ARE YOU A DOOMER?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomer

are you a' survivalist' or 'peakist'? will you 'change the world or die trying' permaculture activist, or are you a 'hole-up over the end-times' type of permaclture ecovillage extremist? will a malthusian catastrophe shape your world-future? are humans too stupid to be peaceful and happy... without OIL???

im mostly impressed with wikipedia, but this article has got to be one of the silliest things ive seen in ages. i hope you get some giggles out of it like it did!

Peace,

Deston Denniston, M.S., C.P.I.
Steward, Abundance Permaculture Consulting
www.abundancepermaculture.com
(360) 673-2124

tee hee hee. i find all the terms made up to label modern concepts funny. I admit. I have a few doomer and survivalist streaks. however I also view my future with the question....what if no disaster ever befalls us?.......I don't want to have lived my life in fear and with its whole focus on 'what if bad stuff happens' and raise my daughter in such a way that she would have trouble fitting into modern culture.  on the other hand
i want to be prepared to fend for ourselves for our basic neccesities if neccessary. I think that if that became an iminent need our lives we would quickly evolve our life to fill in the gaps in our plans just as individuals have been doing since the beginning of time.  so I guess I am a moderate

there are a lot of ways to think on these things...you look at areas that have natural disasters regularly..floods, hurricanes, earthquakes, power outages..etc..and most common sense people that live in these areas (other than moving) have SOME PLAN of what they are going to do when a disaster strikes..food supplies, water, meds, etc.

then there are people like me that live where the only natural disasters are likely short, such as a fire, power outage or huge snowstorm..but we still prepare for those..

then there is the "end of the world" scenarios and peak oil (i like the lite oil term)..and any of us who could go through an extended power outage tend to think LITE OIL all the time..as if there are times when we won't have grid power or vehicular fuels.

we are constantly trying to find ways to supplement the "fuels" at least for short periods of time..here we are working on a propane generator and back up batteries for the short term ..and trying to find wind and solar sources for longer term..

we have always been on an extgremely fixed income..so purchasing solar has been difficult and wind has been impossible..

as we changed over completely to wood heat in our home..a long long time ago..we ahve been working on obtaining batteries and trickle chargers to keep them charged, and power invertors to run our pump for our wood fired furnace (that pumps water to our house and our sons) and also to run the fans to blow the heat off of the heat exchangers into the house..we ahve partially hooked up the water heat to the wood for winter and hope to get it hooked up to solar for summer..also plan to obtain a storage tank for the hot water that the stove can produce as well which we haven't yet.

when MIL was alive we had a flowing well but since her property was sold it is now on other peoples property..so we will be having a flowing well put in on our property in the next few years.

so yeah i guess we are in the LITE OIL phase of planning right now..but do plan to eventually get off the grid more and more as we are able..

i pretty much agree with all the above posts, and we are heading slowly in the direction of being off the grid with hopefully solar, maybe wind combo. fear is not in our vocabulary. prepared is.

we have had winters where the snow was so deep and the roads not plowed and no power for several days. there have even been a couple months we were not able to get to town for necessities. thus, we keep the pantry/larder full for such emergencies. mom nature has taught us well!

Brenda Groth, you are always so full of plans and ongoiing projects.. rose.

My husband is a doomer.  He's got the pantry stocked with months worth of store-bought food and he's on all the survivalist forums reading stuff about TEOTWAWKI (The End of the World as We Know It) etc.  It doesn't help that he has Fox News on the tele whenever he's in the house.

I'm more of a "wouldn'titbecoolifer".  "Wouldn't it be cool if fuel got so expensive that nobody was willing to drive 30 miles to Super Walmart to buy nutrient-deficient food shipped from who-knows-where and people actually had to open local grocery stores, stocked with locally-grown food?"  "Wouldn't it be cool if people actually started having to depend on one another again and we all got to know our neighbors?"  "Wouldn't it be cool if everybody HAD to have their own gardens and raise their own chickens?"

So he's like "Oh My God!    The price of pumpkin pie filling is skyrocketing!  It's the beginning of TEOTWAWKI!!!  Git the guns!"  and I'm like "Oh My God!     People are actually going to be forced to stop at the farmers market and buy all their pumpkins and learn to freaking cook for themselves!    Let's celebrate!!!"

He's, like, hiding from TEOTWAWKI and I'm shouting BRING IT ON! 

