Useless men

About two and half months ago, I read an interesting article regarding peak oil and its implications for society. The gist of the article was that men in this generation don't have the fundamental skills required to survive (and provide for their families) in a society without cheap energy.

Over the last few weeks I have been doing oral history interviews with older people ... of their memories of the 30s, 40s and 50s. They remember working with horses on the farms, raising children with gas lamps, candles, home grown vegetables and home made clothes. This is less than 2 generations ago. What emerges is an innate sense, in the generation that made it through World War Two, of what constitutes enough, of an instinctive sense of self-reliance and an almost universal ability to turn one’s hand to anything.

A couple of years ago I went to London to a peak oil conference, and the evening before it I went to the pre-event social. I was struck by the fact that everyone there (with one exception) was male, aged 25-40, and, as far as I could tell, worked in IT. They were all very pleasant, intelligent, well read on the whole peak oil issue, and as able as anyone to argue that the peak is imminent and we need to act. There were however, almost no women, no gardeners, no builders, no foresters in the room, nor at the subsequent conference as far as I can tell.

Writers such as Shepherd Bliss and Carolyn Baker have questioned why it is that women are less prominent in the peak oil community. I have a nagging suspicion that it is because what we are seeing is, in part, a generation of men awakening to the fact that they are completely ill-prepared for life beyond oil. Almost all of the peak oil writers, and the vast majority of peak oil website writers and bloggers, are men. When I have organised peak oil-related events, finding female speakers on the subject is very tricky.

From the oral history interviews I have been doing, I have seen how older men are less concerned about “going back” to the kind of lifestyles of the 40s and 50s because they still remember how to do things. They often say “well it’s not a problem, I still know how to do all that stuff”. Something happened around the 1960s and the passing-on of that knowledge just stopped. Perhaps mens’ natural instinct is to protect and to provide, and at a time when we feel on some level the need to be doing so again, we are realising that our education has left us completely incapable of doing either. The oil-based economic system has basically said “don’t worry about that, we’ll take care of that for you” for that last 50 years, but that system is now starting to look very shaky, and we realise we have been taught the wrong skills.

The skills one needs to work in the service industry, in sales, in IT, in the insurance industry, in a call centre, are of very little use when one starts thinking about what might follow that in a more localised near-future. What those of 2 generations ago had that we have lost was a practical attitude. They knew how to use the various tools around them, and had a confidence that they could turn their hands to most things. They had the core skills they would need to get through most challenges. Dig for Victory was possible because most people still knew how to garden.

It is interesting to me how specialized professions have become and how much we take for granted in terms of food supply, transportation, etc. If you begin to unravel that support infrastructure, many other aspects of society (including specialized careers) no longer make sense. Need to get going on teaching the kids some basic skills.