By now it is abundantly clear to most of us that we are into what James Howard Kunstler called “the long emergency.”  Radical changes in our livelihoods and lifestyles are imminent, impelled by the convergence of peak oil, global climate change and global economic contraction.  

This is a critical moment, for it appears that we still have some time to decide whether we will cooperate with the inevitable transformation or whether we will go kicking and screaming, clinging to what we are bound to lose and doing great, perhaps irreparable, harm to ourselves and other life on the planet in the process.    

Lisa Nash: THE INSIDE STORY Blogger: Lisa Nash is a chiropractor, Feldenkrais teacher, and gardener who lives in Westminster West, Vermont.

Many have concluded that resilience is the key ingredient in not only surviving but also thriving through the challenging transition period that’s upon us.  Resilience refers to our ability to adapt to the unexpected – having enough options that we can respond creatively and humanely to diverse, rapidly changing circumstances that are beyond our control.  Local food production and distribution, local manufacturing of essential goods, recycling and reuse of resources, intensive energy conservation and renewable generation, and interdependent, supportive communities all contribute to resilience.  

But resilience has internal and largely intangible, as well as external and concrete, dimensions.  Internal resilience has to do with our ability, as individuals, families and communities, to face ourselves and our demons honestly and compassionately, to communicate with each other skillfully, and to navigate stressful circumstances and interpersonal conflict in ways that strengthen, rather than weaken or destroy, relationships.   Such skills will likely be as critical as growing food or building with local materials in the years to come, and yet we tend to underestimate their value and importance.  How many pages of books like The Long Emergency or publications like Vermont Commons are devoted to calls to develop such internal resources or information about how to do so?  Compare that with the number devoted to building external resilience, and you’ll see what I mean.
Our bias toward external, active, tangible responses to crisis is not surprising; it is part and parcel of our American cultural habit.  We have always been a culture that prizes action above contemplation, and even now we have great faith in technological fixes.  It is easy for us to believe that if we simply pour our resources into greater innovation, better planning, and more intelligent design, solutions to our self-created problems will emerge.  We tend always to forget that our existing technologies, and the ways we have deployed them, are products of our consciousness; if we don’t transform that consciousness, we are likely to recreate the same problems, albeit in slightly different form.  

We are also a culture that has elevated the individual over the collective to a historically unprecedented degree, and which has enacted that value in profoundly atomized, privatized lives.  Consequently, we still tend to think of solutions to our current dilemmas in individual terms first:  putting solar panels on our roofs, growing our own fruits and veggies, buying a Prius or riding our bicycles to work.  Many folks who analyze our current predicament conclude that well-being and perhaps even survival in the coming decades will require us to live in tightly knit, intensely interdependent communities, but most of us have absolutely no experience in living that way.  Indeed, we are so isolated that many of us now see “community” as a panacea for all our ills.  We have little understanding of – and less expertise with – the considerable difficulties entailed in community life.  

We would do well to heed the words of Karen Litfin, a researcher from the University of Washington who has spent years studying ecovillages around the world:

“`Eco’is at least as much about the social and personal dimensions of life as it is about nature.  So far as I know, no community has ever failed because it lacked solar panels or composting toilets.  What causes communities to collapse is almost always interpersonal conflict.  We like to think that the primary value of our modern lifestyle is its comfort and convenience, but perhaps even more significant is the extent to which it prevents us from having to actually deal with other people. A commitment to community . . . means really facing others, and therefore facing aspects of oneself that might be occluded in a more individualized setting.  And this requires a commitment to authentic communication.  How easy it is to fool ourselves about who we are when we can so easily retreat into our privatized lives! How much harder it is when decisions about food, work, living space, money and children are collectively taken”   [emphasis mine].   

We recognize that building external resilience requires skills, and that cultivating such skills takes time.  No one builds a beautiful home when they’ve never handled a saw before; no one can make good herbal medicine without spending considerable time learning to identify plants and understand their qualities.  While our changing world won’t require us all to become master builders or herbalists, it is likely that many more of us will need to know the basics, and thus many of us are practicing now.  Similarly, our changing world likely won’t require us all to be masters of internal resilience; most of us will need more skills in this area than we currently possess, and so we need to practice now.

