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WinnersBeyond Peak Scenario Contest |
The Silver Lining
By Kathy McMahon
It's 2050 and Grandnana and Leah, her teenaged granddaughter, are talking about what life was like when everybody found out about Peak Oil
Leah: Thanks for helping me with this assignment, Grandnana. I'll read you the questions I have to answer, and you tell me as much as you can remember, okay?
Grandnana: Okay, Honey, I'll tell you as much as I can.
Leah: Okay, I'll look up the rest, later. First question: "Were there any people aware that the planet was running out of fossil fuels, and, if so, what did they do to prepare?"
Grandnana: "Oh, my. That's quite a big question. Let's put it this way, the people who ran governments all over the world knew it. They had to know it, because scientists kept telling them over and over. I don't think they wanted to believe it, because it was such a massive problem. They knew they had to make big changes, but they didn't want to 'rock the boat.' You see, Honey, everything back then was run by huge corporations. They ran the world, really. They paid big money to the politicians to help them run their campaigns and so the politicians were indebted to them. And the corporations had just one focus: Profits."
Leah: But Grandnana, if they didn't take care of the fossil fuel depletion and come up with alternative sources of energy fast, they wouldn't have profits.
Grandnana: I know, it's hard to describe. It was like the people in power were on a fast moving party train and they wanted to stay on it as long as possible, because they were having such a delightful time. Even when someone said "That train is going into that wall up ahead," they would say "Yes, maybe, but not for a long time yet, and right now, we are going to keep partying!"
The oil executives knew they were running out of fossil fuels. They started buying up alternative energy companies. They knew they couldn't stop the inevitable and they were making so much money, they said "Great! More profits for us!" They weren't going to change until they had to.
And nobody wanted to "scare" the public, because if they told the truth, people would freak out, at least initially, and then they would start doing things that would change the 'status quo.' They'd withdraw money from their retirement accounts. That would cause a stock market crash. The crash would cause an immediate economic depression, and the corporations wouldn't be making as much money. So, the U.S.A. decided to go and grab the last remaining oil there was, and they started making up these stories, and sending all of these soldiers off to war to fight for "The American Way."
The Vice President back then said "The American way of life is non-negotiable." But of course, tell that to 'Mother Nature." So many people died, all over the world, but especially in countries that had the last remaining oil reserves. It was such a waste. Instead of investing in something that would actually improve the situation, the strongest countries fought each other to grab what was left.
Most people thought that some 'fantastic' discovery would be found that would replace oil immediately, because that's what the governments told them. Instead of investing in alternative energy, most people kept putting it off. It was a horrible time, really, but the vast majority of people were sleep-walking. Not all of them, mind you, but the ones that believed what their governments told them.
Leah: What were the governments saying, Grandnana?
Grandnana: It was so crazy now to think that anyone would believe it, but they did. They thought that the value of their homes would go 'up-up-up,' and so they 'refinanced,' which meant that they took out huge loans against the value of their houses. They just got deeper and deeper into debt with the banks.
Then people stopped being willing to pay the high prices for houses and the housing market started to go down. It started slowly, then sped up. After that, people lost their jobs, and the rolling blackouts happened more and more. There was a big push to start conserving, energy and alternative energy products started to become more available, but a lot of people were just tapped out financially. They didn't have the money to spend thousands of dollars retrofitting their homes for alternative energy, and those that did were shocked to find out that they STILL couldn't use electricity like they did before. It was a huge 'wake up' call. The people in poorer cities started to riot, and there was a national outcry, but it was like screaming at the wind.
You see, we were suppose to be at war with these 'terrorists' from the Middle East, so the majority of people blamed the energy situation on the' terrorists.' There were these color alerts that told us how afraid we should be of bombs going off, or poisons in our water, or whatever. Basically, Leah, they told us that the people from the Middle East, the places WE were invading, were going to hurt us.
Leah: Wait. This country was invading the last of the oil countries, but the leaders were telling the people that they were invading us?
Grandnana: Yep, and it worked too. You had all kinds of stuff going around about how evil they were, and how they were "crazy" and just "hated freedom" and stuff like that. Honey, let's get off this, because none of it made any sense in the long run, but people didn't think about the long run. At least most people didn't.
Leah: But some did…
Grandnana: Yes, some did. I was one of them. We were called 'paranoid' and 'doomsayers' and 'survivalists' as if that was a bad word. We kept talking to each other through list servers, generating ideas--telling each other the most current news when we heard it--giving moral support for taking steps to prepare for the decline of fossil fuels.
