For three years, my husband has talked about taking to the hills. About buying a small farm where, with our four-year-old daughter, we can safely survive the coming storm — famine, pestilence and a total breakdown of society. I would wait for his lectures to finish, then return to my own interests. I had no time for the end of civilisation.
As an editor on a glossy magazine until a few months ago, I was too busy. There was always a new Anya Hindmarch bag to buy or a George Clooney premiere to attend.
But recently I’ve wavered. Much of what he has been predicting has come true: global economic meltdown, looming environmental disaster, a sharp rise in oil and food prices that has already led to the rationing of rice in the United States and riots in dozens of countries worldwide. This week the details got scarier. The United Nations warned of a global food crisis, like a “silent tsunami”, while Opec predicts that oil, which broke through $100 a barrel for the first time a few weeks ago, may soon top $200.
In the course of an idle conversation at work last week, a colleague casually revealed that he keeps a supply of tinned food in his bedroom for “just in case”. He has done this, apparently, ever since the July 7 bombings in London in 2005 and the fear of global pandemics such as Sars and bird flu.
He’s not alone. On the internet you’ll find numerous would-be survivalists discussing strategies: where to find a hideout, what goods to stock up on and the merits of carrying a 48-hour survival kit. In the United Kingdom some are even wondering how to get around the country’s relatively strict laws on the possession of weapons.
If not stockpiling food, many others are growing their own, with celebrity chef Jamie Oliver urging us to produce food in our gardens: sales of vegetable seeds in the UK are up 60% on last year this time. Others still are moving towards taking their homes “off-grid”, with rainwater harvesting and solar electricity, and withdrawing their money from pensions to invest in precious metals and other time-honoured securities.
I’ve started to worry. Is my family prepared for the worst? I’m reasonably nimble at the computer keyboard and a whiz with the hairdryer, but otherwise pretty useless. I’ve barely made or mended anything in my life. Thankfully my husband is three years older than me, and — with help from the many self-sufficiency manuals he’s collected — has evolved (or regressed) into a creature from the past: he’s got an allotment, has turned our garden into some kind of nursery for innumerable apple trees grown from pips (farewell, ornamental rose) and recently started knitting. He even has plans for a composting loo, in the event that water supplies fail.
This kind of survivalism is not entirely new. In the Seventies, with the threat of nuclear war in the air, government leaflets suggested we stock up on food and drink to last 14 days and advised how to build our own fallout rooms. Some of my cousins left the UK for a nuke-free life in Australia.
Survivalists have always seemed quintessentially American; scary, bear-like loners in commando jackets, loaded with ammunition. Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma bomber, was a survivalist, as were many of the scary characters in Michael Moore’s anti-gun film, Bowling for Columbine, including one with bulging eyes who kept a loaded firearm under his pillow. But today survivalists include the likes of Barton M Biggs, former chief global strategist at Morgan Stanley, who warns in his new book, Wealth War and Wisdom (published by Wiley), that we should accept the possibility of a breakdown of the civilised infrastructure.
“Your safe haven must be self-sufficient,” he advises, “and capable of growing some kind of food, should be well stocked with seed, fertiliser, canned food, wine, medicine, clothes etc. Think Swiss Family Robinson. Even in America and Europe there could be moments of riot and rebellion when law and order temporarily completely break down.”
Aside from climate change, what underpins all this gloom is a belief that we have nearly reached, or already passed, peak oil — the point at which global demand for oil permanently outstrips dwindling supplies, causing prices to shoot up. And not just the price of oil, but the price of virtually everything else too because our lives depend on ever-increasing amounts of cheap energy and synthetic petroleum byproducts.
Dr Vernon Coleman is a writer and broadcaster who has placed full-page advertisements in national newspapers to promote his new book, Oil Apocalypse. “This isn’t a script for a horror movie,” the terrifying text reads. “The lorry that collects your rubbish won’t be running. Streetlights won’t burn. Hospitals will have to close … There won’t be any more television programmes. You won’t be able to charge your mobile telephone. Within a generation five out of six people on the planet will be dead. I’ll repeat, five out of six people on the planet will be dead.”
Blimey. How long have we got? Well, at the annual conference of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil in Cork last year, the former US energy secretary, Dr James Schlesinger, said that oil industry executives privately conceded that the world faces an “imminent” oil production peak. Recently it emerged that output in Russia — the world’s second-biggest supplier after Saudi Arabia — has peaked already. The Saudis might have peaked, too, but they don’t allow outsiders to audit them, so we won’t know until it is too late. Brazil recently announced a massive new oilfield, but within a week its own government urged caution, warning that the claims were premature.
