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Apocalypse Now-ish with Dave Pollard
1.5k Plays10 months ago
A convo about the collapse of civilization may not be everyone’s cuppa tea, but a spoonful of Dave Pollard makes the medicine go down! And today Dave is bringing the sweetness to episode one of Reskillience for a Big Hairy Chat about the End Times – that ain’t so scary after all.
We discuss what “collapse” means, skills that can help us cope and adapt, why communitarianism is where it’s at, and how to catch each other when The Shit Hits The Fan.
Dave is a writer and longtime student of culture, systems theory, complexity, history, human nature, non-duality and how the world really works. He describes himself as a dechooled non-spiritual vegan and joyful pessimist – and after this surprisingly uplifting conversation, I’m sure you’ll agree.
CONNECT WITH DAVE
Dave’s home on the web ~ How To Save The World
LINKS TO STUFF
Dave’s recommended reading list ~ The Books That Have Influenced Me Most
Dave’s article ~ How Do We Teach the Critical Skills Needed to Face Collapse?
Molly Housch Gordon's piece ~ How to Survive the End of The World
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Resculience Podcast
00:00:03
Speaker
This podcast is home to conversations about skills, about the resilience they bring, and about living closer to the ground so we don't have quite so far to fall if our fragile modern systems fail us. It's hosted by me, Katie Payne, a person who couldn't even wipe her own butt on the first day of kindergarten, but is slowly, surely learning how to human.
00:00:28
Speaker
And just as a side note, reclaiming our wild capabilities may in fact change our relationship to toilet paper. But more on that another time. You're listening to Resculience, gratefully recorded on Jaja Wurrung Country.
00:00:43
Speaker
And I hope it supplies you with inspiration to become the keeper of wisdom and smarts and endangered arts in your community.
Guest Introduction: Dave Pollard
00:00:50
Speaker
Because regardless of what the future holds, whether or not we ever need to start fires by friction out of necessity, it's just fun to learn stuff.
00:00:58
Speaker
And today we're learning stuff from Dave Pollard.
Skills for Societal Preparedness
00:01:02
Speaker
He's a writer on culture, complexity, deep ecology, collapse and the sharing economy. His article, How Do We Teach the Critical Skills Needed to Face Collapse, caught my eye last year because it offered a neat and tidy list of skills that Dave sees as crucially important to learn or relearn in the coming years. Things like growing food, making pottery, building shelter and applying first aid.
00:01:27
Speaker
and more surprisingly, skills like listening, critical thinking, creativity, and imagination.
00:01:34
Speaker
In this chat, Dave offers his predictions for where society is headed, what we can individually and collectively do to prepare, and how to keep a hold of joy whilst white-knuckling it through the Anthropocene. For someone whose focal point is calamity, Dave is remarkably chipper. I left our discussion with a massive smile on my face and little doubt that this was the best way to kick off the series. There's lots of Dave-related links and goodness in the show notes, so flock there if you want more.
00:02:04
Speaker
And for now, please enjoy this really special conversation with Dave Pollard. I'll catch you on the other side. I reached out to you about the article that pretty much foundationally inspired this podcast.
Adapting to Future Challenges
00:02:20
Speaker
And I believe you wrote that a couple of years ago now, the critical skills needed to face collapse. It wasn't that long ago. I think it was earlier this year, actually. This is the one that was published, republished in Resilience, I think.
00:02:34
Speaker
Yeah, quite a few of my blog posts get republished. Nothing beats free material when you're a publisher. So I've learned that it's not so much a recognition of the brilliance of my writing. It is the fact that it's good value for the money.
00:02:59
Speaker
I'm sure you can take a little more credit than that. And it certainly really landed with me. So I'm interested to speak to you. We'll start from a place of that article. But as I understand it, you've somewhat evolved your thinking or even superseded that style of list making.
00:03:17
Speaker
only being only a short time ago so yes Dave I'd love to hear from you what inspired that article and a little about the skills the hard and soft skills that you presented as useful for us to be adapting to what's coming and also to how you've gone from that place how you've moved and where you've moved to since. Yeah I think what happened was that
00:03:47
Speaker
At one stage, I had a pretty idealistic view that what we needed to do was to have a scenario, because I used to be involved in scenario planning, exercises in business. So we needed to have future state scenarios that would help us to understand exactly how collapse would unfold. And therefore, we'd know what skills we need and in what quantity. And we could kind of assign people to say, OK, you're going to need to learn this and you're going to need to learn that.
00:04:16
Speaker
And it didn't take long for me to realize that was pretty naive. It's one thing to say that collapse, if you study the history books, is inevitable. It's another thing to say it's predictable how and when it's going to unfold.
Internal Readiness and Community Building
00:04:32
Speaker
And so since it's not predictable, you can't really prepare for it. So my philosophy has evolved from the early days when I believe that, you know, you need to
00:04:45
Speaker
You need to identify what the critical skills were, learn a bunch of those skills and then find other people to create a sense of community so you'd be all ready. And now I've taken several steps back from that and I believe that it's really largely about adaptation. That we're going to have to be ready to face whatever may come that we can't predict.
00:05:11
Speaker
And that adaptation means that basically we have to start with our own readiness. So work on ourselves internally, first of all. And when I did the list of skills, I basically started on that basis that, you know, we need to learn
00:05:35
Speaker
We need to bone up on our critical thinking skills. We need to relearn how to do our own learning because most of us have been brought up in a schooling system where we don't need to know how to learn. We're told everything that we need to know. In a world of collapse, we're going to have to return to self-directed learning.
00:05:59
Speaker
and learn spontaneously and learn the skills to do that. And that's going to require us to regenerate a sense of curiosity, which I think a lot of us have lost, and re-practice how to imagine, because we haven't, most of us, had practice imagining. So those are kind of the, those internal skills, first of all,
00:06:25
Speaker
But it's not only the skills, it's also a question of self-awareness and self-knowledge. When we're dealing with the problems of collapse and we're finding ourselves in a community where we may not like a lot of the people that we get stuck with in community, we're going to have to learn to understand our reactivity, understand
00:06:52
Speaker
where other people are coming from, so be able to put ourselves in their shoes. And so that's going to take a lot of practice and a lot of work to learn how to build community with the people that we find ourselves with at the various stages of collapse. And I can talk about how I think that will unfold if that would be useful.
