Doug Fine: Author, Journalist, Adventurer, Goat-Herder

 

There’s no viewing of scenery like floating-by-on-an-innertube viewing of scenery. I was really looking forward to this week’s float (mark my words: Relaxed Team Innertubing will one day be an Olympic event) but unfortunately (since scheduling my life to allow five hours away from the Funky Butte Ranch and the associated writing, ranching, loving and parenting was no small feat) and fortunately (for the survival of life as we know it in this valley), a booming thunderstorm moved in when I was about half a mile downstream. I had just heard the day’s first canyon wren call and was preparing to receive the soothing massage this subtlest of five-toned songs always applies upon the deepest synapses in my nervous system, when the counterpoint came – a terrifying, massive, deafening crash, like the ripping of the sky’s inseam, that sliced through the aforementioned Relaxed Nervous System as I bounced around a bend in the river, suddenly exposed to skies so dark, I felt like Frodo at the Mordor border.

The ensuing downpour — one of those so intense that for a short time the air, molecule-for-molecule, is as wet as any ocean (you inhale rainwater) — ended the float trip, but it didn’t end the day’s adventure. Splashing home through flash-flooded streams under the cleanest oxygen this atmosphere offers – the twenty minute storm cleared the pall of wildfire-without-Monsoon haze that lay over my valley for several days – I found my email inbox stuffed – probably more than 100 messages to start. Seems the Washington Post had run my essay in which I speculated on my own prospects for survival if Globalization, box stores, and 49 cent Bangladeshi plastic watering cans ever go away. And now, the East Coast of North America was reacting to the essay. Quickly and fervently. It was (as you’ll see in the full version of the piece that I’ve included below) intended as a self-assessment for me and my family. But it evidently caused folks to look at their own lives. Some of these initial responders were as jolted by my words as I had been by the first thunder clap earlier in the day, some were as appreciative as I was of the wren call. I had two messages from Colonels in the U.S. Army, one supportive (“Congratulations! You get it. The ravaging hoards trying to escape what is left of the cities will threaten everyone”), the other angry, as far as I could tell mostly about President Obama’s health care plan.

 

Just as it’s too early to tell if one short deluge presages the just-in-time arrival of Monsoon season here in the desert, so I don’t know whether I’m really in a position to survive if sustainable living ever moves abruptly from voluntary to mandatory. You’ll have to decide for yourself from the essay. All I know is, I hope it doesn’t happen. For one thing, innertubes for float trips might become difficult to obtain. Plus, for all its flaws, I believe the U.S. Republic and its Bill of Rights is a beautiful way to run a society. Believe me, coming home from a journalistic foray in Rwanda does nothing if not make you more relieved to be born in America. If only for the near-absence of death squads and the water that, most of the time, doesn’t instantly kill you.

Forget about trying to explore whether 300 million Americans can feasibly begin to take baby steps away from culturally-suicidal oil-based sprawl and box store consumerism and toward an equally comfortable and profitable sustainable future. That’s not why I wrote the piece. It just seemed logical to explore my own prospects in the event we don’t make the shift (and China doesn’t and India doesn’t and Brazil doesn’t and Indonesia doesn’t) and we, the collective human species, face a worst-case scenario. Now, I’m a big fan of Darkest-Before-Dawn, bottom-of-the-ninth-inning home run resolutions (like Linus in the Pumpkin patch, I’m about the only simpleton who thinks Monsoon season might still come this year here in New Mexico — in my calendar, I keep moving an item reading, “when Monsoon comes on strong, turn off a drip irrigation in orchard” forward a week). And I remember Frodo. Oh, wait, that’s fiction. Still, I’d love to have friends tease me about my expensive, needless solar panels once the super-clean solar- and wind-powered World Peace and Energy Machine gets discovered by an engineering geek at Cal Tech.

