Bags packed for doomsday

Is the end really, finally nigh? And if it is, what are you going to do about it? John McCrone meets some South Islanders who are getting ready for the end of the world as we know it.

The 'twin tsunamis' of global warming and peak oil could spell TEOTWAWKI - the end of the world as we know it - and already, quietly, some people are getting prepared because they believe we are talking years rather than decades.

Helen, a petite 42-year-old Nelson housewife, is racing to build her own personal TEOTWAWKI lifeboat.

Earlier this year, she and her American husband cashed-up  to buy a 21ha farm in a remote, easily defensible, river valley backing onto the Arthur Range, north-west of Nelson.

The site ticks the right boxes. Way above sea level. Its own spring and stream. Enough winter sun. A good mix of growing areas. A sprinkling of neighbouring farms strung along the valley's winding dirt-track road.

The digger was to arrive this week to carve out the platform for an adobe eco-house. A turbine in the stream will generate power. A composting toilet will deal with sewage.

Then there is the stuff that could really get her labelled as a crank (and why she would prefer to remain
relatively anonymous, at least until she is completely set up). Back at her rented house in Nelson, Helen shows the growing collection of horse-drawn ploughs, wheat grinders, treadle sewing machines and other rusting relics of the pre-carbon era, she believes she will need the day the petrol pumps finally run dry.
There is the library of yellowing books from colonial times, telling how to make your own soap, spin candlewicks, care for clydesdale horses.

``In the kitchen now, I'm always thinking, well, how am I going to do this job if I'm not plugged into the
power? I've been scouring Trade Me for the things we'll need.''

And weapons to defend the homestead? Helen's hands rise to her face in a mix of distress and bemusement.

That it should come to this. That this is the kind of decision you have to make if you are prepared to think future events through to their logical conclusion.

Yes, she will be getting a gun licence and a gun. A rifle will be needed to deal with the feral pigs, goat
and deer that would otherwise raid her crops. But - oh dear - she can well imagine also having to deal with feral Nelsonians, if there is complete economic and social collapse.

Just how long have we got exactly?

``I don't know. It could be 10 years. But I think I've got to get moving while I can. I want to start while I can still hire a 20 tonne digger to do the work. Lots of things are going to bite in maybe just five years,'' she says.

Jurgen Heissner is another Nelsonian who is seeing the writing on the wall.

A founder member of the New Zealand branch of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas (Aspo), Heissner says it was like a blow to the stomach when he first comprehended how close we are to the brink.

He immediately began the process of selling out of his thriving bio-paint business and getting ready for a new world order.

Heissner's young son crawls into the room, one foot tangled in the leg of his romper suit, and gazes up  at us.

Heissner's Japanese wife is in the kitchen making his 50th-birthday cake. Roses bloom at the window. Sun floods across the polished wood floor.

And we're talking about TEOTWAWKI.

Thank God we are in New Zealand, Heissner says in an accent still gruffly Germanic after 18 years
here. The whole damn country is a lifeboat really.

Did I know New Zealand is the only country in the world with spare human-carrying capacity _ the
luxury of surplus water and land? The only one? You may have a few smaller islands
like Tasmania and the Falklands. But so far away from everywhere, and one large farm already, New Zealand will be tomorrow's lucky country.

However, says Heissner grimly, right round the world, others will be making the same calculation.
We have been here before: Chicken Little panicking the sky is going to fall in. Remember when the global-scale threat was nuclear war, over-population, and not global warming but the return of the ice ages?

Or what about Y2K _ the Year 2000 millennium bug that was going to strike every computer dead and
send the Western world rocketing back to the stone age?

Helen laughs and says she knows some Y2K refugees, rich Americans who took flight and built their ``bug out'' citadels around Nelson and Golden Bay, complete with safe rooms and food bunkers. That is how she learnt about adobe mud-wall construction techniques - on a house tour of one of these properties.

Psychologists call it ``catastrophising''.
 Sure there are some worrying trends. But let's not exaggerate. Only the nutters would uproot
themselves and their families, abandoning their widescreen TVs, flush toilets, holidays on the Sunshine
Coast - the whole suburban idyll - to head for the hills, awaiting the end of civilisation.

Heissner scowls at such talk. He trained as a psychologist, so he knows about catastrophising, but also about other standard responses such as inertia and denial.

He says the world is facing a double whammy with climate change and the end of cheap oil.
One problem is too many people think of TEOTWAWKI in terms of Mad Max and other post-apocalyptic
B-movies. This certainly seems the case for US survivalists. Drop in on a website like survivalblog.com -"The daily web log for prepared individuals living in uncertain times'' - and it is filled with po-face discussions about how to set up your Armalite AR-10 semi-automatic with a night scope
and long barrel for perimeter defence.