One of these list servers had a contest. They gave out just a small prize or two, to the person who could come up with the best story of what life would be like after Peak Oil, as they called it then. There were a lot of people painting very gloomy pictures, as if there would be no real future for the human race. The people running the contest wanted something different. They didn't want a "Jiminy Cricket," "all will be wonderful" story, either. How I thought about it then, was they wanted a "fuzzy set" of how we could get out of it in the best possible way. Maybe many "fuzzy sets" of ideas, that people could grasp on to and take action to making it happen. I decided to write one.
Leah: Did you win?
Grandnana: No, my story was much too long, and not as optimistic as I think they wanted, but it was published as a "runner up" along with 5 others.
Leah: What did you write about?
Grandnana: I wrote as if it already was 2050, and I was looking back. I told about how we started to get together in local groups and form 'work groups' to help each other. I went into great detail about how my group in Western Massachusetts, USA, began by listing what we could offer each other in the way of practical skills or products right now, today. We decided that this was going to be a better way to get to know each other, and form attachments, than just sitting around and talking. In that story, I made up a whole group of people that came together that first meeting. One of them raised lambs, and offered to provide the community lamb meat. She said she'd been talking to a dairy farmer in the same town who was fed up with business as usual, and seemed responsive to selling locally too, if he didn't have a lot of people coming in every day trampling the fields.. There was a woman who was an office worker, who knew how to make soap with interesting herbal fragrances and treatments, and she said she'd start doing that for the group, if anyone wanted her to. There was a guy from the next town who had a reputation for being kind of crazy. He was an organic farmer, who tried to get a community farm going, but he was just too odd and people didn't feel comfortable dealing with him. He was a great farmer though. He sat silently for two of the meetings, and then just said: "Squash, beans & corn." People in the room looked at one another, and asked him "What?" and again he said "Squash, beans & corn."
Now I knew that those three plants were the Three Sisters. According to Iroquois legend, these plants were considered a special gift from the Creator. The Iroquois had an ingenious method of inter-planting pole beans and squash with corn. They used the strength of the sturdy corn stalks to support the twining beans, and the shade of the spreading squash vines to trap moisture for the growing crops. The legend was that these three sisters would never be apart from one another, should be planted together, and celebrated together.
Grandnana stopped speaking, and her weary eyes began to fill with tears. She thought about her own two sisters, and about the time when they believed they would never be separated either. It was a long time ago. The flood of emotion was immediately sensed by her "interviewer."
Leah: Grandnana? Do you want to stop?
Grandnana: No Honey, it was just that talking about those Three Sisters reminded me of how difficult it was to leave my own family. Try as I might, none of them believed me. They refused to leave the city…refused to believe that the Emergency Camps were dangerous. But I want to keep on with the story. It was quite a tale. I wrote it all in one night. Where was I?
Leah: The strange man only said "squash, beans & corn."
Grandnana: Oh, yes. So, knowing that about the Iroquois nation, I asked him directly: "You'll plant the Three Sisters for us? You'll help us stay healthy with squash, beans & corn?" The man beamed and nodded his head and warm smiles went all around. Someone else said there was a The Three Sisters Cookbook put out by the Oneida Indian Nation Health Department out of New York, and promised to find it and bring it for our next meeting.
Leah: Wait, Grandnana, did that really happen, or was that in your story?
Grandnana: Well, that's the darndest thing. I wrote that story so realistically; I could see these characters clearly in my mind. They were a rag-tag bunch, some students, some old people, some hippies, a few politicos, a business man who had more money than all of us put together, and of course, the crazy organic farmer who was going to plant the Three Sisters. In my mind, I thought out what a community would need that it could provide itself, and then I put that into the story. I included a guy who volunteered to sharpen knives and shaving blades. I had him eventually buying a bunch of good basic knives for the people who didn't have any, just so he could sharpen them. In my imagined group, the focus was on the pragmatics of building a community with each other, but the emotional support, lamenting about Peak Oil, and having fun with each other was stuff that came later. I didn't want a Polly Anna kind of story. I wanted to let the reader know that we had to learn to overlook other people's vanities or vulgarity or ignorance, because I knew that that's what we were going to have to do after Peak Oil.
Leah: So, what happened?
Grandnana: At the end of the story, I made a pitch that this was what we had to do now, in community groups like this all over the world. I left my email address for anyone in Western Massachusetts interested in starting that kind of group, and I got a flood of responses. They wanted to start a group like that in there neighborhood, too, and they wanted to know how to do it. I had to laugh. I hadn't done it yet. I just wrote a story about doing it. But the story was so clear and so human, I realized that all we had to do was get the people together and we would pull it off.