Edited to add:  My poor husband.  I pick on him so bad, but he really is my hero.  He diligently shops all of the sales and our pantry is well-stocked.  When I want to bake something, I don't have to go to the store for anything - I just go shopping in the pantry.  He saves us thousands of dollars by shopping the sales and taking care of the chickens, chopping all of our firewood, taking care of the apple trees, helping me dig potatoes. . . . I just had to come back on here and give the poor guy some credit!  And if he didn't watch the news, who would?

Um.... guilty


Or at least I have tendencies... All in all I'm just really self-reliant and would rather provide for myself and my family completely. I also grew up on a farm with all that entails, and have seen lean times before.

Maybe not a Doomer, but definitely have mroe faith in my own means of producing food than in someone halfway across the globe.

  What is it about neighbours, were they ever realyl good freinds? i leant that village life was impossible and always has been everyone was always gossiping, do good neibors exist? You just have to be very resilient and broad backed i suppose to know lots of neighbors.
I get to know people and they start to get the better of me and a few years later they ahave almost done for me and i have to escape. I lack the necessary abilities or chose the wrong freinds , I have not been able to chose freinds since i married, I can't manage whats left for me to try out as  freindships as a consequence of marriage thoug i am getting tougher an dmy experience is htat it is usually men who make their wives have the freinds they chose so it is a good erason to be against marriage.  I have got very tough but that is a new suit of clothes for me i don't know how it plays out freinds wise in the long run in the short run those who were used to a free be maybe chose me as a friend because they saw that it would be easy have fled and i am truly happier than i have been in a long time, but to busy to get looking fo rnew friends together though i belive in knowing people that you see in the flesh not just those you know in the internet.

  Why was karate kid so ppopular if it was not that there were lots of other people like me who truly dont know how to hold their own? Those who are really good at it seem to think that those who don't answer them back are just being more sublty clever, rather than that they are useless at the twists and turns of keeping you pecker up in competative conversations. I don't understand how experts at things don't see that others eeally lack their abilities. It is usually experts who know what it takes while those with no experience think its easy. You lot have got me after i have got a lot feircer, after sort of lessons in planting poisonouse plants, metaphisically speaking and letting others learn to handle them, which is one way of not getting manhandled because you stop looking like easy game.

  To give one example of th esort of things you have to face in freindships. Their is a bit in one of Dave Chapellies Shows, on how he hates it when someone has accused him of sleeping with a woman he has never slept with and in the sketch, there he is protesting and saying, "no i did not sleep with her", well, i used to just think, there is nothing to be done about that accusation, i have no proof that this never happened or even ever looked like happening, at least from my end of the question, so i never even tried to defend myself. Well trying is being more savée and brave than i was, he did at least try to remedy things. According to a friend of mine that is called trying to mend matters yourself.

    Am i the only person who has tremendouse problems with social life so i need classes in it rather than discussions about how great it would be if we all new our neighbors again. It is a good topic though.

  What about including, in a discussion on neighbors, all the questions brought up in books on bullying and at work or in the home, apparently twenty percent of the population suffer from abuse of this sort  and i suppose neibouhoood and then we would be beging a bit more like the Corean judo master of the karate kid and ew would be letting people learn the ins and outs of knowing your neighbors.

  What about wisely not knowing your neighbors but having the get up and go to try to find like souls as Paul wheaton does when he involes himself with permaculture groups, though you learn a lot about relations trying to relate to those who give you most problems . Still the story of beatrix potters about the cat who asked the dog to tea and the problems they have realatingkeeps things more eral than those who dream o fgood human relations keep things. You should look for like minded people as well as trying to realte to neiborsor even family.  i adore talking to my family though they are not like minded on many things i find them more fun if they aren't chopping me into little bits than others. agri rose macaskie.

You bring up a lot of good points, there, Rose.  I understand what you're saying because I've been there myself.  However I am happy to say that finally, at the age of 40, I have figured out a few things about human nature and I've been pleasantly surprised.

I recently transferred to a different unit in hospital where I work.  The new unit is much less busy, work-wise, than the unit I previously worked on.  That gives human nature time to really come out - with all the associated gossiping and back stabbing and all those scary things.  I work with mostly women, so that's a double whammy - or so it seemed at first.  I am delighted to say that I have learned to love it - and even enjoy the cattiness.

