There’s a review of 470 on the Transition Australia website, and it is by the kind of reader that every writer dreams of. It has done something that the best of reviews do: it has seen things that I hadn’t seen, in my own book.
There’s one sentence in particular that keeps surfacing as I plant out sunflowers this morning: “It [470] is scary and confronting, but hopeful, especially for the young and fit who know how to provide for themselves, and how to work and live with other people, even if they‘re not the people they’d naturally choose to live with. But there’s a place for older people, and those with different skills as well, when they are prepared to live cooperatively.“
When they are prepared to live cooperatively.
Even if they’re not the people they’d naturally choose to live with.
I kinda remember the exact moment that the idea of writing 470 came to me. I was mowing, and thinking about the paradox that, although we all say we believe climate scientists when they say that the climate emergency is coming on us fast, we really aren’t doing anything to seriously prepare for it. I started to wonder what will life be like in a climate-changed world? What practical skills, assets and relationships, and what attitudes of mind will be relevant? Will it change what it means to be human, to be a good human? I wasn’t trying to tell, in writing it. I was trying to find out.
My now adult kids and I have a family in-joke that we have had since they were teenagers. We talk about whether something they, or their friends are doing or learning “will get you on the zombie apocalypse team”. The zombie apocalypse team is the group of people you want to be with when the shit hits the fan.
Permaculture is often seen as a contraction of “permanent” and “agriculture”, aka gardening. But it is more like a contraction of “permanent” with “culture”. It’s not impossible – it’s even realtively easy if you are young and fit – to make 80% of a household’s living expenses, directly or indirectly, from permaculture. Food, shelter, clothing, water, household power. That last 20% though is a killer. Smelting your own steel for tools, delivering your own baby, setting your own broken leg, building a road or a causeway, playing a symphony, doing science. We are social creatures, even profound introverts like me, and self sufficiency is a folly even if it were possible.
But what gets you on the zombie apocalypse team isn’t just having a useful skill or resource to meet that other 20%. It’s also soft skills, like being good at thinking of creative solutions, or planning a big project, or networking. And most important of all, it’s knowing how to offer help when it’s really needed, the willingness to muck in with good humour to make light work of an awful job. It’s being able to be trusted to watch the back door by someone fending off the zombies at the front. It’s willingness to go full on with someone else’s plan if that’s what is agreed, even if you didn’t entirely agree with it in the planning stage, and cover its weaknesses and never say I told you so.
That last 20% is a killer because it requires working with other people, not just with “like minded” people, but with the others. And here’s the kicker: those “others” include not just people also seeking a co-operative solution even though they see life in a different light – social permaculture has a well developed body of knowledge about that – but also others who don’t see it as desirable at all, whose goal is to undermine and sabotage it, whose goal is to win and the best way to achieve that is to gain your trust then let the zombies in the back door. That kind of co-operative organising is a skill that is so rare it is practically invisible in our culture (much to the astonishment of many indigenous cultures). It includes the facilitator, the negotiator, the conciliator, the compromiser, but also the warrior.
I struggle with the role of the warrior. Situations arose in the 470 world where a warrior was called for, but I couldn’t put myself in that headspace, and those chapters ended up on the cutting room floor. Maybe that is the job for the sequel.
I would love you to read (and share) the review, and to hear what you think of it.
