Resilience starts in your head

"Those inclined to worry, have the greatest selection in History" - Mark Twain

We live in uncertain times. The looming sovereign debt crisis (mainly in the UK and the US). The prospect of more common, more severe weather incidents due to climate change. The looming threat of energy scarcity due to a contraction in oil supplies, and an antiquated, poorly maintained energy grid. In short, Mark Twain hadn't seen anything yet.

John Michael Greer in a much older post wrote about the difficulty of planning the road ahead, in the face of such uncertainty. In it he wrote about the futility of the Transition Town movement, because it was preparing for such a specific outcome, when there was no likelihood, much less guarantee that the problem they were envisioning a solution for would ever come to pass. At least not in the way they imagined it.

Originally, this post was going to be about 'what jobs/skill sets will be needed' in a post 'choose your 'long emergency' society. Upon further reflection, though, the answer is: Nobody knows.

Nobody knows what might happen should gasoline suddenly spike to $4.00 a litre. And it may not be supply contractions due to peak oil that cause it. It might be a coup in Saudi Arabia, it might be another deep water oil spill that triggers a global halt to offshore drilling. It might be any number of things that could trigger a sudden spike at the pumps, or a sudden shortage of electricity, or food, or heating oil, or...or...or...

The one question I see posted again and again in the peak oil/climate change blogosphere (most of whose writers have now embraced sovereign debt default as some kind of unholy trifecta) is: What do I do? How do I prepare?

And by this, people usually mean, "What should I buy?" I.e., should I stockpile ammo and canned goods, or buy a generator, or even a woodstove?

The answers are all fairly universal: Forget about stockpiling. Get out of debt. Learn to grow your own veggies. Have alternate ways of heating your very well insulated home. Learn a skill that will be desirable/useful to your neighbors, or people who may have more cash than you.

All of these ideas, though, are predicated on someone having some sort of vision as to what the future looks like. Some kind of accurate prediction. "Prediction is hard," Yogi Berra once said. "Especially about the future."

So are all of those bad steps to take? Yes and no. No, because anything you do to prepare for an uncertain future is bound to give you a sense of security, and comfort that you are doing everything you can. But yes, they may be bad if you think that they are guaranteed to 'save' you, from whatever you feel you need saving from.

We have a good idea of what needs to be done to strengthen our community, reduce our reliance upon fossil fuels, increase our food security, and reduce our individual debt loads and carbon footprints.

The problem is, will it help if the problem is not a gasoline shortage, but an ice storm? Or if the problem is not a bizarre weather incident, but a sudden spike in interest rates caused by a hair trigger printing press?

The bad news is, nobody knows. The good news is, it probably can't hurt.

So what is the one thing you can do to help yourself, your family, and your community to be 'resilient?' Cultivate a 'do it yourself/let's just give it a go' mentality.

If you're a mid-level marketing manager with a major firm, and that's all you're good at, I'd start learning a few more practical skills, a.s.a.p. Not just because those skills will be useful, but learning how to learn those skills will be crucial.

The process of learning new skills teaches you not only the skills themselves, but how to learn - how to experiment, how to 'give it a go.' If you can cultivate the attitude of not being afraid to try/fail, and a baker's dozen useful skills with your hands along the way, you'll be miles ahead of the person next to you on the GO train who has spent the past 3 years following up to the minute news on Hollywood break-ups and hook-ups.

Most importantly - you need to learn to be comfortable with uncertainty. You need to be ok with not knowing what's coming next, but be able to trust that your knowledge, skills and instincts will get you through whatever life throws at you, and safely out the other side. The best, indeed the only, way to do that - is to set about learning new skills now. Anything that interests you, from knitting and textile work to how to keep slugs from devouring your tomatoes. The skills you learn are not as important as the hard work you do learning how to learn.

But with great knowledge, comes great responsibility, to paraphrase my favorite comic book uncle, and when your Brangelina obsessed neighbor knocks on your door in the middle of whatever situation has had the power out for four days - invite her in. Make her a snack, and help her to make the adjustments that the online community helped you make when you started journeying down the road.

