[DeAnander:]

So -- as when backpacking -- the weight and bulk of my gear set limits to what I could bring along.  The kitchen sink was definitely not going to be packed.  In the course of the journey I reflected more than once  on how little it really took to keep me amused and comfortable;  I brought with me

•    (a) about three good books which I'd been looking forward to reading;  the train journey would offer hours of luxurious uninterrupted reading time;


•    (b) lightweight sketching supplies (small sketchbook, travel watercolours, pencils, etc);


•    (c) the current knitting project (mittens);


•    (d) a selection of familiar food that travels fairly well over a 2 day period:  smoked tofu, celery, little wax-coated cheeses, nuts, dried and fresh fruits, jerky-like soya snacks, hard boiled eggs;


•    (e) the all purpose pareo which has accompanied me on every major journey for the last 5 years, serving as extra sheet/blanket, carry sack, clothing, etc.;


•    (f) toiletry basics (for staying clean and groomed);


•    (g) carefully selected clothing which could be layered up for colder conditions and down for warmer ones;


•    (h) folding umbrella;


•    (i) microfiber travel towels;


•    (j) mp3 player (2GB) containing 25 or so well-loved music albums;


•    (k) laptop;


•    (l) 2 cell phones (one Canadian, one US);


•    (m) some papers and documents


•    (n) my travel documents, tickets, money, passport etc.

All of this fitted into one mid-size backpack, one mid-size soft duffel, and one small fanny pack.  Once I settled into my compartment (a luxury!) on the train I took out my "toys" and books, adjusted the seats into their divan configuration, closed the door for privacy and quiet, and was very well content for the entire journey.  A clean loo and unlimited drinking water were provided by Amtrak.  What more does a person need, really?

I thought more than once of the house full of Stuff "back home," the accumulated consumer goods of 30 years, and how completely irrelevant and unimportant that all seemed when travelling.  It seemed to me that I had everything I really needed to be happy -- even luxurious.

This line of thought led me, of course, to musing on the decade ahead of us (and the one after that!), and the impact of peak oil and other self-inflicted resource liquidation crises that humanity faces [actually, the "self" that's inflicting this vandalism on the planet is only a small proportion of humanity at large, but for those of us in the industrialised West who are that resource-gobbling minority it may well be said to be a self-inflicted crisis we are facing].  We hear very often all kinds of plans, from the fantastical to the suicidal to the murderous, for maintaining or even expanding "the American Way of Life" despite very clear and loud warning signals from an overstressed biosphere and dwindling reserves of water and fossil fuels.  We hear relatively seldom about reconsidering the size and weight of our luggage as we contemplate our journey through the next 20 years and beyond.

Dmitry Orlov, whose name pops up more and more often in the last few years, has written a funny, sarcastic, energetic and ultimately rather hopeful speculative account of how Peak Oil might play out in America.  He bases his futurology on personal experience of the decline and fall of the USSR; here are the links:

Post-Soviet Lessons for a Post-American Century
Part II
Part III

Here's an example of advice from Dmitry:

Suppose you have a retirement account, or some mutual funds. And suppose you feel reasonably certain that by the time you are scheduled to retire it won't be enough to buy a cup of coffee. And suppose you realize that you can currently buy a lot of good stuff that has a long shelf life and will be needed, and valuable, far into the future. And suppose, further, that you have a small amount of storage space: a few hundred square feet. Now, what are you going to do? Sit by and watch your savings evaporate? Or take the tax hit and invest in things that are not composed of vapor?

Once the cash machines are out of cash, the stock ticker stops ticking, and the retail chain breaks down, people will still have basic needs. There will be flea markets and private barter arrangements to serve these needs, using whatever local token of exchange is available; bundles of $100 bills, bits of gold chain, packs of cigarettes, or what have you. It's not a bad idea to own a few of everything you will need, but you should invest in things you will be able to trade for things you will need. Think of consumer necessities that require high technology and have a long shelf life. Here are some suggestions to get you started: drugs (over-the-counter and prescription); razor blades; condoms. Rechargeable batteries (and solar chargers) are sure to become a prized item (Ni-MH are the less toxic ones). Toiletries, such as good soap, will be luxury items. Fill some shipping containers, nitrogen-pack them so that nothing rusts or rots, and store them somewhere.

