How to Survive the Crash and Save the Earth

http://ranprieur.com/essays/saveearth.html

How to Survive the Crash and Save the Earth
by Ran Prieur December 19, 2004

1. Abandon the world. The world is the enemy of the Earth. The "world as we
know it" is a deadly parasite on the biosphere. Both cannot survive, nor
can the world survive without the Earth. Do the logic: the world is doomed.
If you stay on the parasite, you die with it. If you move to the Earth, and
it survives in something like its recent form, you can survive with it.

Our little world is doomed because it's built on a foundation of taking
from the wider world without giving back. For thousands of years we've been
going into debt and calling it "progress," exterminating and calling it
"development," stealing and calling it "wealth," shrinking into a world of
our own design and calling it "evolution." We're just about done. We're not
just running out of cheap oil -- which is used to make and move almost
every product, and which gives the average American the energy equivalent
of 200 slaves. We're also running out of topsoil, without which we need
oil-derived fertilizers to grow food; and forests, which stabilize climate
and create rain by transpiring water to refill the clouds; and ground
water, such as the Ogallala aquifer under the Great Plains, which could go
dry any time now. We're running out of room to dump stuff in the oceans
without killing them, and to dump stuff in the atmosphere without wrecking
the climate, and to manufacture carcinogens without all of us getting
cancer. We're coming to the end of global food stockpiles, and antibiotics
that still work, and our own physical health, and our own mental health,
and our grip on reality, and our will to keep the whole game going. Why do
you think so many Americans are looking forward to "armageddon" or the
"rapture"? We hate this shitty world and we want to blow it up.

In the next five or ten years, the US military will be humiliated, the
dollar will collapse, the housing bubble will burst, tens of millions of
Americans will be destitute, food, fuel, and manufactured items will get
really expensive, and most of us will begin withdrawal from the industrial
lifestyle. SUV's will change their function from transportation to shelter.
We will not be able to imagine how we ever thought calories were bad. Smart
people will stop exterminating the dandelions in their yard and start
eating them. Ornamental gardens will go the way of fruit hats and bloomers.
In the cities, pigeon populations will decline.

This is not the "doom" scenario. I'm not saying anything about death camps,
super-plagues, asteroid impacts, solar flares, nuclear war, an instant ice
age, or a runaway greenhouse effect. This is the mildest realistic
scenario, the slow crash: energy prices will rise, the middle class will
fall into the lower class, economies will collapse, nations will fight
desperate wars over resources, in the worst places people will starve, and
climate disasters will get worse. Your area might resemble the botched
conquest of Iraq, or the depression in Argentina, or the fall of Rome, or
even a crusty Ecotopia. My young anarchist friends are already packing
themselves into unheated houses and getting around by bicycle, and they're
noticeably happier than my friends with full time jobs. We just have to
make the mental adjustment. Those who don't, who cling to the world they
grew up in, numbing themselves and waiting for it all to blow over, will
have a miserable time, and if people die, they will be the first. Save some
of them if you can, but don't let them drag you down. The first thing they
teach lifeguards is how to break holds.

2. Abandon hope. I don't mean that we stop trying, or stop believing that a
better world is possible, but that we stop believing that some factor is
going to save us even if we do the wrong thing. A few examples:

Jesus is coming. If you believe the Bible, Jesus told us when he was coming
back to save us. He said, "This generation shall not pass." That was 2000
years ago. Stop waiting for that bus and get walking.

The Mayan calendar is ending. Some people who scoff at Christian prophecies
still manage to believe something equally religious and a lot less specific
about what's going to happen. At least Jesus preached peace and
enlightenment -- the Mayans were a warlike people who crashed their
civilization by cutting down the forests of the Yucatan and exhausting
their farmland. That's what we should be studying, not their calendar and
its alleged message that a better world is coming very soon and with little
effort on our part. Now the Mayan calendar gurus will say that it does take
effort and we have a choice to go either way, but go back to 1988 and read
what 2004 was supposed to look like, and it's obvious that we've already
failed.

Technology will save us. If it does, it will be something we don't even
recognize as "technology" -- permaculture or orgonomy or water vortices or
forest gardening or quantum consciousness or the next generation of the
tribe. It will not be a new germ killer or resource extractor or power
generator or anything to give us what we want while exempting us from being
aware and respectful of other life. Anything like that will just dig us
deeper in the same hole.

