I’m on a train and tapping out a draft of this on my phone. I’m in a ‘quiet’ carriage, surrounded by loud talkers replaying last-night’s footy grand final, toddlers wandering up and down the aisle, and a teenager endlessly testing out new ring tones on his mobile phone. My battery is about to die. I may follow it.
I was reading stories about climate change. Doom porn, mostly, and doomsday prepper advice. Hope comes in many forms.
My wife’s taken the kids away for a week of the school holidays. I had to work, so I stayed behind. I note that, without my wife’s moderating influence, it doesn’t take me long to return to my solo state of heightened anxiety and tendency towards excess. I’ve been alone three hours. By the end of the week, the family may return to find me hiding behind the couch in full camouflage, holding a can of beans and a crossbow.
I looked up rural real-estate for sale in north-western Canada and came upon some acreage near a town called Kitimat, which looks like the kind of place mentioned in a story about the opioid crisis.
I text my sister who says she was watching a program about how fish in waters that have too much CO2 can change their behaviour, their instincts are thrown off, so to speak. She says it sounds like autism in fish. We’re clearly in synch.
I read Catherine Ingram’s Facing Extinction. She says our children may well be the last generation of humanity and these climate action movements, while touching, are too late, and that most of us live perennially locked in the denial stage of grief for a species that is already terminal. The author says the number of things that will kill the children before 2100 (heat, starvation, thirst, murder, suicide) are so likely that it’s improbable to expect otherwise.
Another article, by Michael Mobbs, likens living in a city now as analogous to Jews living in Germany as Hitler took over. Staying or going could make the difference between life and death. Worryingly, Mobbs, a sustainability expert, is going. I’m on my way back to Melbourne. Kitimat beckons.
When I lived in Vancouver, my friends used to laugh at me for having three days’ worth of food and water stored in earthquake provisions. Now it’s recommended practice. What is recommended practice for this?
Pretty much any doomsday prepper will advise you to get the hell out of a city, long before it’s necessary. Not ‘head for the hills,’ exactly, but be part of an existing community in a sparsely populated area where you are growing and storing food.
I return to Ingram’s article, which instructs us to live for now, in a present, mindful, connected way, unmoved by visions of wealth or personal success, or ego or legacy, to live the way people who are dying often report they wish they’d always lived.
I’m going to stop writing now and look out the window.
– Yannick