Collapse-Able: Three Handbooks for Living Now and Later

By Alice Loyd

The strategies offered in these three handbooks can equip a reader to thrive in present conditions as well as in a period of greater environmental and economic distress. The author contends that assets undervalued by the industrial era- spiritual strength, communal social skills, and practical knowledge-will become both the means to maintain qua

• Language: English
• Publisher: Center for Ecozoic Studies
• Release date: Oct 8, 2024
• ISBN: 9798991352314

Alice Loyd

Alice Loyd has been writing about the climate crisis and energy policy since the early 2000s, advocating for low impact lifestyles. Grounded in her experiences as a child in the Great Depression and World War II, she writes to counter the culture's materialistic detachment from nature. After years/careers in education, business, and non-profit management, in retirement she founded the project Food Is the Key, where she has taught gardening and home food preservation.

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Collapse-Able: Three Handbooks for Living Now and Later

© 2024 Alice Loyd

All right reserved

Collapse-Able: Three Handbooks for Living Now and Later © 2024 by Alice Loyd is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Center for Ecozoic Studies

2516 Winningham Road

Chapel Hill

North Carolina 27516

Cover art and illustrations by Theo Egan

Book and cover design by Carl Brune

Printed in the USA

ISBN 979-8-9913523-1-4

To my grandchildren

and all grandchildren, everywhere

Contents

Introduction

Handbook One

Growing Spiritual Strength for Hard Times

Handbook Two

Deepening Our Connections with Other Humans

and the Rest of Nature

Handbook Three

Acquiring Useful Knowledge

Conclusion

A Time for the Future Oriented

Appendix I: Important Books in My Reading Path

Appendix II: Forming a Mini-Village

Appendix III: CAWST Biosand Filter Construction Manual:

Construction Stages B, E, and H

Acknowledgments

Sometimes authors say in the acknowledgments,I couldn’t have done it without her, or him. I’ve wondered what kind of help would make that much difference. Now I know that the statement likely recognizes a range of support rather than a single type of contribution. At least that’s what I’m saying when I apply that sentence to Laurie Cone. Without her skill as editor offering better language alternatives, as proofreader finding almost invisible errors of punctuation or spacing, as science mentor correcting lay understandings and terms, and as master of general knowledge and astute social observer—without these assets which she generously gave to the project—this particular book would never have come into being.

CES publishing advisor Paul Wright and technical writer Sue Tideman also carefully read and suggested vital changes to the manuscript; Jennie Ratcliffe guided me through the last stages of book creation; and Theo Egan and Carl Brune contributed their artistry and skill to help the manuscript finally become a book.

I must also thank friends who offered encouragement by reading early stages of the manuscript and praising it in their circles, and above all the members of my family, including my late mother, who never doubted that I had at least one book in me, and that it might be a good one.

I owe special thanks to Herman Greene for the editorial and writing experience he gave me during our years together at the Center for Ecozoic Studies, and for his interest in seeing that this book came to publication.

Who else? I’m grateful to my large community of environmental activists, in North Carolina and across the country, whose passion to preserve the order and wonder of the planet has challenged me to do my part. And, perhaps surprisingly, I want to thank an editor who declined to publish the book. Caylie Graham believed in the quality and the subject matter despite its lack of commercial potential, and her rejection letter placed my work in the class of some writers I deeply admire.

To all the plants and creatures who have been my friends and guides throughout my life, I say thank you. And if, despite all of this excellent support, there remain errors of fact or judgment, they are mine alone.

Introduction

A Time for the Strong-Hearted

The world is changing. Along with every other member of the Earth community, humans live now at the edge of the unknown. The next fifty years are not likely to look much like the previous fifty. If we can approach the coming uncertainties as if we were explorers, stepping out onto an unfamiliar landscape with open eyes and hearts, the changes will be less threatening. Perhaps as one way of life is ending, we will find opportunities which that way of life did not afford. I think accepting this possibility is more realistic as well as more practical than clinging to what has been.

