KW-27 Am I a prepper?

I still hope not

I was listening to some talky talk discussion show on the radio this week - it might actually have been the news now I think about it. It probably was. Under the latest heat dome in Europe, there has been a great deal of opportunity to discourse upon the weather, which now at least is understood to be different from the climate, so that’s progress of sorts.

If I was listening to UK radio, then it was almost certainly Radio 4, which is the sensible and mature station of the BBC for grown ups. I especially like the way the presenters of the flagship news programme - the Today Programme - condescend to their listeners The barely hidden contempt for everyone who wasn’t educated at Oxford or Cambridge, and gentle mocking of any expert whose opinions fall outside of the narrowest contemplations of the affluent and aspirational Brit. The class system in the UK is still a much cherished national treasure, protected and nurtured by the population. I digress. The noble scientist was heard to express with some surprise that weather records; hottest, coldest, wettest, dryest, are falling more frequently than statistics should really allow.

Is this the point where I give up?

If I’m ever asked to provide a potted history of how I got to the barracks (philosophically, that is), I always start here. With the realisation as a teenager - around the time of the dawn of colour TV and Hannibal crossing the Alps and allosauruses roaming the streets - that weather records were falling more frequently than statistics should really allow.

I’ve never gone easy on the science community for their failures in communicating the absolute certainty of society-destroying climate change, but if this is to be taken as a contemporary take on where we are, from a leading mouthpiece of the scientific collective, then really what is the point?

Then there is the heat dome itself. It’s been a bit of a horror, but now we have at least a week off. Summer can return to its perfectly pleasant ice-creams and dips in the pool. I’m sitting at my desk and looking out into the very welcome rain and enjoying the far off intestinal rumblings of the planet. If that breaks the heat wave, we’ll have forgotten all about it by Wednesday. Humans appear to be uniquely capable of accentuating the positive. Which is awesome, right up until it becomes an existentially bad idea.

The book which remains the best primer on how we got here, even if it does suffer a little from optimism, is The Uninhabitable Earth. I know, it doesn’t sound optimistic, and if it got any criticism, it was for being too doomy. It came out in 2019, and sold 3 million copies. When I read it, I thought it was a well researched, well written thing that didn’t really reveal anything that everyone didn’t know.

Apparently not. Apparently, it was shockingly revelatory for a great many people. Three million of them, I guess.

2019 is now seven years ago. There are more people today taking collapse more seriously as an idea. Serious conversations are had in high places, and the general mood appears to be some sort of acceptance. Of course, every news item still needs to end on a happy note, making fools of the newsreaders and idiots of the commentators, and it seems that the realisation that “records are falling more quickly” is still capable of generating a profound rewiring in the brains of those who “get it”.

---

And yet, what can an individual do? A little hand wringing does not fold the laundry or put the bins out.

Twenty years ago, the most significant thing an individual could do was to vote for the most environmentally-minded political party available in your constituency.

10 years ago, it was to go vegan.

Now, it is to give up your job and put all of your energy into building resilience into your life. It does not matter how you finance your life today - having a steady job, gigging in zero hours, owning your own business, regular endowments from your trust fund - none of this matters when the supermarket shelves go bare.

There is no system in this world upon which humans depend which is going to survive in a warming world. Nothing.

---

The purpose of the Barracks Project has been To Be Useful.

So far, it has not been. It is unlikely that it is going to be actually useful in any sensible way. On the other hand, no-body changes their life because of one influence alone. Maybe, when enough reasons manifest at the same time within one of you, the Barracks, which at it’s most optimistic stands as inspirational, aspirational, maybe it helps to tip someone into action.

For now, though, I am thinking about moving at least some living into the cellar where it is cool all year around. Hiding in the dark from the ravages above? That was never the plan.

It’s not my fault. It’s not within my abilities or power to change the world. I don’t want to change the world. I want to show that if someone wanted to change their world, it is at least possible. If this incompetent, lazy pirate can do it, then so can you.

But the less that I help other people to change, the shorter the time left available to make change becomes, the more that this whole exercise does become an exercise in prepping. And that sucks.

I always end this asking you to be loving and nice to each other.

Today, I want you to be nice to future you.

Your loving Pirate Ben

xoxo