Not exactly like the story. No. That's why I called it a 'Fuzzy Set.' But close enough for each of us to make it our own, to shape the kind of world we wanted to have around us and just do it.
It reminds me of a movie I saw when I was a girl, your age. It was called "Oh, God." I'll never forget it. It had John Denver who played a clerk in a grocery store and George Burns played God. He went to John Denver and said "Spread the word. I'm not dead." It was a very funny movie, I'll see if the Visual Media Storage has it, and you can watch it. Anyway, he said to God: "Why me?" and God said "Who else? You're as good as anyone…" and so Denver said "Give me something I can show to them, a rod or something that turns into a snake, to convince them." God said simply: "You have each other. That's all you'll ever need."
So, back to what actually happened: Our first meeting, in real life, was small. It had maybe 4 people in it. One dropped out and went back to the city after her husband divorced her. The other three, God bless each one of them, is dead now. But without them, this community wouldn't have had a chance of getting off the ground. Also, I didn't know this, but later on, a guy who was an organic farmer, and who really did have a reputation for being odd, emailed me and said simply "Squash, Beans & Corn." Next meeting is?" He came to that next meeting, and, as if I was giving him some kind of direct order, he said he'll make sure he can grow enough of all three plants for 500 people if the community got that big.
That was Grandpa Franklin, Mr. Harney's Dad. Boy that guy never did say much, but when he did, he got right to the point. I remember one year he said to Fred Davis "More *hit!" (laughter), because Fred had the dairy farm and Franklin needed more manure. He was such a character. And boy, could he farm!
Leah: How did you go from four people to an entire community of, how big are we now? Almost 1000?
Grandnana: We did it because we never talked about three things during the meeting:
*Politics *Religion, or *Anything we couldn't directly control.
For example, we couldn't control what was happening in other parts of the world. We had debates about this rule, until we found the right question to ask:
"What are you willing to do right now, at this point, to help the community's long-term viability?"
Unless it directly contributed to us getting something done, it never became an agenda item. Oh, believe me; these subjects were discussed at other times. But, everyone seemed to realize right from the start, that if we spent our time trying to "craft" some grand plan, we'd get nothing accomplished. If you offered an idea, it meant you were willing to work to make it happen. People had to put up or shut up.
Leah: But how did you deal with the tremendous climate of political turmoil or corporate domination, like you said?
Grandnana: We simply ignored it.
Leah: What?
Grandnana: We simply ignored it. We said it wasn't something we could do anything about, so we'd just ignore it, and that's what we did. By the time the "National Homeland Safety Relocation Directive"(NHSRD) came to each of our homes, we just used the paper it was written on to start a fire. No one even mentioned it during the next meeting, because "it wasn't anything that we could control." We did get word that the army was going through the larger towns one week, but we basically stayed away, and they never came looking for us. I guess they had enough to worry about.
Leah: How did you decide who to let in and who to exclude when the dislocation happened in the cities?
Grandnana: Well, as you know, Dear, we aren't exactly on Main Street. Most people figured that a small, poor community like ours wouldn't have very much to give them. The few that ignored government orders and wanted to be 'Yahoos,' went into the wealthier towns, to steal jewelry and video equipment and stuff like that. City people still couldn't' grasp the fact that food didn't come out of cans and supermarkets. Most of the troublemakers in the cities died, I suppose, and the 'good citizens,' if they waited for the NHSRD, were probably too weak or disheartened to do anything but follow orders.
We did also get a few relatives, most of them before the dislocation. Boy, was it a shock to them coming out here. I remember one woman, a very beautiful young lady, who brought her dog, just a spit of a thing. One thing she asked was what she was going to use to 'pooper scoop' her dog after his walk, because she had run out of plastic bags. We thought that was the funniest thing. The world is falling down around her, she comes to a place of open fields and dirt roads, and she's worried about dog poop. We told her to use leaves, and gave her a spot to put them. But we did get a kick out of that one.
She kept insisting that she couldn't "do" anything, because she was an interior designer, not a farmer. At first she said it in that kind of snooty way, like she was too good for it, but after a while, it sounded more like a plea. Like "Please, can't you see I have no skills?" You know, she couldn't just sit around and be waited on. Unless she came up with something she could contribute, she'd be stuck shoveling manure.
Leah: What did you do with her?
