John Michael Greer’s lastest from the Archdruid Report.
John Michael Greer, The Archdruid Report: How Great the Fall Can Be
This is what the decline and fall of a civilization looks like. It’s not about sitting in a cozy earth-sheltered home under a roof loaded with solar panels, living some close approximation of a modern industrial lifestyle, while the rest of the world slides meekly down the chute toward history’s compost bin, leaving you and yours untouched. It’s about political chaos–meaning that you won’t get the leaders you want, and you may not be able to count on the rule of law or even the most basic civil liberties. It’s about economic implosion–meaning that your salary will probably go away, your savings almost certainly won’t keep its value, and if you have gold bars hidden in your home, you’d better hope to Hannah that nobody ever finds out, or it’ll be a race between the local government and the local bandits to see which one gets to tie your family up and torture them to death, starting with the children, until somebody breaks and tells them where your stash is located.
It’s about environmental chaos–meaning that you and the people you care about may have many hungry days ahead as crazy weather messes with the harvests, and it’s by no means certain you won’t die early from some tropical microbe that’s been jarred loose from its native habitat to find a new and tasty home in you. It’s about rapid demographic contraction–meaning that you get to have the experience a lot of people in the Rust Belt have already, of walking past one abandoned house after another and remembering the people who used to live there, until they didn’t any more.
If you are not working with your neighbors and local communities to built in some resiliency and contigency plans for the consequences of some old and some recent bad decisions, you better get cracking. Relitigating the election won’t get it done. It can be done at the same time as resisting the Trump administration’s excesses. And the networks you develop might be the path to a better politics, but there are no guarantees.
We have indeed squandered 40 years in inaction on the environment in any way that matters.
