Hat tip to De for this one.

This essay by Bill McKibben shows a couple of things, (1) that self-sufficiency in the money-energy grid is unreal and (2) that it is a community effort, not a individual-survivalist one (a decidedly male fantasy in many cases). This is an important bit of nuance for Insurgent American because we see “off the grid” as part of a long term strategic approach to a politics of resistance; not as a withdrawal strategy (and let the devil take the hindmost). At the same time, IA is not promoting one-way sectarianism and more-revolutionary-than-thou disrespect directed at people who don’t achieve line-item agreement on some program. The people who are actually trying intentional communities, experimenting with self-sufficiency, home-schooling, et al, are running our laboratories for us. The day will certainly come when the skill sets required to cope with a very “long emergency” — and the people who can pass these skills along — are in great demand. This process, however, is inevitably political… and that requires that we continue to assert ourselves into the often grubby and tedious, sometimes perilous, always contentious arena of politics. As my esteemed co-conspirator De likes to say, that means localizing our efforts. Changing conditions and self-organization will default to networking and bottom-up coordination, not like a great ship with its officers and captain, but like kefir grains that ferment throughout society. Here is Bill McKibben’s piece:

Old MacDonald Had A Farmers’ Market – total self-sufficiency is a noble, misguided ideal

By Bill McKibben

Generations of college freshmen, asked to read Walden, have sputtered with indignation when they learned that Henry David went back to Concord for dinner with his family every week or two. He’s cheating; his grand experiment is a fraud. This outrage is a useful tactic; it prevents them from having to grapple with the most important (and perhaps the most difficult) book in the American canon, one that asks impossibly searching questions about the emptiness of a consumer economy, the vacuity of an information-soaked era. But it also points to something else: Thoreau, our apostle of solitary, individual self-reliance, out in his cabin with his hoe and his beans, the most determinedly asocial man of his time — nonetheless was immersed in his community to a degree few people today can comprehend.

Consider the sheer number of people who happened to drop by the cabin of an obscure eccentric. “I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society,” he writes. Often more visitors came than could sit — sometimes twenty or thirty at a time. “Half-witted men from the almshouse,” busybodies who “pried into my cupboard and bed when I was out,” a French-Canadian woodchopper, a runaway slave “whom I helped to forward toward the north star,” doctors, lawyers, the old and infirm and the timid, the self-styled reformers. It’s not that Thoreau was FULL ESSAY AT In Character

Posted by stan in Analysis