This is one version of how to pack (rather heavily) for the long and difficult journey after a crash; stockpile things you think your fellow travellers will need, so that you can trade and barter and obtain some kind of status.

Another approach is more like the classic cartoon/tale of the Siberian sledride, in which the stronger passengers throw the weaker ones to the wolves so as to distract the wolf pack and lighten the sleigh for a faster getaway; we can see signs of this exterminist approach in past and current foreign (colonial) policy, a tendency for Anglo/Euros to look at the "teeming brown masses" as expendable and "not wanted on the journey", taking up space that would be better occupied by cash crops for our tables, oil wells to feed our cars, etc.  In a sense Dmitry's stockpiling strategy can be seen as an effort not to be identified as expendable and tossed over the side.

Another approach might be to try to avert the crash by all of us lightening our fossil and consumer baggage now, quickly, to soften the landing.  The image that occurs to me here is the classic one of passengers in a hot-air balloon throwing things -- not each other! -- over the side in order to gain altitude or at least slow their descent.

The question lies on the table, unanswered:  are we willing to throw enough stuff over the side to slow our descent, or should we consider the crash inevitable and start planning what to pack to survive it?  [Or are we, de facto, by not taking other specific actions to soften the impact, implicitly deciding to throw a lot of our fellow passengers (and most other species) over the side in the hope that we alone will survive?  I'm going to rule that option out for now, as simply too depressing.]

Being [and I know some readers will snort with disbelief here] an  optimist at heart, I prefer to think we are smart enough not to drive into a brick wall at 80 mph, and that we might actually consider applying some brake and reducing the magnitude of the calamity, or even avoiding it altogether.  But this does mean jettisoning some baggage we can't afford to go on carrying, and making some serious, thoughtful choices about what is worth keeping.  Travelling light means making choices, not all of them easy.

[and now Nomad:]

Packing Light -- The Nomad Way

DeAnander wrote:

I thought more than once of the house full of Stuff "back home," the accumulated consumer goods of 30 years, and how completely irrelevant and unimportant that all seemed when travelling.  It seemed to me that I had everything I really needed to be happy -- even luxurious.  

When I moved through Sweden on last year's summer traipsing I had packed light; forty kilograms was all I brought to South Africa --  with the aid of baggage restrictions of KLM/Air France.  You take what you need.  Adapting that credo to my own lifestyle has not been difficult, despite the continuous modern-day beckoning of "More! Growth! Free Lunch!" neon signs.

As DeAnander writes: the weight and bulk of gear set your limitations to what you can bring. Yet I packed my kit hastily on the Thursday before I took the coach up north. Six hours before my plane would take off in February, I repacked my bags for South Africa as I came across the weight limitation on my ticket and felt no inclination to cough up E300,- for a few extra kilos. So what do I throw out? Or better put: what do I leave behind in a country to which I will most likely not return for a long while, with the ever-present chance I might not migrate back at all?

I will readily admit that my study years have aced me into packing effectively under time constraints, and that I have frequently slapped my head when I recalled an item left behind. Still, both my Swedish sojourn and my recent swerve through Johannesburg steered my thoughts deeper into a subject that had been laid bare and ploughed ready by earlier debates at ET: the necessity of luxury. And adhered to that: how luxury items scale up in today's Quality of Life. What value do we put to luxury in our own carved-out idea of an ideal life lived?  And: have we perhaps overvalued the wrong luxury items?

Working in Sweden de-stressed me to the point I was wondering whether I should give up on my recently accepted position here in South Africa. Emerging into wilderness, practically from Saturday morning to Friday evening, cut me off politics, news feeds, media frenzy, overburdened workloads which can only be tackled by multi-tasking. It was bliss -- also because it was inside the bubble of ignorance for the rest of the world.

