Rev Left Radio - Poor Proles Almanac: Collapse Narratives, Left Prepping, and Agroecology

Episode Date: February 10, 2022

 Andy from Poor Proles Almanac joins Breht to discuss left v. right forms of prepping, collapse narratives, eco-crisis, anarchism and marxism, rethinking food systems, silvopasture, american decay, the limits of permaculture, land managment, farming, gardening, and more!  Subscribe to Poor Proles Alamanac on your preferring podcasting app, and learn more here: https://linktr.ee/PoorProles Outro Music: "Desert" by Sole & DJ Pain 1 ----- Support Rev Left Radio: https://www.patreon.com/RevLeftRadio or make a one time donation: PayPal.me/revleft LEARN MORE ABOUT REV LEFT RADIO: www.revolutionaryleftradio.com

Hello everybody and welcome back to Rev Left Radio. On today's episode, I have on Andy from the Poor Proles Almanac to talk about farming, prepping, the threat of collapse, the possibility of vulcanization, the climate crisis, and how we can get evolved with building skills on an individual or communal level that can make us and our families and our communities' assets and more self-sufficient in the face of, you know, threats from multiple directions. Like, where is this society going in the next 10 to 20 years, 30 years? This is a question that is in all of our minds. And this is a question that I think a resource like the Poor Prol's Almanac handles particularly well.

So this will be a great conversation for anybody interested in that. And even if you're not, it's a great introduction to these topics. and as always if you like what we do here at Rev Left you can support us on Patreon we are 100% listener funded always have been, always will be we're not going to get funding anywhere else for a communist podcast

so if you want to support us in exchange for that you can get access to not only bonus monthly episodes but a back catalog of Patreon episodes that is hundreds of episodes deep so definitely do that if you're able to but if you don't have money we totally understand these episodes will always be free

but you can help us by sharing, spreading the word, leaving us good reviews on podcast app and anything else you can do to help. We also have merch. I don't promote it very much. I should. It's really cool, good, high-quality merch. I will link to it in the show notes if you're interested in that.

It supports the show. I think we get a dollar or two for every sell, but the big thing is people wearing the merch and expressing that they're part of this audience, part of this community means the world to us. All right, without further ado, Here's my conversation with Andy. Enjoy.

My name is Andy. I'm the host of the Poor Pearls Almanac. And yeah, that's pretty much it. I host a podcast, and here I am. Oh, yeah. Well, welcome. I'm honored to have you here. It's going to be an interesting conversation.

I really like what you do over at the Poor Pearls Almanac. and maybe that's the best place to start for those that might not know about it. Can you talk a little bit about that project, why you started it, what you want to do achieve with it, etc.? Sure. So the Port Poles Almanac is basically, well, it started as basically an outlet for me to kind of put together my thoughts around this really complicated and convoluted conversation about agriculture, food systems, climate change, collapse, and all of these. concerns that I've had and, you know, the shortfalls of things like permaculture and all these other movements that have failed to make meaningful change and to try to synthesize them into like one narrative that makes sense. And that was based on a conversation I had with my

co-host, Elliot, when we were on a car ride down, basically cross-country to go to a friend's funeral. And we hadn't seen each other in probably like five or six years. And we just started talking about this stuff and he's like we should make a podcast people want to hear about this and uh it started as just like a thing for us to just vent our thoughts and it it's kind of uh i don't want to say exploded but it it's grown significantly to the point where uh it it's become apparent that there's a lot of people that feel the same way as we do and i think that's comforting or concerning i'm not I wish I knew which one it really was, but it's somewhere in that space. Yeah, no, I'm one of those people as well, and I've touched a little bit on this show,

some of my interest in that direction. What you're hoping to achieve it is just to get that sort of narrative out and to cover these issues from a left-wing perspective, which you might be interested in this stuff and you might go online searching for, but you'll rarely find explicitly left-wing versions of these conversations. Yeah, so it started very, like, I mean, you have a podcast. So, you know, like the first three months, I think we had like 25 listens. And it was kind of like, who am I really doing this for? Like it's for me, it's not for other people. And as it's grown, I feel like there's a certain responsibility now with it to start thinking about not just like an analysis of what's going on, but also to present like realistic, practical, pragmatic solutions that can be done individually. and collectively, and that's kind of how it's shifted from being like this general, like,

let's talk about what all the problems are and, you know, what are some like pie in the sky solutions to how do we start thinking about what we can do today to have the knowledge, even if we can't apply it today for a better, more equitable future based on the conditions that will inherit. Yeah, well said completely. And yeah, the sense of responsibility that grows alongside the, the growing of one's audience is certainly something that people should, you know, take seriously. Very often they don't. They become very reckless or they do things just for clicks or whatever it may be.

But I also feel that sense of responsibility when I'm putting stuff out to an audience that I know is quite large. And you never know who's in that audience. And so you do want to have a sense of responsibility with the sort of gift you've been given of being able to have an audience at all or have a platform at all. So I deeply relate to that. How did you personally get interested in in prepping and farming and just in everything that you talk about? Sure. So I'll start with the farming piece because I think that's how it all snowballs. So I, my parents are immigrants. They were farmers in Italy or my father was and his father was.

And they came here and the, you know, they lived in the city. So it was like if you live in a city and you know those neighborhoods where you go down and there's like that house that's got the postage stand. plot and it's got the grape vines hanging over the side of the sidewalk and that was that was where I grew up and when I went to college I kind of you know wanted to move away from that came and as I got older I started realizing I needed to get my hands in the dirt and be outside and it was around then when I started thinking about you know where do I want where do I see my future and you know how how important is the things that I grew up around and how unique were those experiences in the modern world and that's when I started to realize that those things were important and in that

process I started to think about, you know, looking at what was happening and think, you know, I feel like the thing that really stuck out to me that got me to take this idea of like climate change or ecological collapse more seriously was like thinking about, you know, being in college and like watching the dumpsters every day just come and dump like, you know, all this plastic and just that's never going to break down and just thinking that's happening every day and it's been happening every day and like just that weight of reality kind of settling in on the the finiteness of the world that we live in and in that process it became more apparent to me that like this is not an if it's a when and it's basically a generational game of hot potato who's going to be

who's going to be holding it when all of this comes to fruition and obviously it's easy to say in that like we all knew how bad climate change is going to get but i think a lot of us even 15 years ago thought like all right the rich people aren't going to let it get that bad like they also have some skin in the game and then it it snowballed pretty quickly after obama that like that is not going to be the case and it was at that point that i think i started being like okay i need to be prepared i need to really think about uh the things that i learned as a child that most people didn't get exposed to and, you know, trying to build on those. And I was starting with food systems and thinking about, okay, what do we need for food? You need fertilizers. So

how do I not need fertilizers? And that was, you know, that first step of, okay, how do I reduce these things? And I think that for a lot of people, it's like you go from, oh, I want to grow my own tomatoes to I want to grow my own organic tomatoes to okay how do I do like no till or you know something like that and then you get into like permaculture and then you stop there and permaculture is not inherently bad in the sense of like it being a system that's a part of that transition period and for folks that aren't familiar with permaculture it's this concept of permanent agriculture and the idea is generally around this idea or is around this concept of how do I grow food in a way that's in alignment with nature?

But in a lot of those conversations, the terms like in alignment with nature, it is like really framed up with like a qualifier of what do I really want out of this site. So like permaculture is like usually like fruit trees and things like that. And most times those trees have no relationship to the native ecology. Even, you know, if you're in North America, like most of the listeners probably are, oak trees are the most ubiquitous tree on the entire continent.