Defining Societal Collapse
00:07:17
Speaker
Well, yes, indeed. Before we get too far into those skills and the adaptation,
00:07:21
Speaker
over preparedness, which I'd love to dig into with you and also the communitarian approach that you have and experience in intentional communities and that kind of thing. I don't want to take for granted the definition of collapse or the way that you see collapse unfolding. So if you could give us a bit of a dust jacket summary of what you mean by collapse, that would be really excellent to frame the conversation.
00:07:46
Speaker
Right, well there's four books that are really good for people to read up on if they want and they're the four, I've read a lot of books on this subject but the four that have been most valuable to me in learning is first of all the books by Jared Diamond of course like Guns, Germs and Steel and secondly a book by a Canadian who lives not far from me actually by the name of Ronald Wright called A Short History of Progress which basically attempted to
00:08:15
Speaker
It basically covers the same material as Gerard Diamond's books, but does it in about a quarter of the volume. So it's a good way to kind of understand why civilisations inevitably collapse and how they collapse. And the third book, which is fascinating to me, was also by Ronald Wright, and it's a novel.
00:08:42
Speaker
that he wrote afterwards to try to envision what life would be like after collapse. And this is where this whole idea of imagination comes. I think there's a tendency for a lot of us to think that once things collapse, everything will be like today except going backwards. So it'll be like the old Wild West or like a Mad Max film or something like that.
00:09:07
Speaker
And what it's likely to be is something we can't even begin to imagine. It's going to be completely unlike anything we have had before in history.
Exploring Post-Collapse Economy
00:09:17
Speaker
We've never had a global civilizational collapse before. So the book of scientific romance, the novel that Ronald Wright wrote, is a wonderful exercise in imagining how that might unfold.
00:09:33
Speaker
And the other book that also imagines that and also draws on currently collapsing societies, which I found even more valuable is a book by a woman by the name of Anna Loewenhopp Tsing called The Mushroom at the End of the World.
00:09:50
Speaker
I don't know if you're familiar with that. It's a difficult book to read. It's a complex study of societies. But basically, its argument is that the next economy after our current industrial growth economy won't be a renewable energy economy. It will be a scavenger economy.
00:10:13
Speaker
And she describes the way scavenger economies work by drawing on the way in which people from Southeast Asia who came to the Pacific West Coast of the United States after the war in Vietnam. And they couldn't make a living doing anything. They had no skills. They didn't have the language. You know, they were in the streets. So they created a new subsistence economy around
00:10:43
Speaker
valuable mushrooms that are highly marketable in countries like Japan. And what she shows is how these people actually created in the forests of Oregon primarily
00:11:06
Speaker
forests which had been basically clear cut and then abandoned because their economic value had been lost. But they were the perfect growing area for some of these incredibly valuable mushrooms. So these Southeast Asians organized around their tribal communities created entirely independent, self-sufficient economies in Oregon State that tied into the existing economy through the export of mushrooms to
00:11:36
Speaker
Asia. And it's just a fascinating study. And then she uses that as a basis to explain how a scavenger economy actually works. And it's not as terrible as you might think. It's actually pretty cool. And if you're a good innovator, we run something, I'm still involved a little with Bowen Island, and we run something on Bowen called the Fix-It Fair. You probably have some of those there too.
00:12:04
Speaker
And people absolutely love these things. All of these people who know how to fix just about anything, from bicycles to 100-year-old waffle irons, they're able to fix these things. And that's
Survival Skills and Self-Sufficiency
00:12:21
Speaker
the kind of skill that we're going to need to be able to
00:12:26
Speaker
to survive going forward. So those were the kind of books that inspired me to envision how collapse will unfold. The reading that I've done of previous civilizations suggests that this isn't going to be a quick Mad Max collapse and then we start building again thing. This is going to happen over, the actual collapse is going to happen over decades, probably in multiple stages where the expression is slowly and then all at once.
00:12:56
Speaker
So we'll have periods at which they'll be precipitous declines, stock market collapses and things like that. And then there'll be periods of relative stability where people will try to rebuild what was there before and it won't work. This is a lesson from past collapses. People will try to rebuild what was broken because it's the only way they know. And eventually after three or four cycles of this,
00:13:25
Speaker
that where the rebuilding doesn't work, we'll start to learn how to rebuild something new, which requires us to kind of reimagine it. So I think it's possible if you look at the history of past civilizations that it could take millennia, like thousands of years,
00:13:47
Speaker
before we reach a state. There's something called in mathematics, the long tail of the power law. And what it suggests is that both technological events, all the stuff that we've got, the hockey stick things of the growth and then collapse, they're all going to have a long tail, which means after the more precipitous collapse, there's going to be this long period of slow decline.
00:14:15
Speaker
And that will probably end one of two ways. Either we will find new viable subsistence ways to live, which are joyful and sustainable and so on, or will go extinct. And I don't think that's a choice we're just going to see. And as I say, it could take centuries or even millennia.
00:14:37
Speaker
before we arrive at that end state. But I, most people are horrified when I start talking about this, but I find it absolutely amazing, exciting. I mean, we live in a world where we're dependent. We don't know how to do things for ourselves anymore. And once collapse happens, we're going to have to learn to do things for ourselves. And as I found out from the fix it fair, it's really fun.
00:15:03
Speaker
to learn these self-sufficiency skills. So I think it's going to be a blast, even though it's going to be scary as hell, as it happens. Yeah. Thanks for bringing some synonyms for fun into this conversation, because this is the conversation I'd like to release first on the Risk audience podcast. But I know that you've described yourself as a joyful pessimist. I'm an optimistic,
00:15:31
Speaker
oriented towards, you know, the sunnier side of life kind of person. The reason that I am fascinated with, I guess I'm not fascinated with collapse and the kind of details of that. I'm actually fascinated by the questions of how to live, how to enrich my own existence, how to eke the meaning out of this life that I've been given. And it just so happens that talking about collapse and what's going on in our civilization, how to
00:15:59
Speaker
how to tend my own life support systems, that happens to be a really good proxy for the questions I've always had. And probably the question at the heart of human existence, which is what does it mean to be here? What really matters? And how do I find the joy and pleasure in this life that also contains a lot of horror and violence and despair and dread? And I'm wondering if that's the kind of foundation of your own curiosity on this subject as well.