Travelling, you carry what you need, no more no less. Bill Bryson's A Walk in the Woods has a lovely description of how, after suffering miles and miles on The Trail, he tosses out the unnecessary kilos (and in the franticness and exhilaration of the act also some necessary ones!).  In this way Bryson keeps his mental and physical sanity. The zen in Scandinavia churned my thoughts to the idea how adaptable that idea is to your own life. Hence I began sketching out my own personal list of Quality of Life necessities. Here it is, from my own journal, and I will admit that it is tuned to my Swedish experience at the time:

• - a place to sleep / shelter


• - three meals per day to keep you going and the equipment to make the meals happen


• - health care


• - good shoes and proper clothing to keep you going


• - Toiletries


• - hot shower & a shave


• - the money to keep your three meals per day, your bed, shelter and shower


• - a little extra money to treat your life to something nice once so often (cinema, book, concert, nice restaurant, hairdresser, manicure, name it)


• - music


• - sunshine & fresh air


• - love & wonderment & friendship & family

The first three are actually enshrined as a basic human rights. The most amazing discovery that ended up on my own little list, personally, was the shower. In our western, increasingly sanitised world, either the longing to be clean has become strong enough that we, as a people, feel uncomfortable after not having washed for a certain amount of time or considerable exertion -- or we might have evolved from sea-bathing fish-eating apes after all.  Nothing, not even brilliantly clear Swedish lakes or burbling streamlets from which we'd drink and fill our bottles, could mitigate this urge. Hot, steaming showers were precious items for all -- no exception.

Comparing that list to the train journey which DeAnander quotes, the energy footprint when you travel nomadically through the wild probably becomes smaller, resting your head never in the same place for every day for five weeks. In a pragmatic sense one returns to the bare bones of the 'savage' lifestyle. In Sweden, people would of course pay for becoming savages for a week (under guidance) -- that's what outdoor travels are mostly about, testing one's extremes outside the known and cultivated environment.

But the small print of course comes at the conclusion:

One drives back to the Netherlands for long, hot baths, iPods, flatscreen tvs talking to themselves, microwave meals, speeding on the highway, clubs. So the hermitage lifestyle always remains an impermanent and finite experiment; exposure to the elements and a 'poverty' of luxury will relapse the moment the return to the Netherlands is complete. That finiteness to the experience and the expected end of trials in the outdoors - that wholly changes the outlook on how we prepare. The summer of Sweden wasn't permanent, not even for me.

Despite some optimism which I'd share with DeA, I'd argue here that the prospect of finiteness is the heart of the matter -- why prodding people towards an awareness of The End of Oil remains a practically insuperable obstacle.  Stuck in the current energy rut, spoon-fed and powered by the inescapable growth trap of modern economics where the common word for downsizing is 'negative growth' -- I'd begin to despair to even attempt getting the message across ...  and that's even without considering the "Apres moi le deluge" crowds.

I despair even more now I've begun to observe South Africa.

My African Experience

After buying bottles of Amstel beer in a Sowetan shebeen and sharing them around, we sat down in Irene's small stone house. That's a good house for Soweto standards - as several townships still are dominantly constituted by corrugated iron shacks -- shanty towns. Here, there was a queen-sized bed, there was a stove and fridge in the kitchen on the other end of the room opposite of the bed. In between, a TV was flashing commercials in Zulu, encapsulating a little girl (not Irene's daughter but part of the neighbouring community). I sat there for most of the evening, slowly being taken over by the alcohol, while I was desperately grasping for the nuances in Zulu culture and hoped not to offend.

Earlier I had visited The Rock, a monumental point of resistance for the people of Soweto under Apartheid time -- it was the look-out point where people could see the police forces coming into Soweto "to restore order". It was a Sunday. The Rock area was surrounded by gleaming cars. Beats of township rap at high volume were pumping through the subwoofers into the air, making it nearly impossible to converse. People complimented each other's cars, sharing around food.