You're not going to see too many permaculturalists who are going to talk about the importance of planting oak trees. There are some, and there are some very good permaculturalists, but I don't see that as the majority versus the minority. And that's kind of the next step for permaculture is to get past that and to think about this idea of like agroecology or eco-economic. agriculture, which I kind of use interchangeably, which generally are framed up within the context of a local biome, as well as within the historical conditions of a site. So like that includes

the indigenous people of that landscape, how that landscape was managed historically. And that's, I think the next step that I feel like my job, like whatever this podcast is 20 years from now when I'm no longer doing it, like that'll be the thing that it did was try to push people past that that step of permaculture and to create ecological systems that improve the ecology and are not just there because people wanted more apples or peaches or whatever. Is that trend beyond limitations of permaculture and toward agroecology? Is that a trend that you see has some inertia behind it, some momentum behind it? Or is it still a very fringe sort of idea?

In the United States, it's definitely more of a fringe idea. and a lot of that is paired to how we think about permaculture. And, you know, in general, if you were to talk to most permacultures, they're usually like white middle class kids that got into farming. And like they didn't want to do the traditional farm. They wanted to feel better about it instead of dumping chemicals on the ground, which is a great thing. But it needs more than that.

And if you go to a lot of places outside of the U.S., things like agroecology, whether or not that's the term they use, they probably won't, those principles exist that, you know, what they plant is in relation to their native and local ecology and history. We don't really have that here for a number of reasons, colonialism being the biggest one. But that doesn't mean, like our uncomfortable with colonialism doesn't mean we get to just kind of abscond our responsibility to the local ecology. Correct. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And yet, you know, with one thing, COVID has shown us is that whatever happens in the future, at least in the United States,

the government is not coming to help. And I think that has dawned on more and more people in an increasingly urgent way. And I've even heard like just completely non-political comedians talking about how, yeah, you know, before COVID, I really thought like, you know, this shit got really bad. Like, you know, somebody's going to, we're the richest country in the world. Somebody's going to come help. And they're like, shit, after COVID, I realized nobody's coming to. help at all. And that's that's a political people realizing that. So the political certainly realize it all across the spectrum. And speaking of that, like what is just out of curiosity your political orientation and how, if at all, does it inform your relationship to these subject matters?

I don't like to define myself by politics. Like I'd probably most closely align as an anarchist, but I don't like to call myself an anarchist. The way I think about it is the way I think about ecological systems like that most most most pretty much every system exists as like a nested version of a bigger system like you think about like how a human body exists like it's a bunch of cells working together and like that that is basically layered and at the the general term is like complex system science this idea that like you've got all these different things that are both independent and self-determining but they also have to work together for a collective good and it's not always in an organized fashion.

It used to be, the previous term had been like chaos theory. And the idea was like, how do you have something that's more than the sum of its parts? And that's, you know, that's everything. And if you think about like ecological zones

and all these different types of systems that are complex systems, quote unquote, they organize without hierarchy. They organize on small scales, even if they collaborate, rate on a larger scale. So, like, in that sense, I define myself as an anarchist, like an anti-hierarchal, small-scale systems

just generally work better. And with that in mind, there's a lot of flexibility based on local conditions. So it's not as simple as saying, like, this is how humans exist. This is how we should organize because X, Y, Z, the biological, the historical, all these different things play into what that should look like. So by definition, in my personal opinion, really no politics really fits that because there's no way to cover all of those variances, but they need to be driven by the local ecology and like these basic understandings of how systems organize naturally. Yeah. Yeah, no, I like that. I have a lot of sympathy with that. You know, one of the reasons that everybody's different, everybody has different influences, different points of emphasis. One of the reasons that pushed me more towards Marxism, is just this idea that

if we're going to do anything I mean in a meaningful way this is a global problem the problem of the eco-crisis and of climate change and so many other problems that capitalism and imperialism and colonialism they need to be confronted on a global scale

and that scaling up process I think is more in line perhaps with some forms of Marxism than with anarchism but I think your point is incredibly valid as well from that perspective as well. So I think these things don't necessarily need to immediately come to loggerheads. I think there can be some creative tension between these two dynamic ways of thinking about our

problems and working through them. And certainly when it comes to any sort of collapse scenario or any sort of fascist scenario, like anarchists and Marxists are going to have to join hands and be comrades and work together no matter what. So it certainly shouldn't be a dividing line which makes us turn each other into enemies. when we agree on so much. And I think we all have the same sense of like heart and care about other human beings and wanting to work together and help other people.

And I think that could be the point where we can come together, especially around these areas of building self-sufficiency, building better ways of producing and distributing food, coming to the aides of one another and our neighbors, etc. Yeah. And I think like I was saying this idea of like historical conditions really define how those systems should organize. And like, the reality is that we don't live in an ideal condition where those systems may or may not work.

And in many cases, they may work in places that are more on the periphery, but maybe not in places that need a strong, you know, whatever it might be to deal with the power of capitalism as it, you know, starts to lose its grip on everything. Absolutely everything. Yeah. One of the things that you really focus on is, and I think we've already alluded to some of it here, which is this rethinking of food systems. You mentioned agroecology. Correct me if I'm wrong in the pronunciation, but this other term silvo pasture, right? Is that correct? Yeah, you got it.

Can you talk about a little bit about, I guess maybe why we need to rethink our food systems more broadly and what that term means and what these other solutions possibly could look like? Okay. So there's a certain thread of conversation around food systems that says we produce so much food and we waste so much food. And that's 100% valid and we do waste way too much food. And there's a lot we could do very simply to fix that. And a big chunk of that is capitalism. However, the thing that undermines that entire argument as a long-term sustainability issue is that a majority of our food is produced. With petrochemicals, we have a finite amount of resources for those petrochemicals.

Further, those decimate the soils. So, like, it's not like it's really helping. It's just, like, you're borrowing from the future, basically. And so the idea of, like, okay, we produce enough food, we just need to be better about organizing it. Like, that's fundamentally false because of the fact that it's based in a system that's borrowing from the future. It's like if you had an adjustable rate mortgage and it's 3% today, and it's going to be 15% in five years and just being like, well, I have extra money every week this week. So like if I just, you know, realign that money a little bit better, you know, suddenly I'm going to be better for the future.

Like, no, there's a day that's coming due and we're not prepared for that. So like that's that's the first point that I think sometimes is like, oh, you're trying to like argue that people need to do all these things and you're just being dramatic about like the urgency of the way we're growing food today. The second part is, like, if we think about our food systems, it's, again, underwritten by cheap fuel because of the fact that our foods are grown places far away and they're shipped in. And, like, that's, it's not necessarily bad that we have foods from far away. Like, that there's a place for that. But that shouldn't be the staples of our food systems. We're shipping, you know, cattle grown in, you know, Venezuela to get packaged in, like, you know, Taiwan. on to get shipped back to the United States because it's cheaper because of the fuel costs.

And like obviously in terms of energy, that's, you know, X amount magnitude, higher energy just because of that. So why is that beef at McDonald's cheaper than the, you know, cow down the street? So when we start talking about this concept of like, how do we rethink our food systems? It's like, how do we, it starts with understanding your local ecology. And then for here and most of the United States, outside of like the Midwest or the Plains region, rather, a majority of the landscape was what's called a Savannah forest. So it was basically like not completely a forest. It was mostly grasslands underneath. It was burned every five to ten years at the most. With, you know, within scope, you know, certain areas were burned more frequently, certain areas were burned less frequently.

But the general idea was that the landscape was managed in a way that could. produce lots of tree crops and also allow for a lot of grazing animals. Now, that's basically in the domesticated sense, silvo pasture. And what silver pasture is like sticking trees in a pasture. So you've got tree crops and you've got like traditional pasture, whether that's sheep or cow or whatever. So in a sense, like that civil pasture system is ideal for most of the United States, for a good chunk of the United States where the populations are of the United States. And that's, so that's where a silvo pasture, I think, is particularly important. Historically, those animals are wild, but in a way, they're almost like semi-domesticated

because we are creating landscapes where they basically thrived so that we could hunt them. Yeah, so interesting. You mentioned the petrochemicals and, you know, I mean, the side point is of the cheap energy, you know, the real cost is not priced in to, you know, oil and how it's used and how it's spread throughout the entire global economy. But the point I really wanted to linger on when you're talking about petrochemicals, you're talking about like fertilizers, I assume, and what they do to the soil. Can you talk a little bit about general soil degradation and what practices in particular in the U.S. have been used that have degraded that soil?