00:16:28
Speaker
Yeah, I think it's evolved over time. Initially, I mean, I called this blog when it started. It's hard to believe 21 years ago. The blog is called How to Save the World. And I was only half kidding when I titled it that. I titled it that because I knew it would attract a lot of Google attention and you wouldn't believe the emails that I get because I got pretty close to top Google rank on.
00:16:56
Speaker
on the expression, save the world now, after all these years. Yeah, but it's interesting how my thinking has evolved from being, how are we going to turn things around to this approach of how are we going to adapt ourselves? And part of that evolution came by
00:17:23
Speaker
reading a book on dog behavior called The Secret Kindness of Animals by Melissa Holbrooke Pearson. And I read it because somebody said to me, this is not a book about dog behavior. Read it, you're going to love it. And it's actually a complete history of behavioralism, the philosophy of behavioralism, the psychological field.
00:17:52
Speaker
of behavioral, and I hated B.F. Skinner when I was younger. It was just like, this was, I couldn't believe that we didn't have complete control over everything that we were doing. But reading Melissa's book made me realize just to what extent we are conditioned in our behavior.
00:18:19
Speaker
on that basis, I started to think, okay, we're not going to be able to turn things around. How can we adapt ourselves if all we're doing is conditioning each other? And the realization of this, which came to some extent was reinforced by another book
Community Problem Solving
00:18:44
Speaker
that I recently read, which is just a wonderful
00:18:47
Speaker
book by the Euroscientist Robert Sapolsky who's worked with baboons and I love studying wild, I love learning about wild animals because I think they have an enormous amount to teach us about how to live in community and how to live in society. So I had spent a fair bit of time
00:19:14
Speaker
working with intentional communities because at one stage I figured, okay, these are people who understand the importance of building community. They'll have a lot of the answers that we need on how to build a community. And what I discovered was they really didn't have the clue about how to build community. They had great ideas. The practice was itself really valuable.
00:19:40
Speaker
but most intentional communities only last about five years. And then they collapse. And I had a friend that I corresponded with by the name of Joe Bagent, who died a few years ago. But his argument was, the reason why you can't learn to build community is because community is born of necessity. And he reinforced that by inviting me down
00:20:09
Speaker
to stay with him in a little village in Belize in Central America. And I was between jobs, so I said, oh, this sounds like fun. I'll get lots of blog posts out of this one. So I went down and visited with him. And he told me the story of this village, which is that 300 or so years ago, a bunch of slave ships went to ground in the Caribbean.
00:20:38
Speaker
A lot of the slaves managed to escape and they didn't know what to do. They didn't know where they were. So they made their way up the coast and they found this little village, which was right on the Gulf of Mexico and seemed to be a good climate. They could grow things there. And basically for 300 years, they lived their own lives.
00:21:03
Speaker
their own rules, they did everything themselves. They were a completely self-sufficient community. And when I visited it, I discovered it still is. All of the people, the kids, at a very young age, they learned how to hook up water supply and power supply, how to fix it when it goes down.
00:21:27
Speaker
all of these skills they learn because they have to, because there's no central authority taking responsibility for this. They've developed a remarkable medical system that, you know, it doesn't do complicated surgery, but it works really well for the people. And they have an incredibly long and healthy life as a result of this. They have their own police system.
00:21:56
Speaker
which doesn't involve anybody in uniform. When somebody has been robbed or something like that happens, the people in the community know who did it because they know each other so well. They know the history, they know the stories of each other.
00:22:13
Speaker
So when somebody gets robbed, they go around to the house of persons they know who did it and they retrieve it and they bring that person back and that person apologizes for having done it. And then they say, okay, well, we understand you did this because you need to, you have a drug habit and you need to feed it. So let's deal with that and so on. That's how you build community. And that's what we're all going to have to learn how to do.
00:22:39
Speaker
when things fall apart and we're not going to be able to learn it from textbooks. We're going to learn it when we have to with the people who we happen to find ourselves with when everything falls apart. So I think it's going to be great fun and it's going to be fascinating learning experience. We're going to have to unlearn a lot of the things and a lot of the beliefs that we think, you know, that certain things have to be done by centralized authority. They don't.
00:23:09
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's a much more promising prospect for people who are going about their daily lives and not necessarily engaging much with their neighbour sphere. I was listening to Jem Bendel speak to Douglas Rushkoff on Team Human recently and Jem was talking about the billionaires in their bunkers now progressing to the idea that actually we'll need a community
00:23:34
Speaker
And so potentially we'll make mini little nations and defend those nations and people have skin in the game. But that's obviously still really misguided and fraught because they're talking about growing tomatoes in tubes and all of this kind of technological hoo-ha. But what I hear you saying is that actually beyond that is the rooting in place, adapting where you are and bonding with people around you.
00:23:59
Speaker
due to, yeah, out of necessity, not this intentional retreat to a perfect utopian kind of community. So are you kind of saying that don't worry about it too much now because when it happens, it happens and we do adapt because that's the nature of being a human or are there things people can do if they're listening in an urban space or, you know, feeling the pull to try and build some community where they are?
00:24:26
Speaker
Are there things that you'd suggest as being useful as a precursor? Yeah, I think it's always useful to be ready for whatever comes along. And the problem for most of us is our lives are so busy, we don't have any time.
00:24:43
Speaker
to learn new things. So I call them my reminder list. I used to call it my action list of things that I wanted to learn how to do, new skills to learn. But now it's a reminder list, which is these would be things that would be useful to know how to do to be more adaptable when things start to get more difficult. And that's where that original list came from. And they're not
00:25:12
Speaker
Complex technical things they're things like learning how to need less And want less That's a huge one. I'd love to start the do less movement. I'm sure that that many people are already championing the do less life flat kind of approach to things but can you talk a little bit more about the sexiness of having less because I feel it's just not part of the conversation it's how do we continue the consumption, you know continue to
00:25:41
Speaker
fund the consumption that we're used to. But actually, we're going to need to really power down in so many respects. Absolutely. And I think part of the problem is that a lot of our current society, because we are so dependent on others, we're driven to some extent by fear. And the only way we can overcome that fear is having more than we need. So we've got some fallback. So the stock market goes down. We've still got this little buffer and so on.
