Faith in the established agencies currently charged with protecting the population from the harm that emergencies, natural and human-made, is evaporating. Time to build our own escape route, suggests Henry Leveson-Gower?
For some years I have been exercised by an enduring and fundamental question relating to the future of humanity: “what should we do?” I have just finished reading, and highly recommend, the book, Lifehouse: Taking care of ourselves in a world on fire by Adam Greenfield which has helped me develop my thinking on this question. Clearly we need to take actions that have a chance of generating activity that helps care for us in a world on fire rather than being swept away with other vulnerable systems. This is how I understand resilience and Greenfield is thinking in the same vein.
Clearly we need to take actions that have a chance of generating activity that helps care for us in a world on fire.
The starting point for this book and for me is that most of our administrative, financial and commercial systems are degrading slowly and will probably degrade faster over the coming decades. Many of us in the UK have seen that with the NHS, our health system, which has not really recovered from the Covid hit. Since then we have not had a year without some shock and now we await the implications of the Trump-Netanyahu war of choice with Iran and a super El Nino. Likely scenarios include increases in the cost of living, degrading services, increasing conflicts and Governments claiming to be able to fix things, only to disappoint and in that disappointment further stoke political disaffection. None of it looks good.
We must begin to accept that the structure and drivers of capitalist systems cannot adapt to the challenges of climate change if we are going to make space for realistic hope. Talk of sustainable transitions, green growth, sustainability and so on no longer figures in board room conversations. And as big carbon doubles down on fossil fuel extraction, the populist right seeks to undermine government action. All this ironically while the implications of climate change become ever clearer and more immediate. It is as if the more real it becomes, the more businesses realise their impotence to address these challenges trapped as they are in the requirements of capitalism. Those business leaders who sought to buck the system are now long gone, and now no-one wants to talk about it.
We must start by realising that no-one is going to come and save us.
Greenfield puts the situation starkly – we must start by realising that no-one is going to come and save us. This is clearly a particularly big switch if you are part of the privileged world where everything is available if you have the right credit card. In the Global North, even if you are not so privileged, there are still governmental systems that you assume you can rely on. If you are not part of the privileged in the Global South, then there may be few systems that you rely on so no switch may be required but this is not great if your situation is as highly precarious as it is. Trump though has done a lot to undermine belief in the reliability of Global North government systems as he generates chaos 24/7 from his social media platform. Counterintuitively this may end up being a good thing in terms of helping us to make the switch out of complacency. We can gain some hope from the grass roots response in Minnesota to the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency’s campaign of terror.
Failure of these systems is also likely to generate substantial anger. I recall questioning my local Waitrose supermarket during Covid lockdowns as to why shelf stackers were still operating during opening hours undermining the health protection of a one-way system through the aisles. I was told that they couldn’t cope with the anger from entitled customers if some shelves ended up empty.
Greenfield looks for hope through examining a range of situations where people have risen to the challenge of doing for themselves. The book opens with the response to super storm Sandy, which in 2012 filled much of New York with polluted sea water cutting off access to power and fresh water, trapping people in the upper floors of buildings. He tells the story of Occupy Sandy, a bottom-up response emerging from the Occupy protest movement following the 2007/8 financial crisis and bank bailout, which became the first responders self-organising practical help for those affected. They proved faster and more effective than the official government organisations such as the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which Trump’s administration has since further degraded.
It was government’s often violent action that destroyed these attempts at self-organisation as they were seen as a threat to state domination.
He also relates other examples of communities organising collectively and heroically to provide self-help in crises including the Black Panthers, Greek self-organisation amongst extreme austerity following their EU induced debt crisis, and most interestingly Kurdish political self-organising during the Syrian civil war. This last example of democratic innovation was another victim of Trump when he removed US support in 2019 giving a greenlight to a Turkish invasion. This, Greenfield found, was a common pattern: it was government’s often violent action that destroyed these attempts at self-organisation as they were seen as a threat to state domination.
Out of these experiences he posits the need for Lifehouses: spaces in communities that combine provision of practical emergency support with building relationships and connection. He accepts that we are facing a “long emergency” and so most small communities are not going to be able to produce everything they need such as food over this longer term. Also skills required such as those to maintain infrastructure are likely to be unevenly distributed. Out of this he suggests the need for networks of collaborating Lifehouses which make a lot of sense.
However, for me this gives rise to a fundamental question: what should we be doing now to make it more likely such Lifehouse networks emerge as the long emergency intensifies? Currently this is clearly no public conversation about these challenges, let alone action. We don’t want to talk about it. Individuals who seek to build self-reliance ahead of future, large-scale emergencies – so-called Preppers – are seen as fringe and their perceived focus on individual rather than community survival is not attractive or realistic.
My proposition is that collective action around local food systems and nature regeneration are spaces which could create the type of connections, relationships and skills that make the emergence of effective Lifehouse networks more likely and quicker as the long emergency deepens and their practical need become clearer.
The key thing is to find current recognised problems of which there is no shortage and seek local collaborative solutions.
Both these areas currently attract energy and interest, with action being culturally acceptable, while we are probably not ready for Lifehouses. They are also some of the few areas where local economies are possible while much else of what we depend on comes through global supply chains. Cooperative economic models can be experimented with and developed which could birth Lifehouse networks as the long emergency deepens.
There are probably other areas such as public health and housing where local organising and provision may be possible. The key thing is to find current recognised problems of which there is no shortage and seek local collaborative solutions. Thereby we may reenergise our dormant powers to do things for ourselves and build back the capacities we are certainly going to need over the coming decades and centuries.
