Dark rooms are full of surprises. A week now among stacked dirty dishes, living by candlelight, encountering unseeable little snowmelt puddles. Nobody mentions this sensation, that the kerosene flame, erratic throbbing strobe in the room, might be depositing its mist of greasy soot everywhere, even on our tongues. Dishwasher forbidden. Washing machine forbidden. Microwave forbidden. Space heater, at 1500 watts, of course out of the question. If you really must rinse a coffee spoon, do it fast and do it under only the briefest, thinnest strand of water.
Typing in the glow of a screen, I’m asking How many kilowatt-hours does a fridge use in a 24-hr period. For the goal is to keep the big battery alive indefinitely, night after night, on its daily dose of sunshine. The big battery is proving itself able to run fridge and freezer and Wi-Fi, one lamp, one radio, and the pump at the wellhead. And charge up phones and laptops. So we’re fine. This exceptional series of blizzards won’t go on forever, and window-high snow will recede. But enforced stingy living turns out to feel like an interesting way of practicing for the future, at least for a bit—crash-course-style, against the day when the laws of ecology (the ones we’ve been flouting all these years) will turn and seriously start taxing us all.
Living under all these restrictions has a liberating aspect. The metaphor of the tennis court rectangle: a straitened playing field frees up action and innovation. (The sonnet form, too: a similar well-used metaphor.) I do so much slogging around in deep snow just shoring things up—sometimes in starlight, and sometimes under ecstatic blue skies—I’m better exercised than usual. Also, I’m putting more thought into cooking meals. Which, anyway, is always an art with economy at its heart. For deep in the neglected reaches of a cupboard are all the best, most famous inventions. Other times, in the amazing depths of silence, I find myself reading with immersion, and I can tackle harder, better books. Actually to be reading something that makes me think! I feel like I haven’t thought since I was young. Who has time to think? As a matter of fact, a power outage feels like being a child again; as boring; as miscellaneous and unsorted.
These episodes are getting to be more frequent up here, and more prolonged, and more—can this be it?—educative. For planet-health alarmists, who see portents and harbingers, the endless sabbath everybody endured in 2020–2021 might have felt like a kind of training for TEC (“total environmental collapse”). But that whole experience was only miserable. It wasn’t as bracing as this county-wide nonfunctioning of every cash register, every freezer case, bank ATMs, most landlines, all roads, along with the paralyzed incompetence of the county’s snowplow crews and utility repair people. What’s exciting, essentially, is being cut off from the economy. The economy is really a mixed blessing; I’d already, for years now, been somewhat trying to circumvent the economy. Now this is the silence of the big engine’s shutdown. Interesting to wake up to each morning.
How can an economy, the entire human economy, be objectionable? After all, the economy is only a simple machine for bringing us what we want. The economy answers desires. It rewards creativity and dedication. An economy (if amoral, if arbitrary) merely sifts supply against demand. That natural process gives it a Mephisto-phelean ability to transform things into other things. It changes earthen elements into sports cars or 3BR houses or college educations, or a juicy steak or a weapon or a naked lady or a tropical isle. It’s almost as if an economy were our id. (Though it’s not for wish-fulfillment alone: the economy can also punish us and even annihilate us as quickly as it might exalt us.)
I sometimes picture myself, and my family, too, ranging around our neighborhood practicing subsistence living. Acorns have excellent nutritive value, but they upset the stomach bitterly, until one learns the Native American knack of leaching them for long periods in clear water. Out on the road between here and the Stantons’ place, there’s always a big patch of wild sweet pea; it stays green all summer, and it’s delicious, especially the tendrils at the plant’s top. A friend of mine in Berkeley says he used to see families of Vietnamese immigrants harvesting wild sweet pea from a median strip. But this swath here, while large, isn’t inexhaustible. A single man, if he stood grazing like a deer, in one afternoon would deplete the whole patch. Plus, wild sweet pea is known to cause dizziness in cattle who feed on it, and eventually psychosis. Which I learned when I finally looked it up, having for years regularly snatched samples of it in passing. It grows just to hip-height and is somewhat irresistible.