Sure. So, you know, the first and most obvious that I think most people realize when they start thinking about this stuff is like pesticides. Like pesticides kill the microbes in the soil to protect the plants. We're growing our plants with certain genetic variants that allow them to be sprayed by chemicals and not be affected while it kills everything else around them. And then we, in that process, you've killed the thing that helps plants eat because plants don't necessarily get all their nutrients from the soil. They get it from the relationships with the things in the soil, which make soluble versions of the things that they want. And if you've killed everything, how do you get soluble versions in?

now you've got to bring in these petrochemicals which are soluble for the plants and you're still not allowing for in that process it causes a lot of damage to the to the soils because of the chemicals that they leach and the way it affects the pH and all of these other things so you're reinforcing the negative effects of the initial like okay we're just going to make it so this plant grows well and adding to that is this process of like tilling the soil the idea of tilling soil is basically to allow the nutrients from like decomposing plants on the top of the surface of the soil to get buried into the soil where all the microbes are instead of the natural process of them slowly breaking down that's basically like you know opening up the flu in your fireplace and like letting all the oxygen in so just like burns real quick but it's not a long-term solution so people have to till the garden every year till the farm every year. And in that process, a lot of carbon is lost. So, like, not only does it, like, create this huge growth in the bacteria and fungi in the soil to grow really quickly if it's still alive,

and this is, like, assuming that you haven't done all the other things that have destroyed the soil, then they no longer have food anymore, and they die off. Because it's, like, this one-shot thing, you've dumped a bunch of organic matter, and they eat it up, and there's no place for them to go. So, like, you've got all these different issues going on, and each of them, I'm like people have started really catching on with this cover crop thing where instead of tilling the soil, you're going to no till, you're going to cover crop, allow that to break down and naturally keep feeding the soil. And that's a great first step. But there's much more to it in terms of the complexity of what nature needs. We can't just flip one little switch and it's going to fix everything.

We need to think about what those local ecologies look like and how do we integrate those food systems into those ecologies so that it supports the things around them. And we don't really spend a lot of time talking about, like, insect collapse. And you're about my age. So you remember, like, driving when you were 16, 18 years old and the bugs on your windshield in the summer. Like, that doesn't happen anymore. It's weird, yeah. And it's like one of those things. Like, you don't realize it until it's too late.

And we're kind of at that point right now. Yeah. Oh, yeah, absolutely. The cover crop, can you just explain that a little bit? Sure. So the idea of, like, a cover crop is instead of, like, okay, say you grow corn. You grow your corn up and you harvest it at the end of the year. All the plants are dead standing up.

And in the process, usually you pull them out to prepare the grounds for the next year. The idea of a cover crop is before they're done growing, you start seeding something else in, whether it's something that's nitrogen fixing, which adds, it's basically protein for plants. Or you throw something else in, like grasses and things like that, which adds some biomass. or, you know, dead material if you till it back into the soil in the spring or if you just let it die off. And in that process, you're protecting the soil from rain, from nutrient loss, from water runoff and things like that. And it more closely mimics the natural cycle of, you know, what ecologies do. Sure. And prior to, I mean, in general, the normal way of doing it is just to take the corn and then destroy the crop and then let the earth go fallow and then replant next year.

Exactly. Yeah, I see. I live here in Nebraska, a huge agricultural industry. It's everything I've grown up around, you know, corn and soy fields as far as the I can see. So you've seen the brown fields in the fall. Yeah, yeah, exactly, yeah. I'm just wondering about the effect of runoff in particular to the local rivers and streams and eventually the ocean. Do you have any insight on exactly how that runoff process works and how it negatively impacts the ecosystem beyond just the patch where the stuff's being

grown? Sure. So, like, if you've, if you have nothing to protect or absorb the, the rain or whatever, snow, whatever it might be, there's two things that are not happening. You don't have plants with the roots that can absorb the moisture because they need it to live. You also don't have that fungi and bacteria in the soil. And as they exist, they create like air pockets within the soil. Healthy soil has tons of air pockets. So if it has a bunch of air pockets, it can fill, up and absorb water kind of like a sponge and in that process it'll also hold nutrients now if there's a bunch of rain and there's nothing to hold that rain in when it runs through it's going to pull a lot of nutrients out of the soil and into rivers or whatever it might be what happens when

you dump a bunch of nutrients into water is you have things like algae blooms and algae blooms whether it's in a river or a delta or whatever it basically stops life in in whatever water in if you've ever been past like a pond like a farm pond a cow pond and it's got a huge algae bloom everything's just dead underneath and that can happen on massive scales i did not know that yeah when i saw ponds like that that that it just means everything's desolated underneath yeah because there's no there's no sun getting in there's no oxygen a cycling through the water makes it just kills everything damn you mentioned um snow quickly and you've mentioned a couple time fungi and i've particularly very interested in just the role that fungi and mycelium play in the overall health of the natural

world, forests, everything. But I'm also interested in snow because here in Nebraska, I think like big blizzards and then the snow melts and that, you know, maybe replenishes the Ogilala aquifer or replenishes the moisture to the soil. But I think there's a little more complexity there that I'm not fully understanding. So just kind of like, what's the role of snow melt and preparing the ground for next year's planting. And then if you wanted to mention something about the role of fungi more broadly. Sure. So you hit on most of it, to be honest.

It's not super complicated. However, there are some things I think that when you think about, you're going to realize they're like super obvious too, but don't, that might not like be the first thing you think of. So like snow has like a very insulatory property. So places that get very cold, snow is particularly crucial in protecting the plant. plants from those bitter, bitter colds.

So if they're not getting that snow, they're getting exposed to more of that cold weather, which ends up killing more of the things. Okay. So that's super important, especially in places to get much colder than where I live. Second, it is a very slow release water back into the soils, particularly on like mountaintops where that feeds into rivers and things like that. But, yeah, I mean, snow is a part. of the water cycle where we have those seasonal rains and snows and if you're not getting the snow

there's no spring flush of water and that's you know that's the key part of growing for most plants brutal and yeah do you want touch on fungi really quick and I know that that's a topic in and of itself but just to touch on it yeah so fun I can never know which one it is if it's fungi or fungi yeah I always go with fungi but um so fungi is like like like like Like, first, the most important thing to understand is that fungi is a really unique thing that we're just beginning to understand the complexity of it. And what we do know about it is, like, there's this really great story from Tom Wessels that I love because I think it speaks a lot to the complexity of ecosystems. He talks about this story of when he was in college and his college professor brought him out to this field and they cleared all the trees in one area. that was like an old, I think it was like a plantation for like white pines or something like that.

And they left one small tree and they're like, well, it has no competition. It's getting tons of soil. Like this tree is going to grow incredibly fast and healthy and like perfect. And instead it died. And it was because when all those other trees around it were killed, there's a lot of complexity in terms of like the ability of fungi to move nutrients. around within the soil to other plants that need them to help facilitate things like making sure that plants have resistance if they're being under attack from a pest or things like that. And if you kill the relationships the fungi has with the plants, because there's no plants,

then the fungi struggles. And I don't know if it dies or not, but it's no longer capable of doing the great things that it does in the soil. With fungi, depending on how deep want to go on it. There's a very interesting ratio with bacteria in that they both produce different types of nutrients for plants. And those nutrients are necessary. The nutrients that like a little grass and a pine tree need are very different. So if you go into like a field, there'll be much more bacteria than, well, there'll be less fungi. There'll be equal amounts of bacteria that there would be in a forest. But the fungi grows. exponentially basically in terms of how many different types there are in the volume

within a forest versus a field because trees need different things than what you might find in a prairie yeah yeah so interesting yeah the the idea that that you know mycelium fungi more broadly serve in this this complex way to shuttle basically resources around to different plants and trees based on the needs and It's kind of like the neural network of a forest, you know, the mycelium take the form of like neurons in the brain and they send electrical impulses and basically allows the entire ecosystem in that area to communicate as a whole sort of, which I think is absolutely fascinating. We don't understand how much this underlies everything in nature. And as you said, we're only just beginning to fully wrestle with its implications. It also has a process in decomposing organic material, right?