You just have to realize that, no matter how nice you are and how hard you try, people are going to deliberately do things to test you.  Yeah - it's mean.  Yeah - it sucks at first.  But that's how people size each other up and figure out what to expect from one another.  It's especially difficult to move into a henhouse where the pecking order has already been established.  Everybody's vying for position - the dominant hen doesn't want to be knocked out of her prime position on the highest perch, and the lowest one is sick of being on the bottom and is looking to $hit on somebody else, for a change.  The folks in the middle don't care quite so much but all the shuffling around is inconvenient for them, too. 

Everybody knows you're going to have to fit in there somewhere so they go to work determining where your spot is.  Can they walk all over you?  If so, they will - of course.  Can you take a joke?  If so that will be great.  Can you give it right back to them?  That's even better - gives you lots of opportunities for bantering.  Can you be depended upon to keep your emotions under control when things get hairy?  They'll play with you a lot to find that out, believe me.  How smart are you?  How big is your ego?  Are you always out to prove something?  Can you roll with the punches?  Do you want to fight all the time?  Can you stay in your place and do what's needed of you there?

Everbody wants to find these things out - they want to play with you.  You'll find out that first impressions of the individuals in the group are usually totally wrong.  The person who bullies you at first, whom you hate, may very well become your best friend.

If you withdraw and try to be an island unto yourself, you paint a great big bullseye on your back.  You have to stay in there and play the game - test everybody out and learn about them, too - they're expecting it and if you're not interested in learning more about them they'll take it as an insult to the group.  Groups can gang up and attack.

It's a difficult game to play but if you stay in it, you can have a lot of fun and make some really good friends that you can count on.  You just have to realize it's nothing personal, everybody does it to eveyrbody.  It has nothing to do with you.  It's just the way life is.

I'm just someone living through some really drastic socioecological changes, and noticing.

Kerrick wrote:
I'm just someone living through some really drastic socioecological changes, and noticing.

Care to elaborate on that?

If you'd like...

I think those of us who are here probably have a good idea of what the drastic ecological and social changes are, so I think I probably don't need to go into too much detail there. I don't think I'm any better equipped than the average person to predict the outcome. I used to study ancient history--I don't imagine I'm much different than the average slightly-educated person towards the fall of the Roman Empire, trying to guess how close the Huns and Vandals would get to our village this season, or how long the army will be able to secure borders that have gotten way too big to sustain. But we know when the Roman army wasn't around any more to use those famous Roman roads, farmers made really good use of them--many people suffered and died and many other people carried on living, just in a different way than before. And I think this pretty much expresses my perspective on the whole "doomer vs. techno-utopian" duality--neither of those positions reflects the reality of the times we're living in, and neither of those labels fit very many real people. We're all living in a time of big changes, and I believe most of us are noticing--even if we're coping with what we're noticing in really different ways.

I think I know what you mean.

As a generation X American I was raised with the illusion of the status quo, and have come to realize what countless generations before me probably always knew... There IS no status quo. Our society and especially our government is a sandy riverbed, far from the rock solid that we have been led to believe.

It never ceases to amaze me - how many people AREN'T noticing!  They're just walking around with their noses in their iPhones chit chatting and partying away, blindly faithful that Walmart will always look out for them.

Well, as a longtime "doomer" I will point out that more of them are noticing, in frighteningly huge numbers. This administration isn't very good at the "bread and circuses" act. Too many changes too fast ellicit anger and frustration.

You know, it's strange--even many of the people who look like they're oblivious, if you engage them in conversation, are thinking about what's going on--they're worried about the problems but they trust G-d or technology or the idea of progress or the experts, or perhaps they trust in these things but their trust is faltering more and more every day, or perhaps they KNOW they need to do something about it but they just can't do it right now because of that job or that spouse or those kids or that college debt.

If you looked at me from a distance, riding the train and listening to my recycled iPod, I probably look like most everyone else in this town. If you had a transcript of my inner monologue over the last few months, you'd read a lot of the same excuses everyone is making--"I know I need to be composting at home, but I can't start a pile now, I'm about to move...I know I want to find a way to meet my own food needs, but I don't have any money for property, and I have to keep working at this job and I can't move farther away, and it takes so much money to start container gardening...I know I need to not take the bus so often, but hey I don't have a car, that's got to be worth something, right? ...I know I need to use the computer less, but I'm on a permaculture forum..."