The Nisenan people—who lived here for many centuries without wrecking the biome—kept their population small, their cuisine simple. Of course, a fish or a deer was a rich prize, but during times when meat wasn’t at hand (and safely edible), Nisenan lived on forage. Berries and roots. Crickets and other insects. The leaves of a plant they called rooreh, which is a plentiful ground-cover, like lettuce, easy on the stomach—indeed, latterly called miner’s lettuce. With digging sticks, they turned up all kinds of things: grubs, earthworms, wasp larvae, the bulbs of various plants. All of which could be eaten raw or brought home to be cooked. The Nisenan lacked any ceramic technology, so they heated things on flat stones; and I’m betting that cooking such items makes them more digestible and palatable.
Given my aptitudes, I think forage, not big game hunting, would be my main provender if the North American economy did someday vanish. Even earthworms! Earthworms have abundant iron, and a protein content comparable to eggs. I’m sure anybody in my family, starting with me, could eat an earthworm, especially if it were heated on a flat rock long enough that it was transformed from a recognizable organism into a protein snack. None of us affluent Americans is squeamish about eating mud-dwelling crustaceans: we order them in restaurants. Objectively, prawns ought to provoke disgust at least as much as a fried worm. A little basic gastronomic know-how in preparing earthworms—using naturally available oils and herbs and peppers and garlic, easy to forage or cultivate—would make an earthworm even toothsome. Cooking is a form of magic. It demystifies the victim. Raw and moving, a worm is an organism with dignities and entitlements of its own. After the application of enough heat, it’s our artifact.
But acorns would probably be our main staple, abundant and nutritious. There are oaks on our property, and on the Cooleys’ property, and the Stantons’ and the Frobishers’. The river here really has nothing anymore except for pike minnows—there’s a dam that walls out the salmon far downstream. But the minnows might provide little bits of protein, if you could catch them. (They’re very quick.) The only large neighborhood mammal we could take down would be the McCaigs’ horse. Actually they’ve got two horses, one of them old and unappetizing. But even if we persuaded the McCaigs to sacrifice Dakota and the other one for the good of the community, their meat wouldn’t last more than a few weeks maximum. In the end, we would all be living mostly off the forest floor. And it would work out mostly all right. Once we’d survived for a season, we could get real horticulture going. On a small enough scale, maybe corn and beans and potatoes, and a little bit of livestock, too, could all somehow thrive without our going back to the old exploitative way of taking more from the earth than we put back in. Admittedly, for a while we’d all go through a traumatic period of adaptation. The last time the human economy existed in impeccable—I mean perfect—harmony with nature, it was Paleolithic times. Since then, by leaps and bounds, industrial capitalism, heavily petroleum-dependent, has brought us an enchanting affluence.
I’m using the word affluence in an unusual, ecological sense. For let us compare ourselves with my fox. (In particular, I’m thinking of the small red fox who lives in the ravine below the meadow and can never get to my chickens because she gets zapped by low-voltage electrical wire, something I got when a friend was throwing it out, and strung up around their coop.) A fox’s economy isn’t nearly so complicated as humans’. We humans can “shop” for edibles, which may have come from faraway climes by truck or steamship, or even by jet. When we do go to the store, we’re accustomed to traveling the whole way there and back while sitting, inert. Then, at home, we heat our entire habitat, even rooms we’re not occupying: 20,000 cubic feet in the average house. The whole place will have stayed warm because we didn’t turn the heat off. We left it on during the hours we were gone. The fox is utterly different; she doesn’t recruit faraway others—strangers forever—to mine the earth for fossil energy stored from the Carboniferous Period. Instead, the fox lives elegantly. Our inelegant lives, by contrast, lack thrift and art.
Of course we also lack the beautiful warm coat, and the claws, and we lack the tough undiscriminating stomach, and the sensitive nose and the sensitive ears, and the highly focused, simple mind. The reality is, our species needs an economy. The economy is us. We’re a social, essentially congregant animal, and the economy is our medium of creativity and frankly an extension of our soul. I might like to insist it’s pernicious, but it will always flourish. Free-market capitalism sprouts everywhere spontaneously, naturally; you can’t stomp it out. In the shade of some baobab tree, or at some agreed-upon crossroads, people will show up and, for instance, trade something homemade for something grown in a garden. And then naturally start specializing, creating markets for goods and services. Dreaming up a shared project, like a fish weir or a village well. Capitalism will always be with us, like a sort of perpetual soreness from having originally sinned.
