Gentle Decline 1/17: Affinity & Answers
Hello. There've been enough conversations, enough replies, and enough feedback in various places to make it worthwhile doing an issue of answers to questions. I've rephrased some of what's here, so if you don't recognise your question, my apologies. I hope the answers inform you anyway. This is also a huge issue (somewhere around 4500 words, bigger than many essays I had to write for college), so you might want to grab some coffee or something.
And in a further also: welcome to all the new subscribers! Back issues can be seen via the archive at http://tinyletter.com/gentledecline - and since I refer back to them once in a while, it's worth having a look.
You seem pretty cheerful about things that will likely be traumatic, what's with that?
Several people asked this. None used exactly that phrasing. But I am, and I have reasons. First and foremost, I'm essentially a cheerful sort of person. There isn't a lot that gets me down. Second, if I'm going to be miserable in the future, I'm damned if I'm going to be miserable now as well. Third, I do reckon that I personally, and those close to me, will get through the stuff that's coming fairly well, and I think we can help more people do the same thing. There's enough doom-mongering and pearl-clutching going on, and very little in the way of actual thinking about what to do, and I'm also a creature of practicality. I rarely want to talk about a problem per se, I want to talk about the solution, or mitigating the outcome, or the like.
If it happens slowly, can you call it a disaster?
Sure you can. But remember, only the big, societal changes will happen slowly. Each person's individual disaster will happen much more quickly. If you live in some parts of New Orleans, Haiti, Venice or the Maldives, or indeed Nottinghamshire, it may already have happened to you. But I'm a historian at heart, and I take the point of view that someone in 2100, or 2200, looking back, will see the mid-21st-century as one big crisis. There will probably be specific tipping points within that, comparable to 1848 in Europe, in which more than 50 countries/states/geographic bodies had revolutions, caused by "widespread dissatisfaction with political leadership, demands for more participation in government and democracy, demands for freedom of the press, other demands made by the working class, the upsurge of nationalism, and the regrouping of established government forces" (quote is from Wikipedia, Revolutions of 1848, because it's more succinct than me) - but doesn't all that look familiar?
Where's this information coming from, where did you learn this stuff?
The information is coming mostly from the internet - about 90% of it - and the other 10% comes from my somewhat eccentric upbringing in the hills of North Wexford, much of which made it clear that living a "normal" life is strictly optional, and that there are practical solutions to most things. As to where I learned this stuff, I'm learning it right here, sometimes in the act of writing it out, which is more or less how I've learned everything in my life, including the skills for two distinct careers and a degree in literature and history. Writing is how my brain processes stuff. So in a very real sense, I'm making it up as I go along. The ability to look at events and see consequences is a pretty simple thing, I think; I don't believe I've any special capability there.
That seems like a very unhelpful answer, really, a sort of paragraph-long shrug. But maybe it's of some use?
I know "move inland". What's the next most useful thing I can do in the face of climate disaster?
Help someone else move inland. Or rather, make sure you can help someone else when something goes wrong. A lot of the difficulties that are going to arise will happen when people haven't a network to fall back on - and there's no point in saying that you'll help out then; that's not how networks work. Establish connections now, with your neighbours, friends, fellow hobbyists, your church, your political party, whatever floats your boat, somewhat grim pun intended. Make a plan. Tell people people about it. Let people know you've a spare room, a four-wheel drive, a boat, or whatever other thing you think will be useful. If there are people you trust enough for it, give them a copy of your front door key, and maybe your garage key as well. This is (part of) the generosity I was on about in the previous issue, and it's not entirely philanthropic; someone who has visibly helped others will incur more help from them than someone who has stood aside and done their own thing to ensure their own survival. If the network you build or already have doesn't include someone who earns less than you and/or some kids, find some and include them.
After that, learn a new skill. Something practical and useful, which doesn't depend on high technology or plastics to get on with it. I don't think it's awfully important what it is after that; diversity of skills will be useful, and the mere process of learning a new thing - actually learning it, not poking at the edges and wandering off - will stand you in good stead anyway. But if you need further guidance, go for something with a useful material output, not purely decorative.
