This time we feature author, Wendy Brown from Maine, USA – author of Surviving theApocalypse in the Suburbs, confronting an issue many of us may have to face – what to do should there bea natural or man-made calamity and we have to fend for ourselves.
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| Across the UK, across continental North America, and around the world, on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes, and this is The Unexplained. | |
| Thank you for returning to the website and the show. | |
| Thank you for your support, your many emails, and your donations. | |
| Please keep all of those things coming. | |
| Go to www.theunexplained.tv. | |
| And thank you very much to Uri Geller for making time to do edition 57 with us. | |
| Uri, I know your time is precious, so to give me an hour of it was a real knockout. | |
| And thank you very, very much indeed. | |
| A lot of listeners to this show, very appreciative of that. | |
| We'll return to Uri at some future date. | |
| We'll also be returning to Richard C. Hoagland. | |
| Had a lot of emails from you asking, it's been a while since Richard's been on. | |
| Where is he? | |
| What's he doing? | |
| We're going to update you on his life and his work to do with space very soon here on The Unexplained. | |
| That is work in progress, as you say, in the US. | |
| This time round, we're going to deal with a subject I've wanted to talk about on this show for five years now. | |
| And quite simply, I couldn't find anybody who was skilled in these things to talk about it. | |
| Now I have. | |
| I got an email from a publisher last week, and I get a lot of those, but this piqued my interest. | |
| It was about a lady called Wendy Brown. | |
| Now, Wendy lives in a great big, sparsely populated state in the U.S. called Maine. | |
| It's way up north, north of Boston. | |
| In the wintertime, it's beautiful. | |
| In the summertime, it's beautiful. | |
| You have to see that state. | |
| Maine is just incredible. | |
| Wendy has written a book called Surviving the Apocalypse in the Suburbs. | |
| In other words, confront this scenario, if you will. | |
| What happens if the power goes out? | |
| What happens if all those nice things that we depend on, like the internet, turning on an electric light whenever you need it, driving on nice roads in your nice car, buying food from the supermarket, which is open 24-7, what happens if you don't have that stuff? | |
| Well, recently, people in places like Japan and to an extent in New Zealand had to confront exactly that. | |
| People who thought that they had nice suburban lives and would never have to. | |
| How would you cope? | |
| Wendy Brown's book deals with exactly this. | |
| So it is called, as I say, Surviving the Apocalypse in the Suburbs. | |
| A title that absolutely grabbed my attention. | |
| So let's get on to Maine, United States in just a second, and we'll talk to Wendy Brown about this on a phone connection, which is digital and not the greatest one I've ever heard. | |
| But I guarantee, having spoken to her already, you will forget the phone line and listen to what she's got to say once she starts to talk. | |
| Quite an interesting lady is Wendy Brown. | |
| We'll get to her in a second. | |
| Just to say thank you to Adam Cornwell for his hard work on the website. | |
| We do have plans for the future, so watch this space. | |
| And as I always say, if you want to make a donation to the show, if you want to send me email, go to www.theunexplained.tv. | |
| Right, let's get online now to Maine, United States, and to Wendy Brown. | |
| Wendy, thank you very much for coming on the show. | |
| Well, thank you. | |
| I'm happy to be here. | |
| Now, we've got to explain that we're talking to you on what you in America call a DSL connection, what we here in the UK call an ADSL connection, but it's a broadband internet connection. | |
| But I think it's a bit of a slow one, which makes you sound a little bit like you're on the telephone, but I think it's going to be okay. | |
| So that'll be fine. | |
| And maybe your internet connection is part of your whole strategy of being able to make your way without being too reliant on all those things from the modern world. | |
| Am I right with that? | |
| Well, yes, because I have my internet connection as part of my phone line. | |
| And a lot of people in my community, in my area, have a cable connection for their phone and for their internet connection. | |
| The problem is when the power goes out, when the electricity goes out, they lose their phone, they lose their internet. | |
| And if I can power my laptop and I can power my wireless internet connection, I still have an internet connection and I still have a phone. | |
| All right, so that explains why you sound like you do, but I love it because it's all part of the story that we're about to tell. | |
| Now, before we talk about the story and why I'm talking to you and why you're talking to me, let's just talk about where you are because you are in a great part of the United States. | |
| A lot of people over here know nothing about Maine, and I think they should find out about Maine quickly. | |
| If I tell our listeners in the United Kingdom, in Europe, and other parts of the world who are not in the United States, that basically Maine is a great big state north of Boston, and in the wintertime, it's pretty close to Canada, and it can be damn cold, but it is full of wide open spaces and full of warm people. | |
| That's what I know about Maine. | |
| How's that for a summary? | |
| That's a great summary. | |
| And I think we have to be warm because it's cold. | |
| We've got to keep each other warm. | |
| You do. | |
| And I'm trying to explain to people who might not have seen this kind of thing, but if you look at some of these American TV shows and they go to a small city where everybody knows everybody else, and it's very, very cold in the wintertime, and there's just an atmosphere of camaraderie, I guess is the word. | |
| People seem to get on quite well. | |
| I can remember walking into shops when I visited Portland in Maine, back in 2005, I think it was. | |
| And it was like stepping back in time in the UK. | |
| People would greet you properly, and they'd want to talk with you, which I think in the big cities over here, that's kind of been forgotten because of the pace and the speed of life. | |
| I think maybe you haven't quite caught up with... | |
| There's still that human scale to it. | |
| Yeah, I think that that's, yeah, I think that's pretty typical of a lot of the northern New England states, Vermont and New Hampshire, are also very much that way, and Maine. | |
| And if you go just south into some of the larger cities, we're only six hours away from New York. | |
| So, you know, maybe because you're coming from a larger city there in the UK and coming here, and it is pretty community-based, a lot of craw maraderie, like you said. | |
| You have this thing called the Down Easter. | |
| The Down Easter is a train that runs up from Boston and has for years and years and years, and it's a real old-fashioned American-type train. | |
| By our standards, It sits quite low in the tracks, and you've got a pretty good view of what you're seeing all around you. | |
| And you go from Boston, big city, and then suddenly you slide through all these communities, and then you're into Maine and you go through snow-bound places, and suddenly it becomes like hometown, wooden shack-style United States, where people chop logs and do things that we've forgotten how to do over here. | |
| It is quite enchanting. | |
| I love it. | |
| I think you're in a great place. | |
