It’s No Joke -
The End of the World Is Coming -
Not in Rapture, but In Rupture
It’s a wild exaggeration to say that the apocalyptic “end of the world” is upon us. It’s more correct to say that “civilization as we know it” is coming to an end because we are running out of the fuel that energizes modern life on this planet - oil. What will we do when the world runs out of cheap oil – when our basic survival supplies and resources are ruptured? It is a question that Gerry Henkel has been asking himself for the last nine months, and in this opinionated essay, he says, with tongue in cheek, part of the solution can be found in the “Survival of the Finnest”.
Paul Webster, a blacksmith with Finnish ancestry, demonstrates one way to start a fire - an old skill that might be needed in the not too distant future. What he is doing is striking a "steel" that he makes on his anvil, against a flint stone. Photos: Gerry Henkel.
By Gerry Henkel
June 5th, 2005, Clover Valley, Minnesota
The sliding door to the deck is open at my cabin in the woods three miles north of Lake Superior. It is 7 o’clock on a foggy Sunday morning and the loudest sounds that I hear coming through the door are birds - robins, chickadees, and a few others that I can’t identify. I just heard a crow flying overhead – for some reason or other, whenever I hear a crow or raven flying, it sounds to me like its wings are made of leather.
A bit fainter in volume are the sounds of cars on Homestead Road about 3/8ths of a mile away - what I can hear are the tires slapping on the highway, but I also hear the engine noise of older and louder cars.
The loudest noise at this moment is the sound of the fan on this computer. More and more I’m feeling that I need to get rid of the electrical and electronic technology I’ve surrounded myself with in this otherwise “primitive” dwelling – the noises and humming of the computer and refrigerator are becoming annoying. Visitors come to see me and love the place because of its lack of pretentiousness and its quietness. Then, when they see the numerous computers (used for parts to keep this one going), it’s obvious they’re disappointed - their image of a pristine retreat has disappeared from their minds. Not to worry though, electricity may not be available in the future like it is at this time.
Now there is another noise outside the door. The birds have stopped singing and the fog has turned to rain. It’s raining hard enough that the sound of the computer can barely be heard. Some rain drops splashing off the deck fly into the cabin, so I close the door.
Closing the door helps me get to the task at hand – listening to the voices in my mind and writing them down. No longer distracted by singing birds and cars on the highway I can now try to figure out what I want to write about the subject that has been consuming so much of my time since last August – a subject so broad that it is impossible for me to describe it in a simple sentence.
It is also a subject that is hard to write about and talk about because it is extremely threatening for most of us. It is as if one of those huge killing machines in a Star Wars movie is coming straight at me and there is absolutely nothing I can do to get away. Or, it is like watching an asteroid coming directly at the earth and no one can stop it. Those are absurd nightmares, and very terrifying.
What is real is that the decline of fossil fuels on which we depend entirely for our current civilization will soon be in short supply. Without cheap oil civilization as we know it is over. As many commentators about the end of the Age of Cheap Oil are saying, “it won’t be pretty”. Nations will be fighting tooth and nail over the rare oil fields that can still produce – Iraq is just the foretaste of what will be happening.
I gained an insight last week into how to deal with the turbulent times ahead after getting a phone call from Margaret Webster, a Finnish-American writer who has just published a great new book – Are All The Heroes Gone? Kalevala Stories For Today. (Margaret called me to say that she was sending the book to me for mention in New World Finn - see page 26.)
As is usual whenever I talk with her, we soon were chatting about everything else under the sun including politics. Given the fact that Margaret and I have strong and similar feelings about the state of world, we were in total agreement in no time at all that a new federal administration was needed in the USA.
I said, however, that even if there was a new administration, we would still be in deep trouble because of an even larger problem that a change in government won’t cure. The problem is that we are ignoring the signs that our civilization is out of gas and it’s going to crash soon – a rupture of unprecedented proportions. Fundamentalist Christians (including George Bush) have been going on-and-on about their idea of an impending rapture, but have been totally ignoring the very real and impending rupture of civilization as we know it.
