Dismantle Civilisation

Says Sharon Astyk, who has been, and continues to be, a wonderful source of common-sense perception. She writes a lot of stuff that we’d write here, but instead are able to link to her articles.

I think at the back of most of our minds is the idea that someday, we’ll use the hand grinder or the wood stove because then, we’ll have more time - we won’t have a job that sucks up our days, we won’t have all these pressures on us. But all of us need to give some thought to the other possibility - what if we don’t have more time, and still have to do this stuff? Even during the Great Depression, 3/4 of the working population had work - and others were able to work intermittently - but every day you had to get up and go where the work was and wait for it. I think a lot of us are waiting for a life of comparative free time that may never come for us - in fact, we may be working more and longer, at least for a time, trying to maintain, and trying to learn to integrate these new tools into our lives.

What I do find is that using this stuff today frees up money for other things - and since money comes from my time, the net of using these lower input things is sometimes less total time on my part than I think. The classic example of this, of course, is the bicycle. Right now, many of us think we don’t have time to bicycle places, and there’s some truth to that. Why don’t we have time? Well, part of the reason is that we have to work an average of 2 months every year to keep our cars running. Dumping the car may not be easy (I haven’t succeeded yet), but the time to bicycle is there - we have to figure out a way to access it. The life with just a bike would be harder in many ways - but easier in others. And while a car/bike life isn’t too costly or difficult, other combinations, in which both the fossil and non-fossil options are both kept going are harder and more costly - it is extremely expensive to lay in a winter’s supply of pellets or wood and install the stove, as well as keeping the oil or gas heat on.

We are entering a period of transition, where we are bringing new (and the old) ways of being, while the oil is still available enabling us to continue in the ways that most of us have lived our whole lives doing. Its not necessarily easy to switch off from civilisation, but we need to be aware that these things are coming to an end, the infrastructure is crumbling and that hand tools do not have the environmental impact that their electric or deisel counterparts do. Every litre less fuel we use is something like 2 kilos of co2 that isnt heating up the planet. Every time we relax and do a job without having to rush, enjoying the act of doing as well as the finished product, we are taking a step away from heart failure and stress, we are making our lives better, and we are hopefully forging better links with our neighbours, family and friends. Every little thing we do in a way that we’d prefer, we are taking a tiny step towards building the world we want to live in, rather than playing along with those who make the rules for civilisation.