However, mightn’t we somehow cut back a little? Given climate change and species loss and ocean death, couldn’t we cut back on certain excessive, extravagant forms of consumption, whether through legislation or just voluntarily?
Well, it would always be a heartbreak. Some people really want their speedboats. Other people have been looking forward all their lives to their culinary tour of Tuscany. Some care deeply about Legos and Furbys and Frisbees, a certain important pair of shoes, the Disneyland hajj, the once-in-a-lifetime, unforgettable, over-the-top quinceañera or bar mitzvah. What are you going to forbid, exactly? You can’t decree that while coronary by-passes will be allowed, there will be no more Brazilian buttock augmen-tations. That isn’t how capitalism works.
People are going to go on wanting their homes heated even if the earth isn’t going to support it. This is our present path. They’ll want a regular, healthy diet, too, even if the Earth won’t support it.
The end of that deadlock is in plain sight, unavoidable and quite natural. The economy itself will answer. The price mechanism will do the work. Everything has a price, from crude oil to manganese ore to arable land, from soybeans to palm oil to September hogs. On its own, by perfect incremental adjustments in costs, the free market will penalize overconsumption. At the same time, it will richly reward the innovations that make our lives more elegant (in energy production, in agriculture, in transportation, in infrastructure planning). By the Invisible Hand, even the laziest and most distracted will be prodded to get solar panels. By the Invisible Hand, even the most profligate spenders will be herded toward reform.
The problem is, it will take time. It will require huge social and industrial changes, and a lot will get wrecked meanwhile. In its slow advent, we’ll perceive it as inflation. That’s how it will be known. This isn’t a kind of inflation that any Federal Reserve policy could remedy; it’s going to be fundamental inflation. Whether in a sudden painful snap of a crisis, or in a more gradual process of sorrows and hardships and farewells, market forces will adjust the cost of living on Earth. The sweet, heavy artichokes of yesteryear. A great meal in an ordinary restaurant. Home purchases for the middle class. (Even just being middle class.) The tomato that tastes like a tomato, affordable to all. Those already living at the margins are like the honeybee population: they’ll be the worst tested, as always. We might pass them on city streets. Or we’ll be aware of them trying to come up across the Sonoran Desert. Across the Mediterranean. The rest, the better-off, will turn to buying old tasteless tomatoes. Begin exploring public transportation. Move in with relatives.
In all this, I certainly don’t think our dense, lively cities are doomed. Far from it. Cities will always be the smartest places, and they’re indispensable. The best of everything, material and immaterial, will always be in cities (the tacos at La Cumbre, the big Elmer Bischoff at the de Young, or just an interesting, consequential conversation). But cities are going to be a challenge. The well-off will start to think of the city as uncomfortable. Or they’ll say it’s getting to be unsanitary, and unsafe. Disparities in wealth can only get worse, so increasingly our cities will consist of citadels and hovels, and not much in between. We’ll have the textbook “dual economy,” which used to characterize underdeveloped nations lacking any middle class. It used to be other, benighted little countries that had only castles and hovels. Nevertheless, San Francisco’s Pacific Heights will still need plumbers and schoolteachers and roofers and waiters even if those people’s standard of living, across town or across the Bay, is falling below what everybody thinks of as normal. In all our urban places, the happiest citizens will be those who long ago put aside their old idea of normal.
I’m hardly Jane Jacobs, but I do think a lot about cities, loving them as I do. Cities are not only, in their density, society’s most fiercely creative places; they also happen to be the most ecologically wise, frugal form of human settlement. Out here in the boondocks, the old romanticism still rules, and most people on their acres are still ruining the environment freely. I picture my favorite cities, and if any kind of drastic ecological “correction” did befall, bringing on hard times generally, I see them doing very well, mostly by decentralizing. Neighborhoods would become more important.