I don't like the sound of all this; is there anything I can do to help prevent climate disaster?
It's a bit late now, to be blunt. I believe we're pretty much already past the 1.5 degree change which will be enough to cause trouble, and probably well on the way to a 4 degree change. But: you can put pressure on political parties to prioritise environmental issues, particularly rewilding, which will have all kinds of useful knock-on effects, and you can plant trees. At the individual level, planting trees is the most effective thing you can do - but the really meaningful changes have to be systemic, and therefore will need to be in laws and policies. You can also, obviously, vote for parties that will actually take action, and against those who won't. Vote in Greens, if you can. Vote in other leftward parties if not. Don't vote for rightward parties, and especially don't vote for Fine Gael or Fianna Fail in Ireland, the Tories in the UK, or the Conservatives in the US - all of them are evil and getting more so, and they don't give a flying fig for environmental concerns, climate crisis, or anything else that will affect poor people more than them.
Didn't you start this doom-mongering a few years back?
I did, thank you for remembering! Almost exactly 4 years ago in November 2015, I wrote an article on Medium called 7 Changes in the Next 50 years, and the borders bit in particular looks uncomfortably prescient right now. The other bits haven't got there yet, but they've 46 years to do so.
Thinking forward is hard, though. Let me give you a quote from Robert Macfarlane's Underland, which like everything else he's written, is sublime in the proper literary sense:
“But to think ahead in deep time runs against the mind’s grain. Try it yourself, now. Imagine forward a year. Now ten. Now a century. Imagination falters, details thin out. Try a thousand years. Mist descends. Beyond a hundred years even generating a basic scenario for individual life or society becomes difficult, let alone extending compassion across much greater reaches of time towards the unborn inhabitants of worlds-to-be.”
He's not wrong. But we've got to do some of that, more so now than in 2015, and more so again in 2020.
I'm kind of worried about the wheat harvest thing, and the price of food going up. What can I do?
Plant potatoes in your back yard, if you have a back yard. If you don't, persuade someone else to let you plant potatoes in their back yard, and share the crop. Potatoes will grow anywhere, and barring blight, will reliably produce a crop regardless of almost anything else. They're also low maintenance, and easy to cook. Once you have potatoes, you're not as dependent on wheat (or rice, or other grain crops) as you might otherwise be. And you're possibly more dependent on wheat than you think you are - wheat is in bread, obviously, but also pasta, couscous, most tortillas on this side of the Atlantic, and of course in biscuits, cakes, and so forth. The price of wheat going up puts pressure on the supplies of other staple carbohydrates, and there are knock-on effects from there. Spuds in your back garden take some of that pressure off you.
Under normal circumstances, the price of wheat would stabilise within a year as more farmers plant it in order to get that higher price. But it wasn't demand driving the price up this year, rather the weather-driven difficulties in planting and harvesting in various places worldwide. Ironically, the most mechanised and automated places were the worst for this; places where less machinery is used did better. So... plant your potatoes by hand? Obviously, we don't know what the weather will do next year. But on average, it's not going to cooperate any more than it did this year.
Isn't it the job of companies to make the most profits possible, though? What else are they for?
Well, therein lieth the problem - many companies don't have any other purpose. Historically, companies were a way to organise and run non-family businesses, the sole point of which was to provide a living (ideally a good one) for their members, while reducing the overheads of working separately. The concepts of investors, owners who didn't run the company, stocks, shares, etc, are all later additions and emergent properties. So, to a lesser degree, are employees who didn't own the company, although they were probably the very first new development. A lot of start-ups are now built from the ground up with an "exit strategy"; a plan for how the owners are going to sell off the company, either via acquisition by another business or by an IPO to the stock market. They're not intended to provide employment, provide a good or service to a community or place, or do anything except make the owners rich(er). Some, like WeWork, to pick one current example, don't really do anything themselves, just make a lot of noise, move some money around, and (probably) disappear again, having made someone, somewhere, a profit.
