You are appalled at the rampant, pervasive “consumerism.” Your government continues to wage an insane, debilitating war. Warning signs of environmental degradation are systematically ignored. As for the oil prices, they are out of sight. More than $10 a barrel… and rising. Even though the first Earth Day gets a lot of attention, soon enough business as usual returns with a vengance. All of this makes you feel… helpless.
You grow tired of feeling that way. You decide to take charge of your life. What do you do?
If you are Helen and Scott Nearing, you move up to a farm in rural Vermont and start figuring out how to live on the land and from the land. You write some books about self-sufficiency like ”Living the Good life.” You learn as you go.
If you are John Shuttleworth, you start a magazine “to give people back their lives.” It starts as a community handout, mere information sheets left under doors. It is called Mother Earth News.
If you are Stewart Brand, you create a catalog of tools, design aids, maps, and metalworking so that “civilization can learn to be more sustainable.” You call this production The Whole Earth Catalog.
These solo, entrepreneurial acts of social and ethical defiance become, after a while, not so solo. Someone gives this trend a name: the back to the land movement.
Today is April 17, 2008. Not 1970. And this magazine is not produced in Vermont, North Carolina, or California. But the unsettling realities of the world we now live in are far scarier than what brought those pioneers to their feet. The marketplace and Mother Earth herself will soon impose their own will on us without waiting for a vote or a treaty. The time is now. As we go to press, oil is at an all-time high of $116 a barrel.
Julian Darley is executive director of the Post Carbon Institute — a think, action and education tank that helps communities “relocalize” and adapt to an energy-constrained world. Even two years ago, the purpose of an organization with that name (as Julian admitted to me with a certain jocularity), might seem specious or remote. But not now. We are at the end of an era in which a certain level of consumption was possible because oil prices were so low.
As Julian explains in the first of a three-part series that kicks off our new column, Hudson Valley Homesteader, the world’s decreasing supply of oil will eventually change everything. From our supply chains to the food we eat, to where we live, work, or travel, and how far we will go to find a dose of so-called culture. Learning to live wisely, frugally, and practically is going to be a life-long process.
For the future of us all, how well we do this new work of saving ourselves will be worth… nothing less than everything. But it doesn’t mean it has to be depressing. Or boring.
This Play issue celebrates the idea that “living locally” in this extravagantly gorgeous valley can be a lot of fun. In fact, the evidence contained in this issue is — to us, at least — absolutely compelling.
For the record: The Hudson Valley, in addition to all its other bounty, is demonstrably a happening place. In fact, we recently had a sighting of Marilyn Monroe parachuting into our own city of Hudson, New York, in broad daylight.
If you’re having trouble getting InsideOut (our copies are disappearing days after distribution), you are not alone. But now you can subscribe. (Call our high-tech subscription office at 518.943.9200.) That way, the magazine will appear at your door days after we publish it. What could be better?
