. In today’s suburban car culture, for example, many people have little contact with their neighbors, who may be very unlike them culturally or religiously. Second, swelling numbers of refugees fleeing from war, rising sea levels, drought and other regional crises will lead to increased encounters between groups under conditions of resource scarcity and overpopulation. In The Human Rights Reader: Major Political Essays, Speeches and Documents from the Bible to the Present, philosopher Richard Rorty explains, “The tougher things are, the more you have to be afraid of, the more dangerous your situation, the less you can afford the time or effort to think about what things might be like for people with whom you do not immediately identify.” As the unfolding energy transition makes it necessary for neighbors to cooperate with one another to meet basic needs for food, shelter and health care, we will have to learn how to work together despite sometimes deep divisions in our cultural and religious value systems.
This article is in four parts. The third and fourth will be up next.
Part three: Community, inclusion and social tolerance
Part four: Incorporating human rights and social justice into our work
Lisa Rayner is a permaculturist and Transition Town community organizer in Flagstaff, Arizona. She is the author of the permaculture book Growing Food in the Southwest Mountains, The Sunny Side of Cooking solar cookbook and her latest book on sourdough called Wild Bread, www.LisaRayner.com.
Dr. K’s thoughts:
I want to thank Lisa Rayner for bringing this important discussion to POB, and would like to add some of my own thoughts, responding to her entry.
“Transition Culture spurns individualist survivalism and emphasizes the need for neighbors to work together to make our communities more resilient.”
Perhaps one of the most persistent prejudices demonstrated by Transition Culture guru Rob Hopkins is this repeated straw man positioning of “survivalists” as “anti-community.” Even after this false dichotomy was pointed out to him in my article I Just Dropped in to See What Condition My Transition Was in: Part III – Rejecting Survivalists? he continues to promote this negative characterization. This is intellectually dishonest. Sharing within community is broadly considered a common good, especially in times of plenty. The issue is how to deal with wholesale theft and violence against the innocent, in times of tremendous hardship.
The issue we must all deal with, and come to our own conclusions about, is whether defending ourselves and our communities against hostile and violent interests is ever justified. As Pink Pistol is quoted as saying “We’re here, queer, and without fear.”
“Religious fundamentalists and other ideologues continue to promote belief in the absolute truth of their particular religious or ideological teachings and the idea that their holy texts should be the law of the land.”
It’s sometimes difficult to spot our own biases, but essential that we do not paint “religious fundamentalism” itself as “ideologues” who force their religious beliefs on others. These sorts of stereotypes inflame the very hatreds and generalizations the author attempts to guard against.
I encourage folks to reject the binary thinking that leads to frame American politics as either “right” or “left.” As we’ve seen so far in this administration, there are no clear “good guys” and “bad guys.” There is plenty of demonization to go around. What we need, as Rayner points out, are difficult conversations focused on mutual areas of concerns and interests. We will also, however, have to keep front and center the human tendency to advocate that “pure need” or raw power is argument enough for theft. If my community has build water storage units to maintain drinking water and yours has not, (choosing instead to build a safety complex,) and now you need water, this is reason for conversation. But if this neighboring town is dominated by a powerful agribusiness farm who’s interest is to usurp our water through whatever means, conversation might not be enough. Confrontational activism might be the exact tool we need. Exerting altruistic self-interest isn’t inherently bad, and neither is homogeneity in a community. While Gandhi clearly pointed out what a cohesive nation could do non-violently against a faltering imperialism, this cohesiveness was clearly self-serving altruism, aimed at a particular people and it promoted a nationalistic interest. It was not as simply a matter as just “talking nice.”
Transition Culture doesn’t “take positions against institutions or projects” and this was, according to Hopkins, a “…conscious decision from the outset.” Transition Culture, by design, objects to local groups, identified as TT’s, participating in social protest, for fear of alienating others who do not share the same political convictions. I applaud Rayner pointing out that “civil rights gains have never been given to anyone simply for the asking.” This is something Hopkins, himself does not believe. For him, it is a myth “that change is something that we have to fight for, that those in positions of power will cling to business as usual for as long as possible.” While arguing that “confrontational activism as the primary tool in our toolbox is profoundly unskillful,” he never directly addresses the politics inherent in consciously removing this tool from TT’s resources or those claiming to act on its behalf.
What about Gandhi’s Salt March to manufacture salt from saline mud? If Ahmedabad were a Transition Town, would this protest be considered “not positive enough” “too political” or “too confrontational” an action because it would break British law and alienate the British community living among them?
To truly be relevant and “protect democracy and minority rights during an era of resource scarcity and social turbulence” we need to examine issues of power, not pretend that they don’t exist or that we can wish them away as a collective group of individuals. Yes, we must allow the “feelings” involved in peak oil and climate change to be expressed, but this isn’t enough. Systems, made up of people, do take on a life of their own, and some of us are much more influential than others. At times, local parental action to “stop bullying” in our schools is enough to improve the life of a speech-impaired child. But if it isn’t, if the very function of the school models the abuse of power, social protest and confrontation is a viable next step. We’ve got to thoughtfully challenge a movement that intentionally removes political protest from its agenda in order to keep the “party” going. We need to “hope for the best, but plan for the worst.” To assume that the current governments will “take care of social justice for us” or we can all just “choose” to be free of prejudice, is incredibly reckless and naive.