00:26:10
Speaker
I think the only way you can learn to need and want less is by practicing it. The astonishing exercise that taught me about this was when I retired because I was earning a large amount of money as a senior partner with a major international consulting organization.
00:26:35
Speaker
And they said, well, you're going to get the pension, the partner's pension, and it's going to give you 40% of your current income for the rest of your life.
Minimalism and Frugality Culture
00:26:48
Speaker
And I said, oh, so that means I don't get to retire because I got to, you know, I got to make up the other 60% somehow. And it was an older retired partner who just laughed and he said, just try it.
00:27:04
Speaker
And to my astonishment, I actually lived a more comfortable life on 40% of the income when I retired than I had when I had 100%. For a start, when you stop working, you find that your clothes budget goes way down. The repairs and maintenance and the gasoline for your automobile goes way down.
00:27:31
Speaker
And life becomes far more enjoyable because the more stuff you've got, the more stuff you have to worry about breaking down and falling apart. So the key to practice in terms of needing and wanting less is try it. Set yourself a budget. Yeah, set yourself a budget and prove to yourself that you can do with
00:28:01
Speaker
much less than what you have now. Yeah. And that definitely calls on the imagination and human ingenuity that you spoke about earlier. I think having those challenges and games can really inspire positive behavioral change. And also too, I wonder if you've noticed this, but role modeling is such a powerful force in a life of simplicity and voluntary frugality. Like the people that I share a property I'm here living in exchange,
00:28:30
Speaker
and the woman, the elder of our property Sue, I've cooked, I've catered courses and things with her and watching her
00:28:39
Speaker
cook and you know if we're roasting potatoes if there's any first of all she measures out the oil absolutely to the most infinitesimal kind of millimeter of quantity required to coat those potatoes and crisp them but after they've been taken out of the baking dish if there's any glisten like a slick of oil in the bottom it's
00:29:00
Speaker
mopping that up with something, using it again. She's so reverential. Every single thing, whether it's food or clothing or shelter, everything in her life is an act of great devotion to the things that she does have and for that reason.
00:29:15
Speaker
You know, the folks that I live with, they're pretty well known, you know, the co originators of permaculture, but they live below the poverty line, you know, we're all living below the poverty line, not really, you know, we're paying our taxes in service to the commons and service to community and that kind of thing we just don't earn.
00:29:31
Speaker
a lot of money. And yet I think, gosh, this is absolute luxury. I'm living in luxury. We're eating the most gorgeous food that we've grown. And I think, yeah, Sue Dennett, especially, her role model ship and the culture that she's created in this environment of, hey, this is how we do things. There is zero waste. Everything's a loop. And it's just not cool to be a wasteful hedonist.
00:29:58
Speaker
I feel that benefit too is couched in a culture of frugality and care for resources. So I'm wondering if you have that around you or if you've seen people positively respond to that culture. I think we've got that in spades. There's another great book called The Logic of Sufficiency. I can't remember the name of the author offhand, but if you're interested in learning more about
00:30:24
Speaker
how living at a level of sufficiency rather than a level of abundance and surplus is a better life. It makes more sense in a lot of different ways. That's a great book to read.
Gift Circles and Resource Sharing
00:30:37
Speaker
One of the things that really hit home to me, because I lived on Bowen Island, this little island for a long period of time, and I discovered at one stage that I didn't know my neighbors.
00:30:51
Speaker
So what we did is we, we said, we're going to have a potluck. Do you have potlucks in Australia? Okay, great. We're going to have a potluck and we're going to invite all of the neighbors, everybody who lives within, I guess there was about 30 houses that were within a reasonable walking distance from our, uh, from our place. And, uh, most of them showed up with this potluck.
00:31:19
Speaker
And what we talked about was, you start with the formalities, what do you do? But what we really got into is, what do you care about? What do you do with your leisure time? What do you need that you can't get on this island? Because you get a little bit isolated when you're living on an island off the coast. And it was astonishing to discover. I bought probably 20% or 30% less stuff
00:31:48
Speaker
In the years after that meeting because I said I don't need to buy this tool Because I know that this guy has one I don't need to you know Learn how to do this particular thing because I can just invite this neighbor who knows how to do it better than anybody and in return I'll offer them something and
00:32:13
Speaker
We did something called a gift circle, which is a wonderful exercise as well Where we actually invite people to come and tell us what you need and tell us what you have a surplus of which could be time it could be space it could be Tools and things that you have it could be food But you've got a surplus of you got trees first thing with fruits and so on and
00:32:44
Speaker
And it was a fascinating exercise. It was terrifying for most people to go through that Not because they weren't willing to talk about what they had a surplus of everyone's willing to talk about that But when they acknowledged what they needed And so first of all you had to listen to find out what people had in surplus and then all of a sudden you realize Wow
00:33:12
Speaker
I could really use that. So then you have these like quiet one-on-one conversations with people. And when you start to do it, this is the essence of community, is when you know who has what skills, what stuff, what space, what extra time, all of a sudden your needs are way, way less than they were before.
00:33:36
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, beautiful. Gift circles are an amazing technology of meeting each other's needs and community building. And I love the idea of gathering without any kind of overlay of an agenda, simply to share a meal with your neighbors and get to know each other. And then naturally those conversations emerge. And also too, you touched on that relearning process of how to receive
00:34:05
Speaker
and how to be in that awkward space of asking for something that you require. And then also breaking through the formalities or the etiquette of the kind of dominant system where we're in our little homes, don't you dare knock on the door unless we have a pre-organised appointment.
00:34:27
Speaker
let alone turn up at someone's house and ask, oh, can I please put some washing in your machine or borrow your drill? Like I, I think that there's a huge piece around being comfortable to be in a position of asking and also getting over our, our shyness and preciousness around interrupting or breaking into those, those four walls that people have kind of set around themselves. And that's a huge piece of it for me too. Like how to, um,
00:34:53
Speaker
How do I extend out into that community? Even though I do know all those amazing resources and gifts are there, it's then coming around to that and possibly to hang ups about, gosh, it's a bit filthy or feral not to be able to do my own laundry or not to have such and such a thing. So there's a lot in there psychologically. Yeah, I think when I was involved in the transition movement,
00:35:22
Speaker
I initially put together with a group of friends this list of about 100 skills that we thought people needed. And this is just overwhelming. And we actually made a game out of this where you had to... It's basically a balancing act. All games are dealing with issues of limited resources and scarcity and decisions between them.