| Have you always lived there, or did you choose to be there? | |
| I chose to be here. | |
| I did not grow up in Maine. | |
| Okay, what's your story? | |
| My father was in the military, and he is originally from southeastern Kentucky and joined the military, and then met my mother in Ohio, and my sisters and I were born, and we moved all around the U.S., and I lived in Europe, and then my father retired from the military, we moved to a small town in Kentucky where we lived. | |
| Then I went to college, and then I joined the military, and I met my husband, who's originally from Maine. | |
| And he told me when we met that, you know, he planned to move back to Maine at some point when he got out of the military, and he wanted me to come with him. | |
| So that's how I got here. | |
| Now, you've written this book, and it covers a lot of stuff that I've wanted to talk about on the radio for a very long time, and did, in fact, about five years ago, try and do a show. | |
| I tried to do a show on a national radio station over here in the UK about what exactly people would do if the power went out, if a lot of the modern conveniences that we depend on weren't suddenly not available because somebody pulled the plug on them or there'd been some kind of natural catastrophe and we had to fend for ourselves. | |
| And you know something I tried and tried and tried, and my producer at the time, a nice guy called Dave, made a lot of phone calls both sides of the Atlantic and we couldn't find anybody outside what you call their survivalist magazines who wanted to talk to us. | |
| We could find people who would say, hell yeah, we can survive. | |
| We'd just get ourselves a couple of shotguns and buy a year's supply of storable food and we'll be fine. | |
| I was looking for ordinary people who'd found ways that they might be able to survive if they were called on to. | |
| And I couldn't find anyone to discuss that with me. | |
| It looks like you're the person. | |
| Well, thank you. | |
| Yeah, I liked your accent. | |
| That was pretty cool. | |
| That was pretty awesome. | |
| And you nailed it. | |
| I think that there are a lot more people now who are in the mindset that I'm in, too. | |
| And I think that if you tried, you would probably find a lot more who were trying to move in this direction. | |
| I think the issue is that we're looking kind of around us and seeing that these things that we've taken for granted for all of these years, you know, we have water, coming straight into our house, and we have all of this electricity that we have all this access to. | |
| And I think that we're looking around and saying, okay, our dependence on all of these things is really foolhardy at this point because there's a good chance that we may not have those things. | |
| And we get a lot of little wake-up calls, if you will, that those things are very fragile. | |
| This system is very fragile. | |
| And we lose power regularly here in Maine. | |
| The price of gasoline now is starting to increase and is becoming a lot more expensive. | |
| So just being dependent on our cars is going to be a little more difficult for the average person coming up. | |
| Grocery prices are rising. | |
| The cost of getting electricity to us is increasing. | |
| So I think that being able to move outside of that dependence on all of those things, and that's what the book is about. | |
| It's about encouraging people to think beyond all of the modern amenities and to think about, well, what if you didn't have those things? | |
| And the reason why it's a really cool idea to get into right now, it is in fact essential right now, because if you think about all those poor people in Japan who woke up one morning to find that there was devastation in various parts of their country, not only that, there was a nuclear power crisis there. | |
| An earthquake had caused terrible destruction, an awful loss of life there. | |
| And for many people, they found themselves overnight transported back into the Stone Age. | |
| Now, if they hadn't had a chance, and there's no reason why they should have had a chance to think about how would I deal with that beforehand, that's a hell of a shock. | |
| And I think what you're trying to do, tell me, if you are, is give people a chance to at least think, what would I do in my nice modern world where everything works if suddenly one day I got up and everything didn't? | |
| Right, well, exactly. | |
| And that is exactly what I'm trying to do. | |
| Last night or yesterday, some severe storms hit Arkansas here in the U.S. Some people were killed, and 15,000 people are now without electricity. | |
| What are they going to do? | |
| You know, if the stores don't have electricity, they're not going to be able to supply the people with food, water, and basic supplies. | |
| If the people don't have electricity and they have no way of taking care of themselves without electricity, they don't know how to heat. | |
| They don't know how to cook. | |
| They don't know how to entertain themselves, any of those things. | |
| And it happens all the time. | |
| I mean, like I said, we lose power here in the U.S., not in the U.S., but here in Maine regularly. | |
| And sometimes it's out for weeks in some parts, not every day or every year. | |
| But in 1998, there was a severe ice storm that hit Maine and hit parts of Canada. | |
| And there were places here, not too far from where I live that didn't have power for three weeks. | |
| How do you survive? | |
| I have to tell you that last year, here in my apartment in London, we had a power out for about two hours, I think it was. | |
| And I had some candles in, and I had an AM-FM radio that runs on batteries. | |
| But two hours was about as much as I could take. | |
| And I was beginning to think, well, the contents of my fridge are going to defrost themselves. | |
| And how am I going to get myself washed and ready for work early tomorrow morning? | |
| And by the time the power came back on, I was a thankful boy indeed. | |
| I cannot imagine what I would do. | |
| And this goes for probably everybody who lives Around where I do, if we had a power out for a long time or if transportation was disrupted, I'm not sure what we would do. | |
| We had a very bad winter this last year. | |
| Back in December, we had some very bad snow and ice, and that was bad enough to deal with, but at least the shops were open and they kept the power going. | |
| In a situation in this modern world, living in a place like I live, I don't know where to start. | |
| Tell me, what would I do? | |
| Well, once you have shelter, everything else is kind of easy to come by. | |
| You just need to think beyond the obvious. | |
| You know, do you have a water supply near your house that you could purify if you had to? | |
| So if the answer is yes, then what you need to think then is how can you purify the water? | |
| And there are a couple of ways. | |
| One of them is to use a chemical, which I don't recommend. | |
| Another way is to boil the water. | |
| So you choose boiling the water and then filtering it. | |
| And you can make a very simple filter using charcoal and sand and the legs of a pair of blue jean pans. | |
| Really? | |
| Yeah, because the typical filter, like you have the brittle water filters, for example, is just activated charcoal. | |
| It's not even something really fancy and something that they have to have all of these specialized equipment to make. | |
| It's just activated charcoal. | |
| And charcoal is charred wood. | |
| I always thought that it was, I used to think that it was coal, but it's not. | |
| It's wood. | |
| Yeah, no, it's, well, it is coal a long way before it would become coal. | |