Even though I couldn’t see Margaret because we were talking by phone, I could tell that my blunt words didn’t quite register with her. That’s the problem with talking about the end of the Age of Cheap Oil, or as it is referred to in the jargon of oil experts “peak oil”. It’s such an overwhelming concept – it is hard to think about it. (Here is an excellent site that helps explain the entire concept of "peak oil".)
But Margaret let me talk, and she asked questions and she listened to what I was saying.
I said to her that even if the Bush administration was removed from office, it won’t make much of a difference in the long run. The fact is that the six billion plus people on this earth are going to go through some very turbulent times within the next 10 to 30 years with or without George Bush running our ship aground. And, even though he comes from a family that has been in the oil business, even he can’t make oil come out of a dry well. (Something he proved with his own Texas oil venture.)
One consequence of having minimal oil available in the future is that there is going to be a tremendous “die-off” (as some call it) of the earth’s population. There are over six billion people on this planet right now – a planet that can only support about one and a half billion humans without non-renewable cheap oil. Prior to the discovery of oil, humans relied on renewable sources of energy that limited population growth.
Without oil and other petro-chemicals (natural gas and coal) we can’t feed six billion people, we can’t manufacture the goods and medicines they want and need, and very importantly - we can’t run the electrical generating plants. The result: billions of people dying in the next 50 years.
If it is true that we are totally dependent on petrochemical fuels (oil, gas, coal) for our food and protection – and that the supply of the fuel will soon be unavailable to most of us – the next two or three generations are going to experience disasters no civilization has experienced before. No government can stop that from happening.
Survival of the Finnest
At this point in our conversation Margaret said, “Gerry, you need to meet my son Paul.” I cautiously asked why. She said, “Because he knows how to survive.”
Margaret managed to get right to the point while I floated around in a plane of mental anxiety and depression. Since last August, when I first started burying myself in the subject, I have learned so much and it has often left me depressed about the future of humans on this earth.
I’m not alone in having this response. I have seen many others who go through the process of learning about the reality facing us who also have ended up with black clouds of depression around their heads. I have friends and family members who refuse to talk about it anymore because the reality of the future “turbulence” can be overwhelmingly discouraging. It is hard to face up to the fact that life as we know it – especially for us coddled and pampered Americans – is over with and so few of the coming generations will have peaceful lives.
How will we survive in the future? Margaret apparently had a clue, and she was giving it to me.
Two days later I drove from Clover Valley to Esko to meet Margaret and her son Paul at his blacksmithing shop in the back yard of his ten acre homestead.
Clover Valley is a rural area northeast of Duluth and has been populated by Finnish immigrants since shortly after 1900. When I moved here in 1974 there were still many of the original Finnish families along Homestead Road - Aho, Nynas, Gustafson, Mattson, Lampela, and Saari, just to name a few. The township’s Lakeview Cemetery is full of headstones with Finnish names. When the Finns first came here they used their traditional Finnish skills to survive some tough winters, and eventually to thrive and prosper. Even before they had ready access to the benefits of cheap oil, they did very well without it.
The story was the same in Esko. Finns settled and farmed in the area of rivers and forests to the west of Duluth many years earlier than they did in Clover Valley. Prior to cheap oil and electricity which was often provided through the co-ops that they built, the Finns of that region had developed strong communities: Cloquet, Thomson, Cromwell, and Esko among them. Paul Webster (Webster being an anglicized form of a Swedish/Finnish name) moved to Esko from his family home south of Cromwell where he had grown up fishing and hunting. He brought with him the innate survival knowledge that he had largely gained from his Finnish and Nordic ancestry.
I drove into Paul’s driveway while there were still a couple hours of daylight left. While swatting mosquitoes, I watched him heat up metal and pound out hooks and fire-steels (ancient Viking tool for starting fires) on the anvil next to his blacksmithing forge. Margaret was there as well, as were his son Teddy and his daughter Aurora.