Yeah, so they have a process in that decomposition cycle. But, like, what I think is really interesting, like what you just brought up this idea, that it's basically mimicking the way our bodies work. It goes back to what I was saying about, like, complex systems, that, like, everything is almost like a nested version. Like, we all exist, and then we exist as, like, parts of the organism of, civilization or society or whatever term you want to use. But like this idea of like how the fungi are particularly important in, you know,

returning those decomposing materials into like soluble nutrients for other plants and the way that the forest can naturally select the healthiest trees to survive. And in some cases, that's where humans are in particular important because we can go into a forest and identify with our eyes and our sense. what needs to be cleared in order for other trees to survive and to improve the quality of life for the things around it. You can go into an early growth forest that's 30 years old and it's around here. It'll be thickets basically of like white pines.

There'll be every six inches for half a mile and you can barely walk through it. And if you think about it, what food is that providing? It's not providing anything. So despite it being something that's growing incredibly quickly, it doesn't produce anything really for like ecological support. So like humans can go in and instead manage those forests, clear them thoughtfully with, you know, with, you know, an interest in producing more food for us and the things around us.

So we can be like this very unique, like almost like a beaver, the way we can manage an ecosystem. and accelerate that that natural process. If and when we properly understand how it works and our relationship to it and the complexity and the interdependence of everything, et cetera. Exactly. And you know, you can go into the science of it and like I find it interesting, but you don't have to.

People have been doing this for 14,000 years at least. And I think that's the part that, you know, when we talk about like how, you know, all these different things that we need to do and all these things we need to learn. learn to be able to properly manage a landscape, go stand outside every day and you'll learn more than you'll probably ever read in a book. Yeah. No, that was my experience, especially with fishing. As I got into fishing, you know, I go out there and you think, yeah, fish, you know, you put a lure on, you throw it in a fish bite, you pull it in, but actually you start to, just without even trying, without even thinking about it, you start learning the ebbs and

flows and the dynamic of the entire lake and the ecosystem around it, how you can just observe how different animals play different roles in maintaining this entire sort of ecosystem. And you just learn a lot by immersing yourself in it, even without any books, any scientific knowledge whatsoever. Certainly it's interesting. Certainly it helps. But yeah, I found that to be one of the most rewarding aspects of that particular hobby. But there's plenty of things that are just like that. Yeah, fishing is fun. And it's funny. It didn't occur to me until I was talking to a friend who fishes and he was talking about like you know I was just like you know I'm an all right fisher I'm not super good but it's more of a I want to get out of the house go do something where I can

just kind of space and just like look at the water and he's like you know I you know I was like why don't ever catch fish like you do he's like oh you know these are the places I fish and he started describing I was like you're the water is an inverse relationship of the ecosystem like it's the edges just like in the forest that are most productive. And like when we were talking about like humans in nature, most times when we're talking like a savanna ecosystem, the reason why those are particularly valuable is because you basically created the entire ecosystem as like this matrix that's a web of like edge spaces.

And like edge spaces are really big in permaculture. But like in fishing, as you know, the most productive spots are right around like the transition points. you know where the log meets the deeper part of the water or whatever it might be that's where you're going to be because you have these two competing ecosystems that like species can specialize and go after the things in the other ecosystem when they dip too far over yeah that's why the large bass love to sit near like where all the hatchlings or whatever they're called the little babies hang out because all they have to do is wait for them to cross that edge and that's where you're going to hit them so it's just like super cool to see how all these things like interplay

in a way that you might not realize until afterwards. 100% yeah and if you go out and you try to catch any sort of fish you have to almost immediately some exceptions but specifically with like bass you then have to understand it's prey you have to understand how does it feed what is the sort of cycle

seasonally and within the day that they feed what how does their prey behave at this time of the year and so yeah so just you you get immersed and it goes deeper and deeper and it's actually like an incredible deep thing like fishing is not just some like redneck throwing a line in and just sitting there it becomes an infinitely complex a thing that you can just continually get good at i've been doing it

for for several years now but still i feel like an absolute amateur all the time me too let's go ahead and move into the to this prepping part of the conversation i think it's very interesting it's certainly one of your many interests and particularly in the u.s and probably Canada. When you think about prepping, a lot of it is inflected through right-wing, specifically libertarian philosophies. And it's a lot of centered around. How much guns and ammo do you have, etc.? I'll often see these pictures of like right-wing preppers with like a million guns. And it's just like him and his wife. I'm like, you know, you can only hold one at a time, right? It's not that big of an advantage to have just a million guns and nobody to share them with. But I'm just

interested in your sort of interest in prepping and specifically that difference between right wing prepping and what could be called, I guess, left wing prepping. Sure. So with prepping, you know, I think you hit the nail on the head pretty good in terms of like the image that exists as like the cultural understanding of what prepping is. What I think is really interesting and I think this is something that can be really dangerous on the left is to oversimplify what the right is doing um in terms of prepping because while that is um like the idea of like i'm going to go get a bunker and me and my 500 guns are going to you know eat canned beans for the next 10 years yeah whatever like that that exists but there's a network a community of people that feel that

way and even and there's like a weird camaraderie in that process and it usually falls under like usually like a religion obviously Christianity here in the united states so like the idea that they're like these lone wolves basically I think can be really dangerous because I think as things get worse the reality of the fact that that's not a viable system but now you've got a whole bunch of people that are scattered with like a ton of weapons could be really dangerous especially if they believe that there's like this persecution against their religion where they can find that commonality to defend even if they don't want to share there's a really big, uh, danger in that, that mentality. Um, but to flip to the left side, you know,

I think when we talk about left prepping, to me, what that usually means is how do I care for my community in a way that I'm best capable? Instead of, you know, I, there to, I know I just said what's flip to left, but to go back to like the right wing prepping, like a lot of that overlaps with like the ideas of like homesteading and like, you know, how do I do all these things myself? Because that all fits that like I'm hyper individualism I'm gonna go do this you know my quote unquote ancestors could go live on the land blah blah blah so I can't I just have to learn all these things the frontier spirit yeah and like that's patently false like that's all based in like stories that were sold to people to convince them to move out to the middle of nowhere yeah um so

and that's a whole other conversation but when we talk about like left prepping it's about what are the skills that I have what are the resources I have available and what are the things I'm concerned about in my local community that I need to be able to help provide for. So for me, that's growing food. That's teaching people how to grow food. It's trying to build these inroads into communities because at the end of the day, as much as we want to talk about like, you know, solidarity across the left and blah, blah, blah, the reality is that like we're going to have to work with where we live. And for many of us, especially if you don't live in a city, that's going to be, like, predominantly with, from liberal to

conservative to probably not those far right people, but probably everyone else that's scared off by them. Those are the people that you're going to be working with. Like, that is your community, whether or not it's the community you want. And that's a really uncomfortable thing for people to talk about. But it is, that is the world we live in. Like we, at no time has the left ever been able to be like, hey, let's go create a commune 50,000 left is and we're going to go like make this ideal society like it's never

happened it's never going to happen and it's definitely not going to happen when like there's no like fuel or like fuel costs like $20 a gallon and only rich you know Jeff Bezos can use it for his yacht yeah yeah or his uh day trips to space yeah or his uh his support yacht or whatever it is one that carries his helipad yeah i was going to ask um you don't have to say what city or anything, but like, what region of the continent do you happen to live on? I'm in Massachusetts. Okay, so northeast. Yeah, I'm out here in the Midwest.