| You'd have to wait a couple of million years, I think, for it to turn into coal. | |
| And most of us don't have that kind of time. | |
| The one problem that those of us who live in this urban environment would have is that we'd have, in order to boil water, I can think right now, and I've never thought of it before, there is a stream quite close to where I live. | |
| I could get water. | |
| It is pretty pure. | |
| It would need to be boiled. | |
| To do that, I would have to start a fire, and the thought of starting a fire in my apartment scares the hell out of me. | |
| How do you get around that? | |
| Well, you don't have to start it inside. | |
| Can you go outside on the sidewalk? | |
| I guess so. | |
| Yeah, no, I could do that. | |
| And then you don't, and I know a next concern would be fuel, and you don't have to have a lot of fuel. | |
| There's a rocket stove, for instance, could be used to boil water, and it uses twigs. | |
| So if you have a tree nearby that has some dead branches, you can go and get those dead branches, and you can use that in a rocket stove. | |
| And all a rocket stove is, imagine two cans. | |
| You have two different sized cans, one smaller than the other, and you're going to take one of those cans, you're going to cut a hole in the bottom so that you have, one can is going to be completely open and the other can is going to have a flat top on the bottom. | |
| You cut a hole in the bottom so that you can shove some twigs and stuff in, and then you're going to insulate in between the two cans, and you can use something like sand to insulate in between the two cans. | |
| The top of the cans is your cooking surface, and then you put the little twigs inside at the bottom of the cans, and you're going to have this incredibly efficient way of heating stuff in boiling water, and you only have to blow the water for a couple of minutes to make it safe to drink. | |
| I mean, it's like five minutes at boiling, at a full roiling boil, like five minutes to make it safe to drink. | |
| And then you'll want to filter it just in case there's dirt and who knows what in there, right? | |
| Well, right, the place that I'm thinking of getting the water from, you know, they have deer in there, so I probably have to do that pretty assiduously, I would have thought. | |
| But look, once you've got water, now that I'm starting to think along these lines, then you've got a chance of survival, haven't you? | |
| Get the water into your system, then you've got some hope. | |
| Absolutely. | |
| If you have shelter first, shelter first, because you can die from exposure in a matter of hours. | |
| So you have your apartment there in London. | |
| The next thing you want to do is to have the water. | |
| And if you have a way to boil the water, and like I said, a simple rocket stove out on the patio or on the sidewalk outside, boil the water. | |
| And then so you have shelter and you have water. | |
| And then the next thing that you need is food. | |
| But you don't need a lot. | |
| We eat a lot more than we need in this country. | |
| In my own case, and I know a lot of people in that situation, it's a sad fact, isn't it? | |
| We do. | |
| We eat probably three times, four times more per day than we should or could. | |
| And then the other part of that is that there are a lot of things that we don't eat that we can. | |
| And there are more plants out there that, you know, just weeds that we just don't even see as food. | |
| There are more plants out there that are edible than that are poisonous. | |
| And it's just a matter of figuring out which ones can be eaten. | |
| There are more plants that will not harm us than that will. | |
| Now, again, I live in a place where there are mushrooms, wild mushrooms growing. | |
| But if you tried to eat those, they'd make you pretty sick. | |
| And I think some of them would probably kill you if you ate enough of them. | |
| So you've got to know. | |
| You've got to have a book or some kind of guide. | |
| Presumably, if we've had some kind of calamity, there isn't going to be the internet there. | |
| So I can't look the thing that I'm trying to pick from the ground and maybe eat. | |
| I can't look it up on the internet. | |
| So you've really got to do your preparation. | |
| You've got to have a book and you've got to know what's what. | |
| Right. | |
| And I talk about in my book, that's one of the chapters is building a library. | |
| And one of the most important things that you can have for yourself is a book on wild edible plants in your community. | |
| And then there's just some general knowledge of different kinds of plants that everybody has and that everybody overlooks. | |
| And just about everywhere that I've ever been, people have dandelions. | |
| Those are edible. | |
| They're incredibly healthy. | |
| And I was doing some research recently about dandelions and gallstones. | |
| And they're actually recommended for helping to dissolve gallstones or to prevent them. | |
| So, you know, do you have dandelions? | |
| We certainly have loads of them, especially at this time of year, but all the time, really. | |
| And it's just triggering a little bell in my mind that when I was a kid, I think probably you can still get it, but we had a form of drink called dandelion and burdock. | |
| We had dandelion and burdock soda, as you would call it, pop as we call it here. | |
| Yep. | |
| And burdock is also edible, and it's a wonderful plant, and it's full of lots of nutrients. | |
| So there's two right there. | |
| If you can identify just those two things. | |
| There's a survivalist rider here in the United States named Tom Brown, Jr., and he says that you only need to be able to identify four species of plant. | |
| And I can't remember all of them. | |
| One of them is grasses. | |
| we don't necessarily think of grass as being a nutrient and it's not something that i would make a salad out of but if you chew it and like a really popular kind of substance here in the u.s is tobacco and people used to chew tobacco but you don't swallow it you chew it and you spit it out right and tom brown advises that you chew the grass you swallow the juice and then you spit the grass out you don't swallow the | |
| But that's one of them. | |
| And another one here where I live is cattail. | |
| And cattail is called the grocery store of nature. | |
| It's nature's grocery store because just about all of the plant is edible. | |
| So if you can identify grasses, if you can identify cattails and then nuts and most nut bearing trees have an edible nut and acorns grow everywhere. | |
| Oak trees grow in just about every climate I've ever lived in. | |
| And all acorns are edible. | |
| Some of them are better than others, but all of them are edible. | |
| They just require some processing. | |
| Now, we've got to say that we've got kids listening to this all around the world, so we don't recommend that you do this right now. | |
| You've got to know what you're doing. | |
| You've got to have supervision. | |
| So don't go out there trying this because you might pick the wrong thing and you might make yourself really sick. | |
| What we're saying is you've got to do your research and you really do have to be aware of what you are doing. | |
| Exactly. | |
| And, you know, having a book or having somebody who knows a little something about wild edibles is that is essential. | |
| And, you know, don't just go out there and start grazing in your yard, but do start to learn about these different wild edibles because, you know, they're important. | |
| They should be an important part of our diet, even, you know, even now. | |
