deconsumption reading room

How to Survive the Crash and Save the Earth

Ran Prieur, who authors the addictive ongoing "reality"-serial Landblog, offers up 9 Steps to ponder on the path to deconsumption. Ran artfully weaves together practical strategies informed with an ideology of responsible being, to give a vision of our future that offers more hope and promise than other, more simplistic, "survival guides".

How to Survive the Crash and Save the Earth by Ran Prieur

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.
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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.

Richard Heinberg's Closing Address for 2004 Peak Oil Conference

Heinberg is a long-time Peak Oil researcher and journalist. The 2004 Peak Oil Conference was held on Nov. 12-14 in Yellow Spring, OH. About 150 people attended.

Short, hopeful, clearly spoken and authoritative, this is perhaps as good a primer as any to give to people you care about who either don't wish to see or don't have the time to recognize what is ahead of us.

Richard Heinberg's Closing Address for 2004 Peak Oil Conference

So what do you do if you are living at the end of an empire? I suppose one rational response would be to eat, drink, and be merry. Why not? It sure beats worrying oneself to death over events one can’t control, and thus squandering whatever moments of normalcy and chances for happiness may remain before the end comes.

Somehow, I think that you here have other ideas about what to do. I suspect that if you had been passengers on the Titanic, you would not have been drinking yourselves into a stupor at the bar; you’d have been strapping deck chairs together, finding a way to increase the signal strength of the ship’s radio, or invent waterproof buoyant suits that could be remanufactured from hemp ropes using equipment commandeered from the ship’s machine shop.

I probably can’t tell you anything you should be doing that you are not already doing about as well as you can under the circumstances. We all know the drill—grow more of your own food, conserve energy, become active in your local community, learn useful arts and skills, stock up on handtools. In essence: we must plant the seeds for what can and will survive; for a way of life as different from industrialism as the latter is from the medieval period; a way of life whose full flowering we ourselves may never see in our brief lifetimes.

Can Organics Save the Family Farm?

This may be one of the most important and seminal articles of the next decade. It's already being regarded as a kind of Declaration of Independence for the sustainable food movement. Eliot Coleman's writing is concise, well-structured, and draws on his wealth of experience to provide a message that rings true on many, many levels. Kudos go to The Rake magazine for the original publication.

Can Organics Save the Family Farm? by Eliot Coleman

"How did deep get turned into shallow and good food revert to mediocre? It is a logical result in a world blind to the elegance of natural systems. Humans think in terms of more milk rather than exceptional milk, cheaper eggs not better eggs. Since modern humans tend to consider nature imperfect, they focus on improving nature rather than improving the function of agriculture within nature. Humans want to change the rules rather than try to operate more intelligently within them. A recent advertisement from a biotech company reinforced that idea by highlighting the phrase “Think what’s possible.” It’s true that these companies think they have the power to remake the parts of nature they don’t understand. However, if they understood them, they would realize they don’t need remaking. It is our human relationship with the natural world that needs remaking."