It's entirely possible to run a company which provides goods or services, pays its employees well, invests in the necessary tools and goods to keep doing both, and doesn't make a profit. The only reason for a company to make a profit in reality is to attract investors (who might be the initial owner(s) in a start-up model). And it's that chasing after investment that makes companies in a capitalist system so destructive - because a company makes more profits for its investors if it externalises costs, per the last issue. A really good example of this is Uber, which externalises even the cost of having employees by classing them as contractors instead, and thereby dodges having to pay for insurance, benefits, etc.
(The cost of that externalisation doesn't just disappear, mind. It lands on the general tax-payer as the "contractor" employees rely on the state, whatever state they're in, for the things the company should be providing to them as employees.)
Have you done any research about solar power on a small scale?
Not much for Gentle Decline, because the audience is international, and solar power on a small (as in, one house or one small group of houses) is a very localised... thing. There are places in the US, for example - mostly cities - where it is illegal to have a property that doesn't have a connection to the mains electrical grid. Local ordinances concerning solar panels may make it difficult or actually impossible to get planning permission for them in other places.
Here, the SEAI (Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland, and I feel they really could have gone for ireLand and made it SEAL...) offers a grant for installing solar panels. Except that it's a rebate after installation, not a direct grant, and it's not always clear if they cover the cost of the extra timbers a roof might need to support the weight of the panels, and it's only available on buildings constructed and occupied before 2011 and, and...
Solar power is a decent enough solution, even in a place that doesn't seem to get much sun. But it has yet to cross the threshold of being a reasonable thing for someone to add to their house without a lot of cash on hand to make it happen. There are new builds being put out there with solar panels included as a default, which is one of the more pleasing things I've seen from the building industry in... ever, really. I fully expect this situation to change in the next 5-10 years, because the technology is advancing pretty quickly, and sooner or later someone is going to come up with lightweight panels that can be plugged directly into a household electrical system by a civilian, or at the very most a qualified electrician, for small money - which I expect to settle out somewhere around the cost of a spare car tyre - not an amount you'll spend for fun, but one that isn't going to be in the space where you need to do any serious saving for it.
What do you think the outcome is going to be when those displaced from flooded areas decide that they're entitled to the kinds of setups you have recommended for higher-above-sea-level properties?
Ugh. Well, I did ask for questions. I honestly don't know, although I have some speculations. Much depends on how the situation of people being displaced initially resolves, because humans are creatures of habit, and we'd far rather do what someone else did before us than think of things to do ourselves. And that resolution depends on how fast coastal or low-lying areas become uninhabitable, and which people are displaced first, and to where.
The following paragraphs contain some socio-economic assumptions that are not terribly comfortable to read, but here goes: the worst-case scenario is if middle-class, particularly upper-middle-class people get displaced first. Poorer people (or middle income people from poorer backgrounds, to be fair) don't expect any real help, and don't have the entitled feeling that they should get it. Richer people will make their own arrangements, and indeed, are in some cases already doing so. But the middling sorts, when it finally dawns on them that lowering the flood wall for the sake of the view was a poor idea, are going to cause ructions. Part of those ructions will involve demands that government give them land/housing/space to replace what they're losing; land and housing and space that doesn't exist, or that belongs to other people. And this is going to be exacerbated badly by those displaced people seeing the arrangements that people who've made preparations have. That could get as far as violence, and I really hope it doesn't, because that's what will set the scene for further displacements.
If poorer people are the first displaced, then things are liable to be more peaceful. They'll end up staying with extended family, or friends of friends, probably looking for social or council housing in inland towns, but they won't generally have the entitlement that will drive them to make demands of anyone. Unless there's a complete lack of resources - money for food, and housing - they're generally not going to want to draw too much attention for fear of being separated from what support networks they have.
Rich people being displaced will be mostly invisible, except for empty houses in coastal areas, possibly even falling into disrepair, because they can just buy inland and move.