The favela, the canal district, the shantytown: all my life I’ve been peculiarly, personally attracted to the places where informality and warmth and imperfection are the rule. Not only dooryard chickens and unashamed clotheslines, but also the characteristic building materials and techniques, the culinary tricks, the right kind of neighborhood civility that amounts, itself, to an excellent standard of “gentility.” A micro-economy’s network of skills and talents, the forms enterprise can take on a smaller, less corporate scale: the single-proprietor tienda, the small-appliance repair guy in his storefront—they could make a comeback.
Jane Jacobs, in advocating walkable, mixed-use neighborhoods, devotes whole chapters just to the urban institution of the sidewalk. She loves sidewalks. She points out, for instance, that one of the principle purposes of sidewalks is the absorption of children into society, where they can begin to explore “outside the realm of maternal authority.” As a force in maintaining public order, sidewalks are more important than the government, with the “eyes-on-the-street” role of passersby and denizens. In her argument, sidewalks are safe, in a way that public parks will never be.
It was in the picturesque year of 1961 that Jacobs’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities was published. That was a time when social-class mobility was more fluid and dynamic, and such neighborhoods were commonplace. Our present-day, harder class divisions might be re-arranged in unpredictable ways, if a crisis of resource scarcity were to bring on any kind of long or endless recession. In such a future, I can only picture decentralization—a breakup, a friendly balkanization, along with tolerance—as the saving strength of cities. A city might only find itself spreading out a little. Not much. Maybe just enough to make room for gardens. Large-scale horticulture will never be feasible in urban spaces; rather, cities will continue to have cooperative relationships with the open countryside.
Which is what cities have always done. Five thousand years ago, the first places deserving the name “city” were communities that didn’t provide their own food. Labor specialization will always be the key to a city’s fantastic creative power, whether in boom times or in a period of undependable supply chains.
We’ve been getting sun this week, so in our isolation we’ve been able to stream movies, and we’ve been watching a miniseries about a post-apocalyptic North American civilization that has been wrecked and mostly depopulated. (Or zombie-populated, sparsely. A pandemic fungus ate people’s brains.) In the movie, the sets are interesting to linger over. Actually, the actors and their lines are less interesting than the backgrounds. The studio location scout may have had an easy time of it. Much of this post-apocalypse movie could have been shot in existing American places—desolate malls, or failed real estate developments—providing the art director with ready-made exteriors needing little dressing, already furnished with…whatever…parking-lot weeds and abandoned mattresses and a toppled shopping cart.
Of course fun, when it’s good, isn’t at all “escapist.” Fun is serious—it’s as serious as you ever get. A movie is a form of play, but play is never only “play.” Play is enthralling because its rehearsals are practical. Where your mind idly, fancifully wanders, the real thing will soon follow. (As surely as the oxcart wheel will follow the meandering ox, says the Dhammapada.)
Admittedly, my own trying to live as an ascetic environmentalist in our foothill farmhouse is (this must be obvious) sanctimony and hypocrisy, here where we’re still frankly basically bourgeois, only dressed up as broke. We’ve been here almost thirty years—twenty on this particular place—and if I’d ever thought about it, ideally I might have thought life here, once we’d perfected it, might be something like that culinary tour of Tuscany, at least sometimes. I understand in Tuscany there are hilltop towns where tourists at a little table in a dooryard, for not much money, can get food that had nothing whatsoever to do with Kraft or PepsiCo or Archer-Daniels-Midland or Mon-santo or Tyson Foods or Cargill. I imagine those tourists looking around and remarking on the beauty and the wisdom of it all: Why can’t we get a meal like this at home?
