Resilience Revisited

During this holiday gift-giving, which is intentionally kept to a minimum within my immediate friends and family, there was a bit of a recurring theme of preparedness – or survivalism.    There was a Tom Brown’s Field Guide to City and Suburban Survival,  an emergency space blanket, and a key fob what clever weave of cording around some survival tools.  For comparison, I pulled out my old survival kit from a wilderness survival course – put together so many moons ago in college.   Fortunately, the only occasion I’ve had for emergency use was for the bouillon – to replace salts lost in a desert hike, and the matches for a fire after a surprise storm.  But the need for survival is the same – only the setting has changed from wilderness to the urban jungle.   “Le plus ça change, le plus c’est la meme chose.”

Is it winter that is prompting us to tuck in and prepare?    I spent much of last week setting up my little indoor farm and preparedness supplies.   Stocking up on water, rice and beans, seaweed and mushrooms.  My “greens” sprouter is now going full force, the sauerkraut is brewing  and I just figured out how to get the long grain Basmati to sprout for GAMA rice.  It’s a nifty no-rinse method using thick hemp sprouting bags and an old cooler for a controlled temperature environment.  More on that another time, but I have a way of eating rice even with no power and limited water.   Outside, the compost pile has been established, and I’m thinking of getting the worm farm started.    The knitting needles have appeared, the darning yarn, and sewing machine.   What is this, if not a crazed reaction to far too much book study time?   Is it just winter?   Or is there something more primeaval?

Martin Holladay comments on a shared nostalgia for the hippie building heyday, and I tend to agree that all of these actions are reflective of a concern about resilience and passive survivability.   So, too, was my treatise on thorium. It is a recognition of the vulnerability of our human existence and the desire to create some sense of independence, some ability to take care of oneself.   For some of us, the pleasure is in the creating of solutions and we are eager and open for radical ideas, fringe elements, innovative thinkers.  For others, it is the security of a carefully researched plan or the assurance of a “green building” program.   But I believe our generation is only too well aware that major climate changes are upon us, that political uncertainly is real, and that we really can’t predict out too far in the future.  We understand the need for resilience, the need to wean ourselves from dependencies, the need to regroup into smaller clusters.   There is a change afoot, and I am cautiously optimistic for this new age of Aquarius.