Preparing for ‘the long crisis’

We might have the idea that we don’t need to practice the skills for dealing with uncertainty, hardship, and conflict in advance, because “crisis brings out the best in people.”  We may remember that people in New York City were extraordinarily courageous, friendly, and cooperative in the wake of 9/11 and assume that the long emergency will call forth similar qualities in us.     

However, there is a profound difference between short-term crisis and long-term crisis.  In short-term crisis, there are typically many immediate, tangible tasks to be done, and every reason to believe that, no matter how terrible things are at the moment, they will soon improve.  In long-term crisis it may not be clear that anything we do makes a difference – we may well not live long enough to witness substantial change for the better.     

Evolution has equipped our species beautifully for the former type of crisis, but not so well for the latter.  Generational poverty here at home and the situation of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza are examples of long emergencies.  While some extraordinary individuals respond to such sustained challenges with astonishing bravery, compassion, and endurance, many others respond with despair, addiction, and violence.   As we descend more deeply into our long emergency, we will have great need of people—the more of them the better—who have cultivated their ability to meet hardship in creative and compassionate ways.   

We may also have the idea that the long emergency won’t require extraordinary inner resources because while some familiar comforts may be lost, those losses will be outweighed by gains: greater intimacy with nature, renewed self-respect, and closer family and community ties.  Americans have always been big fans of “positive thinking,” and I sense that many writers and organizers think that if they don’t give people reason for hope, we will be overcome by despair and thus fail to take actions that are both possible and necessary.  I share the view that there will be positive aspects to the changes that are imminent, but I am convinced that, as Rob Hopkins (permaculture teacher and founder of the Transitions movement in the U.K.) puts it, “if you don’t find [the prospect of peak oil and climate change] scary, you haven’t really got it.”  

It seems inevitable that this transition is going to involve a lot of loss: loss of cherished forms of livelihood and recreation, loss of familiar comforts and conveniences, and, most probably, loss of life as well.   Whole populations may experience trauma similar to that of those dwelling in an occupied country during wartime, and again, there may be no end to the “war” for several generations.  To deny that there is going to be immense hardship entailed in this transition is as foolish as denying that global climate change is happening and that human activities are largely responsible for it.  Such denial is harmful in at least two ways: first, it prevents us from taking the steps we can to mitigate the risks, and second, it prevents us from putting the powerful energy of emotions like fear, grief, and rage to the service of our transformation.  Again, though, if we examine our automatic responses to such emotions, we find that they are largely unproductive; it takes a lot of practice to build the inner resources to work with them in creative, innovative ways.

How, then, do we cultivate inner resilience?  How do we learn alternatives to our habitual reactions to uncertainty, loss of control, and loss in general?  How do we learn to face ourselves and deal with other people?  

Mindfulness meditation and other contemplative practices are profoundly helpful in this regard, as are some psychotherapeutic techniques.  Moving meditation forms, such as T’ai Chi, Chi Gong, and yoga, as well as somatic education practices like the Feldenkrais Method, Body-Mind Centering, or the Alexander Technique offer us the ability to practice maintaining awareness of internal dynamics even as we act.  Indigenous ceremonies powerfully reveal our habits of seeing the world as a collection of objects and enable us to experience it instead as a communion of subjects.   All of these practices tend to spill over into our communications with others, but there are also numerous practices that directly address interpersonal communication – Marshall Rosenberg’s Non Violent Communication (NVC), for example.
Happily Vermont is rich in resources for developing inner resilience.   

When Richard Heinberg  spoke in Brattleboro last April, he talked about the need to identify, honor, and support the people in our communities who already possess expertise in various aspects of external resilience – people who know how to grow food, repair things, provide effective low-tech health care, etc.  I would suggest that we also need to identify, honor, and support people in our communities who already possess expertise in various aspects of internal resilience –  meditators and mediators, therapists and healers, teachers of martial arts and yoga – people who have demonstrated their ability to “absorb disturbance and reorganize while undergoing change,” as one group of authors defined resilience.   

There is a tendency for action types to see such folks as self-indulgent and basically irrelevant – and a tendency for those who have spent years cultivating inner resilience to feel undervalued in, and therefore isolated from, traditional political movements. We simply can no longer afford to harbor such divisions in our communities here in Vermont.  We urgently need to put all our skills and resources – internal as well as external – to the service of creating a livable future.

Lisa Nash is a Putney-based public health advocate and blogs for Vermont Commons.