Only two places I've ever lived is Montana and Nebraska, both red states. Montana's a little bit different. I mean, there's like an environment, at least when I was there, there's like an environmental layer that sort of maybe blunted the worst edges of right-wing non-environmentalism that you can sometimes see here in Nebraska. But I take full, you know, to heart that that idea. that whatever happens, even if it's like the lights go out

for three fucking weeks or something, that it would be very much like me going out and like looking around at my neighbors and then seeing just a hodgepodge of different people. Like I live around people of different races, different religions, you certainly have to assume,

and based on the Trump flags, I know there's plenty of conservatives and right wingers in the area. So yeah, it's like how can I talk to regular ass people because when I walk out of my door and meet my neighbors in the street, they're not going to all be anarchist and Marxist.

yeah right it's like if that was our worst case scenario like I'd be you know gung ho let's do it yeah but that's like the unfortunate truth is we need to learn how to get out of our bubble and the internet has been especially under COVID has been like this incredible force to like force us into this bubble yeah and it's really hard sometimes for people to see outside of it and that can be really bad especially you know with what's going on right now in the earth on the world like in terms of politics, in terms of collapse, in terms of the economy, like, what's going on in terms of

inflation and the fact that we can't get things, you know, whether it's, you know, getting the right size coffee filter or, you know, whatever it might be. Like, everyone sees it, but there's nothing we can do about it. And I don't think that's going away anytime soon. Yeah, and these

globalized supply chains, done for efficiency and for maximizing profit, have clearly, failed in the face of a pandemic, what are they going to do in the face of multiple simultaneous eco crises under the domination of climate change in 10, 20, 30 years? So, yeah, that's a huge thing. And, like, just going into a store in the United States specifically and seeing entire shelves empty, you've already seen how it's put huge pressure on the average American's mind. Like, what the fuck is happening? When COVID first happened, people are fist fighting over

toilet paper. There's no specific need for toilet paper in particular. but it's just like that mentality kicks in. People are not used to this sort of being deprived of everything they want exactly when they want it. And that alone can drive like a lot of people crazy. So when any sort of crisis hits, even if it's something small, a snowstorm knocked out power for a week, you don't want to have to be like, oh God, I have to run down to the grocery store.

You want to be like, well, actually I already have enough for three weeks, water and food and some basic stuff to keep my family safe. and, you know, let's take it from there once we get there. But, you know, not having to go into a grocery store on day one of any sort of crisis is, like, a good starting point for, like, how you can start building some level of self-sufficiency and then build it out from there. Yeah, and I feel like as awful as COVID is for like a number of reasons, I think in a lot of ways it's a good wake-up call. Like, this is the preamble to the future that we have. Exactly. And if you are looking at everything happening and not learning anything,

that like maybe it's time to start rethinking about the way we live i mean i i i don't know you're probably not listening to this podcast first absolutely uh and uh like also like it's okay to be nervous and for the idea of like acknowledging that what's the way we've always lived is not the the future and i mean i know i have kids like i think about you know what what does the future look like that we're handing off to them and part of what i'm trying to do is to like put put some roots down in the sense of like here are some tools that are available here's some of the things we can start thinking about here's a vision of how things could be different yeah and I think that there's a lot of power and like showing that there can be something else and I feel

like that's a really big struggle with us on the left like as as the right goes into like this prepping mode of like homesteading and like ultra you know falling back on their religion and being able to point to like a better time quote unquote the left really doesn't have that like across the spectrum and that's really bad in terms of like how can you provide hope for people if you can't point to like an example yeah and while we can't do that we can try to present alternatives and we have a really big responsibility to do that yeah totally yeah no that right wing impulse to turn back to some false, you know, nostalgic, romanticized past that never actually exist. It does give them a sort of vision in their communities. Like, you know,

it's not what we're doing right now, but it's like what we used to do. But the problem with the left is that we have to point to a future that doesn't yet exist, that we're aiming to create. And so we don't have the, even the false certainty that, you know, the nostalgics and the reactionaries might have of pointing back to some romanticized past. We have to actually build a vision of the future and then try to present that as like, let's work towards this together, you know, which makes our job harder,

but also more rooted in reality, I think. Yeah, I agreed. Now, when it comes to prepping, there's an impulse that obviously drive somebody to get into it, right left, or center. And a lot of those impulses, particularly as of late, center around some version of collapse,

and perhaps they always have. So I'm wondering how collapse narratives on both sides of this particular divide, what we're calling broadly the right and broadly the left, which my God could be broken down into an infinite subsection of groups and ideas and movements. But I'm just wondering how the right and the left broadly think about collapse and perhaps if there's any interesting differences in how they envision collapse happening. That's a broad question. You can take it in any direction you want.

Yeah. Honestly, I don't think their vision is significantly different except for the climate component. I think both sides are afraid of a powerful government that will push them in a way they don't want to go. I think both sides recognize that the government is losing its legitimacy in the eyes of a lot of people. I think both sides recognize that, like, use the term, a liberal democracy model, has proven to be a failure in terms of like what you're seeing across the globe. So I don't think we're very significantly different in that way. I think that the key differences, you know, with a lot of the left is the idea is no one should have that kind of power. And for a lot of the right, it's we should have that kind of power because we are objectively right.

And I do worry to go back to what we were saying earlier about like these echo chambers is that the left is, dancing very close to this idea of also having this belief that we are objectively right, and anyone, even in a different strain of leftism, is fundamentally false and in the process of being false bad or problematic or whatever term you want to use. It's not just that you're wrong, but you're either cynically bad faith wrong or you're just like a morally bad person and that's why you're wrong. And that's like a sort of left Puritanism that's been revamped. It's so weird.

Yeah. And again, I think that plays into the fact that people are stuck at home. Yeah, I do too. That plays a huge role for you. Yeah. So, like, there's some very big similarities in the way we both see collapse happening. Who we blame it on is a number of, you know, I think the right blames it on, like, George Soros and, like, immigrants and the left and liberals. Yeah, the secret Marxist, rich people and, you know, immigrants.

and these Marxist corporations. Yeah, like whatever. And like that it's this like, you know, we have to overthrow the capitalist to be the capitalist or whatever mentality. But I also fundamentally think a part of it for people that fall into those camps is that they're also deeply dissatisfied with the way they live despite the fact that statistically speaking, they live a lot better than 99% of people in history. You know, they want to go back to the.