The ant and the grasshopper is not only a cautionary tale - it's also a really crappy way to treat the neighbors you may so desperately need one day.

Re-imagining Suburbia

I have been absorbing Jeff Vail's article about Rescuing Suburbia over at Energy Bulletin, and I thought I would weigh in with a few comments of my own.

Suburbia, as Jeff very rightly points out, is here to stay. The thought of just walking away from acres of subdivisions a la St. Petersburg FL, or Flint, MI may be ideologically appealing to many urbanists, but the economic impact of abandoning cities neighborhood by neighborhood would be nothing short of devastating. That and the resources required to build more dense, walkable cities in the short term are going to be too scarce, and too badly needed for other things (i.e. food production).

So what to do? Sharon Astyk has been writing and blogging about the power of Victory Gardens for years now, and it just so happens that if you have way too much yard to mow conveniently with a people-powered reel mower, the next logical step is to plant gardens.

"But!" I hear you cry, "Nobody knows how to grow veggies any more. The knowledge just isn't there!" Really? Is that why just as the 'great recession' turned it's ugliest, seed companies across North America were posting record orders, and often running out of stock?

For all of Mainstream Media's almost total failure to address the coming challenges, I would venture that there exists among many people a deep and profound unease. A sense that things are bad, and are going to become increasingly so before they get better, if indeed they ever do. So people are gardening and turning to Farmer's Markets in record numbers.

One thing Jeff does refer to, however, when it comes to Surburbia is the concept of telecommuting, and how we'll all be able to go to work virtually. It is here that I disagree with him the most. For one, if, as many Peak Oil writers believe, there is an economic crash (and if it isn't due to energy costs, it will be sovereign state default, or something like it), it's not going to be a case of how you get to your 6-figure financial planner job in downtown Toronto, it will be how you replace the income of that job that has been suddenly rendered superfluous.

As Jeff Rubin likes to say, suddenly entire generations who have never done work more strenuous than typing on a keyboard or serving a cappuccino are going to be figuring out what to pack in their metal lunchboxes, as production moves back onshore due to the skyrocketing costs of shipping goods from China.

And where, I hear you ask, will we put those jobs? More in a moment.

The other issue that comes to mind is that of Transit. In the original Peak Oil Special Report on Raise the Hammer, one commenter mentioned that the reason the buses ran so infrequently in the suburbs was because nobody wanted to take them - $4.00 a litre oil will change that.

An interesting example of that was, on a lark last weekend, I went to the HSR trip planner, to check out how to get from my house, to the most remote suburban area that I could ever see myself wanting to go to by transit, the hilariously named Meadowlands shopping district in Ancaster. I plugged in the addresses, expecting to see a three transfer, 1.5 hour trip through pergatory. No dice. One bus that runs about three block from my house, and drops me in front of the Sobeys in Ancaster 41 minutes later. 41 minutes may seem like a long time to a seasoned car driver, but as someone who takes a GO bus/train combination to work of 1 hour and 20 minutes each way, 41 minutes doesn't seem so bad.

Some of the basic infrastructure is there, it just needs the demand to support it. Demand, I'm fairly confident will be coming soon.

In the meantime, what needs to be done? Well for one, our antiquated zoning system that rigidly defines industrial vs. commercial vs. residential is probably destined for the dustbin of urban planning history. Now while nobody wants a Matt Jelly Special across the street from a Nursing home, the time is going to come when some enterprising businesspeson is going to see a 1/2 empty strip mall and realize that a nice little garment factory, or cheese production facility would do just fine in there. While some of the suburbanites may howl at first, those who have just been downsized from their job in the mutual fund industry may see it as a well needed source of jobs that doesn't require a 45 minute commute by increasingly crowded bus.

While nobody is advocating a total abandoning of zoning requirements, the time has come to think seriously about the 'sanctity' of suburban zoning. We have the opportunity now to take some practical steps towards re-imagining these neighborhoods as places where work, shopping, living and agriculture all get just a little more neighborly.