The system can be reformed. Yes, and it's also not against the laws of
physics for us to go back in time and prevent the industrial age from ever
happening. Ten, twenty, thirty years ago the ecologists said "we have to
turn it around now or it will be too late." They were right. And not only
didn't we turn it around, we sped it up: more cars with worse efficiency,
more toxins, more CO2, more deforestation, more pavement, more lawns, more
materialism, more corporate rule, more weapons, more war and love of war,
more secrets, more lies, more callousness and cynicism and
short-sightedness. Now we're in so deep that politicians right of Nixon are
called "liberal" and the Green Party platform is both totally inadequate
and politically absurd. Our little system is not going to make it.

Also, there's a time lag between smokestacks and acid rain, between
radioactivity and cancer, between industrial toxins and birth defects,
between atmospheric imbalance and giant storms, between deforestation and
drought, between soil depletion and starvation. The disasters we're getting
now are from the relatively mild stuff we did years or decades ago, before
SUV's and depleted uranium and aspartame and terminator seeds and the
latest generation of factory farms. Even if we could turn it around
tomorrow, what's coming is much worse.

We're not strong enough to destroy nature. Oddly, this argument almost
always invokes the word "hubris," as in, "You are showing hubris, or
excessive pride, in thinking that by lighting this forest on fire to roast
a hot dog, I will burn the forest down. Don't you know humans aren't
capable of burning down a forest? Shame on you for your pride."

In fact, we've already almost finished killing the Earth. The deserts of
central and southwest Asia were once forests -- ancient empires cut down
the trees and let the topsoil wash off into the Indian Ocean. In North
America a squirrel could go tree to tree from the Atlantic to the
Mississippi, and spawning salmon were so thick in rivers and streams that
you couldn't row a boat through them, and the seashores were rich with
seals, fishes, birds, clams, lobsters, whales. Now they're deserts
populated only by seagulls eating human garbage, and nitrogen fertilizer
runoff has made dead zones in the oceans, and atmospheric carbon dioxide is
increasing oceanic acidity, which may dissolve the shells of the plankton.
If the plankton die, it's all over.

Maybe we can't kill absolutely everything, but we are on the path to
cutting life on Earth down to nothing bigger than a cockroach, and we will
do so, and all of us will die, unless something crashes our system sooner
and only kills most of us.

3. Drop Out. (See my essay How To Drop Out.) Dropping out of the present
dominant system has both a mental and an economic component that go
together like your two legs walking. It's a lot of steps! Maybe you notice
that you hate your job, and that you have to do it because you need money.
So you reduce expenses, reduce your hours, and get more free time, in which
you learn more techniques of self-sufficiency and establish a sense of
identity not dependent on where you get your money. Then you switch to a
low-status low-stress job that gives you even more room to get outside the
system mentally. And so on, until you've changed your friends, your values,
your whole life.

The point I have to make over and over about this process, and this
movement, is that it's not about avoiding guilt, or reducing your
ecological footprint, or being righteous. It's not a pissing contest to see
who's doing more to save the Earth -- although some people will believe
that's your motivation, to justify their own inertia. It's not even about
reducing your participation in the system, just reducing your submission
and dependence: getting free, being yourself, slipping out of a wrestling
hold so you can throw an elbow at the Beast.

This world is full of people with the intelligence, knowledge, skills, and
energy to make heaven on Earth, but they can't even begin because they
would lose their jobs. We're always arguing to change each other's minds,
but nobody will change if they think their survival depends on not
changing. Every time you hear about a whistleblower or reporter getting
fired for honesty and integrity, you can be sure that they already had a
support network, or just a sense of their own value, outside of the system
they defied. Dropping out is about fighting better. Gandalf has to get off
Saruman's tower!

4. You are here to help. In the culture of Empire, we are trained to think
of ourselves as here to "succeed," to build wealth and status and walls
around ourselves, to get what we desire, to win in games where winning is
given meaning by others losing. It is a simple and profound shift to think
of ourselves instead as here to help -- to serve the greatest good that we
can perceive in whatever way is right in front of us.

You don't have to sacrifice yourself for others, or put others "above" you.
Why is it so hard to see each other as equals? And it's OK to have a good
time. In fact, having a good time is what most helping comes down to -- the
key is that you're focused on the good times of all life everywhere
including your "self," instead of getting caught up in egocentric
comparison games that aren't even that fun.

