I‘ve explained before that I’m not a believer in the myth of the Noble Savage. We are by nature, when faced with adversity, fierce creatures, capable of extraordinary violence and cruelty.

I’ve also written that, as many contemporary anthropologists have explained, the claim that prehistoric humans (i.e. humans prior to the recording of our culture, which began about 30,000 years ago) lived short, brutal, dangerous lives is complete nonsense. Although we can never know for sure, and while the believers in endless “progress” continue to pour on the propaganda that life has never been better, there is now compelling evidence that:

• Prehistoric humans who weren’t eaten by predators or struck down by diseases lived long (70-90 year) healthy lives. They suffered few illnesses except in areas of temporary overcrowding, had almost no dental diseases, musculo-skeletal or chronic diseases, and exhibited almost no signs of malnutrition.
• Because there was abundant food and an ideal climate at hand in the forest, and our numbers were small, we were, for most of our first million years on the planet, vegetarian gatherers (our running speed, teeth and fingernails are not designed for hunting or eating raw flesh), who “worked” to provide for our essential needs only about an hour a day. The rest of our time was spent in leisure.
• Prehistoric humans were tribal, communal, generous, social, cooperative and peaceful. Only on rare occasions, when tribal territories were invaded by another tribe which had (most likely) suffered from some natural catastrophe and were in search of new land, did we exhibit violence, and then it was fierce and short-lived. This is nature’s last resort, when peaceful means of dealing with unsustainable numbers (like diseases, and falling fertility rates) fail to rectify the balance.

With the advent of climate crises like the ice ages and volcanic supereruptions (which may have repeatedly reduced human population to a few thousand people, perhaps as recently as 70,000 years ago), our species would probably have become extinct, had it not been for our extraordinary intelligence and (in desperate times) ferocity. First, we invented the wedge (the arrowhead, knife and spear) about 30,000 years ago, during the latest ice age, which allowed us, for the first time, to catch and eat large animals, so we could survive outside the jungle, our natural homeland for a million years. We then discovered (independently it seems, in many places around the globe) catastrophic agriculture about 10,000 years ago, which allowed us to settle. The result is the civilization we write about in our history (we have conveniently forgotten how we lived for a million years before history and civilization). Jared Diamond explains the consequences:

As population densities of hunter-gatherers slowly rose at the end of the ice ages, bands had to choose between feeding more mouths by taking the first steps toward agriculture, or else finding ways to limit growth. Some bands chose the former solution, unable to anticipate the evils of farming, and seduced by the transient abundance they enjoyed until population growth caught up with increased food production. Such bands outbred and then drove off or killed the bands that chose to remain hunter-gatherers, because a hundred malnourished farmers can still outfight one healthy hunter. It’s not that hunter-gatherers abandoned their life style, but that those sensible enough not to abandon it were forced out of all areas except the ones farmers didn’t want.

Archaeologists studying the rise of farming have reconstructed a crucial stage at which we made the worst mistake in human history. Forced to choose between limiting population or trying to increase food production, we chose the latter and ended up with starvation, warfare, and tyranny. Hunter-gatherers practiced the most successful and longest-lasting life style in human history. In contrast, we’re still struggling with the mess into which agriculture has tumbled us, and it’s unclear whether we can solve it.

No one is to blame. We did what we had to do to survive the catastrophic effects of climate change — and that has precipitated the sixth great extinction of life on Earth. We cannot change who we are, and we cannot undo what we have done. What is interesting to ponder is if, as I and an increasing number of students of history and current events believe, our civilization will crash by the end of this century, and we will be back to a situation similar to that of prehistory, what might we do then , to avoid repeating “the worst mistake in human history”?

(conception of art after the collapse of civilization culture by afterculture)

Suppose that, by 2200, with the collapse of our civilization, the world looks like this:

• Human population is back to 1800′s level of about one billion people, declining slowly by 1%/year (the reasons for this continuing decline are complex, and I may explore them in another article).
• About 97% of the population is living as farmers, using a variety of catastrophic agriculture and permaculture methods. Cities are mostly abandoned and used as a source of materials for scavenging for one-off manufacture of essential products, since there is no oil to power industrial machinery to make new mass-produced goods.
• A high quality of life has been achieved, due to the retention of knowledge about sanitation and disease prevention, and the abundance of scrap materials for building, making clothing etc. Most of our time is spent in leisure activities.
• There are much lower chronic disease rates, due to less stress, less pollution, and improved nutrition. Frequent pandemic diseases, however, ravage humans, farmed animals and catastrophic-agriculture crops — Our descendents are still suffering from the effects of lost biodiversity during the last civilization, one of which is increased susceptibility to pandemics.
• Societies are principally peaceful, and community-based. Everything is done on a small, local scale.
• Because of drastically reduced contact between communities (motorized travel has ended, and long-distance communications and information technology has proved too expensive to maintain due to material shortages), the new societies are astonishingly diverse and heterogeneous.
• Conflicts between communities are rarer, partly because contact is rarer, partly because lower population density and falling population means less stress on local resources, and partly because war technologies available for conflict have become unaffordable and fallen into disuse. The few conflicts tend to be between communities ravaged by monoculture crop diseases or severe climate events (mostly a consequence of what our civilization has done to our atmosphere) and nearby thriving permaculture communities.

This is not a nomadic, gatherer-hunter society, since even before civilization desolated the Earth and its natural food-production capacity the global population of humans that could be (and was) comfortably supported as gatherer-hunters was only about three million, not a billion (see top chart above). These post-civ societies are, in this vision, slowly migrating from catastrophic agriculture to permaculture (the growing of plants sustainably in such a way that they require no weeding, watering or artificial chemicals, and propagate naturally).

Nature has, of course, always practiced permaculture. It is extravagant and inefficient compared to catastrophic agriculture, which is what she shows us after severe floods, fires and other land-clearing events. Our ancestors thought that the more efficient catastrophic agriculture would serve us better than permaculture, and that is what Jared Diamond calls our “worst mistake”. Might we be smart enough next time to adopt permaculture instead? My sense is that we will, but it will take time and ideological struggle before we get there, and by the time we do our population may well have decreased back to a hundred million or so (perhaps two millennia from now). All other things being equal, this might be the next great time to be living as a human on Earth, a time as full of peace, love, health, joy and abundance for our species as much of prehistory.