00:35:45
Speaker
So it was like, which skills are you going to develop and which ones are you going to pass on? Um, and it was kind of scary and a little overwhelming until we realized not everybody needs to know everything. Yeah. The most important thing is knowing who in your community has these skills. Yeah. And decommission the nuclear power reactor. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
00:36:13
Speaker
And I did derail your reminder list, Dave. I'd love to hear more about what's on that list, what you're reminding yourself that you may want to cultivate or cultivate in the time that you have. Yeah, I guess.
00:36:28
Speaker
What struck me is that most of the survivalists, of course, are focused on the hard skills, the technical skills. And it was interesting when I published that list of skills that a
Foraging and Survival Skills
00:36:42
Speaker
permaculturalist who's from Australia by the name of Peter Webb, and he's now living in the jungles of Brazil.
00:36:52
Speaker
And he's introduced permaculture culture, permaculture activities back into the indigenous peoples in that jungle. And if they ended, they initially used them, but they forgot because, you know, they had taken over by like colonized, like the rest of us. Um, and he talked to, he added to the list. He basically said in terms of the tech, the, the, the hard skills, one of the hard skills is how to maintain a fire.
00:37:21
Speaker
Oh yeah. It's not until you've tried to start a fire, even that, where do you find dry materials? What are the kind of the fineness, the medium kindling? What are you using as a spindle and a board? And even if you're one person, how almost impossible it is to start a fire by friction with the hand drill. And how long do you season different kinds of woods?
00:37:47
Speaker
It doesn't take a huge amount of skill to learn these, but they're absolutely essential skill. He also talks about the fact that one of the skills that we've lost is the ability to identify and forage edibles, because we consider it to be, except for mushroom fans. Mushroom fans get this completely, but other people don't. There's a woman on Bowen Island who studied this extensively
00:38:18
Speaker
And Bowen Island, it's a volcanic island. And it's got a lot of forested area. But at one stage or other, it was all forested. So it's not old growth forest. And she actually did an experiment where she lived in the forest for a week, eating nothing but local plants.
00:38:40
Speaker
that she found in the forest. And she did her research, of course, in advance. And everybody was just like, they couldn't believe it. Because it's like just all weeds. What in the world did you eat? Are you feeling OK? Do we need to take you to the hospital?
00:38:57
Speaker
That's pretty impressive. It's very impressive to be able to sustain yourself like that because I don't again it's like the fire thing I don't think people quite realize how many calories we require and also that you know if you're just subsisting on vegetable matter It's pretty you're gonna be very very hungry Yeah, I think that's true although you're talking to a vegan so I
00:39:20
Speaker
Oh, okay. No, I understand. I, you know, I'm an ex, I'm a vegan. So I will definitely empathize and relate with you. But I mean, I, I feel like growing a lot of vegetables and I grow a lot of vegetables here. It is quite energy intensive for what I get that calorific. Right.
00:39:38
Speaker
But I understand the nutrient density and the diversity that we need in our diets and how to cleverly kind of procure starches and carbs and things that are more filling. But yeah, I don't know. I sometimes think, gosh, it's really, really tough as a single person, you know, alone style, going out into the wilderness and your friend going out into the land. That's a tall order. And it's not as simple as, you know, just felling an animal and eating some mushrooms.
00:40:07
Speaker
It takes a whole village. It takes a whole region to feed it. It does. And again, it's a question of not trying to do it all yourself. You work with other people. So somebody goes out and forages for the whole group. Somebody else goes and starts the fire for the whole group. This is how community works is when you do that. But it's interesting. There's several farms on Bowen Island where they wouldn't pretend that they grow all of their own food.
00:40:36
Speaker
because basically they say it would be boring. I don't get enough variety, interesting variety in my food. But what they do is that they have determined that on a calorie basis, the amount of food that they produce is more than the amount of caloric energy that they actually consume. So they are a net exporter.
00:41:02
Speaker
of food. So they sell more into the local community, the local community markets and so on, then they bring back in terms of other foods from other places. So they know they could survive by themselves on foods. But that's quite amazing.
00:41:20
Speaker
Yeah, so I think those those technical skills are really important and growing and harvesting food or are an important part of that. You know, I live on the coast and complicating that is the whole issue of seafood. And
00:41:38
Speaker
One of the things this woman said is, if I was, instead of being on the forest, if I sat on the seashore, I could survive for a week on various seaweeds and other foods that I could harvest quite easily in the water as well. So her argument is, I'm not entirely convinced, but her argument is that it's not as difficult as you would think. When I go to the fix-it fairs, for example, and I watch
00:42:08
Speaker
One of the women in our fixed fair is actually a former Supreme Court judge. And she used to do knitting under her bulk, under the judges. When she was making decisions and listening, she would be knitting at the same time. And what she is able to repair
00:42:34
Speaker
in terms of mending clothing, darning socks, and so on. We have this fix at Fairford, it goes for roughly three hours. And people go home with armloads of stuff that she's fixed in that short period of time. So if a Supreme Court judge can learn to do this, there's no reason why the rest of us can't.
Community Self-Organization
00:42:56
Speaker
But again, it's not that everybody needs to know how to repair their own clothes.
00:43:01
Speaker
You just need to know some people in your community do it and who those people are and what you can offer to them in return. Yes, so how have you gone about focusing your attention, skills-wise? How have you selected skills to hone? Because you have mentioned when we were emailing that you've been on a bit of a journey with facilitation.
00:43:26
Speaker
And that has been a struggle for you potentially. So yeah, I'm keen to hear how, you know, if you've oriented yourself towards things that have come a little more naturally or if you've gone and pushed your edge in certain respects as well. A little bit of both. It took me a long time to figure out what my distinctive competency in life was. And that turned out to be
00:43:54
Speaker
through imagination. I wasn't a lonely kid, but I was a solitary kid growing up. I was scared of other kids. So I learned to entertain myself. I invented my own games and so on. So I had a very rich imagination. I had lots of practice imagining when I was young. And it took me a long time in the business world to realize that what my business clients valued more than anything else
00:44:22
Speaker
was the fact that I could say, you know, I read about this in a science book today. And I wonder whether or not this thing that butterflies do, like one example is butterflies have, their wings are too light to be able to support pigment. So the way in which color is seen in a butterfly's wing is through refraction.