Margaret had intrigued me with her claim that Paul “knew how to survive” after I had ranted on and on at her about the turbulent times I saw ahead of us. I really didn’t know what to expect when I arrived at his place. Would I find a “back-to-the-lander” living with kerosene lamps and work horses? Would I find a gun-toting anti-government “survivalist”?
Paul is not a “survivalist” - far from it. Rather, he is hardly distinguishable from any other 41 year old working man who holds down a regular job and raises a typical family in middle-class America. True, he no longer works a regular day-job as a teacher, and his family doesn’t quite fit the description of “middle-class”, but he is not all that different from his neighbors who live nearby.
As we talked through the late afternoon and into the evening, I began to understand what Margaret meant - and moreover why she wanted me to meet Paul. It was not because he had basic skills that could save him and his family from the coming catastrophes, but because of his attitude of confidence. I started to understand something very important - it’s not only what your survival skill level is, but most importantly, your attitude.
There was a key phrase in Paul’s conversation that night: “If you need it, make it.” He explained that to him this is near the core of Finnishness, it is what he called the “crafter influence” in his life. It is a self-confident attitude about life. It is the everyday practical application of sisu.
It is also the concept that is at the center of his personal teaching philosophy. In more than 11 years as a high school teacher – especially when he taught at-risk children in an alternative school – he taught his students that they needed to learn how to make and get things – especially the basic things of life like fire, food and water. (One lesson he teaches his students is how to make fire in many different ways – especially with flint and the fire-steels he makes in his smithy shop.) According to Paul, along with knowledge of science, mathematics, and other academic skills, all students should learn basic living skills as well. For many of his students who were classified as being “at risk”, it was necessary to teach them basic living skills to adapt to their less than optimum living conditions.
How will we survive the coming turbulent era of life on this planet as we slip and slide on the downslope of the peak oil curve? The example of Paul Webster - one of many people of the self-sufficient type that I’m sure we all know - serves us well. No way is he a larger than life hero, instead, he’s a guy who confidently uses his head and his hands to “make what he needs”, and then goes on to the next task. It’s this type of confidence that creates survivors.
His ancestry provides him a philosophy of life and a direction. It is similar to a letter I read on a peak oil website. The writer wrote about the true wealth that will be required to survive in the future. He said that after finding a community to be part of, the next most important treasure to possess in the coming years is the treasure of sustainable knowledge that the rural poor of this world
I have somewhat facetiously termed this way of living and surviving and thriving the “survival of the Finnest”. Of course, many other cultures of the world besides the Finns have these skills (as the letter writer above attests).
Paul finally finished work on the fire-steels he was making and let the forge fire die. There was still enough light in the sky to walk on some paths that his family had made through the woods on their property. We walked past the chicken yard and past the pigpen - obvious sources of food that do not require huge inputs of fossil fuels – and down the woodsy paths. Every few steps Paul pointed out various plants that could be eaten or used for medicine - which also don’t require oil-based fertilizers and pesticides. His knowledge is so extensive of nature that he was hired by a local band of Ojibway (Chippewa, Anishinabe) to teach children about plants and survival skills.
When we returned from the walk he showed me the inside of the blacksmith shop. There are a number of forges and anvils that he uses for teaching, and there were a few of his products lying around on tables and the floor. One object was a fish spear he had recently made, and there were parts of a huge steel fish sculpture (elements of it are in the graphic above) that he has to finish so it can be installed this July in an art gallery in Deerwood, Minnesota.
When I spoke with Margaret on the phone two days before, I had done my usual rant about the “end of civilization as we know it” – something I was really tired of doing because it isn’t very hopeful or helpful. Now, after two hours with Paul and Margaret I realized something very important: times to come will include periods of disaster and turbulence, yet the fittest will survive because of their ancestral know-how and confidence.
Inside myself I could feel something turning toward a little more light, and away from the doom and gloom darkness.
Paul Webster can be contacted at forgefiend@msn.com for artistic, production, and custom blacksmithing.Professor Seppo Korpela at the University of Ohio, Department of Engineering, has an excellent list of books and other resources about our energy crisis: http://mecheng.osu.edu/~korpela/oil.html
