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Greece on the brink. And America?

The situation with Greece is becoming a horror show. Everybody knows the country is going to default, with unknown consequences for the European banking system and, in turn, the world economy. Now even the IMF needs a bailout. Read this chilling report from Greece, which lays bare the desperate situation of the Greek middle class. […]

The situation with Greece is becoming a horror show. Everybody knows the country is going to default, with unknown consequences for the European banking system and, in turn, the world economy. Now even the IMF needs a bailout. Read this chilling report from Greece, which lays bare the desperate situation of the Greek middle class. Excerpt:

“It feels like we’re in a post-war situation,” says Mary. “There’s no optimism; we don’t know what happens next. We just try to survive.”

Over the past six months I’ve stood in the middle of Athenian crowds so furious that they will withstand tear gas and endure near-lethal stampedes to make their point.

What’s been obvious, each time, is the ordinariness of the people involved – bank clerks, interior designers, even a concert pianist once, their faces painted with alkaline liquid against the sting of the gas.

But it is this seething anger of those who have never been on a demo that is really frightening – because we have no model for what happens if the middle class of a developed country simply switches off from politics and gives up hope.

Not since the 1930s, anyway.

We have to hope that somehow, Greece, Europe, and the world can swerve away from the brink, but the truth is, this situation increasingly appears beyond the ability of anyone to control. In fact, part of our problem is the belief that if only our leaders make the right political calls, we can avoid disaster. I have been writing in recent days about my sister’s death in our small south Louisiana hometown, and how astonishing and beautiful has been the local social network (= friends, family, neighbors) in offering material, emotional, and spiritual support to her family. On my old blog (most links lost, alas), I wrote about how folks there pulled through 10 days of being without electric power after Hurricane Gustav in 2008, relying on the social network and on the competence of local folks who had chainsaws and knew how to use them. That sort of thing. If what is rolling over Greece now and will roll over Greece in the near future comes to America — and there is no reason to think it will not — it seems to me that a place like St. Francisville is where you’ll want to be, if you can get there.

The reasons are pretty clear. First, there is land on which to grow food, and lots of woods and water from which to harvest meat and fish. There are lots of people who still know how to do this. I heard my dad telling a visitor the other day that growing up during the Great Depression, he and his brother used to hunt not for sport, but because if they didn’t bring home a mess of squirrels, or whatever, their family didn’t eat. Hardly an ideal situation, but at least meat was available, if you knew how to get it.

Most importantly, there is still a fair amount of social capital there, which is better than money in the bank (a big part of Greece’s overall problem is that it’s a country where, as Chris Dickey puts it, “everyone rips everyone off because everyone feels somebody else is going to rip them off”). The point is, there are all kinds of factors already in place that make life in small towns and rural areas more resilient than life in the cities and suburbs. And that’s what we should be thinking about now: not saving our way of life, which is not sustainable anyway, but building in and building up resilience. First, we’ve got to overcome what Sharon Astyk describes as the “Klingons vs. Cylons” problem — a false choice between the unrealistic hope that technology will magically save us from the crisis without us having to do anything, or the belief that we’re doomed to endure a “Mad Max” dystopia.

The truth is likely to be different, says Sharon, and I believe her. Here’s what she expects, and what she proposes we should do to prepare for it:

“Ordinary Human Poverty- The Great Depression, Plus Climate Change, Plus Peak Oil” – Kunstler has a better name for this of course, but my version doesn’t have asian pirates in it, and in my version, not all southerners are dumber than Jethro Clampett ;-). Seriously, this is my bet. And I don’t think I’m in the minority here – I think what we’re facing is a massive, probably worldwide economic depression, a very extended one from which the magic of fossil fuels will not lift us back into growth.

I think we are facing using a lot less energy without the money and resources to make that easy on anyone. We are likely to see large scale unemployment, lots of poverty, people unable to meet very basic needs, and a very mixed level of response – some places doing better than others at helping people, some places essentially on their own, some places becoming very violent or unsafe, some places doing better – rather like the world we live in now, where some places are violent and some aren’t, hunger is increasing, access to basic necessities going down….

This is the scenario I believe in – the one where the grid may or may not go down, but you won’t notice anyway because the power company turned out the lights months ago, when you couldn’t pay, the one where to pay the mortgage you have two other families in your house, and 11 people sharing the bathroom. That is, this is the reality for most of the world, and I think it will be our reality.

If you don’t know Sharon’s work on resilience (she and her writing partner Aaron Newton call it “adapting in place”), it’s based heavily on the belief that peak oil is real, and that it’s going to cause tectonic economic shifts that cannot be stopped but can be prepared for. For Sharon, adapting in place — and by the way, you may still be able to get into their new online class on Advanced Adapting in Place — is not about stockpiling ammo and hardtack in one’s home bunker and awaiting the apocalypse, but making prudent preparation for very hard times, including building social networks that you and your neighbors are going to depend on. The government is not going to be able to help any of us much. We’re going to have to do this ourselves. She explains the concept like this:

[M]ost of us aren’t going to be living in new urbanist walkable communities or in perfect ecovillages driving electric cars – we’re going to be living where we are. Some projects will be done – but the idea that we’re going to do a full-scale overhaul of our society seems deeply wrong – we did a radical build out to get ourselves here, and we used up the easy, cheap segment of our resources. Which means that most of us are going to be limited to what we can accomplish ourselves, using our personal resources, what resources are available through family, friends, community and governments of various levels. Much of our way of life may have been, as Kunstler refers to suburbia, the greatest-misallocation of resources in history, but is how we allocated the resources – we’ve done this build out, and we’re going to be living with the results.