00:44:52
Speaker
of the cells so that it can be incredibly lightweight without needing and still very bright and beautiful. And I sat down with a guy who was in the thin film coatings business and he said, you know, what you just talked about, we could apply to anti-counterfeiting of currencies. So instead of
00:45:20
Speaker
worrying about how we color the currency, maybe we change the way in which we use the paper. So the paper actually has, then you can't counterfeit it unless you've actually got the paper. It doesn't matter whether you got the ink or not. So those are the kinds of things. And so I think the key is to learn what are your distinctive competencies.
00:45:51
Speaker
and then determine how they could be or will be valuable in the community in which you're located. And so my distinctive companies, I think, I have a big chart up on my wall of the Wikipedia cognitive bias codex.
00:46:12
Speaker
which is absolutely fascinating. It's 260 different cognitive biases all categorized that people have. And I discovered when I was younger that, you know, my critical skills really were fairly intellectual. So it's imagination, it's curiosity, it's critical thinking, and so on. And so I've learned how to apply those.
00:46:40
Speaker
But what I've also learned is what I'm no good at. And one of the things that I got involved with a number of years ago was the business of facilitation. And I was intrigued by it because my experience in business with facilitation was absolutely awful.
00:47:02
Speaker
We had facilitators who basically thought their job was to convince the employees what the boss had already decided to do. They were not the least bit interested in hearing the ideas of the employees. That wasn't the purpose of the exercise. So that was my experience with facilitation. I had a negative view of it.
00:47:29
Speaker
And then I got involved with this whole group of facilitators up and down the west coast. And we ended up, actually we were going to write a book about facilitation. It ended up being a card deck because it was more fun again. And more people have learned, we sold thousands of copies of this facilitation card deck.
00:47:54
Speaker
Because my experience was so awful, the group did not use my stories to help identify the important patterns in good facilitation. They used my war stories of how not to facilitate. I told them all these terrible stories and they basically said, okay, flip it around.
00:48:18
Speaker
How can we convert that terrible example of how not to facilitate into an example of how to do it well? So that was how I learned. Okay. Yeah. I mean, facilitation, it is on your list of soft skills and I believe it's italicized. Maybe one of the ones you've picked out as really quite important. It feels a little slippery to me and I know a lot of people, it's only,
00:48:45
Speaker
in recent years that I've understood somewhat the role of a facilitator and how kind of our chemical, a group or a gathering or a well-facilitated space can be and what can arise from that. But are you able to describe why facilitation is an important skill, especially in this time that we find ourselves in?
00:49:07
Speaker
Yeah, it's interesting. You're not the only one that has trouble identifying why it's so important, or what it is, even. Every time I cross the border, when I have gone to events that are facilitation related, and the people that say, well, what event are you going to? And I say, I'm going to a facilitation conference. It's very meta. What's that? What are you going to do exactly?
00:49:32
Speaker
So eventually we learn to say we're going to a learning session on how to conduct better meetings. That they can kind of relate to. Yeah, I think it's important primarily because
00:49:51
Speaker
communities are going to have to relearn how to self-organize. We're going to have to take a lot of these self-identified leaders in our communities down a notch or two because they may be perfectly competent at leading in a hierarchical system that has a huge amount of available resources to deal with. So you can pretty well automate the process.
00:50:18
Speaker
in a highly oil-dependent, complex environment. But when you're starting to rebuild things from scratch, you have to learn how to self-organize, to self-manage. And so that's why I think it's so important.
Cultural and Generational Differences
00:50:39
Speaker
And a key part of the reason why I think so many of us are poor at facilitating is because we're no good at listening.
00:50:49
Speaker
My experience has been that almost all the best facilitators that I have met have been women. And I don't know whether, why that seems to be the case, that they just, they are better listeners than men are as a rule. But facilitation basically is the skill of helping
00:51:15
Speaker
a group to achieve a common objective where everybody in the room brings something different to the solution of that problem. So the job of the facilitator is to say, okay, this person is going to be at value in this area, this person is going to add value in this area, and to bring out the best in everybody in the room. And that starts with listening.
00:51:43
Speaker
And I think that's why it's so important because the community is going to have to self-organize in such a way that it knows who has what skills and who has what needs and weaknesses. And how do you match those up in a way that involves everybody and doesn't require somebody who knows everything and has to take charge of the process. So that's why Facilitation makes the list.
00:52:12
Speaker
Yeah, and of course not everyone is able to articulate themselves or express themselves or advocate for their ideas and skills and gifts in the same way. And I'm guessing that as a facilitator you're picking up those imbalances in groups as well and trying to maintain some kind of
00:52:34
Speaker
you know equilibrium in a group of people or as you say draw out draw out people who really do deserve to be heard and have wonderful things that are being harbored that are often overshadowed and dominated by louder voices in the group who are much better at simply selling themselves. Yeah and they're they're definitely a challenge to deal with that. I find
00:52:57
Speaker
One of the challenges is when you're dealing with groups with different demographics as well, and that applies in a number of different ways, but one of them is cultural differences. I'm living now in a community that is incredibly multicultural.
00:53:15
Speaker
And I remember walking into our local bistro the other day and I have finally learned there was a couple talking. One was English and the other was a woman who was apparently Japanese. And the English speaking guy, I don't know what language they were speaking. The English speaking guy was going on and on and on. And the Japanese woman was nodding and nodding and nodding and nodding.
00:53:44
Speaker
waiting for the English-speaking guy to shut up. And, you know, there was two things going on there. The first was that the English-speaking guy figured that a nod meant, I agree with you. But what it actually means in the Japanese culture is, I hear you.
00:54:08
Speaker
It doesn't necessarily mean I agree with you whatsoever. And the other thing about the Japanese culture that I learned from sitting in the bistro, doing a little bit of cultural anthropology, was that in the Japanese culture, after a conversation, you always leave a gap. Whereas in English cultures, that gap is kind of an embarrassment. You gotta fill it somehow. You gotta fill in that space.
