Apocalypse Now

I’m thinking that most of the journal and magazine articles I read, and the news reports of politicians' and think tanks’ outputs, desires and forecasts, are irrelevant. I can only relate them to imagining the Captain of the Titanic at the dinner table, blandly regaling to his special guests his stories of this great ship’s exceptional functioning, all the while as they rush towards that iceberg...... out of sight, just over the horizon, in the dark.

What’s the point now of my adding another rant against the  heedless ignorance of our times, adding to the g growing yet still feeble pile of clear eyed visions published?

It’s time to read, to write,  what i can do to prepare to live in a different land,   
under a different climate, where the basics, food, shelter, community, cannot be taken for granted, have to be built from the ground up, by us as newcomers, who do not yet know the language we must use. In the land we will all shortly occupy we will have to acquire new skills to do the work necessary . We will find few teachers, and so have to invent, or re-invent our own skills of basic survival. We will have greater reasons to fear the predators and  power-seekers among us.

How it has come to this...

Everything we have come to rely on as if of course that is what sensible people do , all the articles and faiths of our present consumerist oil based culture, all are irrelevant and will be swept away by the coming tsunami of global scarcity.

We have overpopulated the planet and are running out of the cheap oil and the readily available resources, of metals, and chemicals (think fertiliser) , and pure water and clean benevolent air, that fuelled our population growth since the 1700’s. The global economic scheme that started with the Industrial Revolution is ending. 80% of what we do, or eat, or wear, or use for medical care, is fuelled by cheap oil. Which will soon be gone. Our children will have to stay close to home, get everything they need for survival near by. Medical care will be seen as the fraud it is, based on the wrong kind of science, a mechanical science, instead of what would work, an ecological and biological science. We are members of a culture, we are not mechanisms with interchangeable, replaceable parts, and will soon have to relearn that fact, forgotten for a mere century. All the speeches and prognostications claiming what we must do to save our education systems, our medical care systems, our economic systems, our democratic organisations, are now all irrelevant. No one knows what the coming collapse will look like, or how to survive it. All we can do to prepare, is to try now to learn to live as if we had no oil, nor any food except local food, nor any medical care or education save that we could  provide ourselves.
with love from Donato

http://www.donatopoetry.com
http://www.postcarbon.org