It's a liberating, even touching experience to see how this community embraces their freedom with a certain flashiness of material possessions which for so long were denied to them under the Afrikaner viciousness. Yet cringeingly, I could also not help the thought that this catwalk for cars was nothing more than following in the exact footsteps of the white community leading towards the same economic pitfall. National petrol prices are going up, the people demur but they do not stop driving -- there is hardly an alternative. There are some eight million cars in South Africa, or so is the estimation. The end of cheap oil is as inescapable for Africa as it is for the West - yet for a city like Johannesburg, correction, for a nation like South Africa whose economy at first appearances is so single-handedly dependent on cars, I can not suppress the niggling worry that when the world hits the cliff, the fall will be thrice as deep in Africa as for the western world. For Africa, the current window of opportunity in the bonanza world needs to stay open longer to be able to make the stepping-stone work. But is the country preparing enough?  [DeA:  is anyone? are we?]

A few weeks after my visit to Soweto, invited by a friend, we drove up out of Jo'burg, north to Hartebeespoort Dam -- an artificial lake crowded with holiday homes.  It was the single most disconcerting experience I have had so far, as Hartebeespoort Dam is vintage Afrikaaner country. The lake is surrounded by gated communities of holiday houses - or in other words, a second house which is furbished just as or more luxuriously as the other home. There is a pool, a huge flat-screen TV with surround sound, two cars (one of them a 4WD), tumble-dryer, washing machine, dishwasher, airconditioning. (!) And then there was stuff. Cupboards stacked with the uselessness of shoe-racks, chair covers, endless rows of cleaning materials, knick-knacks, salt and pepper holders.

Is it useful stuff for them? I'm sure it is. But in a country where you can drive 10 kilometres to find people living in a house of 10 square meters and another 10 kilometres to find villas which would not disappoint their American counterparts -- I find myself severely unbalanced between the extremes. South Africa is the Rainbow Nation -- which previously used to strike me as a beautiful description of the cultural, environmental and financial diversity, and now also struck me as a cover-up name for the retaining of economic pillarization, or post-apartheid structures.

Graph from EIA data : World Total Net Electricity Consumption (Billion Kilowatthours)

Energy Consumption in South Africa has been on the rise, and is now on par with an industrial nation, with a slight acceleration visible after 1994 when the ANC began to deliver more of the basic services of electricity (and water) to the country's townships. I have not done a search as to what the energy per capita is for South Africa today and how (doubtless) there is a huge skew between the communities. Nevertheless, according to Earth Trends per capita electricity use was in 2003 roughly 4.760 kWh.

What makes matters worse: Most of the energy from South Africa is based on coal, and SA is swiftly becoming the largest exporter of coal-to-liquids technology. The Sasol plant at Secunda has already announced it wants to expand by 20%, upping its production to 180.000 barrels per day in 2014 and barely a word on carbon capture.  [DeA:  and Africa is dispropportionately hit by global warming damage, more heavily than most of the industrialised North:  paying the bill for the carbon binge, even though it came so late to the party as hardly to be a participant at all.]

So there we are. Most of the white S African community is as blind to the coming energy crunch as most of the western world. The black community has an additional nuance: it was never allowed the Suburban White Dream and wants to catch up with it in the fastest way possible. And who the hell are we to make them stop dreaming as long as the white community and western world doesn't wake up and start buffering?

DeAnander's Post-Script

We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements in life, when all we need to make us really happy is something to be enthusiastic about.
-- Charles Kingsley

We may have to pack light to make it through the next century, or indeed the next millennium.  If we have to pack light, what do we really need to preserve that essential ability to feel enthusiasm, a genuine pleasure in life?  Most of what I own I don't really need or am not truly attached to;  this is something you find out not only when packing for a journey, but when packing to move (which I'm doing now, and that's another story).  Is it worth packing and paying for the larger size of truck and toting the heavy boxes?   Maybe not.   Maybe I can live just fine without it.  I suspect that the same applies to us (affluent Westerners) as a culture; much of what we have isn't really all that wonderful -- not worth throwing away a perfectly good planet or killing people for, anyway -- and we could be quite happy with a lot less material cruft and a much lower energy budget.

So I'm proposing the question -- to myself and to us all:  suppose you're packing light for a long journey; suppose you don't have infinite energy to haul heavy baggage around; suppose you don't have infinite suitcases to pack tons of junk into; what would you stuff into the backpack and take on the train, and what would you leave behind and hardly miss as soon as the journey started?

[Since I did the final copy edit and typing, typos and format errors are entirely my fault!  --DeA]