But there is another variable that Jared Diamond refers to — population growth. Gatherer-hunter societies self-limited their populations, partly by abortion or infanticide, and partly biologically — these societies nursed their babies until they were old enough to travel on their own feet with the tribe, and natural selection evolved us in such a way that women rarely get pregnant while they are still breast-feeding. So women normally only had one child every five years or so, since more than that would be too much of a burden to carry around on the nomadic treks of the society.

Civilized societies have no such burden, and nature (she works slowly) has not yet evolved a physical mechanism to reduce human fertility naturally (though sperm rates in males are now declining precipitously) to compensate. We have not been smart enough to balance our own numbers in the current civilization. Will we be smart enough to do it in post-civilization societies, especially when population is still declining?

I was thinking about this when I read Sex at Dawn, the book on prehistoric society and sexuality by psychologist Christopher Ryan and psychiatrist Cacilda Jetha. They cite several anthropologists whose conclusions about prehistoric life jibe with my own, above, and how agriculture changed the way we live: “Farmers, afraid of the wild, set out to destroy it.”

They explain how it is in our species’ best interest to be cooperative. Human remains older than 10,000 years show almost no evidence, they say, of violence or injury, especially the types of injury that result from conflict. They also dismiss many of the arguments about prehistoric human behaviour extrapolated from the study of today’s indigenous peoples, explaining that there are no gatherer-hunter cultures left on the planet whose ways of life have not changed drastically as a result of contact with the dominant civilization culture. We are all civilized, now.

They go on to compare the genetic makeup of humans compared to that of other mammals and conclude that we are much closer to bonobos than our other cousins, the chimps. For example, we share an oxytocin-release mechanism that brings us enormous pleasure and relaxation when we have sex, that chimps don’t have at all.

They also argue that, prior to the discovery of catastrophic agriculture, women were equal to men in all respects and in all group activities, because there was no need for specialization. With agriculture and the invention of civilization, the concept of personal property necessarily arose for the first time, and women became, like land and slaves and other ‘resources’, the unequal property of men. And with property came hierarchy, power politics, and then, as Jared Diamond said, “starvation, warfare and tyranny”. And as a result, women, enslaved in a patriarchy of scarcity, became anxious about their own security and jealous of others who had more. Women’s desire for male partners who offer them security, and both males’ and females’ jealousy and possessiveness are not inherent human nature, the authors claim, but the result of what civilization culture has done to us. They rail against the “Flintstonization” of our prehistory and the unquestioned belief (reinforced by the theories of Darwin and Hobbes) that prehistoric humans were much like civilized humans in their behaviours.

In fact, they say, what we know about anthropology and evolutionary biology suggests that prehistoric humans were almost certainly “fiercely egalitarian” (they would have found any hoarding, jealousy or possessiveness highly insulting and contemptible to the tribe, behaviour worthy of ostracism). As part of this fierce egalitarianism, they were, while responsible and nurturing of the young in the tribe, highly polyamorous (sexually active with many partners), free of jealousy, and generous in their openness to sexual advances.

They point to our (and our ancestors’) extraordinarily large testes, high sperm production, huge and constant sexual curiosity and appetite, and natural tendency towards (what is now disparagingly called) promiscuity (original and etymological meaning: “in favour of mixing without discrimination”), as evidence for their claim that, rather than competing for mates before copulation (as most mammals do), we are like the bonobos in letting our sperm compete post-copulation to ensure the optimal diversity and health of our offspring. Hence we are wired, they claim, to have sex often (many times per day) and without discrimination with many members of the opposite sex. Hence:

• the multiple orgasm capacity and loud vocalizations of women in sex, to attract more males, and make multiple couplings pleasurable for women,
• the fact that women’s orgasms tend to draw in the current partner’s sperm and expel the previous partner’s,
• the fact that having lots of orgasms reduces aggressiveness and stress and makes daily tribal life happier,
• the fact that paternity was impossible to establish and hence must have been irrelevant in prehistoric cultures, and
• the fact that monogamous marriage is such immensely difficult, unhappy, self-effacing work, and so often fails to last.

If prehistoric humans had a name for the members of their tribe they had sexual relationships with, that word would not be “spouse” or “partner” or any other word implying some form of exclusivity. It might instead be “consort” — literally “someone one shares and joins with”. We are meant, the authors conclude, to enjoy a lot of sex every day with many “consorts”, because it feels good, and is good in every way for us and our “tribe”.

So back to the question of whether or not, especially if we were to give uncivilized vent to our normal voracious sexual inclinations, a post-civ society would be able to control its population to avoid all of the problems that overpopulation produces. What’s interesting is that, despite their sexual promiscuity and vitality, bonobos on average give birth (to a single baby of course) only every five to six years — which is how long they nurse their young. Even before human habitat destruction made them an endangered species, their population was kept stable by the natural “birth control” of lactation, and by natural predators and diseases.

Post-civ human societies may well go back to nursing their young for four or five years, which may, in a healthy, natural human population, drastically reduce birth rates. Nature has already reduced human male sperm rates, though some of this may be due to high stress rates, hazardous substance abuse, environmental factors and modern malnutrition. But if post-civ societies retain our knowledge of health (especially sanitation and disease prevention), and if populations of human predators only slowly return to levels sufficient to significantly affect human numbers, what are the chances we will be able to avoid another human population explosion, and the commensurate catastrophic problems that would produce, all over again?

Perhaps I’m a dreamer, but I think the odds are pretty good. As our descendents rediscover that they are an integral part of all-life-on-Earth, and reconnect with each other and with the land where they live and the other creatures who belong to that land, I think they will instinctively and voluntarily reduce their birth rate to levels that are sustainable. I would argue that the low birth rates in affluent nations today are due primarily to awareness and hard-nosed adjustment to economic realities rather than a conscious or unconscious altruism, since citizens of those nations are especially inculcated in the civilization culture that inherently disconnects us from each other, from our senses and instincts, and from all life on Earth, and treats “the environment” and its inhabitants as an “other” for our arbitrary and exclusive use.

I’m also concerned that, along with the rest of the oil-economy-driven mass-produced trappings of global civilization, post-civ humans will probably not have access to reliable birth control products.

But somehow or other I believe that reconnected humans will just know that they have to reduce their numbers back down to the levels of sustainability. There is something about living a natural life integrally, as part of all life on Earth, that drives you to behave responsibly, not out of guilt, but out of love. Our inherent, human, lost biophilia.