Defining yourself as here to help is a prerequisite for doing some of the
other things on this list properly. If you're here to win you're not saving
anything but your own wretched ass for a few additional years. If you're
dropping out to win you're likely to be stepping on other outsiders,
instead of throwing a rope to bring more people out alive. And as the
system breaks down, people here to win will waste their energy fighting
each other for scraps, while people here to help will build self-sufficient
communities capable of generating what they need to survive.

In the real world, being here to help is easier and less stressful, because
you will frequently be in a situation where you can't win, but you will
almost never be in a situation where there's nothing you can do to help.
Being here to win only makes sense in an artificial world rigged so you can
win all the time. Thousands of years ago only kings were in that position,
and they reacted by massacring all enemies and bathing in blood. Now,
through a perfect conjunction of Empire and oil energy, we just put the
entire American middle class in that position for 50 years. No one should
be surprised that we're so stupid, selfish, cowardly, and irresponsible.
But younger generations are already getting poorer and smarter.

5. Learn skills. Readers sometimes ask for my advice on surviving the crash
-- should they buy guns, canned food, water purifiers, gold? I always tell
them to learn skills. You know the saying: get a fish, eat for a day; learn
to fish, eat for a lifetime. (Just don't take it too literally -- there
might not be any fish left!)

The most obvious useful skills would include improvising shelter from
materials at hand, identifying and preparing wild edibles, finding water,
making fire, trapping animals, and so on. But I don't think we're going all
the way to the stone age. There will also be a need for electrical work,
medical diagnosis, surgery, optics, celestial navigation, composting,
gardening, tree propagation, food preservation, diplomacy, practical
chemistry, metalworking, all kinds of mechanical repair, and all kinds of
teaching. As the 15th century had the Renaissance Man, we're going to have
the Postapocalypse Man or Woman, someone who can fix a bicycle, tan a hide,
set a broken bone, mediate an argument, and teach history.

Even more important are some things that are not normally called skills,
but that make skill-learning and everything else easier: luck, intuition,
adaptability, attentiveness, curiosity, physical health, mental health, the
ability to surf the flow. Maybe the most fundamental is what they call
"being yourself" or "waking up." Most human behavior is based neither on
logic nor intuition nor emotion, but habit and conformity. We perceive,
think, and act as we've always done, and as we see others do. This works
well enough in a controlled environment, but in a chaotic environment it
doesn't work at all. If you can just get 10% of yourself free of habit and
conformity, people will call you "weird." 20% and they'll call you a
genius, 30% and they'll call you a saint, 40% and they'll kill you.

6. Find your tribe. We minions of Empire think of ourselves as
individualists, or as members of silly fake groups -- nations, religions,
races, followers of political parties and sports teams, loyal inmates of
some town that's the same as every other. In fact we're all members of a
giant mad tribe, where the relationships are not cooperative and open, but
coercive, exploitative, abusive, and invisible. If we could see even one
percent of the whole picture, we would have a revolution.

You may feel like you want to do it alone, but you have never done it
alone. To survive the breakdown of this world and build a better one, you
will have to trade your sterile, insulated links of money and law for raw,
messy links of friendship and conflict. The big lie of postapocalypse
movies like Omegaman and Mad Max is that the survivors will be loners. In
the real apocalypse, the survivors will be members of multi-skilled
well-balanced cooperative groups.

I think future tribes are already forming, even on the internet, even among
people thousands of miles apart. I think the crash will be slow enough that
we'll have plenty of time to get together geographically.

7. Get on some land. This might seem more difficult than the others, yet
most people who own land have not done any of the other things -- probably
because buying land requires money which requires subservience to a system
that makes you personally powerless. I suggest extreme frugality, which
will give you valuable skills and also allow you to quickly save up money.
You probably have a few more years.

If you don't make it, it's not the end of the world -- oh wait -- it is the
end of the world! But you still might know someone with room on their land,
or someone might take you in for your skills, or if you have a tribe one of
you will probably come up with a place in the chaos. And if not, there will
be a need for survivors and helpers in the cities and suburbs. So don't
force it.

If you do get land, the most valuable thing it can have is clean surface
water, a spring or stream you can drink from. Acceptable but less
convenient would be a well that doesn't require electricity, or dirty
surface water, which you can filter and clean through sand and reed beds.
At the very least you need the rainfall and skills to catch and store
enough rainwater to drink and grow food. (The ancient Nabateans did it on
less than four inches of rain a year.) Then you'll need a few years to
learn and adjust and get everything in order so that your tribe can live
there year-round, even with no materials from outside. With luck, it won't
come to that.

