Green Survivalism
A few months ago, John Laumer wrote about Survivalist Green for TreeHugger.
The most prominent face of Survivalist Green is that of the city dweller; the second is of the suburban or exurban dweller. (Covers everything from apartments along the rail line to Mega-Mansions in the exurb zone.)
The third face of SG extends to the house trailer next to Mom & Dad’s farmstead and on to the Off Griders and Climate Doom Cultists.
I’m starting to call oblivious city dwellers “gridheads.” Their day is coming! My version of going off-grid is a bit more tech-friendly than TreeHugger’s caveman illo would suggest.
On Friday, May 2, Harriet Green’s article Natural Born Survivors was published in The Guardian.
This week, the details got scarier. The UN warned of a global food crisis, like a “silent tsunami”, while Opec predicts that oil, which broke through $100 (£50) a barrel for the first time a few weeks ago, may soon top $200.
Green goes beyond the survivalist stereotype and provides examples of regular folks and even business executives preparing for tough times.
The purpose of this blog from the beginning has been to combine the best elements of the greens, survivalists and technogeeks.
We should care for nature and people like the greens without concluding that “human extinction would be a good thing.”
We should adopt appropriate survival methods of the backwoods types without becoming racist, sexist and just plain mean.
Technology should be geared for loose self-reliance and a new do-it-yourself ethic, instead of locking users into a pay-by-the-month system that will be catastrophic if it fails. Think free software, wifi and MAKE magazine.
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May 5th, 2008 at 9:51 am
“Gridheads” - I like that. Can I use it, Kent?
The relative prosperity in the United States over the last eighty years has left most people unprepared for the tough times that are an inevitable part of the cycle in both nature and human social systems.
You have an interesting blog in that most survivalist types are preparing for a complete meltdown of society to more “primitive levels” while you feel that technology will continue to serve an important role for those who survive the ordeal.
Of course you are more likely correct as the knowledge of technology will not go away even if the grid is down. I look forward to more posts Kent.
May 7th, 2008 at 4:07 am
Gridheads is a registered trademark of the greedy pig on a hill corporation–oh wait, just kidding. If you like it, feel free to use it as far as I’m concerned, assuming it’s original with me, in a Creative Commons non-commercial sense. If you sell it to Hollywood, share the wealth, brother!
I include permaculture, seedballs, ham radio, and non-electric fluidic tinker-toy rod logic under the term “technology.” Neil Stephenson described the struggle over future technology as the choice between “feed” (like the grid) and “seed” (off-grid) in his novel, The Diamond Age. But with nanotech.