this previous time, which was just slightly better. But that doesn't address the fundamental problems of like they don't feel satisfied because of their alienation from their work and things like that. Like they're misdiagnosing the problem. And on the left, I think we see fairly comprehensively that that's a big feature of why we feel the way we do. Yeah. But to circle us back to this conversation of like what the collapse looks like, I

think on the left we recognize there's this climate component and I think climate change is going to accelerate the illegitimacy of the government in the sense that like I think that we'll see in the next few years examples of like major cities starting to be if temporarily abandoned basically you know whether it's from massive fires or you know tsunamis or you know the ocean warming and the tides coming higher and higher where cities will have to be temporarily, you know, abandoned for a week or two or whatever it might be because you can't live there. And when those things happen and the government doesn't have a valid response, it's going to be interesting to see how that power dynamic plays out. You know, we think about like places like Texas and like, you know,

last year when they had that freeze and the government couldn't do anything. And like, like those just things like that like we think of them as kind of like oh yeah there's our government they're like incompetent but like at some point we're going to get to the point where it's like holy shit can i swear on this yeah of course please do we encourage it um like holy shit like the government really it's not even like they don't care about us they physically can't do it because they're so feeble because the way our resources are allocated yeah they don't have the capacity to do that and deal with things like the protests in the streets and to deal with, you know, the massive policing

because there's just not enough bodies. There's, you can't stick money in front of the problem. Like, we're going to get to that point. The only tools they really have to keep order is blunt force in the form of police, but with certain forms of collapse or certain forms of climate catastrophe,

that's not a viable tool to use at all. You know, it's only to put down protests violently, but like, it's not going to be a solution to anything else. The only things that the government does right is like it's military and it's police, because it funds them and it still believes in those elements of government but that's it yeah and like you think about like when they they bring up the national guard to deal with situations and like in many cases

they're pretty decent at that but the national guard is you know when you look at like the military budget is like the smallest drop of that and like that's not a solution as these you know these once-in-a-lifetime events happen like monthly right i mean just think about the weather we've had in the last few weeks. It's just been like crazy. Like the way the temperatures have just dropped. We just had like an emergency ice storm that dropped like two inches on us, which is just like crazy. I've never seen it happen here in my life. And it's just like it almost wasn't even like a huge deal. And the storm was so big. I think you guys got hit by it too. Like I think it missed the entire. It missed us a little bit. We didn't get an ice storm. But I heard most of the other parts of

the country did. Yeah. And just like these things that were once in a lifetime or now, like just par for the course and they build up and they they compound on one another and then there's this fucking terrible thing that i've started to see too where people just move the fuck on you know it's like after wildfire season everybody's talking about how terrible this is and then it's like we go a month without a wildfire at least one that the whole country pays attention to people forget about it you know that ice storm in texas terrible we we bished about it for a week back and forth, who's fought with the Republicans blaming windmills and, you know, the left saying, actually it's because you privatized your utilities. And then everybody forgets about it.

It moves on. So it's like we move from disaster to disaster without ever really like linking them together. I saw a documentary where, you know, guys living out in California have lost everything to, you know, 60 year old guys too. So they've lived there their whole lives. They know the normal patterns. They lose everything to insane wildfires. And then they'll sit there and say, Yeah, but this has nothing to do with climate change. And it's just like, oh, my God. That one kills me. It's so fun.

I have this story. I probably said on, like, every podcast interview I've ever done. But I'm going to add you to that. Let's do it. Where I used to be a carpenter. I worked with a bunch of trades guys, like old boomers. And, like, I remember sitting like one winter, like we'd have our coffee break. And they'd be like talking about like back in my day, used to be like cold.

And we always had two feet of snow on the ground. And I was like, yeah, there's a name for that. it's called climate change and he's like no not that and I'm like then what do you think the ground warming and getting less snow is he's like it just it was colder then it's just like it speak to that like fundamental like how the politicization of language has like functionally made those conversations impossible to have and it it's not because we don't see things the same way like i was just saying about like right wing prepping versus left wing prepping we see 90% of it the same way we're just diagnosing it differently.

So I think there's a lot of opportunity, not with like the alt-right, but like a lot of people who are totally disenfranchised and recognize that it's not working, their solution is to say, fuck it, I don't care about other people. Like,

not that I don't care about other people. I don't care about people I don't know. I need to take care of the people I do know, which is like if you think about a completely rational response, like you want to take care of the people you love first. And if you're assuming there's a big bad guy out there, like you don't know who that, is, so you're not going to help people that might be associated with them.

So, like, there's a lot of, like, very rational, logical thinking that goes into this. It's just, like, skewed just slightly, and that's, you know, it's like building a house on a faulty foundation. Yeah. Like, you have this, like, one faulty piece, and it just destroys how there's so much similar, yet it's so much different. Yeah. That's a really, really good point.

I completely agree. One thing you said earlier is about right-wing people's sense of, of meaninglessness in this society. And I think this is really huge with, you know, you can talk about January 6th, but like just the movement broadly, like this idea of civil war, this idea of like Antifa's coming to the suburbs, you know, let's stock up on AR-15s, let's take family photos with their AR-15s. I think there's a fundamental meaninglessness in a consumer society that says the only way that you can really express yourself is through your consumption. There's no such thing as community like it used to exist, you know, even the jobs that, you know, a generation ago might have sucked

ass, but they still came with good benefits and high wages and gave you a sense of, I can support my family and a sense of self-worth. Those have gone away and been replaced by even lower wage service industry jobs in a lot of cases, if they're replaced at all. You have the deaths of despair and the opioid epidemic. And I think a lot of people on the right experience, that meaninglessness, that shallowness of their existence. And it's almost like, it's probably not even fully conscious, but perhaps mostly subconscious, but it's like, I almost want collapse. I almost want civil war. I almost want violence and conflict because at least that would give me some sense of meaning. And in fact, I think on the left and the right, in a meaning, in a society that

doesn't offer any meaning to anybody or community, like we go into our political world and we sort of can build meaning in those structures. I can build meaning as somebody on the right or the left by identifying myself increasingly with that political ideology and meshing myself in that political community. And then you're basically in an echo chamber that perhaps drive you to more and more extreme actions. But especially like these well-off suburban white guys that are, you know, have beer bellies and drive big-ass trucks and actually compared to most other people in the U.S. are doing pretty goddamn well. They still have this inner urge to like, like pick up the gun at least even if they don't actually do it there's this urge to do it you know

and uh i think that there's probably a lot of reasons for it but something about the meaninglessness of modern society and the urge to to create meaning even if you create it through the worst possible ways because war for example is horrific but it does create a lot of meaning you know yeah uh yeah there was a bunch of studies about like um i think it was like depressed or suicidal people in like paris during i think it might have been like world war two and they were getting involved with like driving the ambulances and like dealing with people that were dying

and I'm probably wrong about World War II it was some some war in France and like they were talking about the people that were depressed and felt they had no meaning were the most useful because like everyone else was dealing with like the chaos of the extreme violence of war

and because they were so desperate for meaning it was like those were the people that were so more important to keep things going to help people survive. And I'm doing a terrible job explaining it because it's like something I vaguely remember reading like a decade ago. I know, I know exactly what you're saying. And I don't know if this is the book that you're talking about, but there's two books by Sebastian Junger, one's called War and one's called Tribe.

But he makes these arguments very explicitly. And I think he also gives rise to that exact example. I don't know exactly the context. But yeah, in any case, it's this idea that like a lot of people who were depressed or anxious or, you know, felt meaningless out in the normal life when conflict and chaos and bloodshed came, they found meaning in engaging with that, you know, helping people survive or whatever. And the community that immediately arises in the face of, you know, social decay or conflict or, you know, let's say it was like the French during the Nazi occupation and you're not a Nazi and you're under the German control. and you know before you hated your life but now every day is infused with meaning but it comes through the chaos of war and so yeah i don't know it's it's a very complex psychological human need um and i i don't know the the full dimensions of it but it seems that there's something there

for sure yeah and it's all driven but at this point at least probably by capitalism yeah and like it's just manifesting in different ways on the left uh left and the right 100% absolutely well what do you think about, I mean, this is probably, let's go with more or less the last question. We'll see where it takes us. But upcoming elections, the overall estate of American decay and what partial collapses might look like, you know, regional collapses, even like local collapses, as opposed to like a full-scale collapse. Like the government of the United States could continue to function in some way while swaths of the country are left to fend for themselves. I mean, I think we kind of saw it with something like Katrina,

where, you know, the poor black elements of New Orleans in particular were left to basically fend for themselves in the worst of situations with no government help at all. And, of course, with climate change, I mean, the rich can have multiple houses, the rich can move, the rich can fly out, you know, Ted Cruz can go to Cancun when Texas freezes, for example. And they can like sort of leave the the poor and working class people behind to fend for themselves.