If I’m right, after the dark of civilization’s collapse, life and sex at the dawn of the next human experiment on Earth may not be all that different from what is described as our prehistory in Sex at Dawn. A life and world full of fun and sensuality and connection and joy and peace and love and ease and passion and discovery and abundance and responsibility within community. This is what I see now and always in the life of wild creatures, having freed myself from the propaganda of “wild” life as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short…[in] nature red in tooth and claw” (to conflate two pro-civilization shills, Hobbes and Tennyson).

I dream of such a natural life. I mourn its loss for myself and my fellow humans who will likely never truly experience it, that magic connection, that true presence, that unimaginable joy. My recent nighttime dreams have been of my prehistoric ancestors, back in that astonishing time when we were free.

And I dream for such a natural life for my tribe’s descendents two hundred (and two thousand) years from now, when the mess of civilization is behind us. That is who we’re meant to be, and how we’re meant to live.

I will do what I can do to make that dream true for them.

(charts above from Wikipedia)

(this article is an attempt to shorten, personalize and update my signature post A Framework for Personal Action)

third chart in my collapse scenario for civilization

For many years the thesis of this blog has been: Our civilization is in its final century, and there is nothing we can do to prevent its collapse. When I began writing this, I was largely dismissed as a defeatist and a depressed ‘doomer’ (or worse). As awareness has grown about the now-inevitable end of (a) cheap energy, (b) stable climate and (c) the growth economy, there is a growing acknowledgement that the collapse scenario I have written about is at least conceivable.

This acknowledgement tends to come from people fortunate enough to have the intellectual curiosity, critical thinking ability, undiminished instincts, and time to study and learn how the world really works (not how we are told it works by those powerful and moneyed interests best served by denying the extent and potential impact of these crises and prolonging as long as possible the current unsustainable way we live). And to the extent those knowledgeable people find their way to this blog, they tend to ask the same question:

If the collapse of industrial civilization cannot be prevented, what should we do now?

In a way, much of what I’ve written on this blog is an attempt to answer that question, without being too presumptuous, and appreciating that there is no one right answer to it. My answer: Liberate myself, from civilization’s bonds and destruction, before it collapses on top of me.

Here’s what I’m doing to that end:

1. Understanding what is really going on now

The newspapers and the other media, including most of the independent and progressive media, are of little help in this regard. Here’s what I have written before about more useful reading:

Our world (like all ecological and social systems) is inherently, staggeringly and wonderfully complex, but everything we are taught about the world and how it works (in schools, and in the mainstream media) is reduced to simplistic, mechanistic terms. We continue to believe that “the environment” (something that is portrayed as somehow apart from us) is just facing “problems” that need “solutions” (political, economic, scientific, technological, or spiritual). In complicated systems (like your car), “problems” can be fixed. But in complex systems there are no problems, only predicaments, unintended consequences of actions that cannot be undone. Nature teaches us (if we will only listen) that we don’t fix a predicament, we adapt to it. The reason so many of our modern crises are so wicked and intractable is that they are not problems, but predicaments, unintended consequences of (mostly) well-intended human actions. To understand how the world really works, and how we can start to learn to adapt to our modern predicaments, we need to understand complexity.

With that context, of the need for adaptation rather than futilely chasing “solutions”, these are the books and articles that have given me a better understanding of how the world really works and what to do about it. Seven books, which I read in approximately this order, have been the most illuminating:

1. Full House, by Stephen J. Gould. The improbable emergence of humans on Earth.
2. Story of B, by Daniel Quinn. A radical revisionist history of civilization, in fictional format, and an explanation of how we got to where we are now.
3. A Language Older Than Words, by Derrick Jensen. A dark explanation of the reason for the core of grief at the heart of the modern age.
4. A Short History of Progess, by Ronald Wright. Why all civilizations collapse. A survey of past civilizations’ savagery and short-term thinking. Jared Diamond but shorter.
5. Against the Grain, by Richard Manning. Why Jared Diamond said monoculture agriculture was the greatest mistake in human history, and what it’s come to now.
6. Straw Dogs, by John Gray. While we have a responsibility to try to make the world better and joyful, for those we love and leave behind, we cannot be other than what we are: a fierce, brilliantly adaptable species destined to bring about the next great extinction, and annihilate ourselves in the process.
7. The Long Emergency, by James Kunstler. What the near future will look like when this century’s looming ecological, economic, political and resource crises begin to cascade.

I also regularly read the blogs and other resources listed in the Post-Civ Writers section of my Gravitational Community in the right sidebar. And of course I talk regularly with people who have reached a similar understanding of what’s happening in the world. As a result, I think I have a relatively solid understanding of our current situation.

2. Acquiring essential knowledge and abilities for living sustainably in community

As the collapse worsens, large, centralized institutions (corporations, governments, universities, social services, banks etc.) will start to fall apart, as their analogues did in previous dying civilizations. As this happens we will need to re-acquire the knowledge and skills of resilience and community-based, sustainable self-sufficiency. We will have to reinvent local, small-scale institutions within our communities to do all the things we now depend on large, far-away organizations to do for us.

The knowledge we will need includes, first and foremost, knowledge about ourselves: Our strengths, motivations, needs and personality traits. It also includes knowledge of what we’re meant to do in this world, which entails knowing what we are uniquely good at, what we love doing, and what the world needs now that isn’t being provided, or at least not sustainably so. That kind of self-knowledge can’t be learned in books: It requires experiment, exploration, research, discovery, taking risks, just trying things. It’s taken me a lifetime to figure out. There’s a great Jessica Hische poster circulating on Google+ that suggests “The work you do while you procrastinate is probably the work you should be doing for the rest of your life.”

Some of the skills we’ll need are technical skills (like growing our own food, making our own clothes and repairing things instead of replacing them), but more of them are ‘soft’ skills and personal and collaborative capacities that we were born with (like curiosity), or which our ancestors learned just to get along in their local communities (like presence, and empathy), but which we no longer learn in our disconnected, fragmented, hyper-competitive society. I created the chart above and this downloadable checklist, to self-assess which of these abilities I have, which I would look for in community partners, and which I aspire to acquire or practice.

