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Striking word-picture from 'Batiushka' at Saker, on how we too - in the West - will be living before long

War and conflict
#1

Can I just say that the picture she paints of the Dacha life is actually quite bearable - I’d even say preferable to the current standard Pampered Twenty Percenter life-style - so long as you’ve got prepared, and acclimatised to it.

This is very much how I live now, give or take a few real privations which the average Ukrainians are suffering and I’m not. We do get power outages here at the boatyard from time to time, though; a familiar experience; so we’re all tooled up for off-grid living on our boats.

And - like the East Europeans and Russians - there happens to be enough woodland here, neglected, virtually unmanaged and unharvested, to collect all the wood-stove fuel that I need - and to spare - just for the work of carrying and processing it, with simple hand tools.

Also, there’s enough neglected land to do guerrilla growing, as I did - again - this year; first flow of taters already in use in my galley. :innocent:

I do of course get it that such good luck isn’t always around for urban dwellers; but as the example of Cuba demonstrates beyond question, urban food-growing - in LARGE volume - is entirely possible, with a bit of ingenuity.

This is the way things will be going, as the Long Descent picks up pace now. For even the lightly-prepared, it’s doable - and entirely bearable!

Indeed, my considered opinion from long experience is that it’s actually much better than the PTP consumer life. How else does it come about that my grand-daughter, her husband AND her mum, between them bring in about ten times - sic! - my income; yet they’re struggling incessantly to hold their lives together, and I have to subsidise them out of my single-person state pension - which I can do, easily: no sweat at all?

World turning upside down, innit:

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#2

PS: About forty years ago, I was running a ‘lend us your garden!’ initiative in a medium-sized Brit town where I then lived, whereby we would make an informal arrangement with suburban people living the standard PTP life to borrow their under-used gardens to grow food; they getting a share of the crops by way of rent. That worked well. It put a number of people in touch with available urban land which they didn’t own, but which they could still use effectively. It also tempted the hitherto neglectful property owners with the common sense practicality of actually doing some of their own food-getting. And - since they knew that their neighbours in the town were also doing it - a LETS trade in individual surpluses of production also sprang up at the same time. LETSes, of course, tend to do well in Interesting Times (Local Employment and Trade exchanges), using their own locally-generated scrip - or pixel - currencies; ours were ‘Oaks’, equivalent roughly to a pound sterling.