“We’ve got to start preparing now,” says Coleman. “The Saudis historically have always increased oil when there is a need, or if the Americans ask them to. This time they haven’t done so. Suddenly they have stopped increasing. All the evidence is there: we’ve reached peak oil.” Like many others, Coleman suggests that the recent move towards biofuels would not have happened unless conventional oil supplies had become scarce — and that it has been a disaster. “How stupid can you be? If you use land to grow crops that enable Americans to drive 4x4s, of course you’re going to reduce the amount of food that people can eat.” After a long period of steadily increasing globalisation, Coleman foresees a future in which everything will shrink back to the local. “You must prepare yourself for a different world. A world in which the rich ride horses, the middle classes use bicycles and the poor walk. If you are planning for the long-term — and in this scenario, five years is long term — don’t buy a house that relies on you having petrol for your car. You want a house in a town with a small garden where you can grow vegetables and you want to be relatively close to railways, hospitals, shops and libraries. The government shutting down local post offices is an enormously stupid thing to do.” Coleman believes that many big companies will collapse, taking their pension plans with them, and governments will not be able to step in. He’s switched his own investments to gold and silver.
We have little chance of fighting off the hungry masses when they tear lettuces from our window boxes and scale the fence of our allotment. And the truth is that probably few places in Britain are much safer — not even in the most remote parts of the countryside. Which is why we have put our hopes in a saner band of survivalists, who believe the answer is to work together.
The “transition town” movement was started by an Englishman, Rob Hopkins, after a stint working as a teacher in Kinsale, Ireland. After learning about peak oil, Hopkins and his traumatised students spent several months trying to imagine what Kinsale would be like without oil, some years in the future — then worked backwards to create an “energy descent” plan that, on completion, was unanimously endorsed by the local authorities.
Returning to the UK, Hopkins started something similar in Totnes, Devon, south west England, which became the first official transition town. There are now more than 35 of these grassroots initiatives up and running, not only in towns but also cities, villages and entire islands — and more than 500 communities worldwide are taking steps to join the Transition Network.
Hopkins recently published a manual, The Transition Handbook, a startlingly cheerful book that gives some idea as to how transition initiatives work — from the very early stages, in which groups raise awareness through film screenings and talks, to the later development of local food networks and even the launch of local currencies.
The movement uses 12 steps, rather like Alcoholics Anonymous, to wean us off our dangerous addiction to oil. This includes honouring elders, Hopkins says. “They have the knowledge of how things were done in the past”– when our lives depended so much less on the black stuff. “We have been doing work with people who remember the Thirties and Forties, people who say it would have been insane to eat apples from New Zealand. Back then all the food came from near the town, but we don’t have that resilience any more. In the lorry strike of 2001 we had only three days’ worth of food in Totnes.” The key to effecting a smooth transition is rebuilding resilience and self-sufficiency at every scale — from the household to the wider community — all at once.
When the price of oil rises, Hopkins cheers. “It’s like a racehorse owner cheering his horse. The things I want to see happen only happen in times of high oil prices. In the Seventies there was the most incredible flowering of creativity. Solar power, permaculture — they all started in the Seventies. Then cheap oil came back and everything went out of the window. High oil prices will stimulate creativity all over again: the knock-on of rising food prices will make it more cost-effective to grow food here; the higher cost of petrol in your car will make you ask if it’s worth making the journey.” The bonus is that, as we burn fewer fossil fuels, emissions will be reduced and climate change might be slowed.
Peak oil can, Hopkins says, confirm the widespread belief that people are inherently selfish. But the “head for the hills” response, he says, is more typically North American than British. “I wrote a piece on my website, transitionculture.org, called ‘Why the survivalists have got it wrong’. That elicited more comments than any previous post. Some came from survivalist websites and included such gems as ‘Which is better, a gun or a club? The answer: You can use a gun as a club but you can’t use a club as a gun.'”
A key part of the transition-town process is what he calls the “great reskilling”. “We no longer have many of the basic skills our grandparents took for granted. One of the most useful things a transition initiative can do is to make training widely available in a range of these skills.”
What skills does he have in mind? Bicycle maintenance? Home energy efficiency? Basic food growing? “You need to look at the skills people used to have that might still be appropriate, as well as looking at the skills people have now. Speaking to older people in the area around Totnes, it turns out that, for example, they all knew how to darn their socks. I know very few people my age who know how to do that, and it is a skill that, once we get beyond the throwaway society, we may well need again. Hence the sock-darning workshop we are running.”
Sock darning, eh? It’s not as glamorous as those George Clooney screenings and it lacks the superficial appeal of a hoard of rice, or gold coins. But I’m pretty sure my husband hasn’t tried it yet and in the spirit of amiably competitive self-sufficiency that I’m confident will soon become mainstream, I have decided that sock-darning may well be the survival skill for me. —