In times of chaos and darkness, families will need to practice valuable skills of resilience.
Craig Chalquist, PhD
2011
“Will the family survive?”
I hear this question asked more now than during the Cold War, when the United States and the Soviet Union stood ready to push the big red button that would end the world with fire.
The question is understandable. From dissolving polar ice caps to vanishing fresh water, our species faces a deadly range of challenges largely unaddressed by—indeed, created by—broke and broken political and financial machines. California, a state larger than some nations, now hosts garage sales to stay in business, its once-proud University turning away students by the thousands for lack of funding. Nationally, even the less alert among us now suspect that when President Obama campaigned for “change,” he meant the loose coinage left in American pockets after the trillions handed over to the very financiers who melted down the world economy.
No, the family cannot survive all this and more—shall we add swine flu and salmonella to the list? Mass consumption and mass extinction?—by clinging conservatively to its nuclear form: family as imperial fallout. A better question might be: What must the family do to creatively adapt?
When the Northridge Earthquake quit trembling ten miles from our apartment complex, everyone rushed outside in the dark. After an hour or so of frightened conversation, neighbors began stating their skills: “I'm a plumber. I can inspect pipes.” “I'm a cook with a gas-powered grill.” “My freezer is full of meat that will spoil—might as well eat it now!” On the first day the power stayed off, we were pockets of nervous near-strangers. On the second day we were friends. By the third, when electricity flowed again and emergency services rolled into town, we were active members of an extended family clan, the natural formation of our land-rooted ancestors.
Nature provides a model for dynamic balance through what ecologists identify as resiliency, the capacity for staying alive after receiving potentially disabling shocks and stress. Resilient animal, insect, and plant communities rely on more than one way to feed, repair, and maintain themselves. Chickens keep cows clean by eating pest larvae in the trampled soil, but so do other hungry birds. If a key species moves out of the area, another quickly replaces it.
For an example of resiliency at the community level we have only to think about the demonstration garden planted and maintained by the Master Gardeners of Contra Costa County in California. We do not grow just one kind of plant. If squirrels eat our eggplant seedlings, we still have tomatoes and peppers and squash to harvest. If the squash looks a little sad because bees can't get through our bird netting, we shuck corn and scatter radish seeds and turn up soil to plant wheat and rye. Never put all your eggs in one basket, Nature wisely advises. Have a Plan B, C, D, E, and F to fall back on.
Imagine the potential for disaster were flowering plants to rely on only one species of pollinator, or if the elaborate webs of fungus in the ground had not evolved to direct nutrients toward trees that most need them. Gardening reminds us that if Nature thought in terms of “too big to fail,” human beings never would have arrived on the scene. Would not have found a scene to arrive on.
Families who can no longer rely (if they ever could) on official outside forces for safe food, clean water, decent education, affordable healthcare, emergency services, personal protection, or sanity in government will remain viable only if they teach themselves how to find these and other necessities elsewhere. In the family of the near future, children will have to grow up learning multiple ways to grow or trade clean food, and multiple strategies for educating themselves from multiple sources (not only teachers but smart neighbors, retired specialists, books, online). Parents will need to know how to talk and listen to each other, how to solve problems with discussion, how to manage painful emotions, when to show assertiveness and when to negotiate.
The key to all this is developing skill at networking. Family members will have to be as clever as wise social workers at hooking into community resources—like the mechanic and the doctor willing to barter to rewire a generator or set a broken limb. Families will need community members to trust—such as the neighborhood philosopher who teaches how to see through rhetoric and propaganda, or the wise elder who reconciles vandal and victim instead of calling overwhelmed or indifferent police.
Abandoning a misplaced childlike faith in journaling, gadgetry, or God to see us through the end of empire, the family will look to itself and its hub of relations for expertise: the local farmers who grow fresh food, the local butchers who offer meat in trade, the psychotherapist with listening skills to teach, the historian who knows the signs of theocracy and fascism to watch out for.
Nature's resiliency also depends on endlessly patient experimentation. How many different eyes can light the world? How many ears can hear its sensuous rhythms? How many kinds of brains can interpret it? The word “family” goes back to a Latin word for “servant,” but it can redefine itself as “laboratory” of social and ecological innovation. With their mother's milk children can absorb a journeyman confidence for trying out new things: new foods, new methods for gathering and growing it, new ways to get around safely, alternative solutions to current dilemmas. This confidence may well prove the single most important psychological tool in the family survival kit.
Whispers Nature to those who listen, The single solution is always fragile and often apt to make things worse. The single military surge, bailout, garage sale, business plan, standard text, diplomatic pipeline, book of rules, techno-fix for the planet fail, and Gaia shakes her forested head, wondering perhaps whether we will shortly meet Neanderthal shades in the cemetery of terminated evolutionary experiments.
Many different energy sources, communication loops, nutrients for self-repair, ways to govern wisely, modes of transportation: that is how the living world thinks, ever alert for breakdowns. It is also how we must raise our children to think so they can care for themselves and their communities as an outworn mechanized civilization collapses to make way for splendid new variations in how to live sanely and sustainably here.
Bio
Craig Chalquist, MS PhD is a core faculty member of the School of Holistic Studies at John F. Kennedy University. He is the author of Terrapsychology: Re-engaging the Soul of Place (Spring Journal Books, 2007), Deep California (iUniverse, 2008), Storied Lives (World Soul Books, 2009), and co-editor with Linda Buzzell, MFT, of Ecotherapy: Healing with Nature in Mind (Sierra Club Books, 2009). He is also a Master Gardener through a partnership of the University of California with the U.S. Department of Agriculture. He has been published in The Contra Costa Times, AlterNet, HopeDance Magazine, The Journal of Critical Psychology, Spring, Dream Network Journal, and Psychological Perspectives, has contributed to three anthologies, and has been interviewed by Time Magazine, KUBO, Shrink Rap, The Meria Heller Show, and University of Guelph Radio. Visit his home page: http://www.chalquist.com