The possible scenario where there are riots over housing, food, etc, in 2030s or 2040s Ireland is pretty grim, but I don't think it's terribly likely. It's a lot more likely in places that are densely populated, and where there's already a lot of discontent simmering, by which I mean the UK, particularly England. Being blunt about it, I wouldn't want to be in England in an era of climate migration. The US is huge, and has a lot of inland spaces that are underpopulated - there's even housing in many of them, so it's not going to be such an issue there - although the propensity for violence in the US is always greater. My insight into other areas is pretty poor, but I know that Bangladesh and swathes of South-East Asia are going to be in trouble, most of the Pacific Islands are done for, and there's a fair chance that parts of India, Africa and Australia are going to become uninhabtable due to extremes of heat, so there'll be migration from those places too. Possibly some of that will apply in South America, as well.
For what it's worth, I don't think we're going to see fortified outposts or the like in the near future - that's really an output of American gun nut fantasy, rather than anything real - and in the case of sporadic or isolated violence, a well-established reputation for generosity and evident cooperation with people around you is a much better defence than any wall.
What crops are likely to disappear with what key pollinators?
Weirdly, as far as I can make out, there isn't much work at all done on what insects pollinate specific crops to really answer this. Partly, it varies from place to place - there are plenty of pollinators for pumpkins and squashes in the Americas, but there aren't nearly so many in Europe (which probably explains my lack of success in growing the damn things). A lot of pollinator research is coming from Australia, where both crops and pollinators have largely been introduced from outside, and where native pollinators aren't going to make up the shortfall if the introduced ones die off.
So, first, crops that don't need pollinators. Brassicas and leaf crops (lettuce, etc) are harvested before they even flower. They don't need pollination to provide food. They do need pollination (and to be left go to seed) to provide seeds for the following year. That can still be done by seed companies, though, who use manual pollination. Root crops, most grains, onions, garlic and celery are in the same state. Peas and beans will mostly self-pollinate, and also produce their own seed as part of the food. Tomatoes, peppers and aubergines will mostly self pollinate, but will do better with insect pollinators.
Pumpkins, squashes, melons, and cucumbers need to be pollinated. So do all tree fruit and most nuts. You can hand pollinate the gourd-type crops, but it's painful, and hand-pollinating tree fruit and nuts is obviously not practical. Bees - honeybees, bumblebees, and the various solitary breeds - are the major workers here. I believe from my own observations that their numbers may have surged this year in Ireland, but official figures aren't in yet. Strawberries, blackberries, blueberries and raspberries will sort-of self-pollinate, but do far better with actual insects.
So the short answer is that if the numbers of pollinators-in-general goes down, we're going to lose tree fruit, and gourd-type vegetables, and see serious reductions in soft fruit. The carbohydrate crops are reasonably safe. One that we might not otherwise consider is cotton, which doesn't absolutely need pollinators, but definitely benefits from them - there'll be a reduced yield and a corresponding rise in price.
It is possible and even likely that pollinator populations are much more affected by insecticides and other crop treatment than actual changes in climate. However, it's pretty certain that climate will have an impact, because it always does.
Any thoughts on how a community could start to stash research material?
Books have a pretty solid proven record, and work in the absence of other devices, power sources, etc. If stuff is printed on good quality paper, bound well, and kept in a dry environment, it should make it to a century at the very least.
Information loss is, sadly, pretty inevitable in the process of climate disaster, albeit mostly at small scales. There are still plenty of companies much of whose business depends on a hard disk in a fileserver which is stashed in a basement, under a desk somewhere, or possibly nobody's quite sure where it is. The amount of people's personal data that's going to get left behind in houses and apartments if they have to evacuate quickly is also pretty huge.
In terms of academic research, I don't think there's much any individual can do - except preserve their own research and immediately relevant material from other people - and institutions who publish or archive research en masse will have to be relied on to make sure their information is safe.
In terms of preserving information about how to do things, what's safe to eat, how to treat injuries or illnesses, and other practical, relevant things, then yeah, print it, bind it, keep it somewhere dry.