But if you engage with people on their level--something I'm admittedly not always good at doing--the majority of people know something isn't right, and they're hopeful and fearful to various degrees. On my better days I'm trying to focus not on my incredulity that people can just go on and on engaging in habitual actions that are destroying the planet, but on how it is that many people do come to realizations that we need to make big changes, despite the compelling power of habit and comfort. If we can figure out how that happens, we'll have a better way of persuading more people to act.

fffarmers girl i think you are making the, "all wrong", sound, "all right". I have seen people being completely done for, as they say there are variouse ways of killing a man by bullying and that for the rest of their lives. If your trying to be nice and not to competative its not funny this merry free for all does for you. Maybe fffarmergirlyou are good at it and enjoy it?

      Bullies are not testing you, they are looking to knock others completlely out of the running.

      As i said the good at bullying seem to really believe others could keep their end up, that they have just chosen a different way of getting were they want. THey always believe everyone is as bad as them, this helps them to blacken others. They don't only use people they blacken them too. A typical example from my childhood was me trying to get my brother to help with the washing up he walked out laughing at me. Some one who does not ever do their share is a bully, no? Well he thinks it was very bad of me to even try to make him join in every so often, that i was bullying because i pushe dhim to help.
    Because they need reasons for using others or for pushing them right out of the running they  blackening them, blackening others is  is the best  way to get an excuse for using them. Blackening others also reduces their power of reply they don't get any support. Then if you stop seeing them it is you who are mean for forgetting them not them for pushing you around in ht efirst place because they have managed to get into a situation in which you ahve been invalidated and they have been bolstered up. Bullies end up with proffesional distortion they can always only see what desvirtue others. They get so used to blackening others they really can't, hardly, see through their own ruses. Those trying to get out of their ruses are forced to tell on them that makes the victims look like blackeners too. You can't fight them without getting wounded and that is one of the wounds you recieve, no one is a quick as a bully to call others bullies, you get tarred with their brush,  people always think others have their own faults. If you know bullies you will find they are calling you a bully.
    I have found the verbal tricks to get the better of me wlly nilly, so complicated that it is obviouse that it takes a long time to learn them, how do bullies have the cheek to pretend it is easy, that if the victims don't give as good as they get it is their choice not that they really don't have the skills needed to answer back? Who whatching a good film of a lawyer defending a case would think anyone could do that if they wanted without training . Bully parents often teach their children the ropes very young. The sort of verbal juggling necessary for this sort of activity is hard to attain.
      I can tell you that it is endlessly frustrating being beaten at arguments and no one would lose that many arguements if they new how to win them. It takes a long time to learn to do things like call others liers when they go back on what they said before just so as to win an arguement if you are scared of hurting others or of losing their freindship and bringing bullies up, pointing out their tricks does mean losing their freindship often and it means them them redoubling their efforts to make you look bad, so it means losing the freindship of others.
    Bullying includes doing for the other behind their back and that is a joke victims  can't laugh at because they can only say two and two make four, i am so unpopular when i have been trying really hard, something must have happened behind my back. It incluldes being really good at arguing knowign that if someone criticises them that person can be accused of trying to do for them though trying to do for others if different and They kniow others arer to lazy to eally look into it and find out if their was a bit of criticism or a long term and all out on every front attack a complete running out of town.

      You say it is fun, would you show another woman the ropes to finding it fun or do you let them struggle on their own? People pretend its fun and healthy but they don't show the weak at verbal agressions the ropes. Imagine that it was boxing, the person who boxed others and beat them silly every day, who knew that th ey were stronger and had more technique would be told to pick on someone their own size and if they pretended to be responsible and allowed matches between uneven partners they would be considered inrresponsible even potential assasins.
      It includes lots of great lazyness in getting to know others and as adults don't know each other the door is left open for falsifying their character and alsoopen to others accepting the falsification and you find, among adults that they tend to believe they and other adults are good judges of character when they are extrodinary lazy about it and blind on the good points of others.
      All the bullies i have ever known and some of them are fun as well as bullies have had excuses for their games.

    I have a book on bullying it says take your children out of schools who try to rest importance from bulliying, only trust in those who take the question seriously.
      I find the ones who are good a pecking orders normaly say it does not matter. Being stepped on and sitting looking at a long and depressing future is frightening and it is not a moments fear here and there, it is, a cloud that is always there and it is also frightening when you don't know how to help someone else who has been squashed whose real nature has been distorted and you don't know how to fight for them.
  bullying causes suicides, it is not fun.

Normal the end result is very little participation for anyone as more and more peopole get knocked out of the running.  agri rose macskie.