The signals of danger for creatures who need clean air, water, and food are abundant, but for industrial systems the many forms of pollution and habitat destruction have been the necessary marks of success. The misfortune of modern life is that the success of the economy is a threat to our survival. As English environmental writer and thinker Edward Goldsmith explained succinctly four decades ago, Economic growth . . . is biological and social contraction. They are just different sides of the same coin.1

And the challenge of our particular period of modern life is that economic growth based on biological and social contraction is nearing its end point. As the resources the economy requires for growth disappear or become financially unobtainable, the system based on their exploitation will begin to fail. We are likely to face the loss of industrial-era amenities at the same time we are dealing with a damaged planet.

How will we manage either of these hardships, much less both? In such an unfamiliar situation, where do we turn for help? And, you may be wondering as you begin to read, what information can a handbook offer that will help a person navigate this passage?

I suggest we begin by considering that the ecosystem, though injured, continues to support life. Seasons still turn, seeds still sprout, and in my part of North America this year, the Brood XIX periodical cicadas came out of the earth exactly thirteen years after their kind was last seen, to hum and lay eggs and die, as they have ever done. Many elements of biological life persist, though fewer and weaker, and so may we.

How has the ecosystem managed this well in the face of destruction? The answer is the reason for these handbooks: Earth is a flexible, tough, buoyant, and strong web of life—and we are a part of Earth. As difficulties mount, we can be sure that the survival capacities Earth has bred in us will become manifest if we put them to use. Just as evolution has prepared the rest of the biosphere to manage challenges, it has produced in humans the capacities we will need as the dangers increase.

We have both the strengths and the vulnerabilities of the whole of nature. I’m not saying we are invulnerable, or that Earth is. The assaults may surpass ecosystem tolerance, and thus ours as well. But the time to wilt is not yet. This is the time to join with Earth to realize our native resilience.

In the three handbooks I’m introducing, I will maintain that our most useful capacities as times get rougher will be those the industrial economy has overlooked and ignored—our spiritual and social faculties, and the creative aspect of our minds. These undervalued and thus typically less developed powers that evolution has had the wisdom to give us will be needed in the new era. My hope for this writing is to strengthen these abilities so that we are collapse-able—so that we are prepared to deal with whatever circumstances come our way.

There is more to you than meets the eye, said Gandalf to Frodo.

J.R.R. Tolkien2

The three handbooks that follow are my effort to help younger people manage the decline of a far-from-perfect way of life by using a wider lens, one that includes not only such experiences as a person of my age might offer, but also the perspective of non-industrial cultures from today and back throughout human history.

Handbook One

Strengthening Our Spirits

The industrial way of life began and has succeeded by exploiting the human spirit. We have been shaped to seek comfort and to close our eyes to the corollary suffering. Few of us escaped the segmentations, externalizations, repressions, and conformities that make us passive consumers and willing employees. Whatever ease we have obtained through modern progress likely has been gained at the cost of something more precious: our sensitivities.

To know I have a thorn in my foot is fairly straightforward. It hurts when I walk. To recognize that something is missing is not so easy. By adulthood I will have filled the empty spot with whatever substitutes I can find. I will have grown callouses around the absence. I may have forgotten that it exists.

To uncover the heart’s stifled longings is work of the spirit, and to do this we don’t have to go on retreat, or quit our jobs, or join a sangha or a church or a twelve-step group. We might do any of these as we discover our deeper needs, and it’s better to have support in any undertaking. But there is no set program and no universal book of instruction. What is required is more personal and of a higher level of difficulty: we must pay attention.

We must open ourselves. We must develop the sense that we belong here, that we are connected to the whole of existence. We are not born and then stranded by the planet that bore us. We have roots—however you may name them—that bind each of us to everything else. When we attend to the subtle messages from within and from our surroundings, we are recovering some of the capacities that make us fully alive. We will be blooming, as we were meant to do from the moment of birth.

It is these life-affirming assurances that will carry us through adversity. If you’ve lived through a world-ending event earlier in your life, you may have found that level of anchorage. In Handbook One, I will talk about the anchors that have sustained me. We are inextricably tied into the flow of life in this universe, even if no human agent is present to demonstrate the connection. We need to find these roots now, in order to be ready for whatever comes.

