LAST LETTER TO MY GREAT GRANDCHILDREN
I must tell you this, young ones, on the eve of the fourth decade of this century. You will need an island within an island in the coming decades. You will have to have safe haven, certainly, but you will need to build the foundations of a novel society, a new self-sufficient culture, in reality an altogether new and different civilization.
I am of great age. The civilization that I will be leaving you soon is devolving before our eyes. All the warning flags set out by the scientific community since the 1980s are streaming straight out now, for the winds of biosphere change are roaring. We humans -- tied to a technological umbilical cord coursing with megawatts and hydrocarbon fuels to the present global economic mono-system -- are not prepared whatsoever to face the immense climate stresses well underway and growing worse and more dangerous with each passing decade.
Who among us is prepared to fend for ourselves for a even a weekend, a week, a month, a year and more? Are we prepared to grow our own foods, or produce building materials to build shelter, or provide our own heat and light and water? You will have to, children, for this present worldwide hyper-consumptive house of cards will not stand for long before the global climate locomotive barreling down the single set of tracks that we have laid down for ourselves since World War II nearly a century ago.
As I write to you, it is 116 degrees in Texas, Arizona, Nevada and much of California, and it has been that ungodly hot for a week during the daylight hours. Livestock losses are mounting rapidly on the open rangelands due to the fierce temperatures. Grain crop yields are plummeting across the Plains; wheat, corn and soybeans can’t withstand the thermal onslaught. The Mountain West forests are ablaze from California to Colorado, not to mention the raging conflagrations across Canada, Scandinavia and Siberia. Houston and New Orleans were underwater three decades ago; now Charleston, Richmond, Baltimore and Washington, Philadelphia, and New York are routinely pummeled by waves of storms that are super-saturated with moisture welling up from the Gulf of Mexico. Creeping salt water infiltration is underway everywhere from Boston to Beijing to Buenos Aires. Seawalls are being erected against sea level rise, but there is not enough money on the planet to fund the construction of structures to hold back the ocean of your future.
You must leave, young ones. I urge you to emigrate to Newfoundland. You must go east, to the farthest eastern point of land on the continent on the great Canadian Province isle to where our family’s forebears once called home. It will be the nursery for the paradigm shift in human endeavor that must take place, or the Earth will surely make the changes, drastic ones, for us all.
Why Newfoundland of all places? There are myriad reasons. Newfoundland is on the northern coastal fringes of the continent, not in the landlocked midlands where the temperatures are soaring yearly to record highs. The center of the continent is fast becoming uninhabitable because of the heat and the crushing drought. When murderous climate-change temperatures finish off the agricultural economy there in a generation, the disruption in the Plains and Midwest, not to mention the nation as a whole, will be overwhelming.
In Newfoundland, you will have the ocean at your doorstep, with all the critical resources the sea has to offer: bearable summer temperatures, plentiful food in all seasons, life-giving rainfall, and even the ability to move about without hydrocarbon fuels, if necessary. There are great forests across the Province, freshwater sources aplenty, arable land along some of the river bottoms, constant sea breezes to power wind turbines, and a very sparse population given the grand dimensions of the island. So, too, the residents of Newfoundland are the heartiest stock, use to making due with considerably less income than, say, a Torontonian or New Yorker, and more adept at subsistence living off local resources than anyone in the States.
It will be of no use to bring hyper-consumerism with you. That excessive mode of living is doomed to atrophy or even collapse by the time you reach mid-life. You must adopt means of existence that were once common to all humanity since the retreat of the continental ice sheets of the last Ice Age.. You will have to have a hand in food and materials production, in local resource procurement, and in energy generation. You will have to act collectively in community with others for the common good, so that all may thrive once the all-the-toys-for-the-boys Bud-Lite culture falls terminally ill.
The changes underway on our home planet are undermining and will bring down the current civilization in your lifetime as assuredly as comet debris strikes wiped out the Pleistocene megafauna and the continent-spanning Clovis Culture people 13,000 years ago, and Ilapongo volcano aerosols severely disrupted cultures all over the world in 536 A.D., booting cowering humanity into the maw of the Dark Ages.
To prepare for that eventuality, you must create a safe haven of like individuals who understand fully the need to embrace the production of their own goods and services. You must become independent of the greater global consumptive culture, that which leaves its vast populations utterly dependent on the sweat and labor of others in other lands and on the crumbs cast off by the super-elite.
As the burgeoning climate hardships stagger the world’s peoples, render coastal cities awash and millions of acres of productive coastal farms ruined, and force tens of millions to pull up roots to migrate to unwelcoming lands, you will want to be secure in community with those have taken the long and difficult steps to self-reliance in an environment that can sustain you for the long, long haul.
That environment is Newfoundland. It must be your lifeboat, your place of refuge from the billowing climate storm clouds of your future. Newfoundland will be your New World. Be off with a pioneering spirit. Seek out the old homestead and the few relatives remaining. Embrace the Newfoundlanders and their culture by the sea. Settle in the new found land of the East and bring with you the tools of self-reliance and self-sufficiency. Forge with sweat and sheer determination a new social and humane economic paradigm because, well, because you will have no choice. There is precious time to waste; we all know that’s so deep in our bones. There is survival and a new and life-giving order of things to gain.
Go now.