In any event (and all of this, from my truncated float trip to survival of society, is connected through that nasty little demon Climate Change), I’m hoping that the universe is planning to bring rain any time I plan any hike or excursion (in other words, in this one case, during this one bone-dry season, I’m rooting for Mr. Murphy and his law), and I’m also going to leave my tape measure outside again in case that’s what brought the storm on. Whatever the cause, I’m moister for the moment than I was when I posted the previous Dispatch – better hydrated in all my cells. Which made me ready to start replying to the emails, and to conduct an online chat with readers that the Post’s editors requested due to the large response to the piece. Let me know if the essay amuses, scares or outrages you –- this version is about twice the length of the edited version in the Post, and contains some points that felt important to me. Particularly about the lack of a sense of urgency among some member’s of the planet’s financial and legal elite.

I’ll start it with the introduction I sent to my mailing list members announcing the piece’s publication. The illustrations accompanying today’s Dispatch, by the way, come from the just-published Korean-language version of Farewell, My Subaru. I’m delighted with them, not least because the illustrator decided to make me look like Butt-Head (you know, Beavis’ friend). The drawings only came about because, after extensive negotiation, the Korean publisher proved too cheap to buy the rights to photos in the book and in these Dispatches. Thank goodness. I’ve been searching for my Ralph Steadman for years. Who knew he or she was working in Korea for $3/day or whatever? These illustrations reflect such a profound understanding of the essence of life here on the Funky Butte Ranch. The Farewell, My Subaru translator must have done a fantastic job. Any Korean speakers out there who can let me know is that’s so? It should be on Korean bookshelves soon, and I’ll have a couple of copies I can send out.

 

OK. Here’s the intro and then my full version of what became the Washington Post essay.

Ever wonder what would happen if you popped into the Quickie Mart for a quart of juice and some batteries and found the shelves were empty…permanently? I do. Here’s an essay I wrote on this issue, which I’ve thought about for several years and which partly explains the Digital Age Carbon-Neutral life I’m attempting here on the Funky Butte Ranch. It ran in theWashington Post’s Sunday Outlook section last week, and has since been picked up by the Denver Post and other publications. It’s scaring a few people, judging by some of the feedback I got from the Beltway. Heck, the essay’s scaring me. That’s the point. That’s why I wrote it. It seems that my first three or four decades on this planet have, against all odds, turned me into a –gulp– survivalist.

Not that I’m rooting for a collapse. Comfort is good. But it seems mainstream to at least wonder about it, given the goings-on of the last two thousand years. Or the last two. Meanwhile, cross your fingers that building a Green economy is going to help the world thrive into the foreseeable future and beyond.

IN THE YEAR 2049: WOULD I SURVIVE A WORST-CASE SCENARIO?
A Former Suburbanite Plans For Post-Globalization

A shorter version of this essay ran in the Washington Post.

By Doug Fine

I’ve spent the last three years trying to get petroleum out of my life and to live locally. This is a hardcore lifestyle decision for a former Long Island boy raised on Val-U-Meals and educated by M*A*S*H dialogue. Where I differ from many locavore cruncholas is that I’m determined to do these things without giving up my Digital Age comforts. You know, the ones that allow me to, for example, write and file this essay from the middle of a solar-powered ranch 23 miles from a town. I was plugging along moderately well at this, using perhaps 80% less petroleum and coal than I had before overalls became my fashion mainstay, when my son Quinn was born last June.

 

This life-changing event occurred at about the same time resource prices were at historic highs, the dollar was in free-fall, and the Earth’s supply of oil was allegedly half-gone, with India’s and China’s masses just beginning to latch on to the Globalization teat. Cheap, Costco-era consumerism might not go on forever, according to the scariest headlines on Quinn’s birthday.

Oh, and then a couple of months later, the world financial system nearly collapsed. Mainstream, suburban friends rapidly migrated from believing my experiment in neo-Rugged Individualism was radically subversive, to simply radically unfeasible. Models of the planet’s near-future that include the collapse of Globalization shifted from the purview of Idaho survivalists to a topic on CNN at primetime. Everyone I know seemed to have the sense that sixty nine-cent Bangladeshi plastic garden buckets might one day actually become difficult to obtain.

Where did the truth lie? What if I wake one morning to milk the goats, say, in, oh, let’s say 2049, and find out the supply ships and trucks are no longer streaming in from China and California? Given that I now had a family to provide for at my remote outpost in the American Southwest (I live on a 41-acre spread I call the Funky Butte Ranch in the middle of nowhere New Mexico), I thought I’d better take a hard look at our own prospects for survival if all our consumer safety nets went away. For now, my sustainable lifestyle choices are optional; a question of ethics. You know, grow lettuce instead of buying Chilean. Use organic cotton diapers instead of Pampers. But what would I do if both box stores and crunchy food co-ops were suddenly no more? In other words, recent headlines forced me to examine my place in a hypothetical post-oil, post-consumer society forty years in the future.

