Gentle Decline 2/35: Spirits & Staircases

Hello. It’s a been a while; the spring and early summer have been busy, and in a way that hasn’t included a lot of time to do any thinking. Notably, a lot of my creative outlets have been quieter than usual - it’s hard to schedule games in summer, the SCA stuff has been more do and less write, and a lot of the work I’m doing is troubleshooting rather than analysis or writing. And creativity results in more creativity, and less creativity does the opposite. So at this stage I have just enough time to grab some to write, and that will result in more writing.

[Gentle Decline is an occasional newsletter about climate crisis, and - more to the point - how to cope with it. All issues are free! You can support the newsletter via Patreon (where there’s sometimes further discussion about particular points), Ko-fi, or by buying some of the seriously classy merchandise, including the new Plant More Trees t-shirt.]

Positive Things

The EU’s Nature Restoration Law has been passed. The Irish Times notes that it will affect about 9% of the land in the state, which honestly can only be good. Better preparation has reduced death tolls from climate disasters, according to the UN. And someone has developed bacteria-powered batteries which work by being buried in soil.

But what if not?

Someone who’s not - to my knowledge - a subscriber or reader of any of my stuff, but to whom I was talking about Gentle Decline at an event asked: but what happens if everything is ok? We’ll have moved all our infrastructure and made expensive preparations for nothing.

I think at the time I made some polite noises, tried not to spill my coffee, and didn’t really answer the question, because the difference between that person’s understanding of the world and mine is a big enough gulf that without a bit of preparation, I wasn’t going to be able to say anything useful. I’m still thinking about it a couple of months later. But in full belated l'esprit d'escalier mode, I do have some things to put forward.

So first of all, I think this person isn’t necessarily coming from a position of climate denial. They are, though, almost certainly coming from a position of immense climate privilege. That is, they are unaffected by, or don’t feel that they’re affected by, the changes that are already here. Since I know they’re in Ireland, I can guess that they work indoors, in environments that are air-conditioned in summer and heated in winter, that their commute or regular travel doesn’t include flood-prone areas, that they haven’t really encountered anyone else who’s a climate refugee, and that they don’t have any close relatives or friends who work in agriculture or fishing. And that they are prosperous enough that changes in the costs of living haven’t really impacted them or their work.

Or, admittedly, that none of these are true, and they’re just completely oblivious, but let’s assume some basic comprehension of their environment.

You’re almost certainly aware of someone like this - a relative, a co-worker, someone in your circle of friends, who works in IT or law or something similarly cerebral, and just hasn’t been affected by anything outside their work except the pandemic and the snow in 2018.

So the first thing I’d like to point out, if I could go back in time to this conversation, having collected my thoughts, is that everything is already not ok. Just because you personally are not standing in your kitchen in knee-deep water and trying to remember where the hell your passport is doesn’t mean it isn’t happening to other people.

The second is that the momentum of natural processes means that the best-case scenarios, where all change could be averted, are straight up no longer possible. So the “if” condition of the question cannot be fulfilled, except in the vague alternate history way.

The third thing is that while it is still theoretically possible to avoid the middle-of-the-road outcomes, that would require immediate decisive change at a governmental level, pretty nearly worldwide, which would then need to be enforced with both individuals and corporations, and that this shows no signs of happening. So in reality, both the best-case and not-TOO-bad cases are off the table, and we’re looking at the worst third or so of the models.

And the fourth, then, is that at some point, this will catch up to even our privilege-insulated IT guy or lawyer, or those close to him, in some form.

Mind you, the actual first thing that came to mind afterward was Joel Pett’s famous cartoon.

Even in the broadest sense, taking precautions against a thing that might happen is just good risk management. I’ve needed a seat belt maybe four times in my life (and only really needed it on one occasion), but I wear one every time I sit into a car. The whole industry of insurance (usurious as it is) rests on the same principle.

Bug Out Bags

Ages ago, in Volume 1, Issue 7 (formatting did not survive travel across two platforms; I’ll fix it at some stage), in February of 2019, I provided some text on what should be in a bug-out bag - that is, the bag you grab when you have to leave the house in emergency circumstances, whether that’s fire or flood. Some recent conversations have given me cause to look at this again. Here’s what I wrote back then:

So, not counting pets and people and not in a priority order: passport, wallet, keys, phone, phone charger, tablet and/or laptop and relevant cords, antihistamines, plasters, painkillers, cash, spare glasses if I have them, writing paper and pens/pencils, and the odd little calculator-like widget the bank uses for remote verification. Possibly also a torch, although the phone does one have one built in. I have no medication I need to take every day; if I did, that and the prescription for it would move right to the top of the list. As it happens, about half of this stuff does live in my day-to-day geek bag, or in my pockets, and I can lay hands on the rest in well under 5 minutes. The contents of yours may vary wildly, but should not exceed what you can stick in a medium-sized backpack in, well, 5 minutes.

Circumstances have changed a fair bit for me since then; I’m now self-employed and usually working from home, and I do now have a stack of medications I need to take every day. There is no paper prescription for those; it lives on file at my pharmacy, and needs to be renewed every 6 months with my GP. So that’s one less thing I can grab on the way out. Annoyingly, one of those meds needs refrigeration. I can lay my hands on a cooler and some ice quickly, but a cool bag of some kind would be better, and I don’t presently have one.

Otherwise, the list remains pretty stable. I would add my current notebook (replacing “writing paper”), and I would consider grabbing the stack of older notebooks, now going back six or seven years, but that’s quite a chunk of weight and volume in an emergency. The current one should, in theory, contain anything I need.

The one item I’d put on there that wasn’t before is a multitool. Oddly, I’ve owned one of these for more than 20 years (possibly the best among a range of excellent gifts from my mother in law), but I’ve really only started to use it on a daily basis in the last five or so. Being in an office every day meant that it was rarely necessary; being at home or working on SCA projects or just doing little bits of maintenance wherever I happen to be means it’s in frequent use. It does, however, live on my belt, so there won’t be any need to find and pack it.

Closing

I’m going to stop here at the about 1400-word mark, which is short for me, in the interest of getting this issue out. More - and some activity in other newsletters - soon, or at least sooner.

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