Grandnana: What could you do? We told her simply that these were the kinds of jobs we currently needed done. She could decide which of them she wanted to learn and rotate into, or leave. You should have seen the look on her father's face when we said that. He'd been trying to get that girl to do something practical for the last 5 years. She just refused, until she realized we were serious, and that she had no where to go. When she got stronger from the manual labor, she didn't mind it so much. But initially, she showed up in clothes like she was going on vacation. Not the kind appropriate for the life she was going to lead. We got quite a bit of that from relatives escaping the city. We called it "Country Shock." No one paid much attention to it after the first 1/2 dozen, because we knew that most of them would wise up and come around.
Leah: What did you do to those that just wouldn't work?
Grandnana: We told them they were welcome to stay on the outskirts, if they could find someone to put them up, but they could not participate in our community. No food. No soap. No hot water or heat. Nothing. We weren't being harsh. It was just a fact of life. One more person actually meant more farming, more space to share, more house to keep up. If we let some people just sit around because they were "special" then we'd have the same slave mentality we wanted to get away from. Nobody was "special" even then. Even if you had piles of gold or silver. Unless you planned to do some metalwork with that, you could move on.
Leah: Was there violence?
Grandnana: Yes, there was some in the very beginning, with people who didn't want to live "like them communists" and remained in town. They usually had some of the basics to survive on, at least for a while, but eventually, they realized they couldn't just run to the store to pick up some items they ran out of. One or two tried to rob other people. One guy was shot breaking into a person's house late one night. People had guns for hunting. There was a large segment of our community that got practice using them before the mass evacuation. But after a little while, most sensible folks that stayed away at first, realized that we weren't so crazy or "commie" after all, we were just neighbors helping each other to survive. They came around.
Leah: Question Two: What were your worst fears? What was the most difficult period for you, personally?
Grandnana: My worst fear was that nobody would have any interest in being in community with me. I was afraid I would just remain isolated with your Grandpapa, your mother, and grandmother and life would just get harder and harder. Of course, before you came, my biggest fear was that you wouldn't get out in time. Thank God my daughter finally started to listen to me. I just wish the rest of my extended family had. At least for their children's sake.
The most difficult period was when I started to realize that a large percentage of people were not going to do anything until it was too late to be effective. They were so used to what they were doing; they couldn't imagine a world where they couldn't keep doing that anymore. They just couldn't imagine it. And they paid with their lives for their lack of imagination.
Most of them died of the so called "pandemic flu," in the relocation camps. I think a lot more just starved to death waiting for the next shipment of food to hit the grocery shelves. For me, having a community by then, the worst of it was not knowing how the entire world was going to turn out. We were alright. We knew we would be, ten years before. It was those "good citizens" who "waited for direction" that got the worst of it.
Leah: Question Three: What items of the fossil fuel age do you miss the most? Which types of things do you think the Post Peak Generation missed out on by being born later?
Grandnana: Oh, that's a great question. Let me think: I guess overall I'd say it wasn't just "things," as much as it was the feeling that life was easy. It took no effort to have what you wanted. We never thought about how much electricity we used when I was a girl. You flicked a switch, and paid your bill, and there it was. We used to take "joy rides" for hours.
Leah: A "joy ride?"
Grandnana: It meant that you just got into your car with your friends and drove as far and as long as you wanted, until it was time to go home. If we were moving in a car, we thought we were getting somewhere. We had such a great variety of everything: isles of soaps and shampoos; ice makers built into these gigantic refrigerators, and you could just put your glass up and get all the ice and water you wanted. We used to give the dogs ice water too. Items from all over the world available every day: spices, cloth from India, bananas and other tropical fruit all year round, as many as you wanted.
But short of that, what we gave up in consumer goods we got back in community. Not everyone has ipods to listen to individually, but we have instruments we can make music on together. We don't have rock stars, but we have sparkling stars over head, now that the night sky is seen so clearly. We don't have a lot of things, but we have a lot more time to be with our families. Working together for the common good. We never had that before the threat of Peak Oil. We were never challenged to learn what the true meaning of brotherhood and sisterhood…real participatory democracy, really meant. Now we do.
Kathy McMahon is a future Grandnana who is waiting for her community to email her. You can reach her at Grandnana at peakoilblues dot com
You can reach her at grandnana@peakoilblues.com or visit her website about the psychological effects of learning about peak oil at www.peakoilblues.com.
Permission is granted by the author to freely publish or link this to other websites, as long as the above link and email address is included in each case, so my community building invitation reaches interested parties.