00:54:39
Speaker
Whereas in Japanese culture, after somebody says something, you can have an unawkward pause of 30 seconds or a minute where nobody says anything. And nobody has a problem with it. I don't think we're quite the same way. Yeah. Yeah, that's a great point. We do not like the vaccine. The cultural differences can be a challenge. And we're going to deal with that not only in
00:55:09
Speaker
different cultures, ethnically different cultures, but also generationally different cultures. When we find ourselves in community, we're going to discover that old people and middle-aged people and young people, their style of communication, their style of learning,
00:55:30
Speaker
is inevitably going to be different. So one size does not fit all when it comes to the give and take of building community.
00:55:40
Speaker
I'm wondering if you have elders in your community you look to and they're playing or they're inhabiting that space of really holding something for the greater community and also too if you are undergoing or have undergone any initiation or rites of passage that is helping you move towards a position of eldership in your community.
00:56:05
Speaker
I think diseases are enough of a rite of passage of getting old. I know a number of people who have been involved in those kinds of rights, particularly because of the fact that we're trying to reconnect here in British Columbia with our First Nations heritage and understanding. So there is an elder program that
00:56:31
Speaker
enables some of the older people on Bowen Island in particular to learn more about the ways and practices of First Nations people and to be able to represent them. So I think that's going on to a considerable extent among the older communities. I think it's had less of an impact when it comes to younger people.
00:57:00
Speaker
And I don't know how you deal with that. I don't know how you get them. I don't know how you even get them into the same room to talk about things, because we live in an atomized kind of a culture now. And in many cases, it's stratified based on either ethnic or demographic
00:57:30
Speaker
stratifications. And so if all you're ever talking to is other people your own age, how do you get the kind of perspectives and the depth of skills that you're going to need to create a community that has to be open and inclusive for everybody?
00:57:48
Speaker
Yeah, I wonder if it's what I see is a magnetism like a draw that people have ultimately to certain aspects that may be undernourished at the moment you know the way that when I go camping.
00:58:03
Speaker
I know that oftentimes there'll be groups of young people out there in the bush too, because they are yearning to be in wilder spaces. But of course they take their footy and their boombox and they make a ruckus and it's really unpleasant for everyone else at the campsite. But I see that as this latent desire, like something tugging at them, calling them back to the land in some way, even though that may seem a little fraught when it's so noisy. But in the same way, I wonder if we
00:58:31
Speaker
have an understanding or an inner knowing that we do need to connect with our elders or we do need to, I don't know, be in community and that's expressed differently and could be more sophisticated, but it might, we might just be drawn inevitably, especially if things become more challenging. Well, yeah, this is the problem. As I say, community is born of necessity when you don't have to live in community with other people, when you can survive just fine
00:59:01
Speaker
You know, all by yourself, year after year, you don't learn the skills.
Mindful Nature Connection
00:59:06
Speaker
You don't discover the things that you need to know about yourself and about your neighbors in order to be able to do that.
00:59:15
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. Well, speaking of nature and nature connection, I'm interested to know, Dave, if you have a practice or a connection practice with the more than human world in the place where you're living, what are some of the ways that you enjoy the world around you and some of the pleasures and wonders of your place?
00:59:40
Speaker
My favorite one, I live up on the 42nd floor of an apartment building. This is not a good place to be when collapse happens. I'm here for a short time as a renter
00:59:55
Speaker
for complicated reasons. So please don't suggest to anybody that living on the 42nd floor is an example of sustainable living. Somebody do it. Yeah, I guess. But so this is the circumstances I find myself in. And one of the joys of that is not only the incredible view that I have out the window, but it's a fascinating place to watch birds
01:00:24
Speaker
and particularly bird behaviors in groups and how much I learn from comparing how birds in groups and studying how birds in groups behave compared to how
01:00:40
Speaker
humans live. So that's a key part of it. I also do, and I generally will summarize this once a month on the blog. It's part of the ritual that I've learned as a blogger now is my last post of every month is the result of what I call mindful wandering. And that is almost always in natural places. So walk around river banks, I'll walk up into the mountains.
01:01:10
Speaker
down to the lake or down to the ocean. And I'll just write about my experiences, what I've run into. And so having that imperative forces me not only to get out into nature, but it forces me to pay attention because I'm looking for anecdotes, stories, narratives that are going to be interesting to the reader.
01:01:40
Speaker
So that forces me to pay attention. That's another skill. I mean, we live in such an attention deficit society that for me to learn to pay attention, it's almost as hard as learning to listen well. And these were skills that were never rewarded in all of my years in business. I didn't have to listen. I was high up in the organization. I got to tell people what to do. I didn't have to listen to them.
01:02:09
Speaker
Um, and I didn't have to pay attention because everything was kind of, if you learned how things work, you did things the way you'd been taught to do them. Um, but the sheer joy of paying attention, it's not only, uh, an essential skill to learn, uh, when you're going to have to relearn the context, you know, it's, uh, it's also, uh, uh, a joyful skill as well.
01:02:38
Speaker
Yes, yeah, it is extremely pleasurable. But the implication is that when you're wondering and there's some kind of need there to be foraging or understanding what's happening seasonally and what's changing in your environment, the impetus is taking those stories back to the village or understanding
01:02:55
Speaker
deeply how to interact then with the systems around us. It's a joy but also a necessity to be place-based humans, creaturely humans who really know what's flowering, what's fruiting, what's predating. So there are reasons for having good attention and noticing skills.
Knowledge for Community Living
01:03:17
Speaker
Right. One of the jobs that I had with this large consulting organization was
01:03:23
Speaker
as their chief knowledge officer. What a title. Yeah, I think I was the first and last chief knowledge officer of the organization, but there was a time in which intellectual property was a big deal in business. It was kind of the hot subject for the year. And one of the things that we developed were these models of what knowledge is.
01:03:51
Speaker
And of course, organizational learning ties into all of that. But one of the things that I got out of that, which was really valuable, is understanding that there's three kinds of knowledge. There is no what knowledge.
01:04:06
Speaker
You know facts history Processes and so on there is no how knowledge how to do things and there's no who knowledge Which is that who knows how to do this who else is good at doing this and to me the key to
01:04:31
Speaker
to being successful in community when things will require us to do that is a good mix of those three. You're going to need to have some know what knowledge, some know how, and a lot of know who. The know who, the ability to create, sustain, and reciprocally draw on and use relationships is going to be absolutely critical.
