Earth Hour.
Worried about climate change? Recognise that your lifestyle is damaging the earth’s life support system? Need some way to show that you care, that doesn’t involve giving up anything, any hard work, or any challenge to the status quo and those who run things? Turning your lights off for one hour will not have any real effect, and can be done by anyone. No matter how disempowered you feel in your everyday life, or how enslaved you are to your mortgage payments, you can feel good and like you have made a difference, simply by turning your lights out for one hour (the earth hour website suggests making a blog post about it while the lights are out, completely negating any tiny possible CO2 reductions!)
Having lived on a smallholding, gradually reducing our shopping and increasing our self-sufficiency, for the past 5 years, I have been told time and again how ‘lucky’ I am. Many many people would love to live this life, but are fundamentally slaves within civilisation. The danger of earth hour and similar events, is that people are encouraged to do a token gesture, thereby feeling better about themselves and their lives, without taking a proper honest look at their lives, or doing anything that will make a difference.
Lets face it, most of us have grown up within the empire/civilisation with very little contact or experience of food growing. The transition to a more sustainable society, is not going to be easy for most of us. Growing food is hard work, and even the hands-off systems of permaculture and no-dig raised beds are hard work to set up and the personal changes we’d need to make to live with nature will not necessarily come easy.
Making this lifestyle harder is the fact that we are not able to remove ourselves completely from civilisation. Many of us have mortgages or rents to pay, which means we must generate cash – which the industrial food machine has made close to impossible from small farms. I have a few chickens, as an example, whose eggs end up costing me more than supermarket eggs. They are fantastic eggs, far superior to any industrial factory eggs, and I could reduce my costs if I had more time to put into growing food for my chickens – time that now goes to making a cash income to pay our few bills.
I guess what I am saying is that we are all slaves to some degree in this system. People who are still totally reliant on empire for their necessities are likely to find earth hour appealing as they can get a warm glow without any comfort zone infringement. What we need, though, is to take stock, look at the situation and start freeing ourselves from that slavery. This system is in the process of crashing, the earth needs it to crash, the human race needs it to crash. Dependent slaves will be going down with it – leave your lights on and use that hour to research heritage veg seeds, permaculture, rainwater harvesting or some other skills that will help in the local, organic, hand-powered reality.
Those of us further down the line also could do well to honestly look at where we stand. I look around my farm/home and see far too many external inputs. Breaking old habits is perhaps the hardest thing to do, especially when those habits have been with us all our lives, and are reinforced by everyone around us.
Things have to change, and the longer we resist that change, the harder it will be for us. If we wait until the decision is made for us, either through financial collapse due to peak oil, or food scarcity due to climate catastrophe (both hapening already) it will be no fun. If we avoid hard work and hardship now, it will accumulate for later.
On a positive note, permaculture systems do get easier with time, as perennial food plants get established, and life generally gets easier on the farm as we get used to the work, the different diets, different hours, and self-motivation. It should all get easier too, as the system collapses and perhaps demands for our time and cash disappear.
By growing stuff now, instead of buying it, we are also hastening the economic collapse, which in turn pushes others into a different culture, as jobs vanish and businesses disappear. Civilisation is a worldview, and is supported by our confidence in it. If enough of us find our way back to the land, refusing to waste our lives in factories and offices, those same factories and offices cease to be economically viable and disappear.
Ten thousand years or so of civilisation have gotten us here, we can’t expect quick fixes to work although you may well find that home grown food immediately improves your health.
The only way to change society is to start living what you want society to be like. Its up to you and me to stop buying things from far away or big companies, or that we can make or grow ourselves, and to reclaim our lives. It is unlikely to be easy for any of us, but it will be worth it.
