COLLAPSE
How Will Communities Handle Troublemakers?
Part 3 of a 3-part series
Part 3 of a 3 part series. In part 1 of this series, “Farewell to a Garden,” I shared photos of my veggie growing this year at a farm in Sonoma County that I just left. In part 2, “Why I Hate Market Farming,” I explained my departure. In this final part, I discuss some big picture reflections highlighted by the experience.
An increasing number of people are collapse-aware. They see that the United States is in decline, economically, politically, socially and otherwise. The systems that provide for our needs are at once decreasing in quality and increasing in price. The status quo serves fewer and fewer people even as its ecological footprint metastasizes beyond the finite limits of our planet. Sooner or later, something will give way that reveals our system as the house of cards that it is. Whether this is gradual or quick is unknown, but regardless of the timeline, the collapse aware know that the time to prepare for other ways to live is now. This is why I got into farming in 2005. The disaster that struck New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 showed me that we cannot count on big institutions to take care of us; my anarchist friends who traveled there to help out reported that the localized, community-based efforts were much more effective than…