One of the critical abilities on this list is the ability to learn. To acquire it, and to instill it in our children, we may all need to deschool ourselves and unschool them. I was fortunate enough to experience a year of unschooling, but completely deschooling myself will be a lifelong endeavour.

When our economic systems collapse, our investments, currencies and commodities will become worthless, so I’m investing in learning instead.

3. Reconnecting with the Earth, with my instincts and senses, with the place I live and the other creatures who live there

Our civilization tries to break the bond between us and the natural world. We are taught that the “environment” is something apart from us. Before I can really understand what is happening and what I can and must do about it, before I can be ready to face the enormous challenges ahead in ways other than denial and attempts to perpetuate the status quo, I need to reconnect, to re-become a part of all life on Earth, to see just how empty, meaningless and intolerably destructive our consumerist industrial civilization really is. I need to become centred, aware, and outraged.

There are many ways to reconnect, and each of us must find the way that works for us. Joanna Macy teaches courses in reconnection, based on the principles of appreciation, presence, and openness. Eckhart Tolle and Richard Moss describe meditation-based ways to live in the Now, instead of being paralyzed by the past or fixated on the future as so many humans have become. Derrick Jensen talks about listening to the land. David Abram shows us how to rediscover the spell of the sensuous by paying attention to the natural world until we just melt into it, become part of it.

This is a long and difficult journey. I’m still trying to find my own way.

4. Living as sustainably and responsibly as possible

Here’s Keith Farnish’s summary of how to do this, which is advice I follow seriously:

Don’t buy anything that you don’t need. If you have to buy something, remember the 4 R’s: Reduce, repair, reuse and respect. Become vegan, or as near as you can to remain healthy. Buy local. Eat simply. Reduce the energy used in your home to the bare minimum. Change your behaviour to allow for this. Become energy independent. Have fewer [than replacement level] children. Travel as little as possible. Don’t fly. Don’t drive. Instead: walk, cycle, use the bus, go by train.

I could do better, but I’m working consciously at it, every day. I understand that this is not enough to make much of a difference, even if everyone in the world could and would do so. But it is still necessary. I feel I must try to stop feeding the machine of industrial civilization, and at the same time try to minimize my personal contribution to the damage that civilization inflicts upon the world, as the sixth great extinction of life on Earth continues to accelerate. I am striving to become a model of a better, more responsible, more sustainable way to live.

5. Daring to tell the truth, and showing others how to prepare for collapse

Talking about the collapse of industrial civilization as inevitable, in “polite company”, takes courage. Most people don’t understand, and don’t want to. They want to believe that the future will be wonderful, that ‘leaders’ will fix what’s broken in the world. As Kenny Ausubel and Nina Simons explain, I have to get past the internalized oppression that I carry inside me, the fear of saying and talking about what I most care about, even though doing so makes me vulnerable and may expose me to disbelief and even ridicule.

I have found it easiest to begin by talking with others that seem to get it — people in the Transition initiative, people living in intentional community and people living an alternative culture lifestyle. But I’ve discovered that even these relatively enlightened people don’t really grasp the speed, extent and inevitability of collapse, and, as a result, are mostly clueless about what really needs to be done. It’s easy to get disheartened, and to stay silent, complicit with the inadequacy of our response to the cataclysm we have unleashed on this planet.

I am striving, through this blog and in my daily conversations, to make the discussion of our civilization’s inevitable collapse and the preparations we need to begin now to equip ourselves and our children for a post-collapse world, part of mainstream social discourse. I will continue to do so until a critical mass of people turn off their TVs and stop listening to the propaganda and denial of the media, corporations and politicians. I believe that the creation of the self-sufficient communities we will need after collapse will only begin when we are ready, in large numbers, to talk about it. I am not optimistic that this will happen in time, but I have to try.

And recently, I am beginning to have this discussion in a new light: Not the grim business of surviving a long series of cascading crises, but the joyful business of liberating ourselves from a way of living that has never been right for us, and which has always been constraining, oppressive, debilitating, and horrifically destructive to our world and to our souls.

6. Fighting back against those destroying the Earth

I have met many of the ‘leaders’ whose actions and organizations are destroying the Earth. I have met few who are doing so intentionally. Many of my post-civ writer colleagues believe that if we’re going to shake ourselves out of our complacency we have to get angry, have to identify the perpetrators of destruction and confront them with all our energy and will. I can’t sustain that kind of anger, but I have no illusions about the fact that we are destroying this planet, so quickly and utterly that its recovery to full health will take centuries, even millennia, after we’re gone. And that destruction is causing unimaginable amounts of suffering.

My passion to reduce suffering motivates me more than anger. So that’s the motivation I’m trying to draw on, to put to work fighting back against the destruction.

The ways in which anyone chooses to fight depend on their personal passions, energy, time and appetite for risk. I’ve decided it’s important to avoid getting sucked into methods of fighting that don’t work (petitions, writing letters, protest demonstrations, and donations to environmental groups seem to me to be usually ineffective, which is why I guess they are the most tolerated forms of activism). I’ve decided it’s equally important that I not exhaust myself quickly (e.g. by getting caught and arrested) — this will be a long fight.

We each must select our own battles and what tactics we’re willing to use. I plan to do my part to fight the Alberta Tar Sands and factory farming, but I’m not yet sure how I will do that. My sense is that I need to meet and collaborate with others who have chosen the same battles. My sense is that guerrilla tactics that capitalize on the vulnerability of civilization’s massively centralized, globalized, hyper-efficient systems will work better than direct confrontation or symbolic actions, no matter how well covered or clever the latter may be.

What matters, I think, is results — less destruction, less suffering, a less ghastly transition to a post-civilization world.

7. Living joyfully

Lately I have been writing a lot about living more joyfully: Spending time with people I love in gentle, natural, beautiful places. Filling my day with healthy, natural pleasures. Finding and conversing with bright, informed, creative people. Learning to laugh, and let go. Playing.

I don’t see this as being at odds with preparing for civilization’s end. Just as I seek to be a model of responsible, sustainable living, I also want to be a model of joyful living. I want to show others that there is a better way to live, a way that does not depend on consumption and acquisition and ownership of stuff for gratification, for fulfillment, for pleasure, for joy. For all the material wealth it bestows on a fortunate few, our civilization is too often a joyless place, a place of endless insecurity, anxiety, envy and despair. The laughter I hear is mostly forced, mean-spirited, alcohol-induced, and almost desperate.