01:05:01
Speaker
the three, no theory. I really love it. Now, I believe that you wanted to share something from Molly Housh Gordon. And I think it is a really beautiful way to wrap up a conversation like this. And what she writes is
01:05:19
Speaker
just a riot and wonderful, so I recommend people check out her writings on Substack. But I'd love to ask you, Dave, if there's anything else you wanted to touch on or speak to before we end on Molly's 12 Steps. I guess one of the things that I wrote about in the article was what I'd learned from reading Terry LePage's book, Eye of the Storm,
01:05:47
Speaker
Which I didn't love as a book, but I found it challenging and interesting. And it identified some additional things that we need, that we can do in order to be able to adapt as collapse happens. And a couple of them I thought were really useful. The first one is the importance of finding out where you really belong.
01:06:17
Speaker
And that's I don't know that there's a process for that It's largely an intuitive thing I have been in places in my life where I just said I could live here and other places where I've said oh my god, how does anybody live here? so the beginning I think it's important to begin to understand now where you really belong and I
01:06:44
Speaker
having those conversations with with the people that you care about as well because right now we rely I've got kids on the other half of the the other half of the country they're all grown up but we're going to reach the stage fairly early in collapse where air travel is going to be out of the question
01:07:07
Speaker
So one of the first things we're going to need to adapt to is the fact you're going to be stuck with the people who are close at hand. And if the people you really care about are thousands of miles away, it's not too early to start thinking about whether or not you want to move closer to them or move them closer to you. I thought that was
01:07:29
Speaker
really valuable. And the other thing that I'm finding out, we're reading about this in the news now every day, is developing our capacity to offer people refuge. We are likely to have, by the time Collapse gets into full gear, we're likely to have as many, according to the latest reports I just read, of two billion refugees.
01:07:58
Speaker
people who will have to move, not for economic reasons, but because the places they're living are just not inhabitable anymore. And as climate change worsens, we might find that we're part of that as well. We'll be okay for the first part, but as things continue to get worse, we may all be on the move.
01:08:21
Speaker
So learning how to offer people refuge, especially when we've got such a fearful anti-immigrant mentality. And again, I understand that people are driven by fear. They're terrified about how millions of people moving into their neighborhood are going to negatively affect them. And so part of learning how to offer people refuge is learning how to understand
01:08:49
Speaker
But these people are just like us. So I thought those were really useful. But other than that, I'm ready to jump into concluding with the little excerpt from Molly Hoosh Gordon's sermon, if that's OK for a wrap up. That would be great. Thank you. All right. The sermon was called, How to Survive the End of the World.
01:09:17
Speaker
And it's in second-person conditional, which is a tense that I try not to use because the more I study collapse, the more I realize I don't know. So I usually put these things out in the, you know, these are possibilities there. And so I think it's very smart and pretty funny.
01:09:43
Speaker
And so here's what she says. This is how she concluded her sermon about how to survive the end of the world. Get to know your neighbors. Feed them. Let them feed you. Watch each other's kids, grandkids, and pets. Develop the muscle of generosity like you're training for a giving ultra marathon. Share everything you can with anyone who asks and ask for what you need. Get in touch with your body.
01:10:13
Speaker
You will need it and it knows things. Pay attention to what is happening below your neck. Tell the truth and tell it to yourself first. Sit at the feet of your most vulnerable neighbors and in your most vulnerable places, they have the most teach you about survival. Listen.
01:10:41
Speaker
Remember your ancestors and the things they survived. Find the resilience that is your birthright and the courage that made way for your life. Practice taking risks. Show up in every struggle where someone is fighting for their dignity because that is how we will all survive. Learn about reparations and native sovereignty.
01:11:08
Speaker
Double down on exorcising supremacy systems from your soul. Learn to be tender.
Podcast Conclusion and Teaser
01:11:17
Speaker
Refuse to be hardened. Let your heart be moved every damn time. Root in the place you are. Learn its history. Learn its geography. Learn its seasons.
01:11:35
Speaker
sing a lot, and dance, make art, make love, rest luxuriously, eat pie. The world is ending and beginning now. Let us love, connect, and fight like hell for the dignity of each and all. Isn't that gorgeous? Yeah. Yeah, it is glorious.
01:12:04
Speaker
I wish I could write sermons like that. Well, I, for one, love the ripples that you cast into the world and have been so enjoying your offerings and your articles and extremely gratified and appreciative that you agreed to come on the podcast. And I think this is the perfect way to start. Resculience. And I've really enjoyed speaking to you today, Dave. Thank you so much.
01:12:32
Speaker
Thank you very much, it's been great and I look forward to hearing from all of the subsequent speakers on the podcast and seeing how I can contribute. It was such an honour to speak with Dave and I hope you're compelled to take a deep embracing dive into his back catalogue.
01:12:51
Speaker
Knowing that I never stick around to hear the end of a podcast, this closing bit is just for the diehards. If you're still here, you're a legend and I'm going to pay that commitment by letting you know who's joining us for episode two. It's one of the most radical women of my acquaintance, Meg Ollman from Artist's Family. She's a permaculture, neopresent propagator.
01:13:12
Speaker
a village augmenting and mending miracle worker, a writer, facilitator, fermenter, storyteller, a two-wheeled wonder, and a composer of the stickiest songs you'll ever hear. It really is a cracker of a convo, so queue up Resculience episode 2 to hear Meg's story straight from the Magpie's beak.
01:13:31
Speaker
Pretty soon I'm going to get a Patreon up and running so we can connect and chat about the creative process of podcasting, what's coming up from these conversations and any other enriching resources you'd like to swap and share. Also feel free to get in touch with me on the gram with guest suggestions or ways to make the podcast more fun suggestions. I'd really love to hear them.
01:13:52
Speaker
Oh, and I know that it's only episode one, but if you're feeling big of heart and limber of thumb, you can hop onto iTunes or Apple podcasts or whatever it's called and leave Resculiant some stars and a nice review. Thank you so much for tuning in. And there's a thorn bill outside my window eating bugs in the tree, which reminds me it is time for tea. Reskill you later.