As recently as the early 1980s students in San Clemente, CA took part in semiannual duck and cover drills replete with blaring sirens, in an attempt to prepare for an accident at the nearby San Onofre Nuclear Power Plant. Don’t ask me why anyone thought that ducking and covering would come in handy when dealing with a nuclear leak. But at least someone was trying to remind people that disaster could strike their otherwise serene “Spanish Village By The Sea.” Of course in the 1970s and 1980s, my hometown had seen plenty of other small scale reminders that Mother Nature can be a real witch. A brushfire from nearby Camp Pendleton destroyed dozens of homes in 1976 and several other houses not far from ours slid down the hill in 1980 (amazingly no one was killed). And every time the ground shook from an earthquake we all wondered when “the Big One” would finally cause California to break off into the ocean. So, at least in theory, most Californians have been warned to think about disasters—to have some canned food, water, or other essentials handy—and perhaps not to get too comfortable with the “good life.” At least in theory.
The tragedy in Japan is a reminder that it pays to be prepared. How prepared? Well, that may depend upon the individual. Obviously, if a meteor is going to hit the earth tomorrow, preparation is likely not going to matter. I am as much of a realist as any regarding the need to brace for the worst. However, it is also the case that we all have lives to live, and trying to make sure that life is completely safe-proofed can easily turn you into a paranoid, obsessive, nervous wreck. For all you worry warts out there preparedness may also include taking valium.
Still, I think most Americans need to adopt a more realistic attitude toward what our economy and government can and cannot provide them. Or at the very least, they need to realize that maybe—just maybe—we can’t have it all when it comes to a perfect environment coupled with a first-world lifestyle. In addition, having an economy based on debt-fueled consumption may be as dangerous as building a home of unreinforced concrete, on an unstable slope, perched above the Pacific Ocean.
Events such as the BP Oil accident last year, or the Fukishima Nuclear leak this year underscore the difficulties of resource extraction. Most experts in the natural resource arena will point out that Americans have been averse to digging more mines, building more oil rigs, and, now, are also losing what little tolerance they had for constructing nuclear energy plants. There may be good reason to be skeptical regarding some projects—such as building a bunch of nuclear power plants along fault lines in major population centers where evacuation is also difficult. But if you don’t like power plants in your backyard, then do not expect to have cheap prices for energy, food, or materials. Sorry to break it to you, but our economy does not run on hot air. If that were the case, we could just hook up all of the pontificating gasbags in government, academia, and the media to power generators, and voila—a cheap energy nirvana! You have to admit, it would be a limitless renewable energy source, but I am still waiting to see the patent.
The reality is that economic growth is a messy, dirty process: go visit China sometime to see how little interest some of their businesses have in preserving the environment. In many ways Americans have self-imposed resource scarcity upon themselves through a lack of investment in the extraction and production of needed fuels or minerals. Beyond this, many of the world’s resources likely cannot keep up with continued world population growth. This seems to me to be a cold, hard fact. Over the last ten years, there has been a return to thinking about “peak everything,” not solely because resources are that scarce, but because so many more people in the emerging world aspire to live the same lifestyle we have taken for granted in the West. This story should be a familiar one to many. But it is not familiar to all.
How Well Will You Survive History Happening To You?
When we face natural disasters many question just how resilient the modern, first world earthling is, given all of the technological comfort provided for us in our modern age. The disaster in Japan is far from the worst natural or man-made disaster to have hit that country in the last century. Not only was Japan bombed back to the Stone Age in the 1940s, but in 1923, the Great Kanto earthquake may have killed up to 400,000 people (largely due to fire.) If you look at pictures of Tokyo in the 1920s, you might confuse them with pictures of Hiroshima in the 1940s. Yet the events of the 1920s and 1940s are but a distant memory to most living Japanese people, and one has to wonder how easy it will be for the present generation of Japanese (or Americans, for that matter) to weather supply shocks for necessities, let alone monetary disasters fueled by a financial system that is over-dependant upon debt.
Any thoughtful person should conclude from the events of the past ten years that our global economy is hardly invincible. Events such as the one in northern Japan simply reinforce the need to respect that bad things happen when they are least expected. Across the Pacific from Japan, I may not be loading up on potassium iodide, but recent events remind me that unfortunate scenes from across the world, or from the pages of a history book may also be in my future, however unpleasant a thought that might be. I would like to believe that I am prepared, if only partially, for a bit of history happening to me.
I could list all of the different ways people could prepare for history happening to them: getting off the power grid as much as possible, having foodstuffs or—even better—some sort of farm, thinking about an “escape route,” and of course buying precious metals. It might be as simple as downsizing and eliminating superfluous, wasteful practices from your life. But I think the best form of preparedness resides in a view of the world that does not expect outside entities to always be there; that does not view material comfort as an end in and of itself; and that recognizes how living, as has been said, “is the art of learning to let go.”