In pre-industrial times, everybody was a survivalist. The supply chain for your food was from your front door to your field, and if your house fell down in a hurricane, there was nobody to drive you to a gymnasium and stuff your backpack with t-shirts and fish sticks. If you got sick, you died or you didn't.
However, as we've come to rely more and more on the intricate machinery of a mechanized world to keep ourselves alive, there have been those who worried about what would happen if the whole thing fell apart.
In the 1950's, with nuclear Armageddon looming, some wondered if ducking and covering would really be adequate protection against several mega-tonnes of high-powered Russian technology. Sales of easy-to-install home fallout shelters boomed, along with freeze dried foods and other accoutrements of civilized living necessary for a couple of years spent keeping the mutant hordes at bay from behind 5 feet of steel and concrete.
As cold war tensions eased, people thought less about nuclear war, but the disintegration of industrial society remained a concern for some. The 70's saw the first use of the term "survivalist", often in reference to well-armed eccentrics with unconventional views on race relations holed up in the countryside somewhere.
While the survivalist trend waxed and waned with energy crises and predicted ice ages, and made a limited comeback during the Y2K scare, it never recovered the mainstream appeal it had achieved in the first couple of post-war decades.
But that may be changing.
The current movement to save the planet, or more accurately to save ourselves, has a couple of different components. High-glam, high tech is one part. These are big budget, big picture projects - giant wind farms, networks of hydrogen fueling stations, massive new buildings that generate their own power . Most of these are in concept or planning stages and a few have actually been built, but the common denominator is they cost a lot of money and a lot of fossil-fuel energy to build, both of which are in increasingly short supply.
Trotting alongside the mega-projects are our individual efforts like recycling garbage, turning down the a/c, driving slower etc; simple things that we can each do to lessen our impact on the environment. We can call this "feel-good" stuff, because while it doesn't hurt, incremental actions like riding a bike once a week won't pull us out of the global warming frying pan. Besides, half the planet's population is living a low-carbon lifestyle already, and for the most part desperately trying to escape it.
But there's a more disquieting element to the personal green battle. That's the piece that speaks to the voice whispering in the back of every eco-enthusiast's head :"What if we don't get it together? What if things do come apart?"
And there are plenty of people ready to answer those questions.
Green websites are chock-a-block with useful advice on how to grow your own food, collect rainwater, and install enough mini-solar and wind power to keep the homestead running in the event of blackouts. What farm animals can I raise in my yard? Can I grow tomatoes in a window box? What's the best kind of composting toilet?
It's not called survivalism any more, because that terminology has unpleasant associations, but it amounts to the same thing. How do I take care of me and mine, once government and society have collapsed from the twin threats of climate change and resource depletion?
The ongoing shift from "how do we save the planet" to "how do I save myself" is subtle, because no one wants to be the the first one in the neighbourhood to go all Chicken Little. Still, as the media drumbeat of impending cataclysm sounds louder, it's not surprising that more people are looking for a personal backup plan. Not that we're survivalists, you understand, that's so...crazy. But no harm in keeping a little garden in the yard, and maybe throwing some solar panels on the barn up at Uncle Harry's farm.
There's nothing wrong with all this, practically speaking - anything we do to make our footprint lighter helps. But it's important that we not lose sight of the bigger picture, which is that if we abandon the effort to act collectively and yes, politically, we doom ourselves. 7 billion people simply can't go back to the land - we've domesticated ourselves to the point where without some form of the complex infrastructure we've built, most of us will disappear.
Luckily there are solutions. In the UK and increasingly elsewhere, citizens are planning "transition towns", communities which would be largely self-sufficient but don't subscribe to the "every person for themself" ethos of the survivalist. Urban farming collectives are popping up in cities around the world. People are helping each other. And at a national and international level, leaders who don't see the importance of a shift to sustainability are being marginalized.
So haul your ass out of that bunker, buddy. We've got work to do.
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