The Day After Generation

I've been thinking a lot lately about death, doom and destruction. The topic came up at a memorial service, but that death wasn't so much the inspiration. Instead, it's probably the books I've been reading: Stephen King's "Cell" and H.G. Wells' "War of the Worlds." Both are about the destruction of society (if not humanity) as we know it. Both end with a degree of hope, yet both rather thoroughly chronicle the fragile nature of the thing we call civilization.

Whether it's Britain of the late 1800s or the Northeast U.S. in the early 2000s, whether it's a Martian invasion or a cell phone pulse that turns callers into crazies, the effects are amazingly simple. The familiar comforts gradually fade and certain things that seemed ubiquitous and unending become vital and increasingly rare.

It was at the memorial service that I and some fellow thirtysomethings discussed "The Day After," that early '80s TV movie about nuclear holocaust. It has never fully faded from my consciousness, though I'm sure my memories of it are far richer and more frightening than the actual show. I mean, the production values on that kind of thing just never hold up, even if Jason Robards can out-act just about anyone. That TV movie forever changed my life, I thought. Then I talked to Mike Urban, a multitalented photographer I work with. I think the conversation at the service began with talk of hunting. He was dressed colorfully (a tribute to the deceased), including some bright orange, which is why it came up. Mike talked about being a hunter, which amazed all of us soft city folk who buy our meat wrapped in plastic if we eat meat at all. And he talked about how he has been known to cry when he kills a doe. And he talked about how he uses all parts of each animal he kills.

Usually this kind of conversation causes me to think of how the other person is, you know, odd or something. But this time, perhaps inspired by my journeys through apocalyptic fiction, I realized that if civilization goes south, Mike is just the kind of guy I want to be around. He knows how to do the kind of useful things that many of us are detached from -- not just killing food, but using tools in practical (and artistic) ways.

We talked about off-the-grid living, which for me is very much a high concept but for him is within reach. We talked about peak oil, for in addition to my apocalyptic fiction, I got a little wigged out by this article:

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2006/03/22/peakoil/

A taste:

Matt Savinar has become a full-time prophet of "peak oil," spreading the word about how the world's oil production will soon peak and global demand will outstrip supply.
When that happens, he imagines that all the ways Americans now depend on oil will become rudely apparent, as the price of everything from filling up at the pump to fruits and vegetables in the supermarket shoots up. Cities and towns will start to struggle to provide basic services like police, firefighting, school buses, water and road repair. Office workers will lose jobs because they can't afford to commute to work from their suburban homes. Even if they could get to the office, there'll be fewer white-collar jobs, as businesses flounder under the strain of a flailing global economy. Yet suburbanites will be grateful for those big backyards to support vegetable gardens, if they can just keep their hungry neighbors from sneaking in at night and stealing their harvest. All that is before we even consider the possibility of an oil war with the likes of China, where, incidentally, so many of those cheap goods that we've come to depend on are manufactured. ...
From his modest apartment, about 60 miles north of San Francisco, he parses the latest energy news and fulminates on his Web site, Life After the Oil Crash. "Dear Reader," he welcomes visitors to his site, "Civilization as we know it is coming to an end soon. This is not the wacky proclamation of a doomsday cult, apocalypse bible prophecy sect, or conspiracy theory society. Rather, it is the scientific conclusion of the best paid, most widely-respected geologists, physicists and investment bankers in the world. These are rational, professional, conservative individuals who are absolutely terrified by a phenomenon known as global 'Peak Oil.'"
Far from being ignored or dismissed as the hyperbolic rantings of an underemployed twentysomething California attorney, his Web site (which has about 6,000 visitors a day, and which sells books, DVDs and soon solar-powered ovens) has been quoted in the U.S. House of Representatives by members of the Congressional Peak Oil Caucus, like Republican Rep. Roscoe Bartlett from Maryland. He's been name-checked in Fortune magazine in a recent profile of one of Bush's billionaire buddies, who claims to have read Savinar's site every day since last September, and is keeping $500 million of his fortune in cash just in case Savinar and other peak oil doomsayers, like James Howard Kunstler, are right. ...
Critics debate the degree of doom to attach to peak oil, but Savinar is right: Scientists don't deny it's coming. The only question is when. Some geologists say we're already on the downslope while others put the peak at around mid-century. Regardless, thousands of people of various professions aren't waiting for the exact date of the bad news to be pinned down. They've seen the polemical documentary "The End of Suburbia: Oil Depletion and the Collapse of the American Dream," shown at countless house parties, community centers and city halls across the country. Or, maybe they've been frightened by truly alarmist Web sites, such as Die Off, that predict billions -- yes, that's right, billions -- of deaths globally because of peak oil. Or they've read the Hirsch report, a paper commissioned by the U.S. Department of Energy, in which professional energy analysts found that it would take at least a decade to prepare for peak oil, yet they don't see their government exactly leaping into action.
The peak oilers believe that by the time we know for sure that peak oil has come and gone it will be much too late to prepare to live without the 21 million barrels of oil a day that the U.S. is now accustomed to consuming.

The term "The Day After Generation" comes from Mike. And whatever day after we face (and here's hoping it's not to apocalyptic), he will be ready. It's enough to make me want to learn a useful skill. This wordsmithery is just so ephemeral.