One contributor complains that of course everyone has their BOV (bug-out vehicle) sitting loaded with
supplies in the garage, ready to light out the instant the SHTF (shit hits the fan), but what is their fallback plan, if it hits the fan while they are on a business trip or holiday?

In New Zealand, too, there is internet questioning about how we are going to handle the boatloads of
Japanese and Indonesian refugees who will surely be headed our way.

Robin Scott, author of a new book, Fortress New Zealand, and a website of the same name, says national security has to be a future concern.

With a regular army of just 4500 troops and 15,000km of coastline to defend, the introduction of national service seems a must at some point.

Scott, a 59-year-old British accountant, was another whose life was turned around the day he heard
about peak oil.  ``It was September 2004. I just happen to get chatting to the guy to whom I was selling my house.''

Scott went ahead with a shift from Cornwall to Scotland, but then as soon as he could, brought his wife and grown son and daughter to the safer harbour of New Zealand. He started  in Karamea on the West Coast  until the sandflies got him down. ``I came out in great boils. It wouldn't work for
me there.''

Now renting a little bit of paradise, a swanky beach house overlooking the sand dunes in Christchurch's North Beach, (``I wouldn't buy here of course. It'll be the first place to get washed away. But I can enjoy it for the moment.'') Scott is busy negotiating on a small self-sufficient farm block in a quiet corner of West Canterbury. Yet while security is a worry in a fast-changing world, Helen, Heissner and Scott, all stress that gun-toting survivalist fantasies just won't wash.

They say there is no point in attempting to stand alone, creating a private fortress stacked with
ammunition and baked beans.

The only solutions worth considering will be community-based ones.

So they see their roles as being the pathfinders, developing the models of how to cope, which they can then teach the rest of us, if the worst does happen.

Helen says there is a bit of a grassroots movement going on, one that shares buzzwords like permaculture, relocalisation and home-scale technology.

And the movement has some idea of how the future may actually pan out based on the precedent of Cuba's ``special period'', the decade after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991
and the sudden halving of Cuba's oil supply.

A film about that time, The Power of Community: How Cuba Survived Peak Oil, has caused more of a stir in some quarters than Al Gore's global warming documentary, An Inconvenient Truth.

In Cuba, power stations were shut down for much of the day. Trade nearly ceased. The threat of mass
starvation was real.

Helen says it was exactly the kind of disruption that New Zealand could face if the global economy turns nasty because of oil wars or fast climate change.

But Cuba pulled itself together by giving up on the car and tractor, and turning to bicycles and oxen. State farming was replaced by self-sufficient home gardening _ communities
growing their own food, even in the cities, using parks, balconies and roof-
tops. Nearly half of Havana's food now comes from within its city limits.

The Cubans were helped by a team of Australians who taught them the
principles of permaculture, a system of sustainable, small-scale agriculture, developed in the 1970s.
Helen says it is all about having the knowledge. Pioneers 150 years ago had to be able to look after themselves with small mixed farms. These are the skills we will all need to relearn.

She  has been interested in permaculture for 20 years and has  nearly completed a horticultural
degree. Her plan is to experiment to find what would be the right combination of crops and animals to allow for year-round living off the land in a place like Nelson.

In her vegetable patch, Helen is trying with small stands of wheat, sorghum and other cereals. On the
patio, avocados, mangos, bananas and baby coffee trees grow in pots. She thinks she may need to know how to cultivate tropical plants if the weather is changing. ``I see it as creating a Noah's Ark of different species. I will have plants for fibre, plants for medicines, plants for fuel.''
There is much to learn if we are being practical about TEOTWAWKI.

Where will the know-how come from if the average Kiwi has to dig up the back garden to feed the family? Or build the composting toilet _ an outdoor dunny _ to feed the garden once there are no more fertilisers.

Helen says people may laugh at her now. But as in Cuba, one day small efforts like hers could be the seed from which a new society will have to grow.

Heissner also feels it is about creating the examples from which others can learn. So one of the prodh
jects he is now involved with is Atamai Village, a sustainable homes development to be built near
Motueka, if the plans are approved.

About 35 houses will share chicken runs, a goat herd, orchards and a foraging forest. Heissner says  the
settlement will be largely self-reliant for food and power.

In a post-oil world, Heissner says craziness like Nelson tanking its milk  to Christchurch to be pasteurised before it makes a return trip to the shops will have to end.

Communities must be reinvented, so they work on a  local scale. This is another of the lessons of Cuba where universities were broken up - three became 50 - so they became largely walking distance.
Scott says, perhaps they are all being too alarmist. Perhaps the optimists are right when they say we  will find new oil fields, that climate change will not be so severe, that other
technologies will come to our rescue.

However, he  believes now is the time to be considering the scenarios and  reacting in a practical way. ``I don't want me and my family to be sleep-walking into a disaster,'' Scott says, as we sit staring out at the million-dollar view of Pegasus Bay, a southerly whipping up the waves and sombre clouds darkening the sky.

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