I’m a city mouse that wants to learn about the country. I grew up in Chicago and have specialized in comedy, computer skills and climate change. Since starting environmental policy graduate school, I realized how little relevance computers will have in the distopic Eaarth I believe is our future.
My sense of impending environmental and economic doom was compounded by the hipster zeitgeist that is low-impact farming and urban homesteading. Always one to follow the crowd, I too am enthralled by the idea, if not yet the actual execution of, canning vegetables and knitting hand-spun alpaca-wool fingerless gloves!
I believe the convergence of interest in community resilience and relocalization is more than a knee-jerk response to the era of globalization and corporate exceptionalism. We joke about Mayan predictions and solar pulses, but it seems even more likely that natural disasters and resulting ecosystem collapse will seriously impact our resource-extraction-based living standards. When that happens I want to be able to provide more for myself than we’ve been habituated to. As a post-college educated American I’m in the top 1% in terms of opportunities, and probably the bottom 1% in terms of actual applied survival skills. If there’s not a Wikipedia page about it that I can google on my smartphone, I probably won’t make it – that is, until after my awesome Survival Skillz Summer!
“Jessy,” you’re saying to yourself, “what makes you such an apocal-ist?” (*person who believes in an impending, non-Rapture based Apocalypse – patent pending) Not to be a killjoy, but our globalized economic system is constructed in a way that creates intense worldwide fragility. Farmers in developing countries can’t compete with our food subsidies, which drives them to city slums searching for work, and eventually on a northward migration.