 

Now, I’m not rooting for such a thing: I believe the U.S. experiment, bastardized as it periodically has been by corporate takeovers of the government, has proved a real step forward for humanity. Every time I come home from journalistic forays to places like Rwanda and Uzbekistan, I think, “God Bless America, for the generally palatable water and near-absence of death squads alone.” Plus, slave labor, forest depletion, climate change, and global resource wars aside, there are a lot of good sides to the Globalization era. When else could I email a musician in Mauritania to ask if I can upload his latest album?

But when major investment banks started crashing at a rate of one per week, I knew I had to look into the scarier future scenarios that I and my growing family could face. After all, when I was covering the former Soviet Union as a journalist in the 1990s, every single person I met, from every sector of society, told me that he or she had thought pigs would fly before the all-powerful Politburo would crumble. And yet it happened overnight.

I started my Year 2049 assessment by assuming that I’d actually become 100% food, water and power independent in forty years. An optimistic assumption, perhaps, but I’m an optimistic kind of guy. After all, at the three-year point in my local-living experiment, my solar-powered fridge is filled with regional (and in many cases homemade) produce, and my water flows, care of solar panels and a pump that had thirty-year warranties, to a drip irrigation system that required no electricity. Even a Japanese auto manufacturer couldn’t match that kind of bumper-to-bumper warranty.

I own healthy if rambunctious goats who despite the carnage they wreak in my rose bushes give me more than a half gallon of milk per day, and the Ranch’s chickens provide so many eggs that I can almost sense my arteries clogging from all this healthy local living. The corn, beans and squash are leaning toward a robust fall harvest as I write. Maybe society will hold on long enough for me and my family to become truly self-sustaining in these key areas. When I embarked on this project, I had perhaps three days’ of food in my home in the event of a supermarket disruption. Now I have maybe three months’ worth. I need to do better than that, but we’re on our way. I have a neighbor who knows how to build and use a bow and arrow. He said he’d be willing to give me a class, should shells no longer be available for my shotgun on the sporting good shelf at Wal-Mart.

OK, let’s assume I and my brood could eat, drink, and shed light at the Ranch once the Silver City, New Mexico Wal-Mart (the closest supermarket at more than 20 miles away) folded from lack of diesel-powered supply trucks. I wanted to analyze my prospects in the more shaky areas of security, medicine and especially maintenance. Plus the basics we so often take for granted, like, say, clothes. I quickly realized the long-term question for me might not be “where will I find Fair Trade organic cotton boxer briefs?” so much as “where will I get underwear at all?” In a post-consumer 2049, children in Bangladesh would no longer be sewing my skivvies for me. Luckily, my fiancée has taken up knitting. And we’re pricing alpacas.

 

First things first, though. I wouldn’t even have a place to store my underwear if I didn’t think about the Ranch’s physical security. What if my family does get its survival cards in order, and hordes of former Wal-Mart shoppers don’t? What could we do to stop them from treating my Ranch as though it were a buffet line?

“Form a small army,” my friend Wiley suggested to me recently, and that might be a good start. Or at least a well-armed clan. But I’ve kept that suggestion under my hat in the larger world, because I recognize that the very topic of armed ranch protection sounds certifiably paranoid to some folks. In fact, when I travel to the more civilized parts of North America these days, I’ve learned not to discuss things like “perimeter security,” because when I do, friends and colleagues look at me as though I have escaped from a compound in Waco. Indeed, shortly before Wall Street teetered on collapse, I visited extended family on the East Coast. While there, I took a walk around a burglar-alarmed swath of Long Island suburbia with an Uncle and Aunt who are, respectively, a prominent attorney and a former executive for a well-known Global clothing conglomerate.

“Between 1 and 10, what do you think is the chance of total societal collapse in the next forty years?” I asked.

“Zero,” said my Uncle.