Handbook Two

Deepening Our Connections

A human is meant to live in the company of other caring humans from birth until death. Just as the more-than-human Earth web is intricately interwoven with a role for each member—none more worthy than another—so also the human community must be if humans are to thrive. The emphasis on individuals that Western culture advocates is an aberration, an abnormality in the history of the race. For a child to be normal within the ancient pattern, it must be nurtured in a nest of human guardians and teachers, and for those adults to behave normally toward a child or toward each other, they must have had the same upbringing. The results of generations of more modern, civilized child rearing are not pretty. If we often don’t feel safe among our fellow humans, this is one explanation.

But we can create safe alliances. Humans come with 40,000 years of aptitude for cooperation and caring. Several thousand years marked by societal distrust have not erased the tendency to draw toward each other, as every disaster proves. It will take re-training and then practice for most mature Westerners to bond enduringly with others in common cause, but this is exactly what we must intend and then accomplish if we are to manage the upheaval that may accompany the disintegration of both the economic and the natural environments. We will need each other more than ever, even as threats to social cohesion accumulate. The handbook on deepening our connections is meant to help with this aspect of adaptation.

Handbook Three

Acquiring Useful Knowledge

To people in the more comfortable classes of the Global North, the ending of industrial civilization may at first seem to be the most serious of our problems. To lose services we’ve been able to buy with the wages of our participation in the economic system is a cause for concern, since most of us don’t know how to manage without them. Daily we access technologies we understand only well enough to press the right buttons or the proper pedals. We eat food we know little about, even if we can afford the label organic. We turn on faucets from which water appears as if by magic. We depend on life-extending medications we could not replicate if the pharmacies were to close.

The third handbook aims to help people prepare for a world without either the services we’re accustomed to having others perform for us, or a reliable internet where we watch YouTube videos to learn new skills. In the near future, I think most of us will need to take more responsibility for the day’s ordinary survival tasks, and while we will benefit by exchanging services with each other, I think we’ll lose the option to remain ignorant about how to meet basic bodily needs. Only in the affluent nations of the Global North have typical humans lost the knowledge to grow food, obtain water without expert assistance, and manage their own sanitation, for example. One of the attractions of the intentional community where I chose to live is the nearby folk school,3 where old skills are taught by practitioners committed to their preservation.

This part of adaptation will be a hard adjustment in developed nations, with most people facing it with fear and resistance. Speaking as an octogenarian raised in the Great Depression and World War II, I have to say I’ve been puzzled at the attitude toward work considered menial that I’ve found in many of my same-age peers. It is as if the post-war 1950s advertisements, with their glamorous depictions of labor-saving devices and chemicals, caused two generations of Americans to aim to rise above the duties that accompany being a human animal. Instead they were glad to put on Sunday clothes every day to go to the office, or leave home to operate or repair machinery in a shop, factory, or farm. They preferred to get a job so they could pay someone else to attend to anything regarded as lowly.

That stance is appropriate for people with serious physical limitations, but for able-bodied, mentally competent adults to disdain the ordinary work done past and present by most of the humans on the planet falls into some category of pretentiousness. Still, I don’t want to minimize the difficulty of the shifts we can anticipate. People who are not well, not well-off financially, or not young enough or old enough to handle the labor involved have reason to fear the disappearance of institutions and services that have made their lives more comfortable. Pain and distress will increase according to a person’s spiritual, social, and physical difficulties. The weak and sick will need the care of stronger companions to manage such a transition, and everyone needs a village of helping partners. But most readers who take the time to learn some new but very old skills can find satisfaction in creating a fairly graceful life even amid upheaval and difficulty. Acquire useful knowledge now is the advice I hope to persuade people to follow. Or as the Scouts say, Be prepared.

My understanding of the preparation needed for the unpredictable but certainly less orderly period we are entering is based on experience, observation, and research. I know from experience that a quiet connection with sources of inner strength is the greatest comfort in times of trouble. From experience and observation I’ve learned that belonging to a respectful community is the best emotional as well as economic insurance we can provide for ourselves and our loved ones. From experience and research I’ve concluded that people who are secure spiritually and socially can learn how to manage the physical tasks of human daily life if they are physically able to perform them. To the extent they cannot—and at my age I must be included in that group—I have confidence that our spiritual and social strengths will stay with us as long as life lasts.

