Good Ol’ Days
We can choose to not be so complicated all the time. Anthropologists are currently studying simpler times before the industrial revolution to gain insight on how to solve current problems. Simple and complex are relative terms. Simple could be defined in this context as people powered. Complex can be defined as machines or solid state technology.
To be clear, peoples lives have never been simple. Going back to a simpler time in memory is a way to escape the seemingly harsher reality of the present and replace it with a romanticized past. Simpler times in this context are past times in which less was used to achieve the same results, usually with a trade off of labor. Technology, especially mechanization, replaced physical labor. But, that labor achieved more for the individual directly. People worked for themselves usually with their families together. Today, people leave their families to go work for someone else. To sell products to someone else. To make money for someone else. Today, people in other countries don’t farm their own cultural lands. They grow cash crops on the same land but they don’t own it anymore. They work for the new owners of the land. In this country, more and more family farms are being bought by corporations and the family stays on as employees to run the farm for someone else. They then get cash to buy what they used to make and produce for themselves.
Subsistence
“I know that I could take my chain saw, truck and dog, go until the truck dies and be OK.”
Crystal Halvorson
We can become dependent on our technology very quickly. Technology makes life easier in the short run. If you had to haul your own water to do your dishes and to wash with, would you use less water than you do now? If you put up all the food you need for a winter, would it be rewarding to you? Would you appreciate the land around your home more than you do now?
We don’t have to take advantage of everything we have invented. We can live a life of less convenience and more work. Life would simply be harder. But also more aware. More connected.
People who have lived a subsistence life have a different view of the resources around them. They see themselves as responsible for how they live physically. When they grow their own food, hunt their own food and put up enough food to last them through a winter, they are working directly for themselves. They have most certainly earned what they have.
People who work a job to get everything that they have, have also earned those things. The difference is that there is an enormous and hidden infrastructure system supporting them in this effort. And, this infrastructure is causing immense destruction on the planet.
Either we find a system that offers less convenience and more subsistence for our industrialized populations to earn what they have or
we shall be forced to do so
in a greater haste than anyone would like.
The Possibility of Changed Habits
In Juneau Alaska, a town in a remote area of the state, all the electricity comes from a Hydro-electric power source. An avalanche took out the single cable running power to the town. They had no power for four months due to the difficulty in getting crews to the area to fix the cable. In the mean time, back up diesel generators were used to provide functioning power. The cost of power to the residents of Juneau became almost five times more expensive. It jumped from .11 cents per kilowatt hour up to .54 cents per kilowatt hour. The residents of the town cut their energy use by 40% in two weeks. They took out one light bulb in each room of government buildings. They shut down their saunas, their pools and stopped watering their golf course.
They changed their habits.
Not only because electricity became more expensive, but because there simply wasn’t enough electricity to operate all the things they would have liked to have. There was enough electricity to run critical town and home systems. The cost of this electricity to run those systems became very expensive. This is a foreshadowing of what we as a society could face in the not too distant future.
We would be able to have what we need
not what we want.
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