“Zero,” agreed my Aunt. A neighbor’s poodle yapped at us from behind an automatic gate. If the electricity grid collapsed, this neighbor wouldn’t even be able to open his doors.

“Zero?” I thought. “Not even a measly 1?” Tough judges, these elite among the elite. Reminded me of late Rome. That week, the news headlines included fresh revelations of domestic spying by our government and a new record in income disparity between haves and have-nots in the United States. Twelve American soldiers had just been killed by in improvised explosive device in a patch of desert halfway across the world while trying to keep gas prices reasonable. And still the cost of a barrel of oil had doubled over the past year. Even the Saudis were facing depleted wells and were having problems keeping production up to earlier levels.

But my relatives were immune to these warning signs. In the insular world of people rushing to board meetings and Pilates in fine German-engineered road machines while having no idea how petroleum is refined, discussing what kind of explosives I might want to acquire in order to mine the perimeter of my Ranch would be considered a tad déclassé. It just isn’t done. Security in their world is best left to the doorman or the people who answer the phone when an alarm system gets triggered by a raccoon.

But back home in rural New Mexico, by contrast, folks take this kind of discussion quite seriously. Wiley, for instance, knew exactly what I meant when I proposed a buried, alarm-tripping pressure-sensor (with the option to detonate) at the top of the cliff-side entrance to the Ranch.

“Like the Border Patrol uses,” he said, nodding approvingly and spitting tobacco juice as we strolled through the wildflowers on the property and rounded up the goats one afternoon. “You’ll know about anyone who tries to come on the spread.”

“Useful for covering up habitual nudity as well as repelling food and electricity poachers,” I pointed out.

Wiley was impressed. He had seen what a greenhorn I was three years earlier when I bought two goat kids off Craigslist and nearly electrocuted myself while installing my first solar panel. “You’ve come a long way since the suburbs,” he said. In light of my recent visit to Long Island, this was a fantastic compliment.

Maybe I have. But, alas, security is just one element of life in a post-oil scenario. I have to be able to maintain a life worth securing. I thought about this the day I ran outside barefoot chasing the coyote who was trying to treat my chickens like a take-out buffet. Man, that desert was sharp. It suddenly occurred to me that one day my Chinese-made hiking boots would wear out. I could not weave leather into footwear. I was still a year or two away from being able to hunt an elk with a bow, for crying out loud, just to harvest the leather. I brought up this conundrum during a party at a local hot springs several days after this revelation.

“Forget about solar water pumps,” I wailed, whapping near-boiling water with my arm and sounding a little panicky. “If everything breaks down into tribalism, who will make the shoes?”

“Um, I could,” my neighbor Sasha said, wiping the spray from her face.

“Really?” I asked. “You’re a cobbler?”

“A boyfriend of mine learned how to make sandals out of hemp and car tire treads from a Rarumari Indian in Mexico,” she said. “I could learn from him.”

“Congrats. You’re part of the tribe, pending initiation” I said, as though I made that decision, as though I was contributing anything significant enough to warrant my own inclusion as anything other than a meal. “We’ll be the new Mimbrenos.”

The Mimbrenos were the indigenous folks who were so successful in my very valley for a thousand or so years, they lived in numbers greater than humans do here today, all without Realtors. That is, until, er, the climate changed around the year 1300 and they disappeared within a generation. But maybe their share-the-tasks tribal model is ideal for a successful post-consumer society. Even the usually-apocalyptic writer James Howard Kunstler says in his The Long Emergency, “much farm work will have to be done cooperatively, which would form a basis for a broad infrastructure of social relations, ceremonies and traditions among neighbors, a kind of ‘glue’ for local communities.”

That prospect made me feel better about sharing production tasks with other people in my remote valley. In fact, there is a long precedent for dividing labor in indigenous communities that predates box stores. I learned this when I lived in small town Alaska for a while. And nascent tribalism is already unfolding in my obscure valley, if largely because all of us modern Mimbrenos are so sick of driving 46 miles to and from town every time we need a carrot. In the past year, a food co-op, a farmer’s market and a harvest festival have all started up. When a Climate Change-induced hailstorm routed my tomatoes just before harvest last year, I traded troves of Funky Butte Ranch eggs for a winter’s worth of tomatoes with my friend KB.

