Protecting our families and future in a time of crisis | Energy Bulletin
Repeatedly, she admonishes us to be deeply involved with our food which forces us to be involved with seasonality and our food supply's link with nature. Additionally, she tells us that growing and preserving our food is everyday work. If we intend to eat, we must constantly be involved with these two tasks.
If one is not engaged in these tasks and is still dependent on others for obtaining ones' food supply, one will always be at the mercy of the power of corporations which care nothing about nutrition or food security. The challenges Depletion and Abundance toss in our laps are daunting: "Food preservation and food production are keys to democracy....As long as we depend on large corporations to meet our basic needs, we'll never be able to judge them fairly or eliminate their power in our society. That is, we cannot simultaneously call for an end to multinational monoliths and also pay them to do something as basic as feed us.....We should not owe our lives to entities we deplore." (page 206)
That "ouch", however, isn't as painful as the chapter on health care. I've heard many ideas about health care from experts consciously preparing for the complete collapse of that system, and I haven't heard any options for home-based healthcare that don't leave me shaking in my boots. Although I hoped not to mention it in this review, the paltry options that will exist when the system doesn't are grim reminders that many people will not survive collapse for any number of reasons. This is the elephant in the room that we tend to avoid when discussing collapse.
However, nothing could be more real or more poignant. And if the planet, according to many experts, needs to shed 4 or 5 billion people in order to survive, then survival may be the exception, rather than the rule. When we finally recognize this reality, then we are immediately in the territory of something greater and more momentous than our physical existence, namely issues of meaning, purpose, and mystery. Depletion and Abundance does not address these topics, but I do in my forthcoming online book, The Spirituality Of Collapse.
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