(There's a fascinating bit of A Canticle for Leibowitz which has a monk doing an illuminated copy of a blueprint for, I think, a nuclear reactor or part thereof. I'm not holding that up as a way to preserve information, but it's a nice idea.)
Are Raspberry PIs actually useful in an end of days scenario?
If your continued employment absolutely requires you to have a really tough computer; you expect to be operating a computer in flooded areas; you have medical equipment which requires a computer to operate; or you have data resources you need and can't get to any other way, sure. Otherwise... not really. The main things that are going to affect computers in disaster situations are lack of power and lack of bandwidth, and the ruggedised off-road all-terrain computer can't improve either of those. There's an argument that these things will last longer, but they use the same central components as any other machine, and you might actually be better off buying half a dozen really cheap laptops, and when one breaks down, take the next one off the shelf. Because with the best will in the world, computer components are not built for durability or long life, so when they break down, they're gone. It is possible to build a computer with a long working life, but it would be hideously expensive because of all the parts you'd need to have custom-made.
Should we change our education system to better equip kids to better cope with a more in-their-face environment than any of us have had to deal with? If yes, what sort of core skills do kids and teens need to start acquiring?
By and large, kids are already more aware of environmental issues than adults. Despite all logic and sense, there's an inverse correlation between age and acceptance of climate crisis. So some of the starting work has been done, whether it's by media, teachers, or other kids. But at the moment the focus of teaching, media, etc, is on crisis mitigation, and the comfy fiction that the world can be prevented from changing if we just do more of one thing and less of another. However... I suspect that most kids, particularly teenagers, can look at the world and the numbers and come to their own conclusions. They already know the world is going to change. For a cultural take on outputs from this, go read Venkatesh Rao's Domestic Cozy aesthetic series, bearing in mind that Rao himself is Gen X.
In teaching them how to handle it: yes, we should be. I have no idea how to do that; I'm not a parent, not a teacher, and I don't seem to be able to get it across to many adults that there will be change, let alone how to handle it. I would guess that picking out literature about how to handle change in general, and how to handle climate crisis in particular would help (see Issue 9 for some suggested works). I also think that actual discussions, much as I hated them in school, might help; the feeling of connection and cooperation will be a useful one to which to refer back, if nothing else. And there are self-sufficiency books out there which are suitable for kids because they have lots of pictures - John Seymour's, in particular, which I've referenced a few times in these newsletters.
Thereafter: practical things. Small practical things. This is how you fill a sandbag; this is how you read a weather forecast; this is how you plant seeds and weed vegetable crops; this is how you make bread. Maybe even the tougher things that many of us don't know: this is how you clean a wound; this is how you kill a chicken; this is how you use St. John's Wort (and here are the reasons to, and not to); this is how to evacuate through a flood. Interpersonal things: this is how you can calm someone down when they're panicking; this is how you talk to a crowd; this is how you share what you have, when you can.
I don't think we can rely on schools for that stuff; they're not equipped for it, and in many cases, the teachers won't know it, and handouts and textbooks won't work for the practical things.
Never mind the kids, what post-apocalyptic skillsets should we all be concentrating on acquiring?
Broadly, see Issue 7. However, the answer above about skills for kids - plus a lot of the reading I've done since Issue 7 - and the question about preserving research have made me think that talking through a number of the small skills and what-to-do-if questions would be a useful next issue. Also, this is quite long enough already. So look for that next time.
This issue brought to you by people reading and asking questions, and one reader in particular (she knows who she is) supplying a whole lot of them, and by a big jar of jellybeans. More questions are always welcome!
If you feel that Gentle Decline would be useful to someone else in your life, please forward it on and/or show them the subscription link at https://tinyletter.com/gentledecline - and there's also an intermittently updated Twitter feed at @gentledecline. There's been a bit of a surge in subscribers lately, too, hence the welcome above, and I'd love to have more people reading this and being, in some sense, better prepared for what's slowly coming.