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“May you live in interesting times.” -Chinese curse
I confess, I read too much scary stuff. It started about ten years ago when the world was waking up to the fact of global warming. I read everything I could get my hands on to try and get a handle on the scope of the problem. James Howard Kunstler, Richard Heinberg, Chris Martenson, Paul Gilding, you name it. That led to books that talked about global warming as one of several major threats that humanity will be facing over the next several decades. Everything is connected and interconnected, of course, and I suspect that humans would be just fine if we only faced one of these big issues.
The three biggies that humanity is going to have to face in the next thirty years are the end of oil, economic collapse and climate change. It would probably be fairly easy to name a fourth (food and water shortages, the threat of a pandemic, etc), but these are either consequences of the Big Three, or threats that humanity has always faced in one way or another. So I’ll restrict my comments to these and how they affect the planning and operation of Smiling House.
First off, we are not a doomsday preppers. Nora is into animal husbandry because she loves animals and always has. I garden because I love it. And I love it (like every other gardener) because fresh veggies make anything available in the average grocery store seem like tasteless astronaut food. So, no, we’re not coming at gardening or raising critters out of an End-of-Times panic. We would have been here, doing this, anyway. It just so happens we have additional incentive from the Big Three Threats to help us along.
This post was getting pretty long, so I divvied it up into three sections.
1. Smiling House and the End of Oil
2. Smiling House and Economic Collapse
3. Smiling House and Climate Change
I’ll scribble up more in-depth articles on the future on particular aspects of these issues and our responses. It just seemed important to get a treetop view of how this triple threat is currently bending our thinking and planning.