While the current situation has created mobility for some people – those who have already lost jobs and homes, those who know they are in a situation that can’t possibly improve -on the other hand, for many people, the current situation works to keep them in place. Nothing is selling in their area – so they can’t sell their house and move to another. Or they are afraid to change jobs, because the loss of seniority would lead to making them easy targets for layoffs in this economy. It may not be possible any longer to get back what they owe on their house – but it may still make sense to keep paying the mortgage, because they expect extended family to move in, or because they can grow food on the land. They may be tied down by elderly or disabled family members who can’t be easily moved, by a shared custody agreement, or by need to access to certain kinds of medical care. Family – biological or chosen – may tie them to an area, as may familiarity with the climate and region. We may decide that strong community ties make an imperfect area (and all areas are imperfect) enough to keep us there. Or we may lack the resources to move.

Staying in place isn’t always the best of a bad lot of options – sometimes it is simply the best option. There’s been a tendency to rhetorically abandon areas we don’t know what to do with – inner cities, exurbs, suburbia – all of these are dismissed sometimes, as though this will magically vacate them. The fact is that 300 million people in the US or 60 million in Britain cannot simply all go out to the countryside to their own bunkers, unless we wish to create a new suburbia, with barbed-wire, each ticky-tacky bunker lined up in the countryside next to its neighbors . Nor can we move everyone into cities – there aren’t jobs enough, nor room enough to grow food. Food alone will mean that the countryside and suburbs (near the city markets, often built on good farmland) will have to be populated – and the cities were usually cities for reasons long before oil – those reasons won’t go away.

More and more, I am advising people to stay put, or at most move to a place fairly near and like the one they live in now. I don’t think there’s enough time to adapt to new climates and environmental conditions, to retrofit new homes and build communities – now that doesn’t mean some people won’t have to move. But if you can stay put, I think there are some real advantages for most people – it takes *time* to build community, to build soil, to learn the bus lines, to get into the carpools, to find the cheap produce, to learn about pests and diseases and how to keep cool or warm. We need a model of a new life now – not ten years from now when we’ve found the perfect place.

Sharon, incidentally, is not a conservative per se, but in my crunchy con writings, I’ve really come to identify with her perspective, and to learn from her, because she does not believe the government is going to save us from this, or that it can save us. We have to do this for ourselves. Similarly, she does not have the conventional liberal’s faith in government to bail us out, or the conventional conservative’s view that the market is going to rescue us. She is not an alarmist by any means. What she is, is prudent. Sharon quotes a German writer/activist who refuses to surrender to either false hope or hopelessness:

I looked at the audience: all young people with worried faces.  They had come on this Sunday morning to get some orientation from these famous speakers for their own future.  But they only painted an apocalyptic picture gloom and hopelessness.  The gist of their presentations was that there was no alternative, that we could do nothing.  I could not tolerate this pessimism any longer and said, ‘Please, don’t forget where we are.  We are in Trier, in the midst of the ruins of what once was one of the capitals of the Roman empire.  An empire whose collapse people then thought would mean the end of the world.  But the world did not come to an end with the end of Rome.  The plough of my father, a peasant in the Eifel, used to hit the stones of the Roman road that connected Trier with Cologne.  On this road where the Roman legions had marched, grass had gown, and now we grew our potatoes on that road.  I wanted to say that even the collapse of big empires does not mean the end fo the world; rather, people then begin to understand what is important in life, namely our subsistence…

Sharon, a farmer and an ex-academic, is working on an Adapting in Place book now, but a good place to start is her earlier book “Depletion and Abundance.” 

Again, much of Sharon’s work is based on accepting peak oil (as I do), but even if you don’t, only a fool can read the papers today and think that we’re living in normal economic times, and that, in Philip Larkin’s line, everything will come right again if we could only sit quite still and wait. We Americans could easily find ourselves soon in a situation as apparently hopeless as the Greek middle class does today. Are we ready for it? What are we doing to get ready for it?

UPDATE: A reader found a copy of the St. Francisville-in-Hurricane-Gustav post from my old blog. Here it is. Thanks, MEH!

A contingent of Kentucky National Guardsmen are billeting in the Methodist church hall in St. Francisville, my hometown. They’re down in Louisiana to help restore power in Gustav’s wake. Some of the folks from the church who sing and play music went over this evening to perform for them, to give something back to these men who have come from so far away to help out.

Turns out that the Guardsmen had made arrangements with a preacher who works for the town police (or the parish sheriff’s office, can’t remember which) to come hold some kind of Sunday service for them in the church hall. My sister, who was there, told them that if they wanted to have church, well, let’s go into the church itself. And so they did. There were no lights anywhere, but the preacher preached a beautiful sermon about the power of the storm and how faith can’t keep storms away, but it can help believers endure.

“We sure had church,” my sister told me.

We talked just now about what they’re enduring this week, and how they still don’t have any lights on, and the heat. My sister said, “You know, though, I told the pastor at church this morning that this whole hurricane thing has been a real blessing to me.”

“A blessing?” I asked.

“Yeah, a blessing. You wouldn’t believe all the good things neighbors out here have been doing for neighbors. People are going to visit each other, and taking food over, because everybody’s got to clean their freezers out. People are taking the time just to sit and visit and enjoy each other’s company. We have a generator in our camper, and the TV is on in there, but my girls have gotten busy playing games and doing crafts. They’re not watching much. It’s like old times, and I’m gonna tell ya, it’s great. It’s so nice to realize what it means to do the right thing by your neighbors, and to have this time with them. This really is what life is all about.”

I told my sister to watch out for Hurricane Ike, and to please please please drive up to Dallas if it heads their way.

“Rod, thank you, but we’re not going to do that,” she said. “We have our animals here, and everything else. Everybody needs everybody else to be here to help out. We’ll be fine. But we need to be at home.”

There’s beauty in that.

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