And a government run by the rich and for the rich, you know, cares about the rich. And when the rich are okay, it's the poor people can, you know, can basically fuck off. So I'm just wondering what you think about the upcoming elections. And also just to add this wrinkle in and again, take it however you want, this idea that the right has now convinced themselves that pretty much every election on the national level that they lose from now on is rigged. and that I think is not going away they're never going to come back and say all right you got us this time once that ball is set in motion

nothing you can do is going to convince them that you won and so that's going to that's going to create a huge strain because right now 40% roughly 30 40% of Americans don't believe the president in the White House is legitimate now I don't think he's legitimate because I don't think this entire

system is legitimate but they don't think it's legitimate because their favorite millionaire didn't win so I mean that's going to put a lot of stress on the legitimacy of the system it already is so I just want where are we at in the process of decay in your estimation and what do you think different forms of collapse could look like sure so I'm going to rewind a little bit to January 6th because I do think we don't we don't take that as serious as it could be the reality is that like that despite it being hugely disorganized and you know full of a bunch of people that had no idea what they're getting themselves into,

a couple of poorly made decisions by people inside the building and by the people that were storming the building could have very significantly changed our history and the way we think about it. So I think, like, writing it off is dangerous. The people that organized it and that were involved with it and did not get arrested, or even if they did, they're going to learn from it. and they're going to do better next time.

Sorry, I don't mean to interrupt, but I just want to nail down this point really quick, because you're right. There's this, the January 6th event happened. And I think people on the left see a certain sort of liberal overreaction where they're like, you know, this was an insurrection. This was an attack on our democracy. And so, well, actually it was like this half-ass sort of a joke of a thing. They rubbed their shit on the walls. Like, it was so disorganized and so absurd. But I think you're right in that while there might be a certain sort of liberal overreaction,

to the specificity of what happened that day what it does do is it shows a certain direction that the right is moving in and they're going to continue to move in that direction and it's going to get more organized I think it's going to get more intense and it shows a I think a rising fascism

I didn't call it an insurrection I called it a fascist riot and I think we're going to see more and more of those so it's not so much the event itself but what it portends that I think we really cannot we cannot dismiss that is meaningless. Yeah, and I think the actors, while the soldiers will change the actors that are

behind the scenes won't. And I think they are learning a lot. I mean, if we think about even like the left organizing protests, like how far in the last five years, how much better protesting and organizing around protesting has gotten in the United States. And if you look at the way the police just like beat the shit out of protesters early on before they learned how to defend themselves learned how to organize, understood when to do what, you know, those skills come with that experience. And if the Wright keeps doing it, and I mean, we could talk about, like, the actions in Ottawa the past couple weeks with the trucks. Like, yeah, it's a joke, like, in the sense of, like, they didn't really accomplish anything

with a bunch of dudes and pickup trucks and blah, blah, blah, like, that's all valid. But the point stands that this is something that we've never really seen. they're testing the waters and seeing the reaction that they get and seeing how far they can push things and how much how much leniency the state will give them versus what the state has given to the left. Now, in terms of like the upcoming elections, so we've got this midterm election. I don't think anyone's going to be surprised when the Democrats get blown out of the water. That's not going to be a surprise. I think what's going to happen in 2024 is we'll see a very strong right-wing can.

candidate. Whether or not it's Donald Trump, I think it's going to be Trump. I think he's going to pick somebody very young, somebody who can take the reins when he's no longer there. That could be his son, I don't know. Interesting. Yeah, I mean, it makes a lot. Yeah, not Mike Pence. I think there's a couple candidates that are definitely in the back of his mind. But I think what we're in for is a stronger Trump with a more determined base. that feels like there's unfinished business and, um, you know, some, some of that petty revenge that

Trump is, you know, is his signature, you know, the, the, the inability to let things go when he didn't get everything he wanted. Um, and that can be really dangerous when, again, like you said, there's no, there's no longer any respect for the democratic process, whatever that may or may not have been. Um, and there's no way out of that. So then like, what does that look like? You know, obviously we've seen what Trump's presidency would look like if that continued on, especially like with the Supreme Court and the acceleration of more protests in defense of women's rights as well as, you know, the things that we have been protesting for the last decade, two decades, indefinitely, those things will exist with a president that's

more driven to do what he did four years ago to reinforce why he was right and he should have rightfully remained president. And, you know, in terms of the climate, I think, like, we could look at places like the southwest and, like, the water shortages that are inevitably coming. You know, the government will have to do massive infrastructural work to try to move water to places like Phoenix. And, you know, like many things, like, we could look at the bridge that fell in, well, was that Pittsburgh or something like that. I can't remember, but yeah, I know what you're talking about. Somewhere in Pennsylvania, our infrastructure is falling apart. we're really great at building things we're not very good at maintaining them so i could very quickly

see them investing and putting in this you know super expensive huge scale like water service project to try to drive water into places where we have these massive cities in the desert and sure they'll do the effort of building those things they won't maintain them though so the question is how long until they fall apart no one ever replaces them so i think that's where we're at in the cycle we're at the point where the government can still make those one last ditch efforts to appease people. They can do those things. They can build dams around cities, you know, like that are right on the ocean where the waters are getting higher and higher.

The problem is, like Katrina, they're never going to fix them. They're going to go in and they're never going to get fixed. And we're going to get to the point where there's only so much money and so much manpower to go around to install these things. And that's where things start to fall apart. Exactly. Yeah, one of the, I think you're 100% correct on that. And I think one of the trajectories that I see as being very possible in light of everything that you said is some sort of balkanization. You know, we already have a federated system, right? So we already have states, which means we have governors. We have mechanisms of control at the state level all the way up to an executive branch, the governor, which could come as a form of a smaller version of a state when your state is being impacted. So there could be some. something like a partial failure, partial collapse, or just an overall delegitimizing of the national

government, and then regional or state-based forms of governance take on more and more importance. And that could look like an unofficial, slow term balkanization. It could be some form of a civil conflict that causes balkanization. But I can see that process playing out as one of the more likely trajectories that we're going to go into because the federal government becomes less and less able to, you know, whack a mole the multiple catastrophes that are coming up and people are going to be forced, I think, by circumstance to turn to state and local governments in the face of these crises increasingly going forward. And I don't know if that's good or bad, but yeah.

Yeah, I think in that conversation, it's important to remember there's going to be bad actors that are going to want to force that balkanization for power's sake. And in places like I was just saying, like the Southwest, which is so desperate for water, there's plenty of opportunity for bad actors to leverage and utilize that for their own benefit. And as much as like that idea of like, okay, if the federal government withers away and there's these states that kind of operate as like de facto government, well, not de facto governments, but governments in replace of the federal government. government, I think those lines will get blurred pretty quickly as strong states are sitting next to

weak states or, you know, if you think about the natural ecosystems of a region, you know, where those natural borders are, might redefine what that looks like a little bit. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's very true. And particularly in red states, I think, which only places I've ever lived, I think we're going to see, and we already do see like the institutional right, the Republicans, playing not even footsie anymore but outright embracing the far right and so you can see perhaps if in a balkanization context in the face of resurgent fascism weak red states may be teeming up with or somehow empowering local militias that are right wing but are full of fascist white supremacists whatever the case may be or white supremacist infiltrating some sort of state granted militia to operate and then you can see that like sort of actually working together i think we already see this symbiosis between the institutional conservative right and the fascist right. And I think we saw that in Weimar Republic with conservatives and the Nazis saying, you know, this is a bull, Hitler's a bulwark against liberalism and communism. So we have to work with them. And like,

you've seen that, that pattern play out throughout history. So I don't know, there's, there's a lot of interesting ways to take that. I mean, there's this, the sense that we're all spread around. Like, you know, the first civil war was like the South versus the North. But today it's like cities are blue and rural areas are red. So you could live in a red state but live in a city and actually be surrounded by pretty liberal and even outright progressive people, but you're surrounded by hundreds of miles on every side by rural areas. And those complexities won't make for a clean break in who's fighting who.