If the malthusian theory is that which asays that people end up paying the poor a minimum wage which is very minimum, I am malthusian. I have seen the poor from before the time the welfare state started to work well in England.
  Maybe i don't believe in doom so much as that people can't see how things will go round and trying to spread it round they tend to start to pay less and less while there is a reverse magic which is that you pay more and more appears you free more people from dire necessity to grow carrots and strawberrries. and there is suddenly more when you thought there would not be enough it is christ being a good economist his loaves and fisghes rule and pepole must remember that common sense does not explain to us a lot of how things work because we miss some aspect otf things. my psychological explaination of human action is more complicated than malthus'.
  Just think of america without money , there is enough stone and are enough working hands for everyone to have a decent house since houses are made of wood in america there is enough land to grow wood on, well managed.
  There is enough land to grow all the food on so you just plan for plenty and you can have it, and in the way the welferare state plans for plenty. You start thinking their isnot much and you end up with a fair amount of the poppulation on the edge. Thats why the welfare state works there are many more goods in England now everyone is richer, we are richer than we were when we had the empire.Enormouse numbers of sofas cars televisions etc the rich never had as many goods in all england as their are now the poor are not so terribly poor. remember before they were undergrown and very thin ask Dolly Parton if that is not right..

  WHen the trade unions work and force the hands of the rich as the rich force the hand of the worker sacking him or taking him on, so that there is  abit of balance in the system then things come out of the grip of sure there isnot aenough to go round which is a strangle hold into the world of heres findng a way lettign lose a lot of creative energy when the poor are realeased from the strangle hold of just enough to get by.I AM A GrameenLIN BANKIAN. mohamed yunus is one hell of a islamic person and free-er of people from tremndouse poverty to do permaculture..agri rose macaskie.

I'm a doomer, no question there.  Modern industrial civilization is not sustainable.  It is based on increasing consumption of finite resources.  There are limits to our growth, some of these limits are being reached.  The expected result is change.  Some will refer to this change as collapse, TSHTF, or TEOTWAYKI.

Change is coming, but it important to understand that it is a process, not an event.

Cant  handle such big assumptionsb Kpeavey. i have to break it down into compartments," is iron finite for example, what will happen when we have used it all? We will just have to use wodo as pillars and beams again, what things really have to be iron?

  Look i have really been up the road of big statements that you can agree with,  I don't think there is anything wrong with the idea that you can't just use up finite things but its an umbrella statement, i don't really learn about you, i don't know were you will take it. Usually such frases are a good way of cheating people, they agree with you without really knowing where your taking them. I have already been so hooked agreeing with such things and then  when it came down to details not agreeing and being told i had agreed before, before when i agreed wiht the blanket statements i had no idea where they would come out. Who would not agree with a lot of htem they sound fine. "love is good" is an example of another one yeah  but what about the possesive eh?

      Just at the moment apart from good healthy land use and reducing carbon dioxide and so feeding more and stopping impendign katrinas if its not too late, the important thing is Africa and South America and how to make the poor r¡ch and i am for trade unions and education to graduate level, a country needs a lot of highly educted people if it is working on a bigger scale, as a big country rather than at local village cheiftans one, so many civil servants and such are needed.
      People with nice ideas go to poor countries and teach people to read and write. How condescending, teach them all you know, all the science you know all the theology you know all the engineering you know, drop your idea that you have to have a high level of studies to understand and teach them while you work with them, teach the adults as well as the children, just going out and giving them money, doing the interesting jobs for them, perpetuates poverty.

      My son bought home a tape of the television series "The Wire",  to whatch last night and a big drug dealer gave a follower instructions on how to feed his fish, he said that there was a box with the right type of food next to each tank of fish, the fish did not all eat the same food and he only had to put in each tank a bit of food from the tin next to that  tank. I went out to cook at that moment  and missed a bit so i don't know what happened but if you teach peole a minimum and something goes wrong they mislay the fish food for example , they don't have enough information to right things.  You have to give people all you know, all the information you have if you wish them to learn to fish instead of giving them fish, you can't serve them up a potted share of information for idiots and hope it will serve.

      Victorian conservative thinking that stops people talking sense to a great part of the population, that part they deem stupid, still works in many places, even people who have worked there way up are quick to see others who don't look like themselves as too stupid to learn. The same stupid snake shows its head in new places, often among those who pretend to be most charitable., and if you are anti establishment, well fewer people able to argue with the big fish would tend to increase the power of the big fish, so increasing eduaction level would serve your anti establishment ends too. Lack of knowledge and know how in lots of peple would certainley tend to reduce the competition with the few who cut the cake and seem to be hell bent on detroying us. rose macaskie.