At my house, the reality is that the rustic life never stops feeling hectic as well as futile. Or honestly delusory. The Amazon packages keep arriving, no matter how I try to head them off. Salvaged and repurposed building materials aren’t always perfectly sturdy and everything keeps needing repair and repainting. No matter what I cook, I’m opening tin cans and plastic bottles, and then “recycling” them. I go into town more than once a week for fruit, dried pasta, meat, sugar, coffee, vermouth, whiskey, Pepto-Bismol, candy, antihistamines, paper towels, the Grocery Outlet wines, the farmed salmon—the whole catastrophic American shopping cart, just as if I were shopping in Miami or Houston or LA. Supposing I were to renounce coffee, coffee alone, well, it’s conceivable that I could go out on the road here and find some herb, comparably peppy and habit-forming, growing at the roadside, which I could somehow cure and brew. Still, that’s no model for a realistic economy, and it would taste bad. My species, my tender dreamy talkative species, has come so far down this road, it’s hard to picture us ever going back to the virtues of the Nisenan. The first disaster, on the first morning of conscientious living, would be bad, undrinkable coffee, and from there it’s all downhill.
Especially because I’m a resourceful fellow who tries to limit trips to the dump, the place does tend to look like one of those dystopian movie sets. When you heat with firewood, your woodchopping area, over the years, keeps expanding in a large zone of permanent mud and rusty things and wooden pallets rotting into earth. Doing laundry not by machine but by elbow-grease results in clothes that are, honestly, never crisp clean. Snowmelt ditch irrigation on these slopes is all gravity-fed, and at least once a day a crawdad will clog a nozzle under high pressure and need to be dug out. A backyard milpa is, honestly, a mess: ten or fifteen different crops competing alongside their beneficial weeds, enclosed in rabbit-wire fencing fabric that was found rolled up rusty in the woods, stapled on posts of split cedar wobbly at their bases. Then, at end of day, when it comes to cooking out of a garden, especially late in the season, you often get surprises at the point of cutting into something, and you have to reinvent your meal, which everybody at the table will be forbearing about.
These are embarrassments I can live with. Weirdly, I kind of find necessity a source of cheer. But when I stand on a far hilltop and look, even the sincerest effort to live free of the carbon economy seems like an affectation; and of course—of course!—doomed. I’m the selfish and self-absorbed fiction writer, but I’m also the one who has care of all the mechanical devices from the good old days: the swamp cooler with its eternal squeak, the mower whose blade deck gets stuck and keeps on whirling, the magnificent calliope-like gas range, not to mention the biodiesel-burning old car. All operable by me alone, all given a wide berth by everyone else, because my repairs and patches over the years have made everything tetchy or possibly dangerous. This far along, I still haven’t learned how to adjust a kerosene lamp flame so we won’t be polluting our kitchen.
To get an education in fundamental life skills, I continue to depend on YouTube, and thanks to a four-minute video by a no-nonsense woman in Oregon, I’ve learned that a lamp wick’s sopping fabric must be regularly trimmed—and not with a flat cut but rounded in a tongue shape: her simile is “like a fingernail.” If you simply take your scissors and snip it off flat, you get the tall, raggedy flame that twists up on the sides and smokes and smudges the chimney. Maybe isolated individual efforts at a transition are inefficient and ungainly, but one can’t simply do nothing, given what’s at stake. When this particular long outage is over and the roads are plowed, I think we’ll go out for a really good dinner in the dining room of the hotel in town—summer weather is coming, there soon might be days that feel like Tuscany—but over the long haul, over the decades, there’s going to be a learning curve for everybody, including me. This is all still child’s play, me with my woodchopping and my solar panels and my potatoes, as if we were homesteaders, while in fact we’re still some version of a two-income household, still very much in league with global capital, our IRA invested in a portfolio that, I’m sure if I looked, would turn out to be funding everything I say I deplore. I’m just having fun pretending life on a farmette is the real thing, however makeshift the farmette may be. Stalking around this “ex-urban” acre with the menial work of keeping it all going while not making any trips out, neither to the hardware store nor to the dump, insisting on preferring hand tools over power tools—it’s all still a low-stakes game. My education in actual hard facts, and my first encounter with a real learning curve, will come right along with everybody else’s, in the fullness of time: at the cash register in town, at the IGA, when everything I need to live is passing on the conveyor belt, going beep, beep, beep as it gets scanned.
Louis B. Jones is a novelist, author of Particles and Luck and Radiance.