8. Save part of the Earth. When I say "the Earth," I mean the life on its
surface, the biosphere, as many species and habitats as possible, connected
in ways that maximize abundance and complexity -- and not just because
humans think it's pretty or useful, but because all life is valuable on its
own terms. We like to focus on saving trophy animals -- whales, condors,
pandas, salmon, spotted owls -- but most of them aren't going to make it,
and we could save a lot more species if we could put that attention into
habitats and whole systems.

So how do you save habitats and whole systems? You can try working through
governments, but at the moment they're ruled by corporations, which by
definition are motivated purely by short term increase-in-exploitation, or
"profit." You can try direct physical action against the destroyers, but it
has yet to work well, and as the world plunges to the right I think we'll
see more and more activists simply killed.

My focus is direct positive action for the biosphere: adopting some land,
whether by owning or squatting or stealth, and building it into a strong
habitat: slowing down the rainwater, composting, mulching, building the
topsoil, no-till gardening, scattering seed balls, planting trees, making
wetlands -- a little oasis where the tree frogs can hide and migrating
birds can rest, where you and a few species can wait out the crash.

Tom Brown Jr. mentions in one of his books that the patch of woods where he
conducts his wilderness classes, instead of being depleted by all the
humans using it for survival, has turned into an Eden, because his students
know how to tend it. Some rain forest environments, once thought to be
random wilderness, have turned out to be more like the wild gardens of
human tribes, orders of magnitude more complex than the soil-killing
monoculture fields of our own primitive culture.

Humans have the ability to go beyond sustainability, to live in ways that
increase the richness of life on Earth, and help Gaia in ways she cannot
help herself. This and only this justifies human survival.

It requires a new set of skills. A good place to start is the permaculture
movement. Sadly, in the present dark age the original books are all out of
print and rare, and classes are so expensive that the knowledge is
languishing among the idle rich when it should be offered free to the
world. But the idle poor can still find the books in libraries, and many of
the techniques are simple. What it comes down to is seeing whole systems
and paying attention and innovating, driven by the knowledge that
sustainability is only the middle of the road, and there's no limit to how
far we can go beyond it.

9. Save human knowledge. When people of this age think about knowledge
worth saving, they usually think about belief in the Cartesian mechanical
philosophy, that dead matter is the basis of reality, and about techniques
for rebuilding and using machines that dominate and separate us from other
life. I'd like that knowledge to die forever, but I don't think it works
that way. Humans or any other hyper-malleable animal will always be tempted
by the Black Arts, by techniques that trade subtle harm for flashy good and
feed back into themselves, seducing us into power, corruption, and
blindness.

Our descendants will need the intellectual artifacts to avoid this --
artifacts we have barely started to develop even as the Great Bad Example
begins to fall. In 200 years, when they are brushing seeds into baskets
with their fingers, and a stranger appears with a new threshing machine
that will do the same thing with less time and effort, they will need to
say something smarter than "the Gods forbid it" or "that is not our Way."
They will need the knowledge to say something like:

"Your machine requires the seed to be planted alone and not interspersed
with perennials that maintain nitrogen and mineral balance in the soil. And
from where will the metal come, and how many trees must be cut down and
burned to melt and shape it? And since we cannot build the machine, shall
we be dependent on the machine-builders, and give them a portion of our
food, which we now keep all for ourselves? Do you not know, clever
stranger, that when any biomass is removed from the land, and not recycled
back into it, the soil is weakened? And what could we do with our "saved"
time, that would be more valuable and pleasurable than gathering the seed
by hand, touching and knowing every stalk and every inch of the land that
feeds us? Shall we become allies of cold metal that cuts without feeling,
turning our hands and eyes to the study of machines and numbers until,
severed from the Earth, we nearly destroy it as our ancestors did, making
depleted uranium and polychlorinated biphenyls and cadmium batteries that
even now make the old cities unfit for living? Go back to your people, and
tell them, if they come to conquer us with their machines, we will fight
them in ways the Arawaks and Seminoles and Lakota and Hopi and Nez Perce
never imagined, because we understand your world better than you do
yourself. Tell your people to come to learn."