Endnotes

1 Edward Goldsmith, Deindustrializing Society, The Ecologist Vol. 7. No. 4, May 1977, viewed on Resurgence.org archives, https://www.resurgence.org/grafix/ecologist/covers/600/1977-05.jpg.

2 J.R.R. Tolkien, Lord of the Rings (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin,1994), 319.

3 https://folkschoolalliance.org/a-brief-history-of-folk-schools/.

Handbook One

Growing Spiritual Strength for Hard Times

Contents

Strong spirits, nourished by the goodness of the cosmos, will carry us through adversity

A spiritual path begins wherever we are

For me the path has been led by the eternal verities

We can regularly give goodness our full attention

We can respond from the heart

We can give attention to goodness in regular practice

Practice opening the heart

Practice choosing the good

We can give attention to the ultimate mysteries

Death; Love; God; Evil; Miracles; Nature

We can spend time with people who exemplify goodness

Kindness; Integrity; Loyalty; Loving Sacrifice ; Justice; Forgiveness

We can be inspired by writings that illuminate goodness

Seeking truth in non-fiction

Seeing virtue in fiction

We can demonstrate goodness in our own behavior

Exercising the agency of fairness

Recognizing unfair advantage

Questioning consumer behavior5

Withdrawing support from an unfair system

Releasing attachment to benefits

Exercising the agency of truth

Truth-seeking in personal history

Truth-telling in public advocacy

Fine points of truth-seeking and truth-telling

In Conclusion

Strong spirits, nourished by the goodness of the cosmos, will carry us through adversity

I’m ready for whatever happens. The people who see the difficulties ahead and yet feel this well-prepared may not be the ones with a year’s supply of food in metal cans or a shelf full of efficiently-rotated bottles of water. The old man who sits by the window in his wheelchair may live with that serenity, or the tired nurse, rushing each day to catch the morning bus. They can face hardship without living in fear because they have spiritual strength, which is an internal possession. A strong-hearted person with deep inner resources is ready to deal with either prosperity or adversity. For that person, a collapse in the exterior world would be disturbing, but it would not be an insurmountable event.

It is helpful to have external support when we seek to build internal strength, but by definition a spiritual quest takes place within. Although influenced by outer events and outside actors, the spiritual life is an inner event. I can be inspired—inspirited—by what others do and say, but I am the one who allows inspiration to take place. Through my own spirit, I can connect with the deepest elements of life on Earth.

For we are not alone, living on the side of an indifferent planet whirling through space. Earth holds us all at her breast—every creature, every geological feature. It is my belief that food for the spirit comes from the same source as food for the body—from this planet in this universe. Here is where we are. There is nowhere else to be. All we need of nourishment, physically or spiritually, is to be found in this place.

If you put your soul against this oar with me,

the power that made the universe will enter your sinew

from a source not outside your limbs, but from a holy realm

that lives in us.1

So spoke the Persian poet Rumi, thirteenth-century Islamic scholar and Sufi mystic. All of the resources of an endlessly creative capacity are here to sustain us. Our society has not encouraged us to explore the intangible features either of ourselves or of nature, partly because prevailing philosophy has maintained they don’t exist, since they can’t be quantified. Their existence is an internal phenomenon to be observed only by the one who experiences them.

As a result of this atmosphere of denial, our spirits may be underdeveloped. To strengthen them, we must enter their realm and explore it for ourselves. When we do, our spiritual leanings will remain superficial if we merely accept the ideas others have offered. If your path can be labeled, it’s probably someone else’s, not your own. Someone else’s path is fine as a starting place. From there you can find out for yourself the implications of that teaching.

I shall speak of nothing of which I have no experience, either in my own life or in observation of others, or which the Lord has not taught me in prayer.2

St. Teresa of Avila, the great Spanish mystic and reformer, wrote those words almost four centuries ago. I am encouraging you to do as she did: explore your spirit’s capacities for yourself. To the extent you do, your spiritual orientation will not be merely intellectual assent; it will arise from your unique journey. No matter where you start,