| And my husband and I forage a lot of plants and we're teaching our daughters about wild edibles, but we're teaching them. | |
| They're not just going to go out in the yard and pick this and go, oh, can I eat this? | |
| Yeah, that's very much the hard way. | |
| And we don't recommend that anybody at all anywhere does that. | |
| All right. | |
| So there you are. | |
| You've opened my eyes because, number one, I've got water suddenly and, you know, my bottled water would run out because I buy bottled water. | |
| I know it's expensive, but I do. | |
| I'm just lazy. | |
| That would run out very quickly. | |
| My cans of Heinz beans, I normally keep three for emergencies. | |
| They'd go very quickly. | |
| So I would then be having to find other ways of getting both of those things. | |
| If I followed your guide, then I would have both of those things. | |
| But then one of the most important things is once you've eaten, of course, all of that, I'm trying not to be indelicate about this, but all of that stuff has to come out. | |
| And if we don't have a sanitation system and if the power goes down, you're not going to have sanitation like we know it. | |
| Then you're in trouble because if you don't deal with your sanitation needs, very quickly you're going to get disease coming in. | |
| And that was the situation they were so worried about in Japan. | |
| Right. | |
| And I think that we need to kind of be thinking about, you know, what goes in does have to come out. | |
| I have a septic tank here in my suburb, and that's not the norm. | |
| I think most people depend on a municipal waste disposal. | |
| And I would encourage people to start thinking beyond just chucking it. | |
| You don't necessarily want to just get it as far away from you as possible as quickly as you can because there are some uses for that. | |
| One of them is to compost it. | |
| And most people are going, ew, gosh, I don't think so. | |
| But urine is sanitary when it comes out. | |
| It's sterile, not sanitary, but it's sterile when you release it from your body. | |
| And it's very high in nitrogen, and it's very good for your garden. | |
| So if you kind of cut it one to ten, one urine, ten water, you can put it straight on your garden, and your plants will be so happy to have it and grow very well. | |
| And with the other, there's a great book out called Humaneur, and the book describes ways to kind of recycle this back into the earth and turn it into compost rather than just treating it and throwing it into the ocean. | |
| It has a better use. | |
| And there's another use, and my favorite way of thinking about getting rid of our waste, is to turn it into something else that we can use, not just compost, but gas. | |
| And gas can be used to create electricity. | |
| It can also be used to create heat, and we can also cook with it. | |
| And in Japan, not Japan, but in India, they've done a lot of experimentation with methane digesters. | |
| And what that is, is it's a system that takes a bio-organic matter, usually it's kitchen waste, but it can be waste waste. | |
| And they've also done experiments with animal manures, putting it into the methane digesters. | |
| And the digester is airtight, and it uses an anaerobic action to break down the organic material and turn it into the gas, into methane, which then can be used. | |
| And what's left after the bacteria breaks all of the organic matter down is water, purified water, which can be put right on the garden, and compost. | |
| Well, there's a revelation. | |
| And I guess the stuff you're talking about is really basic technology. | |
| It's as old as we are. | |
| have to go out to Walmart and buy yourself an Acme brand methane digester this is the kind of stuff that you could probably if you thought about it knock up quite simply yourself yeah absolutely you can make a methane digester out of two you know those big water bottles The big huge plastic ones that go in the little water coolers, you can make a methane digester with one of those. | |
| Yeah, I had a vision of exactly that. | |
| And, you know, if you use a certain amount of duct tape and a certain amount of ingenuity, I guess you can get away with an awful lot. | |
| Yes, it's just a matter of thinking beyond the obvious. | |
| And like you said, the technologies, the technology is there already, and it's been there for years and years. | |
| We just need to go back to, we need to go back to thinking about these things, not as waste, not as something that we need to get away from us and that needs to be treated and that needs to be thrown into the ocean. | |
| We need to think about it as something that can be used, that's useful, and can be treated in a way that, you know, to complete the circle, if you will. | |
| You know, we eat from the garden, what goes in comes out, and we can use that again to feed our plants. | |
| And this is stuff that people have really got to think about. | |
| And I've tried to talk to people about this, and some of them think that I'm nuts. | |
| They think I'm nuts anyway for doing this show. | |
| But they think I'm crazy for even thinking about these things, because even though some of these people are quite new age in their thinking methods, they live in nice homes, they drive nice cars, and they enjoy doing nice things, wearing nice clothes, eating nice food. | |
| And the thought that they might one day have an interruption in all the services that they depend on in their nice lives doesn't even cross their radar. | |
| Just doesn't. | |
| Right, which is a shame because, you know, during, and anything can happen first of all. | |
| And during the Depression, it was a worldwide Great Depression in the 1930s. | |
| People who had these wonderful cushy lives, and we think back in the 30s, oh, well, they didn't have, you know, electricity and they didn't have, but yes, they did. | |
| And they had cars and they had electricity and they had these big, beautiful, you know, sprawling homes in suburban areas. | |
| And these people were devastated financially. | |
| And what did they do? | |
| And a lot of what they did was they adapted. | |
| And they adapted where they were. | |
| And they had to figure out, well, what can I do if I lose this or if I lose this or if I lose this? | |
| And we have the benefit right now of being able to see these things are starting to happen again. | |
| And we could not have to have it be an emergency. | |
| We could take some steps to be thinking about these things and planning and making some changes to our lives. | |
| And then when it does happen, we're like, oh, well, we're good. | |
| We're set. | |
| But your average kids over there, I can just see, you know, your average American girl aged like 12, 13 at school, watches Hannah Montana, enjoys music, looks forward to a great life, you know, when she or he, for example, leave the parents and with an education. | |
| The American dream is still there to be lived for a lot of people. | |
| So what I'm saying, I think, in a roundabout way is, do you think that our schools need to be teaching this stuff? | |
| Yes, absolutely. | |
| And I talk about schooling in my book. | |
| And my concern is that our schools are too big, especially here in the United States. | |
| And I can't speak to what you have in Europe for schooling because I don't have any experience with that. | |
| But here in the United States, there has been this big push to take small community schools and turn them into large consolidated schools. | |
| And I think that that's unfortunate because bigger doesn't mean better. | |
| And just because it's a bigger school doesn't mean that the child is going to get a better education. | |
| And just because the school has more access to newer technologies doesn't mean that the child is going to learn more. | |
| And yes, I think that we need to start concentrating more on real life kinds of skills, teaching our children life skills. | |
| And that's basic stuff like, you know, how do you purify water? | |
| How do you start a fire? | |
| How do you grow and preserve food? | |
| How do you, you know, mend your clothes? | |
| I wear a particular brand of socks that I really like, but they're very expensive. | |
| And I can't always go out and afford to just buy a new pair. | |
| They're 100% wool. | |
| They're very warm and they're great for my climate. | |
| But, you know, they don't last forever. | |
| How can I keep those socks? | |
| And I learned how to darn socks. | |
| I've never darned a sock in my life. | |
| I've thrown an awful lot of socks out. | |
| I'd have to learn, wouldn't I? | |
| And this is the thing, isn't it? | |
| That we're teaching our kids in schools how to upload videos to YouTube, but we're not teaching them basic stuff that one of these days, okay, I'm sure they can use the skill of uploading videos to YouTube, and it's very nice to be able to do it. | |
| I'm not sure yet if I can, you know, but I'm sure I could learn it. | |
| That's a useful skill, but even more useful is if something really bad happens, how do you live? | |
| Well, exactly. | |
| And these are skills that people used to have. | |
| I mean, two generations ago, you had people who had these skills, and they weren't dependent on, you know, having electricity in their houses or having access to an oil truck delivering their heating oil. | |
| They could go out and split wood. | |
| They knew how to gather standing dry wood to make a fire. | |
| They knew how to grow and preserve some of their own food. | |
| They knew how to entertain themselves without being able to upload a video from YouTube. | |
| You know, just very simple, simple things that we've kind of lost touch with in our society. | |
| And I think our societies revolve around a dependence on money. | |
| And it's kind of a fleeting thing. | |
| People gain and lose money all of the time. | |
| And if our entire lives revolve around just that, then it's incredibly insecure. | |
| You have an incredibly insecure life. | |
| And how can you be happy not knowing all of the time? | |
| If you have some self-sufficiency and some independence and some ability to survive without money and without all of these modern amenities, then you can be more secure. | |
| Now, that is another thing that's opened my eyes and I hadn't really thought of. | |
| We all think about this, I think, especially if you work in a tenuous business like the media. | |
| What happens if I'm not working at any particular time? | |
| Certainly, I've had phases in my life and career where I haven't worked or work has not been as thick on the ground as I'd like it to be. | |
| And you always think to yourself, well, what happens if the money runs out? | |
| What would I do? | |
| And most of us would think, well, that's it then, end of the game. | |
| What you're saying is it's not the end of the game. | |
| There is a way to go on, and you don't have to be dependent on all this stuff. | |
| Exactly. | |
| And that's what the book is about. | |
| It's empowering us to think beyond the money economy. | |
| There are ways to get what you need without having to buy it. | |
| And there are ways to live without having this abundance of money. | |
| You don't have to be dependent on those things. | |
| When you get to that stage, though, Wendy, you're now dealing with other people, I guess. | |
| And you're talking about things like bartering, are you, for the things that you need? | |
| Well, to some degree, yes. | |
| But you don't have to barter. | |
| I mean, I grow my own food, so I don't have to go to anybody else to get that. | |
| I can darn my own socks, so I don't have to depend on anybody for that. | |
| But yes, barter is a wonderful way, it's a wonderful commerce. | |
| It's a wonderful way of doing business. | |
| And I talk also in my book about networking is what I call it. | |
| And what I mean is developing a community where you are, a local community of people that you know that you can depend on or that you can go to and that you have a kind of cooperative relationship with. | |
| There's another side to this, though, that I wonder if you have considered. | |
| And this is very basic. | |
| It takes us back to times in this country hundreds and hundreds of years ago where you get communities that are doing quite well, groups of people who are doing quite well. | |
| There will be other people who are not doing quite so well who perhaps want what you've got. | |
| They want to take it from you. | |
| Then you get to the stage where you've got to defend yourself. | |
| And in this scenario where perhaps there's been a disaster, perhaps your police and military authorities are tied up doing other stuff. | |
| And then you come to the point where I'm in this self-sufficient life because I have to be, but now I've got to defend myself. | |
| Well, I talk about that too in the book. | |
| I talk about security. | |
| And I think that the best, and I always get it wrong, it's like the best defense is a good offense or vice versa, however it goes. | |
| But what I mean is that you make yourself not so accessible by putting up barriers and by being aware of your environment. | |
| You know, you need to walk around and know who's in your community. | |
| There's a school of thought that says there's safety in numbers, and it's going to be more difficult for somebody to come after your stuff if your neighbor is also defending you. | |
| So, I mean, yeah, there's going to be, there is the chance that, you know, people will come and try to take what I have. | |
| But there's also the school of thought that, you know, befriend your enemies and then they can't be your enemies anymore. | |
| But we all know that there are some people who don't want to be your friend, however hard you try, and there are some people who are badly motivated. | |
| In that situation where I can't pick up the phone and dial 911 or 999 over here in the UK, you have to confront the situation where you're going to have to perhaps see somebody off your land or out of your apartment. | |
| Yes, and you need to be prepared to do that. | |
| And what you're talking about is the whole survivalist mentality. | |
| Here in the U.S., there are several camps of people who are preparing, if you will, for this kind of end of the world as we know it scenario. | |
| And their biggest fear is that somebody's going to come and try to take their stuff. | |
| My biggest fear is that somebody's going to come and try to hurt my children. | |
| They can have my stuff. | |
| I will go get more. | |
| And that's the other half of it. | |
| I feel comfortable that my level of survival skills without anything at all is such that I am not dependent on this house and this land. | |
| And we could be okay. | |
| So you could upsticks and go somewhere else and do the same thing. | |
| Yes, I feel confident that my family could do that because we're not dependent on my garden, I can wild forage, I can get food out in the woods, I can make baskets from twigs, I can do these things. | |
| And these are things that I learned from books. | |
| Got it. | |
| So your answer to the fight scenario that we have to confront here because it is part of this whole mix, your answer to fight is flight. | |
| Be a pacifist as far as possible and don't fight people. | |
| Well, no, you know, and it's really a hard topic. | |
| That's a very, very hard topic. | |
| My first response is community and safety and numbers and to put up barriers between yourself and harm. | |
| So fences and strategic plantings and again, the neighborhood watch kind of thing where I have a community of people. | |
| And it is harder for people to, like if it were just me and, you know, a big mob of people came and tried to take all of my stuff and it's just me, chances are they're going to get everything and I'm going to be left probably wounded. | |
| But if there are 10 of you, you've got a better chance than you can coordinate. | |
| Right. | |
| that would be my my first suggestion I'm not gonna fight to the death for you know I'm not going to fight to the death for a chicken egg. | |
| Right. | |
| You know, you can have the egg, and I'll go find another one. | |
| So part of this thing, Wendy, that is also fascinating to me is that it's coming out of this aggressive mentality that we all develop. | |
| You've only got to walk through, and I love New York. | |
| I love most American cities. | |
| I do love New York. | |
| But there's a kind of naked aggression that stalks those streets. | |
| People are very well dressed, but there is a naked aggression about it. | |
| Part of what you're talking about is losing Some of that mentality. | |
| Yes, well, I think that we have to. | |
| You mean, you need to be able to trust your community and you need to be able to trust the people around you, but don't put yourself in danger either. | |
| I think that, you know, if it comes down to me or that chicken egg or me or this house or me and all the supplies that I've, and my children, if it comes down to protecting my kids and losing all of this, I will walk away from it. | |
| You know, that's not to say that I don't have ways to protect myself. | |
| I was in the military. | |
| And I have a blog post that I did on security, and I start out by saying I'm not afraid of guns. | |
| But we need to understand that when you're talking about that level of defense, that if it comes down to that, if you're going to fight for your property, and I'm not telling people that they shouldn't, I'm just saying, if you're going to, you need to be prepared to use that gun in the way that it was meant to be used. | |
| And if you're not, then you need to put the gun down and walk away. | |
| I know that in America you have a different view of guns. | |
| We find them anathema here. | |
| You know, only crooks use guns in the United Kingdom. | |
| It's different in the United States. | |
| There are people who believe that the right to bear arms is fundamental and it's something that everybody has, you know, an absolute right to. | |
| Well, yes, and we do believe that we have the right to bear arms and it's part of our Constitution. | |
| You know, and a lot of people have very strong feelings about that. | |
| And I don't, you know, I'm not going to say whether I think that they're wrong or right about that. | |
| I think that it's part of our Constitution and we should be happy that it is. | |
| But this is controversial stuff you're getting into here. | |
| And there are some people who are going to have to take a step back while they're listening to this and think about this. | |
| You're talking about the potential use in a scenario of a weapon in a specific situation where you know what you're doing in that specific situation. | |
| But it comes with all the background of the responsibility that you have learned by self-sufficiency through your community and all the rest of it. | |
| So literally you are becoming your own responsible police force because no one else is going to do it for you. | |
| Well, exactly. | |
| And the biggest, the key word there is responsibility. | |
| And we need to take responsibility for ourselves and stop pushing it off on other people to take care of us. | |
| We are going to have to take care of ourselves. | |
| And what happens if you get sick, though, Wendy? | |
| Let's take you on to something else here. | |
| We all count on these pharmacies in your big supermarkets there, you know, your Walmarts and all the rest of them. | |
| You've got huge pharmacy sections there and you have every drug for every condition, you know, even some of those conditions imagined by some people. | |
| You know, we have everything that we can to treat the people who are genuinely sick and, as we call them here, the worried well. | |
| What do you do when you haven't got that? | |
| I think that it's going to take some people, I think it's going to take some degree of kind of going back in time when we weren't so dependent on chemical pharmacology and to realize that a lot of those chemical pharmacological advances have their roots in plant-based medicine. | |
| And we need to also look at whole healing. | |
| And I think that we need to kind of change our mind about being breed well and look at some herbal treatments. | |
| There's the song Scarborough Fair by Simon and Garfunkel, and they talk about parsley sage rosemary and thyme, which were used to help prevent the plague. | |
| So we need to kind of recapture that knowledge. | |
| We do. | |
| And here's a story from my own life. | |
| And I'm only just remembering this now. | |
| It must be 15 years ago, but I was new to London. | |
| I was on national radio reading news, and I got a throat infection. | |
| And it left me with a sore throat for the better part of a year. | |
| And I was terrified that I was going to lose my voice, lose my career, lose everything. | |
| I went through all the scenarios, and I went to doctor after doctor after doctor who gave me every pill and antibiotic they could think of. | |
| None of them helped. | |
| Now I was getting really worried. | |
| And then somebody said, why don't you try, and I can't find her now. | |
| I'd love to find her now to know what happened to her. | |
| A herbal doctor, she made me a herbal potion that was based partly in licorice, ground it all up, I watched her do it, made it liquid. | |
| I took this stuff, and miraculously within about a week, my sore throat had gone. | |
| It's amazing. | |
| I mean, herbal medicine is fantastic. | |
| And a lot of times it doesn't have the same kinds of side effects that the chemical pharmacology has. | |
| There's a tree that grows here in Maine. | |
| It's the white pine tree. | |
| It's the Maine state tree. | |
| But it's got incredibly healing properties. | |
| And it's very good for upper respiratory illness, which is perfect that it grows in this area because you're thinking about really cold winters and being stuck indoors. | |
| And upper respiratory infection would be something that you would expect to get here in Maine because we're kind of trapped indoors. | |
| It's really cold. | |
| And, you know, so the white pine tree is very high in vitamin C and it's got like flavonoids and, you know, casserole fruit rather, all these things that you want your medicine to do. | |
| Drinking white pine tea is like a health tonic. | |
| So, you know, just that one thing, and it'll knock your cold out really fast, way faster than Tamiflu or, you know, some of those others, and it's healthier for you. | |
| And you can find it right outside your door. | |
| Now, even if millions of people buy your book, and I hope they do, there are still going to be a majority of this planet who either don't want to know or haven't taken the trouble to learn the skills and the mindset that you're talking about here. | |
| Now, what does that mean? | |
| Well, that means that if something big and bad happens, within communities, the people who are going to be taking a lead and perhaps expected to help other people are going to be the people who have read your book and do know those skills. | |
| So what I'm saying Is it's back to responsibility. | |
| You become leaders, don't you, in that situation? | |
| You're going to have to help out the people who didn't take the time to learn this stuff. | |
| Well, I think that a lot of people who are in this movement already know that that's their role, and I think they're already okay with it. | |
| You know, I think that we were talking, you said back in 2005 you were having a hard time finding anybody who would talk to you about this. | |
| And I've found, I kind of got on, started my blog in 2005, 2006, and I started finding a community of people who were interested in this kind of lifestyle and making these kinds of choices. | |
| I mean, I think it's terribly important. | |
| I mean, you're preaching to the converted here, but those years ago doing that radio show, I thought here is a great topic for our day and our age. | |
| People are going to love this. | |
| We tried for a week to get someone to come on. | |
| We tried university academics, all kinds of people. | |
| And we had people who were engineers and they knew about disaster recovery and that kind of stuff. | |
| But nobody was able to talk about these things, which I think are fundamental and are going to be at some point in all our lives. | |
| Right. | |
| I think that we're moving back into a kind of society, a kind of lifestyle where we do a lot more things for ourselves. | |
| You know, I really believe in the goodness of people. | |
| I think that people want to do the right thing. | |
| I think people want to be good. | |
| And what I've found is over the years as I was moving this way with my family, at first, you're right. | |
| At first, it was, you know, people scoffed at us. | |
| They thought that I was called, you know, some unkind names. | |
| Kind of, you know, people weren't mean to be mean to me, but they just thought that I was a little wacky. | |
| And that's okay. | |
| You know, I was okay with that. | |
| But now what I'm finding is that people are really starting to listen, and they're starting to notice what I saw back in 2006, 2007, with what's happening with the peak oil, with what's happening with the economy now, with what's happening with climate change. | |
| And I think all of those things are creating this perfect storm. | |
| And I think people, I mean, you know, whether they buy my book or not is not the issue. | |
| It's whether or not they see these things happening and decide that they need to make some changes. | |
| And I'm hearing more and more as I kind of talk to people about the book and I kind of talk to people about these things that my family has done, I'm hearing more and more people saying, well, what about this? | |
| And how do you handle this scenario and how do you handle this situation? | |
| And I talk to them about what we've done and they go, oh, yeah, yeah, that's a good idea. | |
| Or, you know, I hadn't thought about that. | |
| But they're starting to think about it. | |
| And maybe just getting people to start, like we said, is an important thing. | |
| Now, look, I'm not teasing you when I say this, but assuming you become, I won't say a guru, but you become some kind of guide for this new age and millions of people buy your book and you make a lot of money out of this, it's going to be very tempting, isn't it, to live a different life, to enjoy comforts like the ones that a lot of people are lucky enough to have. | |
| In other words, aren't you going to sell out in the end? | |
| I think he shouldn't assume that I haven't lived that way already. | |
| I think we shouldn't make any assumptions about what my income level is. | |
| I have, you know, I have, well, we're not rich, don't get me wrong, right? | |
| I don't make millions of dollars, but I have very clear goals about what I want to do with my life. | |
| And what I want to do with my life does not include crazy wild parties. | |
| I was told you I was in the military, so that part of my life is beyond past. | |
| I'm already old enough to kind of have some very clear goals with where I want to go. | |
| And my goal is to go even further and be even more self-sufficient. | |
| And money would certainly help me do that. | |
| But I'm not going to go out and buy a brand new Maserati because I've got a few extra dollars in my pocket. | |
| I'm not interested in that kind of thing. | |
| Okay, I completely understand. | |
| I know entirely. | |
| But I had to ask the question. | |
| Now, listen, something that I've thought about a lot, again, and something that people over here just are not considering this. | |
| And occasionally I might write something in a magazine and mention this. | |
| I wonder if anybody's thinking about this over there. | |
| Increasingly, we are being moved towards digital communication. | |
| We're talking on a kind of digital communication right now. | |
| The phone line that we're on right now is a digital hookup between you and Maine. | |
| Everybody uses YouTube and videos and all the rest of it. | |
| They're migrating radio in this country from analog radio to digital radio, which is a very fragile technology. | |
| If there's some kind of outage, the first thing to go is fragile digital radio. | |
| The last thing to go is old-fashioned AM radio, like you still have in the States that reaches long distances. | |
| Have you given any consideration to communication? | |
| My thought is that we need to localize our lives. | |
| And while we have the computer and the digital communication, I think they're fantastic, and I take full advantage of them. | |
| But I think that our lives are going to be more local and that we don't necessarily need to know. | |
| We don't necessarily need to communicate worldwide. | |
| You know, I think that communication is, you know, letters are good. | |
| And we can. | |
| Oh, I remember those. | |
| I remember those too. | |
| It used to be great when I get elected. | |
| Do you know what? | |
| I can remember. | |
| I'm sure I wouldn't ask you how old you are. | |
| But, you know, we can all remember the thrill of receiving that blue envelope with the, you know, the red and blue stripes around it with airmail in the top right corner. | |
| And there'd be some communication from America or some far flung part of the world from the. | |
| No, I don't think it's gone. | |
| I think it's still there. | |
| I just think that we don't get that thrill very often, you know, is because people don't write letters anymore. | |
| And what's really neat is that my daughter, I have a teenage, a young teenage daughter, and she has, you know, taken up letter writing. | |
| So she writes to, I have relatives who live out of the state of Maine, and she writes letters back and forth to them, and they write letters back and forth to her. | |
| And how exciting for both of them. | |
| You know, her aunts and uncles who live out of the state are getting regular communications From her, and she has emails. | |
| She can call them on the telephone, but they like to write letters to each other. | |
| And isn't that amazing? | |
| Isn't that wonderful? | |
| I think it's kind of nice. | |
| Do you still have a television set? | |
| No, we don't. | |
| All right. | |
| I was going to say that if she gets to see, maybe at a friend's house, whatever, America's Got Talent and some of these reality TV shows, living the life with you that she's living, I wonder what your daughter makes of the reflected view of society that you get from television these days. | |
| I should amend it and say we do not have a television and we do not watch commercial television. | |
