ElementalMom

What Paranoid Feels Like

Yesterday, I went to a highly-recommended salon, to get my hair done. Generally, this is a pretty soothing ritual, wherein I get two hours to chill the heck out and read brainless magazines I’d otherwise not be caught dead reading, and indulge what little vanity I have. My family goes grey early, and I totally refuse. Better living through chemistry! The woman who was doing my hair was not a native english speaker by any stretch, and since conversation was a little difficult, I generally kept my nose poked into my magazine. That was, of course, my first mistake.

I was reading the current issue of Rolling Stone, which featured an interview with Al Gore about Live Earth, and “An Inconvenient Truth”, and a blow-by-blow investigative report by a Rolling Stone reporter Tim Dickinson called “The Secret Campaign of President Bush’s Administration To Deny Global Warming.”

I have an undergraduate degree in Environmental Studies with an emphasis in Marine Interpretation, and all but a thesis’ worth of a master’s degree in the same thing. I am a bona fide, documented, card-carrying kelp-hugging freak. Always have been. I read Al Gore’s first environmental book, “Earth in the Balance“, while in grad school. Being a student rather than a politician, and having rather more latitude in my opinions, I was disappointed by it, as it didn’t seem to go nearly far enough. People, I thought, just didn’t get how bad things were getting.

Well apparently, they’re coming to the party. I haven’t seen “An Inconvenient Truth” yet. I already understand that we’re rapidly making the planet uninhabitable, by our current standards, and that we’re so somnolent that most Americans are still arguing about it as if it might possibly not be true. It’s in our Netflix queue, though.

In every other place I have traveled to in the last five years, upon discovering that I was mainland American, someone has taken me aside, and earnestly said “what is it going to take for you people to realize what’s happening? Here where we are….” and then they go on to talk about the very real changes they’re observing. In New Zealand, the seasons have shifted several months. In Puerto Rico, the rainy season is longer and longer, and the heat is, well, hotter. In Hawaii, they’re seeing erosion, and the cumulative effects of eustasy.

I guess because we’re continental, we can afford a little more cluelessness, a little more obliviousness. I guess that denial feels good.

Me? I sat there in the chair and felt cold.

A few posts ago, I talked about how Cindy Sheehan has given up on America as a political institution, and I agreed. Giving up on a nation is painful, but doable, as the world is filled with other governments that have a lot to recommend them. But giving up on a climate? On a planet I’m very fond of? That’s significantly harder to do, without ending up sitting in a corner, in the sort of shock that renders you actionless.

For part of my childhood, my family hung out with survivalists. And from them, I learned a lot about what certain paranoid mental states look like, and I also learned a lot about basic survival, what it looks like, and what you need to be prepared to deal with. I read Dmitri Orlov’s “Closing the Collapse Gap” and howled with laughter, because he manages to state, with humor, what I generally see around me anyway. Collapse of this system, this empire, is eminent. It’s not a question, in my mind. I am pretty sure that it’s something my children are going to have to deal with.

So if the empire collapses, and the environment collapses… what then?

What then is that even to myself, I start sounding like a paranoid nutcase. I enumerate the basic necessities, I think through means of securing supplies of said necessities, I think about the relative mental and physical fitness that’s required to ensure that one copes with what comes in as reasonable, equitable, and fair a manner as possible. I don’t believe in hoarding, I think that’s ridiculous. I once knew a survivalist who’d built himself a bunker and stockpiled 100 pairs of levis. I asked him what happened if his bunker disappeared, and how he’d cope without levis. And he was unable to answer. His security was locked in a certain coping response, and despite being a survivalist, which means that he’d self-identified as someone who’d faced the idea that things could indeed get very bad, he still wasn’t to a place where he’d given up the need for certain material objects.

If you think about it for a moment, you’ll realize that I just said that a nutcase stockpiling levis has more going for him with regards to connecting to current reality than our government does.

The reality, as I see it, is that as a culture, we’ve gotten fat, lazy, tired, and stupid. Most of us aren’t in good enough shape to walk for a mile, let alone sustain the sort of endurance needed to, say, acquire one’s own food consistently. We require copious quantities of sunscreen to cope with minimal sun exposure without frying to a crisp. We get bent out of shape when our little conveniences are denied us, even temporarily. Our routines have become us, and we are somehow incapable of interacting with the biological world we came from.

Buying a Prius and replacing your lightbulbs isn’t enough. It’s far too late for that. And if we were actually out in the real, biological, environment more, instead of safely cooped up in our little boxes, we’d see it as clearly as people in other places do.

We have some serious catching up to do, if we’re going to make it. We have to step up and face the big ugly. And yet, I believe deeply in my heart that we must do so without the hostility and violence that tends to characterize survival discussions. It’s not about guns, people, it’s about water. Even in a survival situation, you can live without a gun for a day, but you cannot live without water for the same amount of time. Don’t bother stockpiling ammo; learn how to harvest dew or how to make a solar still. And then teach every single person you know how to do the same thing. This isn’t about you. It is about us all.

And by the way? My hair looks great. Now I just need to secure a supply of walnuts, for after the fall, so I don’t show my grey…