Attend my valley’s harvest festival and ask any local rancher the 1 to 10 question I asked my relatives in Long Island about whether Globalized, petroleum-fueled society is likely to collapse in the next 40 years and you will get a number considerably higher than “zero.” Almost o one here — not even your angry, Obama-hating, UN-fearing rancher — believes a country run with purely consumptive/corporate values has a long lifespan. Alas, few people in our valley can agree about anything else, and something tells me that forming a cohesive tribe would entail something very rare indeed: three or more people getting along for a week at a time.

But even if a resurgent clan culture would ensure that I stayed clothed and shod, there remains the unsung and probably bigger question of equipment maintenance. This is where my biggest fears about 2049 dwell. Even though I’m already stockpiling mounds of spare solar panels, water pump components, and truck parts like I’m some kind of electrical pack rat, I don’t at this moment have any faith in my ability to actually install these components when the Ranch’s infrastructure inevitably needs repair.

I would almost certainly have to test that ability if the Yellow Pages are no more. Having been raised on McNuggets and TV in the suburbs (Gilligan, though a survivor, really offers few useful tips), I can barely change my truck’s oil, let alone wire a solar panel. So I have to make sure that my solar electrician, a former hippie named Craig, is a high-ranking member of that tribe that I plan on forming should consumer society crumble. I envision him playing a role similar to the one that the shaman played in earlier clan-based cultures. If he wants the best house, polygamy, whatever it takes. We can write the myths however he wants.

Because, I mean, you think that electrician is hard to schedule now? Believe me, if the oil runs out and Asian factories stop making stuff, the well repairmen and auto mechanics of the post-Globalized future will hold the social prestige that surgeons and professors enjoy today. They’ll have waiting rooms where they keep you thumbing through magazines for hours while listening to Muzak.

Surely I’m forgetting some essential aspect of life in 2049, the way I inevitably forget at least one shopping item when I schlep to town. Do I have enough electrical wiring and seeds stockpiled? What about light bulbs, and medicine? Would my rechargeable battery supply hold up for four decades? Truth be told, I’m not too concerned. Even with some supply gaps, I feel like I have a priceless asset in my growing herd of goats. I figure in the event of a major collapse, whenever I need something I’ve neglected to stockpile during the boom times of Globalization, I’ll sell off a goat kid like someone out of The Red Tent. I don’t think we’ll starve.

Overall, I’m surprised to come away from my initial three-year Ranch assessment feeling like my family’s life is positioned fairly well for a post-apocalyptic 2049. My fiancée even knows how to make paint from curdled goat’s milk mixed with wild dyes, and she plans to build us a mattress stuffed with local plants. We’re starting to stockpile seeds and building a root cellar. The goats will give us protein, soap and garden fertilizer. I don’t think we’ll starve.

Let’s face it, the chaos that’s sure to ensue if the idea of “local living” morphs abruptly from voluntary to mandatory makes exact predictions about life forty years in the future difficult, to say the least. Hopefully we denizens of the Funky Butte Ranch would endure until, I don’t know, some researcher who would have been killed in the Oil Age disclosed an abundant new energy source. But what I’ve learned in this assessment is that the only way I can become truly independent (a word I like even better is “indigenous”) is through incremental steps based in a loose, clan-like community. Or as Kunstler puts it, ‘life…will be intensely local and success or failure will depend on the quality of each community.” Yikes. I better start trying to get along with my less-friendly neighbors.

Meanwhile, I don’t miss most of the plastic box store slave factory crap I’m working toward giving up. And if consumer society continues to flourish throughout my lifetime, I can always claim in a choked-up voice that I made all these excessive lifestyle preparations for Green reasons. But should the unthinkable indeed befall consumer society in the next forty years, my fiancée and I might be among the first parents in recent history to have cultivated a nest that our offspring want to – or have to – visit as often as we like.

Doug Fine is the author of Farewell, My Subaru. He has reported for the Washington Post from Rwanda, Laos, and Alaska. His blog of carbon-neutral misadventures from his remote ranch, called “Dispatches From the Funky Butte Ranch,” is at www.dougfine.com .

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

17 Responses: