Units of Survival: It Will Be So Much Worse Than We Think

Copper engraving of a plague doctor of 17th-century Rome, by Paulus Fürst, 1656.

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Ever since that now infamous David Suzuki iPolitics interview came out I have been thinking more and more about his deadly little phrase: “units of survival.“ It’s only three words, but it’s absolutely chilling.

Quick recap: Suzuki told the interviewer that it is now “too late” to tackle climate change in a way that will substantively delay, defer, or ameliorate what is coming. We must stop thinking politically. In Suzuki’s words,

We have failed to shift the narrative and we are still caught up in the same legal, economic and political systems. For me, what we’ve got to do now is hunker down.

The units of survival are going to be local communities, so I’m urging local communities to get together.

Something that strikes me in that emo 9th grade “is human life really this much of a horror?” place is the idea that neither you nor I or anyone will ever know if they were part of one of those units of survival.

Take the average child born anywhere on the planet. With luck, they might – MIGHT – live for 100 years. On the time scales we’re dealing with, your frail human lifetime is not enough to know if you (and your offspring) have been among those lucky enough to make it through what might be the next great evolutionary bottleneck for the human species.

Since we cannot see our future, we are all a bit like poor terrified John Clyn in 1349, writing from the depths of the Black Plague and wondering what will befall humankind. We’ll know it’s ongoing, and we’ll know it’s bad, but will be right in the middle of the shit storm with no guide in sight.

Clyn left blank pages for the use of those who he hoped might follow him, and he wrote:

So that notable deeds should not perish with time, and be lost from the memory of future generations, I, seeing these many ills, and that the whole world encompassed by evil, waiting among the dead for death to come, have committed to writing what I have truly heard and examined; and so that the writing does not perish with the writer, or the work fail with the workman, I leave parchment for continuing the work, in case anyone should still be alive in the future and any son of Adam can escape this pestilence and continue the work thus begun.

It’s wrenching to contemplate that we won’t ever know our fate. Of course, we wouldn’t know our fate even if we weren’t facing a humanity-sized, humanity-created debacle of once-in-a-historical-epoch proportions. But this is somehow more gripping, like part of a narrative we are desperate to follow to the end, even if it is obscured by the darkness of chance and time.

There is also no way of knowing when, or where, or how you will be hit by the climate change-fueled polycrisis that is barreling toward us. There are folks alive today - even very young folks - who may be only lightly affected in their lifetimes. Unless the entire edifice of human civilization comes crashing down in rather short order and in a dramatic fashion, there could be a long wait time between tomorrow and the disaster that finally wipes you or your community off the face of the Earth.

What is certain, however, is that we are headed into a storm, and there is already enough energy in the atmosphere to keep temperatures rising and climatic conditions deteriorating for decades to come. And so that has gotten a lot of of us thinking about what comes next and how we prepare for it.

Accordingly, I’ve been doing quite a bit of reading about how people are preparing to weather the coming storms, pun intended. There are lots of really interesting voices extolling the virtues of regenerative farming, talking about off-grid living, promulgating strategies for surviving without power, lights, heat.

There are myriad sources for what we commonly call preppers, and while many of those folks used to be associated with the fringe right wing, these days there are also many progressive voices writing about prepping for a collapse that they are anticipating – a collapse due to the changing climate. Prepping, these days, is very much a bipartisan issue.

So I read these various Substacks, blogs, Twitter comments and Instagram posts, and I ponder, what does everyone – or most everyone, to be fair – seem to be missing?

I will answer that now.

What so many seem to be missing is that as they are planting their regenerative garden, or building an off-grid cabin in the upper peninsula of Michigan, or ruminating about collective community and swapping pies with the local Mennonites, they seem to be assuming, absolutely unconsciously, that humming away in the background somewhere is a functioning supply chain. That purring along, underpinning all of our lives, is a quiet engine - the functioning web of global resources into which we can tap at any time for the things that we need.

What am I talking about? I’m talking about things like YouTube videos of guys building an off-grid something-or-other in northern Maine, and unironically using a gas powered backhoe to clear the land.

I’m talking about people building regenerative gardens with hoses that they buy down at the local Tractor Supply, and widgets that they purchased from Amazon, and spanky clean new garden tools that have not yet been used enough to tarnish, rust, corrode, bend, break.

I’m talking about people buying a couple of flats of brand new Mason jars, and putting up pickles as a hedge against future disasters.

Most seem to be writing with the unspoken assumption that all of the stuff we will need to be prepared for our climate crisis future will be available, and the global supply chain basically functional, for quite awhile. Most don’t even take into consideration, I don’t think, the next steps.

This is, of course, understandable on one level. Let’s prep now, so that when the flood/wildfire/hurricane/heat dome that destroys crops comes, we’re prepared! Yes. That makes sense.

I honestly don’t think many are looking even one further step down the road. And looking out that far would seen to me to be crucial. Because I don’t believe you can begin to think constructively about collapse without considering what it will actually look like.

It is all well and good to start a regenerative garden today and get a few peaches and a few tomatoes and some beans that you can give to the local food pantry, but it is another thing to think more long-term, and anticipate what is going to happen when in fact, food does become scarce at the grocery store. And when what you grow in your garden isn’t going to cut it, because you can’t grow wheat, or rice, or sugar, or milk, or baby formula, or bananas, or coffee.

We’re in an odd, liminal period between the rehearsals and the show. We’ve had opening night, and now the run has started. We’ve bought our tickets. We’re at the theatre. The overture is playing, and the audience is filtering into their seats. The actors are still in their dressing rooms, applying the last touches of powder to their Max Factor pancake. You can hear fans and programs rustling in the auditorium. Soon the curtain will part, and we’ll see what’s on stage. We’ll see what’s waiting for us.

And of course, we don’t know what the future will be! We haven’t seen the show yet. We know a little bit about the plot, we’ve read some reviews, but what exactly is to come? It’s still a mystery. Nobody knows for sure.

There are a lot of very intelligent, very informed, very cogent predictions and analyses based on good hard solid science. But telling the future? Nobody can do that. And so while we’re guessing, some of those guesses are admittedly pretty solid. We know that not just because of the scientific predictions, but because some of these tragic future outcomes are HAPPENING RIGHT NOW.

Crop failures? Why certainly! At a certain point, for example, wheat does not germinate properly if temperatures are too high too early in the growing season. Similarly, rice production can be thrown off terribly by climate changes, and that is happening right now.

Local fruit and vegetable supplies, which so many folks who are enchanted with the idea of local community, growing, and cooperative sharing would suggest we can rely on, will be horribly disrupted if it’s too hot in the summer and too cold in the winter.

Rainfall is a huge problem now and will be an even larger problem in the future. We must expect drought and its terrible consequences.

Food supplies will be disrupted, there’s no question. When will this start first? In 2021, NASA was predicting impacts within the “next 10 years.” It is, in fact, happening right now.

To continue my tortured theatrical whimsy, when the curtain rises, we’ll begin to see more clearly where the shit is hitting the fan and how. But for now? We don’t know. And so it’s very easy to think about local conditions continuing unaffected in the background – that Tractor Supply outlet remaining open, and Amazon being available for next day delivery, and Walmart being open just a short drive down the road – but those things are going to be failing too.

What would it look like, then, to not have access to the global supply chain? What would it be like to have a shut-down of a week, or a month? What would it be like to find yourself cut off from refrigeration, and your handy electric food dehydrator, and gas, and running water, and lights, and anything new to use on your modern homestead, and replacement parts, batteries, tin foil, paper towels, Tampax, aspirin, candles…

You can’t build a warehouse. And all that stuff runs out fast.

I live part of the year in my maternal family farmhouse in Iowa. It was built in 1913, on the foundations of a late 19th century stone building which burned down. It isn’t big, but it’s lovely, with original plaster walls and handmade built-in cabinets and bookshelves. There are even two old panes of glass in the largest windows - etched glass, with lacy patterns - that somehow survive, despite being hauled cross country in 1912 and installed in the home where my grandparents raised four very rambunctious children.

The house wasn’t hooked up to the electric grid until the 1940s - when my mother was 8 years old. The furnace burned wood. Light came from kerosene lamps. In the kitchen, a few relics survive of early 20th century farm housekeeping. You would not believe how primitive some of the items are.

My great grandmother did not have a colander. She used a knife to slice wedge-shaped holes in the bottom of a tin can, and used that to strain off liquids.

A wire hanger was cut, woven, and pieced together to make a small cage on a handle, where scraps of soap were collected and reused by swishing the cage through water.

Scraps of tin were bent into shape to make cookie and biscuit cutters.

A set of stoneware crocks with wooden lids used to sit on the counter. When I was a kid, Grandma stored her homemade fry cakes in them. When her daughter - my mother - was a kid, the crocks held homemade pork sausages, preserved in home rendered pork fat from the same hog who was in the sausages.

At the time these things were made and used, the supply chain was fully functioning. Folks could always “get into town” for supplies. The primitiveness of some of the house keeping solutions was a result of tight funds and needs - no time to get to town to buy a fancy colander with money you didn’t have. And for regular people, there was little concept of just buying new when making do would do. As my father used to opine:

Use it up

Wear it out

Make it do

Or do without

We don’t live like that now. And I doubt many of us remember when so many folks did.

Then, there’s the social fall-out of broken supply chains and short supplies of food and other basics.

I read a comment a few days ago (and I wish to heck that I could find it) from someone who had recently experienced a 3 day stint of power outages and short supplies in his community. He was pithy: “it took under 3 hours to go from modern civilization to medieval.”

Drawn guns at the gas station.

Store shelves emptied by panic buying.

Fear that the next car up the driveway would be marauding for supplies.

In the words of Boccaccio’s “Decameron,” which opens in Florence during the Black Death, “Brother abandoned brother. . . . Fathers and mothers refused to see and tend their children.” Universities shut down; shops closed; mills stopped turning. In the countryside, farmhouse doors banged in the wind.

This is what collapse will look like. This is what we should be preparing for.

We need to be clear eyed. If supply chains go down, we don’t have access to most of the modern gadgets that make our lives hum. If the power goes out, we don’t have access to the modern conveniences that make our lives cool in summer, warm in winter, and easy through all seasons.

If you experience collapse at the local level - a flood or hurricane or wildfire that wipes out your town - there is no longer any guarantee that FEMA or the state or the Cajun Navy or the fire brigade or the Scouts will come to help you.

Right now, someone has probably got your back.

Going forward, not so much.

FEMA is going away. The will of the US government is not on the side of disaster victims. And the disasters are starting to come so thick and fast that there will no longer be pauses to regroup and rebuild.

You might have prepped your ass off, but when something breaks, or you run out of parts, or an ankle snaps or your old truck throws a rod or the baby starts showing a yucky red rash or the store shelves are stripped bare because there’s been a run on toilet paper… what then? We live in a world of celestial ease and comfort. The majority of people on planet Earth do not - but I am talking to my fellow privileged Western first world peeps. My peeps who understand that climate change is real.

Even we are desperately under-prepared. Even we haven’t thought it all the way through. Even we don’t have the skills, the habits, and the expectations for how bad things can get. And the help that might come will be stretched thinner and thinner, if it even exists at all.

We might have the moxie to prep, but we need to be clear-eyed about what it’s like to live without power and indoor plumbing. For the long term.

We need to get to grips with what we can live without, because we will have to.

We need to take to heart our “units of survival” and lean in to building community, learning skills, and mapping out a path that does not rely on the underlying assumption that the web will snap back to life, Tractor Supply will open back up with well-stocked shelves, and the modern world will go blithely on while we cosplay pioneer in our neatly tended garden.

It’s gonna get medieval up in here. Probably sooner than we think. Let’s get ready.