Living a simple, joyful life is not only exemplary, it is essential, I think, to keeping our sanity and our energy in a world seemingly gone mad with acquisitiveness, escapism, violence, war, competition, arrogance, fear, sadness and anger. We need our wits, and our strength, for the challenges ahead.

.     .     .     .     .

Liberation

All seven of these actions — (1) understanding what is really going on, (2) acquiring essential knowledge and abilities, (3) reconnecting with the Earth, (4) living responsibly, (5) showing and telling others why and how to prepare for collapse, (6) fighting back against the destruction, and (7) living joyfully, are aspects of what I am now calling my liberation from civilization. They are analogous to seven steps one might go through to liberate oneself from an abusive spouse or relative.

I feel for that reason ambivalent about liberating myself from civilization. I have become dependent on it. For most of my life I felt it treated me pretty well. Or maybe not — maybe it was just, like an abusive spouse, psychopathically clever at convincing me it was good for me. Part of me says liberation is scary. Not ready to change yet.

But the other part of me, responding to Gaia’s quiet and unwavering voice, cries out for liberation. I long to be feral. As anarchist writer Wolfi Landstreicher wrote:

In a very general way, we know what we want. We want to live as wild, free beings in a world of wild, free beings. The humiliation of having to follow rules, of having to sell our lives away to buy survival, of seeing our usurped desires transformed into abstractions and images in order to sell us commodities fills us with rage. How long will we put up with this misery? We want to make this world into a place where our desires can be immediately realized, not just sporadically, but normally. We want to re-eroticize our lives. We want to live not in a dead world of resources, but in a living world of free wild lovers. We need to start exploring the extent to which we are capable of living these dreams in the present without isolating ourselves. This will give us a clearer understanding of the domination of civilization over our lives, an understanding which will allow us to fight domestication more intensely and so expand the extent to which we can live wildly.

This yearning to be feral is something I feel every time I see a bird or wild animal, every time I harvest and eat wild, raw, pure food, every time I walk in the woods, and every night when I sleep outdoors, naked. It is a yearning to be free, free of a civilization which, with the best of intentions, has abused me, enslaved me, placed a veil between me and the natural world, as it has for everyone.

We can’t prevent civilization’s collapse, but we can still make the world a better place as it falls, and, despite our justifiable fears of the suffering its collapse will surely cause (much as its awesome and brutal reign has) celebrate its fall, and our liberation.

Aftermath of the recent Missouri tornados

The political and economic fabric of our society continues to unravel, slowly and (usually) quietly. Much of the news of any enduring significance is about unsustainable behaviour run amok: more bailouts and subsidies for rogue megacorporations, the Ponzi scheme of investment in inevitably worthless commodities, securities and properties, the incurring of ever-more unrepayable debts, China’s plan to stave off massive drought and desertification with a water diversion scheme that dwarfs even the Tar Sands in recklessness, cost and ecological devastation, the slow collapse of centralized education, health  and social security systems.

There seem to be some signs that the weary acceptance and self-blame for the ills of our time among citizens has peaked and is beginning to wane, at least here in North America. Most workers have become accustomed to working ever harder for less income and benefits, to being lied to by corporations, media and governments, to getting less and worse service and shoddier products. They have already given up on governments as worth supporting, and are starting to catch on to the worthlessness, rapacity and amorality of corporations despite being subjected to a half-century of relentless pro-corporatist propaganda. As the gap between ultra-rich and everyone-else soars, there seems to be a growing anger in the land.

Particularly among the young, there also seems to be a growing anomie, a giving up on hope for a bright future, on having any control or influence on what happens in the world, a cynicism and thrill-seeking and who-gives-a-fuck resignation. This neo-survivalism has been prevalent in much of the world for decades, especially in struggling nations with relatively high literacy rates (notably Eastern Europe and Latin America). As we begin the Fourth Turning, however, this appears to be becoming a more global, trans-racial, trans-cultural phenomenon. Generation Next is more social and less individualistic than recent generations, which historically has meant a rise in class struggles, tribalism and vulnerability to charismatic (often psychopathic) leaders.

It may be that as our physical climate is becoming more turbulent, so too will our global political climate.

So: Question of the Month: Many national governments are now so bankrupt that their default seems inevitable, while at the same time we are seeing the rise of right-wing parties prepared to simply abandon publicly-funded health, education and social services, and also a growing multi-partisan loathing for endless futile wars. If national governments are no longer wanted (or able) to provide a social security net, or needed as war machines, what good are they? Might we soon see Soviet-style “peaceful collapse” of large federal governments (the breakup of the EC, and perhaps even the US)? What would worldwide Balkanization and tribalization mean for globalization, for peace vs war, for the UN, and for our civilization?

PREPARING FOR CIVILIZATION’S END

Guerrilla dissent: Vera Bradova calls for a kind of revolution by walking quietly away from industrial civilization. “The job of guerrilla dissenters is not to resist the Leviathan, but to stop feeding it. Our job is not to resist the Powers That Be, but rather to grow another kind of power and another way of life. Because both will be vigorously undermined if done visibly and loudly, guerrilla tactics are called for. It’s as clear-cut as that.”

Bringing Down the Gangster Banks: Ilargi warns us that unless we stop the banks soon, they will squeeze the rest of the economy dry:

The core of the problem here is this: If you believe that we are witnessing a financial crisis, or you’re even still convinced this crisis is over or soon will be, you’re missing the point entirely. As I’ve said for years now, this is not a financial crisis, it’s a political one. And until and unless we solve that political crisis, the financial crisis that is part of it can, will and must, of necessity, only deepen. And at the end of it we will all be left with nothing at all. No shelter or clothes to keep our children warm, and no food to feed them.

The crisis can or may be labeled ‘financial’ in that it expresses itself in ever more dire economic terms. But that’s not where it started, nor is it where the core resides. The core lies in the fact that our economic systems have been hijacked by privately owned financial institutions. Any and all economic activities, whether it’s at an individual, small business or government level, depends 100% on the willingness of private banks to lend into existence the debt that is needed to finance said activities.

The Russian Canary: Time profiles an area of Russia that is literally falling apart, a victim of extreme poverty, unemployment, epidemic alcoholism and drug abuse, and hopelessness. It is becoming uncivilized, and the rest of the country, and the world, may not be so far behind.

“North China is Dying”: The world’s most populous nation is out of water, and it’s trying to stave off collapse by diverting trillions of gallons of water from the south, itself suffering from unprecedented drought. If they can do it, which is dubious, it will buy the world’s largest economy a few more years. And then, endgame.

Peak Debt: Chris Martensen explains how the economy depends on ever-accelerating borrowing, and how current global debt levels, at 5 times annual GDP and many more times annual income, have necessarily peaked. Here’s an excerpt from part 1 (annoyingly, you have to pay for part 2):

Debt-based money systems operate best when they can grow exponentially forever. Of course, nothing can, which means that even without natural limits, such systems are prone to increasingly chaotic behavior, until the money that undergirds them collapses into utter worthlessness, allowing the cycle to begin anew. All economic depressions share the same root cause. Too much credit that does not lead to enhanced future cash flows is extended.  In other words, this means lending without regard for the ability of the loan to repay both the principal and interest from enhanced production; money is loaned for consumption, and poor investment decisions are made. Eventually gravity takes over, debts are defaulted upon, no more borrowers can be found, and the system is rather painfully scrubbed clean… On a pure debt, deficit, and liability basis, the US, much of Europe, and Japan are all well past the point of no return.

Houses of Cards: As US house prices teeter on the edge of another collapse, Americans are abandoning the desire to own their homes. For most Americans, even with interest rates near zero, renting is now a much better option than buying (use the calculator to see if that’s true for your home). And now Canadians are following the US example, borrowing more and more against their homes right before the fall.

LIVING BETTER: THE UNSCHOOLING EDITION

Teachers as Mentors, Working For Students: Salman Khan “calls for teachers to consider flipping the traditional classroom script — give students video lectures to watch at home, and do “homework” in the classroom with the teacher available to help”. This is a small step towards the shift from teaching to mentoring, and eventually, unschooling. Thanks to Tom Atlee for the link.

US Undergrad Education Hits Rock Bottom: The NYT explains why undergraduate teaching in the US is now essentially worthless — it has become an expensive day-care program for unemployable youths.

It Takes That Long to Break a Child’s Will: From Derrick Jensen (thanks to PS Pirro for the quote): “Even when I was young it seemed to me that most classroom material could be presented and assimilated in four, maybe five, years… I’ve since come to understand the reason school lasts thirteen years.  It takes that long to sufficiently break a child’s will.  It is not easy to disconnect children’s wills, to disconnect them from their own experiences of the world in preparation for the lives of painful employment they will have to endure.  Less time wouldn’t do it, and in fact, those who are especially slow go to college.  For the exceedingly obstinate child there is graduate school.”

POLITICS AND ECONOMICS AS USUAL

Professional Climate Sceptic Willie Soon Funded By Big Oil: Soon received $1M from Exxon, Koch Brothers and the API to wage a war of misinformation on climate change.

Canada to Privatize Nuclear Reactor Business AECL: But the debts, ongoing research and financial guarantee costs will be paid for in perpetuity by — guess — the Canadian taxpayers. Another Harper give-away to his corporate buddies.

Bush/Obama War Secretary Robert M. Gates Weary of ‘Wars of Choice’: Having presided over the disastrous Iraq and Afghanistan wars under two opposing presidents, the leading war-monger, now about to write a book, says he thinks that wars that are not in response to a direct attack are, perhaps, usually a mistake. Duh. Three trillion dollars and thousands of lives too late.

THE WAR ON “ANARCHISTS”

Anarchism is the belief that the world would be better without large centralized authority. Per the Oxford Companion to Philosophy: “In broad terms, anarchism is the rejection of coercion and domination in all forms, including that of the priests and the plutocrats…. The anarchist…abominates all forms of authoritarianism, and is the enemy of parasitism, exploitation, and oppression.” Anarchists believe the best form of governance is by non-hierarchical, self-selected, self-regulating small communities. But the media continue to spout the corporatist propaganda and lies of right-wing governments and enforcement agencies, asserting that somehow anarchists are terrorists and believers in violence.

So it is not surprising that a self-styled anarchist would be relentlessly harassed and persecuted for years by Obama’s ever-more powerful police state. Obama’s intrusion into the lives of anyone who dares to dissent from American political orthodoxy is even worse than Bush’s. These two presidents have, through the Patriot Act, quietly dismantled the US Bill of Rights (thanks to Raffi Aftandelian for this link).

In Canada, we witnessed last year a colossally expensive orchestrated event at the G20 meeting in Toronto: Undercover cops dressed up in masks and black hoods and trashed stores and cars and then disappeared as the “official” police stood idly by, watching, with no confrontation and no arrests. Shortly thereafter, the cops, many of them imported from the US, waded into quiet protest demonstrations and beat and arrested thousands of innocent people. The victims were labelled “anarchists” and the staged damages and massive arrests were used to vindicate the staggering cost of policing the corporatist G20 event and the thuggery of the police. A year later, despite mountains of damning evidence, no police have been charged for this fraud.

Not surprising then, that when violence broke out after the hockey playoffs in Vancouver last month, the riots were called premeditated and blamed by police on “organized anarchists”. The truth is much more complex, and hard to find, as the mainstream media, as always, only reported what the police and governments told them. If you’re interested, here are a few links that suggest what really happened: Not a staged event this time, but not “anarchists” either:

The sad, painful truth about the Vancouver rioters’ true identities
Embarrassing (Posthegemony blog)
Aftermath of “Canucks Riot” (Vancouver Media Co-op)
Understanding Vancouver’s ‘Hockey Riot’ (The Nation)

FUN AND INSPIRATION

Photographer “Blamethemonkey” explains how post-processing can turn a mediocre photo, left (this one of Belem Tower, Portugal, at sunrise) into an award-winning one (right). See more or learn how he did it.

Journal Peer Review: A Worthless Waste of Time and Money: A recent meta-research study (ironically, a peer-reviewed one) concludes that peer review of scientific journals produces no improvement in quality, stifles controversy and innovation, wastes time and costs a prohibitive amount. With the Internet, the authors say, such review is obsolete; better to publish everything and let post-publication peer review separate the good from the bad. Thanks to Tree for the link.

Coal Cares: A hilarious takeoff on greenwashing by the coal industry.

How we came to misunderstand dogs: A refreshing new book shows that “showing the dog you’re the alpha” is a mean and ludicrous strategy for getting along with companion animals. Bravo for love and positive reinforcement!

Apple cloud vs. Google cloud: The philosophical differences: An important report in TechRepublic explains that Apple wants the Web to operate like nature (effective, redundant, inefficient, with sync’d copies of stuff in several places) while Google wants it to run like a machine (efficient, dependent on everyone being online always, and hence fragile and in the long run less effective). Google needs to understand that always-on high-speed Internet isn’t available to everyone, and isn’t wanted by many. Apple has it right, this time.

Mac vs PC: A Psychographic Profile: An entertaining study of the preferences and personalities of self-identified “Mac” versus “PC” people.

The Eaglets of Hornby Island – Eagle Cam: It’s the time of year to look in on the little ones (they’re about 6 weeks old) again.

Werewolf: A Mind Game: Rules for an intriguing collaborative/competitive “party” game of group psychology (an evening’s fun for groups of 7-20). Thanks to Geoff Brown for the link.

Love’s a Game: My newest favourite song by the British group The Magic Numbers. Great composition, guitar work and harmonies. Reminds me a bit of the Stones’ great hit Almost Hear You Sigh.

THOUGHTS FOR THE MONTH

Cartoon by David Sipress in The New Yorker

From Dear Sugar, the amazing advice columnist for Rumpus magazine, on deciding whether or not to start a family (the advice works as well for any momentous decision you face) Thanks to Tree for the link:

What don’t you know? Make a list. Write down everything you don’t know about your future life—which is everything, of course—but use your imagination. What are the thoughts and images that come to mind when you picture yourself at twice the age you are now? What springs forth if you imagine the 82 year-old self who opted to “keep enjoying the same life” and what when you picture the 82 year-old self with a thirty-nine year old son or daughter? Write down “same life” and “son or daughter” and underneath each make another list of the things you think those experiences would give to and take from you and then ponder which entries on your list might cancel each other out. Would the temporary loss of a considerable portion your personal freedom in middle age be significantly neutralized by the experience of loving someone more powerfully than you ever have? Would the achy uncertainty of never having been anyone’s father be defused by the glorious reality that you got to live your life relatively unconstrained by the needs of another? What is a good life? Write “good life” and list everything that you associate with a good life then rank them in order of importance. Have the most meaningful things in your life come to you as a result of ease or struggle? What scares you about sacrifice? What scares you about not sacrificing?

So there you are on the floor, your gigantic white piece of paper with things written all over it like a ship’s sail, and maybe you don’t have clarity still, maybe you don’t know what to do, but you feel something, don’t you? The sketches of your real life and your sister life are right there before you and you get to decide what to do. One is the life you’ll have, the other is the one you won’t. Switch them around in your head and see how it feels. Which affects you on a visceral level? Which won’t let you go? Which is ruled by fear? Which is ruled by desire? Which makes you want to close your eyes and jump and which makes you want to turn and run?

From me, a thought that came to me today (in the bath — hot water is wonderful for stimulating the mind and imagination):

Corporations treat citizens (“customers”) exactly the way circus owners treat “their” “wild” animals – as beasts to be trained to obey.

From Derrick Jensen et al. in their new book Deep Green Resistance:

This is the moment when you will have to decide. Do you want to be part of a serious effort to save this planet? Not a serious effort at collective delusion, not a serious effort to feel better, not a serious effort to save you and yours. But an actual strategy to stop the destruction of everything worth loving. If your answer feels as imperative as instinct, then you already know it’s long past time to fight. After that, the only question left is: how? And despite everything you’ve been told by the Eichmanns of despair, that question has an answer. They have insisted that there is no answer, but that’s the lie of cowards. Every system of power can be fought—they’re only human in the end, not supernatural, not sent by god. Industrial civilization is in fact more vulnerable than past empires, dependent as it is on such a fragile infrastructure of pipelines and overhead wires, on binary bits of data encoding its lifeblood of capital. If we would let ourselves think it, a workable strategy is obvious, and in fact is not very different from the actions of partisan resisters across history.

So, will you think it—that one word: resistance? Will you notice that they’ve come for our kin of polar bears and black terns, who are right now being herded into the cattle cars of industrial civilization? Will you join the others who are yearning to action? The train can be derailed, the tracks ripped up, the bridge blown down. There is no metaphor here, as any General Officer could tell us. There is a planet being murdered, and there are also targets that, if taken out relentlessly, could stop it. So think “resistance” with all your aching heart, a word that must become our promise to what is left of this planet. Gather the others: you already know them. The brave, smart, militant, and, most of all, serious, and together take aim. Do it carefully, but do it.

Then fire for all your worth.

From Jonathan Franzen’s recent brilliant, lovely commencement speech (read it all!):

Finally, in the mid-1990s, I made a conscious decision to stop worrying about the environment. There was nothing meaningful that I personally could do to save the planet, and I wanted to get on with devoting myself to the things I loved. I still tried to keep my carbon footprint small, but that was as far as I could go without falling back into rage and despair.

BUT then a funny thing happened to me. It’s a long story, but basically I fell in love with birds. I did this not without significant resistance, because it’s very uncool to be a birdwatcher, because anything that betrays real passion is by definition uncool. But little by little, in spite of myself, I developed this passion, and although one-half of a passion is obsession, the other half is love.

And so, yes, I kept a meticulous list of the birds I’d seen, and, yes, I went to inordinate lengths to see new species. But, no less important, whenever I looked at a bird, any bird, even a pigeon or a robin, I could feel my heart overflow with love. And love, as I’ve been trying to say today, is where our troubles begin.

Because now, not merely liking nature but loving a specific and vital part of it, I had no choice but to start worrying about the environment again. The news on that front was no better than when I’d decided to quit worrying about it — was considerably worse, in fact — but now those threatened forests and wetlands and oceans weren’t just pretty scenes for me to enjoy. They were the home of animals I loved.

And here’s where a curious paradox emerged. My anger and pain and despair about the planet were only increased by my concern for wild birds, and yet, as I began to get involved in bird conservation and learned more about the many threats that birds face, it became easier, not harder, to live with my anger and despair and pain.

How does this happen? I think, for one thing, that my love of birds became a portal to an important, less self-centered part of myself that I’d never even known existed. Instead of continuing to drift forward through my life as a global citizen, liking and disliking and withholding my commitment for some later date, I was forced to confront a self that I had to either straight-up accept or flat-out reject.

Which is what love will do to a person. Because the fundamental fact about all of us is that we’re alive for a while but will die before long. This fact is the real root cause of all our anger and pain and despair. And you can either run from this fact or, by way of love, you can embrace it.

When you stay in your room and rage or sneer or shrug your shoulders, as I did for many years, the world and its problems are impossibly daunting. But when you go out and put yourself in real relation to real people, or even just real animals, there’s a very real danger that you might love some of them.

And who knows what might happen to you then?

Crow photo by (and photoshopped by) Dave, taken at the beach in Stanley Park, Vancouver.

I‘ve been pretty quiet on this blog for a while, and it’s not because I’ve been too busy to write. I just don’t have much new and important to report, or to say. This blog has been, first and foremost, my means of thinking out loud, challenging what I’ve been told, articulating what — I’m learning — is really going on in the world, and imagining what might be done about it.

The evidence continues to pile up that our civilization is inevitably in its final century, that its collapse has already begun and will occur not all at once but rather will play out as a series of growing and quite ugly cascading crises. I’ve been writing about this for years now, and there is nothing much left to say.

My upcoming Links of the Month post will start with some specific thoughts on how this timeline is progressing and what I am doing in response to, or in anticipation of, what I see happening now, and next. These thoughts will be based on data that are largely unreported in the mainstream media, since these media have neither the time nor inclination to look at any complex issue in enough depth to provide any meaningful guidance on what their ‘news’ means, or how one should act on it.

These data come in part from reading books and alternative media (that’s what my Links of the Month posts try to summarize), but mostly they come from personal observation and reflection, and from a growing trust of my intuitive and somatic knowledge — what my body and my instincts, which synthesize what I know consciously with what I ‘know’ subconsciously, are telling me is real, now.

Recently, for example, they have been telling me that the political, social and economic “news” reported by both the apologist corporatist mainstream media and the (mostly) whining cowardly alternative media, are a dangerous distraction from our urgent need to face squarely the many intractible, longer-term issues facing our planet.

Specifically, we are now being distracted by the nonsense written on all sides about an “Arab Spring” and how the revolt of a minority of courageous and/or desperate people against corrupt despots heralds a blossoming of democracy in the region and ultimately in the world. A basic reading of history would convince the most optimistic person that what it in fact heralds is orchestrated brinksmanship that will show (a) that despots are generally replaced by other totalitarian regimes that are, on average, no better than those they followed, and (b) that a sufficiently vicious despot will sacrifice his own people, and cost the world billions in wasted effort to support his opponents, in order to keep power a little longer.

We should have learned this from Afghanstan and a dozen Western interventions before it, but we just keep repeating the same mistakes while hoping stupidly for a different outcome. In the meantime the horrific threats of global economic meltdown, ecological catastrophe, and energy collapse loom closer and larger, and are being mostly ignored, while meaningful debate about them is lost in a blizzard of simplistic rhetoric, magical thinking and cynical propaganda.

My instincts are also telling me that the well-intentioned efforts of the small cohort who are no longer in denial about what is to come — efforts to prepare for these threats, and to increase our resilience so we can contend with them better — are probably misplaced. The first stages of all three crises have been completely mishandled by those with the responsibility to prepare for and respond to them, and we are so afflicted by imaginative poverty, ignorance of history, and total dependence on the very systems that are starting to crumble around us, that we are blind to just how badly we are coping with early-stage collapse. Just witness:

• Our responses to the recent massive banking fraud, the collapse of the housing market and endless international debt crises (our response: bail out the mismanaged gangster mega-corporations and ratchet the system up even tighter so it is even more fragile and the eventual cost of failure more horrific)
• Our preparations for and responses to recent hurricanes, earthquakes and tsunamis (they have been pathetic, and we remain oblivious to how ill-prepared we are to cope as extreme climate events grow in intensity and frequency)
• Our response to the peaking of cheap energy production, soaring extraction costs and plunging reserves (our response: invest speculatively to further fuel the crisis, and placidly accept the preposterous government and corporate claims about the extent of the crisis)

What does this incompetent response to early warning signals of civilization’s collapse tell us about ourselves and our institutions? First, it tells us that we will continue to choose to deny the need to change our current unsustainable behaviours until it is too late. We will do our little bit to recycle and waste less, and then we will hope, ridiculously, for the best. Second, it shows us that there is no one steering this ship as it careens towards catastrophe. Our “leaders” will never risk the political consequences of telling us the situation is worse than we wish it to be, and it is increasingly apparent that, even if they did, or if we miraculously replaced them with “leaders” who did tell us the truth, our present momentum and the lack of any central power to enact and enforce mandatory global changes in behaviour, ensure that they couldn’t act effectively anyway.

There are many prescriptions for saving the world out there today, but they are all based on magical thinking. Technology/innovation, the “market”, “radical democracy”, religious salvation, new age consciousness-raising, grassroots collectivism — belief in any of these “solutions” is an act of pure faith, as none of them has “solved” any problem even a fraction the size or complexity of those we face today. Belief in and pursuit of these “solutions” has, on the whole, worsened not ameliorated these problems. It is time for us to give up hope in such solutions.

And then do what, you might ask? I don’t know. Perhaps just be. If you have the luxury of time, capacity and opportunity to do so, listen to your instincts, and to the place you live, and wait for them to tell you what to do, There is no one right answer, and there is no saving this civilization, or this world. It will be fine, long after we’re gone.

As for me, I have been trying, successfully, to be generous in supporting people and projects that I think are important and will help a lot of people. I have been successfully spending time with people I love, and am slowly learning to be present, to let go, to be a responsible, sustainable hedonist, and to self-accept. I am looking to spend more time in creative and imaginative pursuits, with creative and imaginative people, and more time mentoring, and learning resilience skills and capacities. I am still seeking gentle natural warm beautiful places to live, and safe ways to help stop the Tar Sands and factory farming.

I think I might try posting short daily thoughts here, instead of waiting days or weeks until I have something substantive to post. This blog might become, at least for a while, more of a diary than an overly-ambitious chronicle of civilization’s collapse. If so, it will likely become more personal, and less rhetorical — more about my activities and reflections and the people in my life, and less about my ideas.

We’ll see.