| However, we do have, however, we do have a, there's a caveat right there, right? | |
| We do have access to Netflix and Netflix is this, it is like a DVD service. | |
| Yeah, but post your movies. | |
| Yes, and you can download television programs from Netflix. | |
| And so my daughters do watch television programs. | |
| They watch some of the things that used to be on the Disney Channel. | |
| And they watch these television shows. | |
| And, you know, they have some, it's not been so long ago that we did have TV. | |
| And, you know, I don't want people to think that I've raised my kids, you know, out in the woods and not had any contact with people. | |
| We're regular suburban people. | |
| We live in a suburban neighborhood. | |
| I can see my neighbors' houses from, you know, I could shout across the road to them and we can hear each other and talk. | |
| You know, me standing in my yard, them standing in theirs. | |
| Not that there's anything wrong with them, but we don't want people getting the idea that you're the Amish out there. | |
| Right. | |
| Well, and there's nothing wrong with the Amish, exactly. | |
| But we're not living, you know, off-the-grid, secluded lifestyle. | |
| My children still have friends that go to public school. | |
| They don't, but we have friends who do. | |
| They have friends who watch television, you know, and their lives revolve a little more around TV than ours do. | |
| My kids have access to these different television programs that they can watch through Netflix. | |
| We don't have a TV because a television set uses a lot of electricity, and we're trying to reduce the amount of electricity that we use. | |
| But we have computers. | |
| And don't forget, we have, as they say in America, we have radio. | |
| Yes, we have radio. | |
| Exactly. | |
| So the only difference between the television my kids watch and the television that other kids watch is that we don't have commercials. | |
| Hey, but listen, if you watch your television that way, and if you're a kid, it means you've got to think more about the stuff you watch. | |
| You don't just veg out on a couch in front of whatever happens to be rolling through the tube at that time. | |
| Well, exactly, because they kind of have to go look for it. | |
| They have to go, okay, so what do I want to watch today? | |
| And it's really a conscious decision. | |
| You know what? | |
| And that's what my book's about. | |
| It's about making conscious choices, not just doing because it's, you know, the easiest thing. | |
| Now, listen, this hasn't been the easiest phone connection that I've ever had, but I haven't even noticed it because I've been so enthralled by what you've had to say. | |
| And I'm sure an awful lot of other people are going to feel that way too. | |
| Just finally, a lot of people are not going to get this message, or they may get it and they'll get it too late. | |
| What do you think will become of this world, ultimately, if not enough people don't get the message that they've got to learn this stuff? | |
| I think... | |
| I think we're headed for a drastic powering down. | |
| It's already happening. | |
| I think you can look to places like Zimbabwe, you can look to Argentina, you can look to Cuba, you can look to Russia in the early 1900s, or I mean in the early 1990s, to see where we're headed. | |
| And I'm not thinking that we're going to have this massive die-off of people, but there's a writer who writes about this same kind of thing. | |
| His name is Dmitry Orlov, and he's actually Russian and American, and he watched the Russian economic collapse. | |
| And it wasn't that people just died off, it's that the life expectancy lowered. | |
| So instead of living 70 years, they were living 50 years. | |
| And I think that's the kind of thing that we're going to see. | |
| People are going to get poorer, and you're not going to have as much. | |
| You know, there may still be lots of food in the grocery store, and so a lot of people just aren't going to be able to afford it. | |
| And we're going to have to be more self-sufficient than we are because we're going to need to be able to do more for ourselves than what we do. | |
| It's scary on one hand, and it's a challenge on the other. | |
| Two ways to look at it. | |
| Right, but it doesn't have to be scary. | |
| I mean, yeah, to think about, you know, the end of life as we know it. | |
| Yes, that sounds very scary, but think that it, you know, kind of flip it around and say, okay, but what can I do? | |
| And it's a call to action. | |
| It's empowering to know that I can grow my own food. | |
| It's empowering to know that I can go out and gather wood and keep my family warm. | |
| It's empowering to know that I can repair a hole in my kids' pants, that they can be warm and they can be healthy and they can be happy without being dependent on things. | |
| And I think that we've done ourselves and our children a great disservice by thinking that there's only this one way. | |
| And if we don't have this, we're doomed because we're not. | |
| You know, human beings are incredibly resilient. | |
| And we can do this. | |
| You know, it doesn't have to be scary. | |
| It can be something that gets us thinking about other ways of living, ways that we've lived before or never lived. | |
| You know, we have an incredible amount of this fabulous technology. | |
| And if we just focus what energy we have left in something better than fueling our cars, we could have such amazing lives. | |
| That's a great thought to park this. | |
| Thank you very much. | |
| I have found this, I keep using the word fascinating, but it has been a fascinating hour. | |
| You've opened my head, and thank you very much for doing it. | |
| If anybody wants to read about you, do you have a website? | |
| Or is that? | |
| I do my blog. | |
| Okay. | |
| my blog? | |
| It's at happilyhome.blogspot.com. | |
| And then the book obviously is, you know, my thoughts. | |
| But you know, I just want to say it's not about me, it's not about Wendy Brown. | |
| It is about the message, and the message is empowerment and becoming more self-sufficient. | |
| You put that message really, really well, Wendy Brown. | |
| And it's a delight to talk to you. | |
| Pass on my love from London Town to the state of Maine. | |
| I want to come back sometime soon. | |
| And thank you very much for talking with me. | |
| Well, thank you so much for having me. | |
| It was a pleasure. | |
| It was a pleasure talking with you. | |
| That's an insight into the world of Wendy Brown and her book on the skills that you may need one of these days. | |
| I hope you don't. | |
| But in case you do, you need to read Wendy Brown's Surviving the Apocalypse in the Suburbs and confront some of those things that those of us who live in our nice suburbs in London or New York or Paris or wherever we happen to be find it tough to confront. | |
| Maybe we ought to at least think about them now for all the reasons that we underlined in the show. | |
| Wendy Brown, thank you very much and I wish you well. | |
| If you want to know more about her, go to the website www.theunexplained.tv. | |
| That's my site. | |
| And I've got a link to her site and also some details of what she is and what she does right there. | |
| Thank you to Adam Cornwell at Creative Hotspot in Liverpool for getting this show out to you and for doing some terrific design work on the website. | |
| Adam, you're a gem and you know it. | |
| But I want to tell you once more because simply as they say in the commercials, you're worth it. | |
| And Martin, thank you for the theme tune once again. | |
| And above all, thank you to you for listening to this show. |