It's going to actually, as you kind of alluded to, muddy the water and blur the lines between formations of all different kinds. Is this a non-state actor? Is this a state actor or this somewhere in between? you know what do cities do to protect their liberal populations from you know especially conspiracy driven right wing movements um which completely are unmoored from from reality and thus reasoning with not to say all right wingers but a certain sort of them are so yeah i just i don't know there's a million different directions that could take but it's going to get very complicated and i

think it's going to get very ugly before we we break through to any sort of widespread solution yeah and i think like the thing you just brought up this idea of like the urban uh rural divide is particularly important because to circle back to the beginning of this conversation about like what's wrong with our food systems is that one can't exist without the other. But it's on a much larger scale because of the fact that so much of our food is grown in very specific parts of the country, but they don't have the resources to grow that food themselves. They're completely dependent on this infrastructural chain that, you know, imports petrochemicals. So the second anything starts to fall apart,

it becomes much like with toilet paper. Like that system falls apart so quickly because the way it's designed and the fact that it was designed around efficiency that was predicated by cheap fossil fuels. And now you're saying, all right, now you've got this rural versus urban divide, plus you've got this balkanization. How are you getting things in?

How do you fly materials or drive materials in? And how do you have the urban spaces that process, those materials to make them useful or to package and ship those materials. So it's such a complicated web because of the economic system we've created that it's going to be like, you know, we've talked about this idea of the crumbles that like you're going to start seeing like certain things not on the shelves. You might not be able to get your favorite coffee anymore. You'll get coffee, just not your coffee, you know, and so on and so forth.

And then there's going to be a very quick at some point turn. where the tensions become too high the system starts falling apart and I don't know when that day is it could be 20 years it could be 100 years but it's coming there's no way around it like the way we live is just it's not sustainable

exactly exactly something has to give you know what that buckling will look like and what direction it buckles that we don't know we can only speculate but we do know things cannot go on as they currently are something is giving something will continue to give, and it might take an enormous, spectacular, horrific event to start moving in the direction of actually trying to come up with some solutions, or at least breaking out, rupturing open the problem so that we're not in this purgatory of like, we know that things are dying, we know that the old world and Gramsci in terms is dying, and the new world is struggling to be born, and now is certainly the time of monsters. But we don't exactly know where things are going, how long this purgatory is going to last. and when it finally does break open into something new, what that new is going to look like.

And that's, I mean, that's anxiety-inducing for sure. But I think what you and I both agree on, and I think part of the point of this conversation is that even in the face of that, we have some agency. We have things we can do. We have knowledge we can build. We have skills we can cultivate. And we have a community that we can reach out to and start to integrate into in whatever ways that we possibly can. And that should at least, you know, blunt the sharpest edges of hopelessness or, or, or, or, you know, despair. You know, I like to think of this as well, no matter how brutal it's going to be and

it's going to be brutal. But we're in this great transformation. We're in perhaps one of the most important crossroads in human history up there with like the shift to agriculture, right? Like, because the problem is so global, climate change is so all encompassing that something is going to have to radically, radically change. And so there's some hope on the other side of that that we are in this great transformation period we are asking we're being asked by nature itself to evolve or to perish and um and yeah so we're in this situation and we're the vectors through which that ultimate decision what what direction it gets pushed in we're the vectors through which that decision is made so everybody that gets activated everybody that understands the issues

everybody that makes themselves an asset as much as they possibly can to their community is a step in the right direction yeah and i'll piggyback off of that for a little bit of optimism. One thing I don't think people realize is that this wouldn't be the first time we've gone through massive climate change. About 6,000 years ago, there was a period of basically, based on most of the records, like a good chunk of the planet went under like massive change. And people survived.

And they had none of the tools to understand that the forecasts were coming or that how long that period would take and generations. But they survived. And they learned to evolve. And it was because they were involved and integrated into their local ecology. They understood when the plants were changing. What could survive was changing. And they worked to work with the species that were best for those changes.

And that's what we have to do is we need to relearn to connect both with our local ecology and with each other. To build the communities, to build that resilience, to build the networks that we need in order to survive. And to build the skills that we need to survive, just like you were saying. Yeah, absolutely, beautifully said. And I think we're going to end it on that, my friend. This has been a wonderful conversation. I really, really appreciate your deep knowledge on these subjects. This is an area of stuff that I'm only just beginning to address. I've started composting this year. I'm building my garden for the first time this year, trying to harvest some rainwater, you know, deepening my skills when it comes to fishing year round. And I'm a father as well, so I'm concerned about these issues.

But resources like yours in particular are very, very helpful for somebody on the principled left that is also engaging with this particular field of issues. So thank you very much for that. Before I let you go, can you maybe let some people know where they can find you and the Poor Pearl's Almanac online? And anything else you want to say? Yeah. So the Poor Prol's Almanac is available everywhere you listen to podcasts. So wherever you're listening to this, you can tune in to us on the same. server, platform, whatever.

You can also find us on social media, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter. We're mostly involved on Instagram. We also have a Twitch that's really cool because we utilize it for skill sharing. So we try to do just about every Tuesday what we call the Porpo's Prepper SkillShare. And like last week, we had somebody come on to make soaps.

And the previous week we had somebody actually come on to talk about fly fishing. Nice. So it's like a really cool way to just kind of get your toes wet in a subject matter with a bunch of like-minded folks. And yeah, that's pretty much where you can find us. Absolutely. I'll link to that in the show notes. If you're at all interested in this stuff, you've got to engage with the poor Pearl's Almanac.

You've got to go and get involved in that community. It's really, really important. And, you know, Elliot couldn't be here, but let them know I send my best regard. We'll do. All right, Andy. I'll talk to you later, brother. Hands on the rope to the grave Chasing the flame

Like I'm born from grenade Keeping shit vague Nobody like what I say But the dead Lose many friends in my time Capitalism's to blame Living in shame was so hard It came up like the sun

Sky wanna burn me up Test its own death It's own deafening silence It's a clip war on the sky Ain't a revenge like survival You're wasting to die Living inside of a trip to the zoo Customers think of old prisoners too

For that your dreams Your dream became plain I fell in a hole I couldn't turn back Alice is dead I won't survive Please take my pain We cross picket lines

When we was born Wasting a water on the dead How are you scream at your TV When there is no power left We live fast, so too fast Catch us dancing on the edge But it isn't a mirage They telling us condos in hell

Justice in graves Jobs on the moon post Modern ain't modern enough We live in a scream that is cracking So little gets out What is the meaning of life Is it to go down in flame to build up her name

Fucker reputation if you look in the mirror Not wanting to hide in a frame They put everything into a can So we can live alcohol So we can feel the rest of a sport Rest of a spot Depression deface the symptom of city I'm deeply flawed

That don't make me human Eating it's young as the oldest consumer If water and bees is what we need Why ain't they make it a palm and the bees The oxygen out of the air Air from the caves Gator communities under the ground Where are headed

Visualized decay Cities fall into the sea Rap as silver says I said you are born You can live and be free Wraved a few kids that can live a whole life Maybe they won't Die a starvation of drought Maybe they will

No loss but the natural one So we live without guilt Chop up the head of the city So we can live Let a bit fruit Other than kids of the rich We know they don't give a shit If people go homeless

I starve to death They kick us all out They build a playground There ain't no ethical consumers in a wasteland No revelations in quicks No bosses and graveyards No value in paystups No revelation in quicksand

No bosses in graveyard No value in pasteups We cross picket lines On the day that we was born How me scream at your TV When all the legend power's gone We live fast, so too fast Catch us dancing in the ass

Everything is a mirage Desert Thank you. Thank you.