Sarah Edwards

[Sarah and Paul Edwards will be offering an online course on Sustainable Post Peak Livelihoods, December 12.]

Please tell us what motivated you and Paul to develop this course?

We’ve been following the trends and writing about independent careers for the past 25 years. We wrote the first commercially published book on working from home in 1985 after we had been working from home ourselves and experienced the profoundly positive effect this move had in our health and our family.

Even at that time it seemed to us that we needed to find ways people could escape our overly complex, stress-filled culture and support themselves in more simple lives that better integrate personal, work, and community lives. But after attending a conference in 2005 on the impending effects of peak oil and climate change, we realized finding such options was no longer only a much desired choice by most people, but also an emerging necessity.

We began researching and writing Middle-Class Lifeboat in 2004 to document what people were doing at that time to prepare for a very different world. Since that time, of course, it has grown all the more imperative that people act now to build lifeboats that include plans for sustainable livelihoods. Much was being written and said about planning for energy and food, but it seemed to us that even most people in the know were assuming that somehow they would have jobs like they have today. How we’ll support ourselves post-peak seemed to be the elephant in the room that no one was paying much attention to.

What kinds of responses are you getting from people who are checking out the course and from your students?

We offered the course in Tucson this past summer and online through PostPeakLiving.com this fall and the response has been good. It has opened a lot of eyes and gotten folks thinking in new ways.

What is a sustainable livelihood? Why do we need one? Please define “sustainable.”

Many great minds have attempted to define “sustainable” and they’ve arrived at many varying definitions, but for us sustainable means that which can be maintained over time without jeopardizing our personal, community, and ecological security, health, and well-being.

It is as opposed to the common feeling “I can’t keep this up any more.” and the familiar thought “There has got to be a better way.”

Another way we describe sustainable is simply as “affordable,” meaning that we, our children, and our children’s children can keep going throughout generations without:

• Going deeper in debt or bankrupt.
• Suffering from one or more of the chronic stress-related illnesses so common today from addictions, high blood pressure, and heart disease to obesity and diabetes– both of which nearly a third of Americans already suffer from or are at risk for– and all of which are becoming more prevalent and striking at ever younger ages.
• Depleting our environment of the vital diversity and resources that sustain us such as clean air and pure water, or despoiling it so we loses the earth’s rich diversity and become susceptible to the growing number of environmentally related illnesses such as asthma, cancer, autoimmune diseases and psychiatric or developmental problems like ADHD or autism.

So a sustainable “livelihood” is a means by through we can provide such a life for ourselves and others.

Why have you chosen the term “livelihoods”? Why not “jobs” or “careers”?

Nearly everyone in this country and the Western world has, wants, or once had, a “job” where they work for someone else and receive a regular paycheck in the form of money they use to pays their living expenses.

If that job is something they have trained relatively extensively for, plan to pursue over an extended period if not their entire lives regardless of who they work for, and rely on to define who they are, then it has been called a “career.”

But, as management guru Tom Peters predicted over a decade ago, most of the “jobs” we now have and the careers we have been trained for won’t exist in the future. So we have chosen to use “livelihood” because we it’s unlikely the future will be about jobs as we know them. We don’t think people will be able to depend on someone else to provide them with a paycheck. Nor do we think most of the training and experience we have now has prepared us to sustain ourselves and our families in the future.

We want to invite people to stop thinking about what they can do to earn money in the form of a paycheck and begin thinking instead about how they can provide for themselves by doing for themselves or through the contributions they make to others in their immediate local community. In the future “payment” for our contributions often won’t even be in dollars, but instead in local currency, in exchange of hours or by trading for products and services.

We’re eager for everyone to shift away from a job-mentality and into a do-it-yourself and service mentality. We believe the concept of a livelihood fits better with current and coming realities.

Please explain “in transition” in the title of your workshop? Aren’t we always in some kind of “transition”?

Yes, we’re always in some type of life transition be it growing up, getting married, changing jobs, having children, moving to a new locale, retiring, getting ill or recovering from illness, etc. But in addition to these more familiar life transitions, we’re also standing in a precarious gap between how our lives have been based on cheap, abundant oil and other natural resources and how life will be when we’ll be required to live within our ecological means. That gap is huge, much larger than most people can even grasp. That is the “transition” we’re referring to.

Already one out of two Americans don’t believe they will experience any benefits from an economic recovery. Still more fret when they drive up to see what the day’s price of gas will be. So millions of people are feeling the effects of the transition now, flailing about, unable to get their feet under them, baffled by how suddenly the world they once knew is no longer available to them. But millions of others aren’t yet affected. They see the changes in our economy as a temporary blip that hasn’t really touched them yet. Collectively though we’re in the gap already. We’re in the transition everyone will experience in time, just on varying schedules.

How will sustainable livelihoods today be different from those “in transition” and in the future?

Many existing jobs still produce a viable income but ultimately, as the transition progresses, they won’t. People who aren’t prepared for the vastly different future ahead can rely on such positions now to buy the time and resources to prepare for what they’ll need to support themselves in future that’s unfolding. If they chose carefully some of these jobs can morph into viable livelihoods later.

There are also a growing number of ways we can support ourselves now by providing products or services that will help our communities get through the transition. Even many of these livelihoods, though, may be of little value ultimately. Ironically this is a dilemma. A lot of the things we’ll be able to rely on post-peak can’t provide us with sufficient livelihoods now or even during the transition.

So in our course we explore paths for all three situations – what we can do right now, what we can do to facilitate the transition, and what we can do ultimately – and how participants can determine the best path for them personally to get from where they are today to sustainable life in the future.

What kind of future is this course preparing people to live in?

There are those who think that technological breakthroughs will enable us to keep growing as we have over that past century. Still others think that by turning to renewable energy and using it a bit more wisely we can maintain life pretty much as it is now. Then there are those think we’re on the brink of total collapse and envision a cataclysmic future filled with violence destruction, disease, and death.

Our course isn’t meant to prepare for any of these three scenarios.

We’re convinced there is ample evidence the first two are not feasible and we don’t believe there is a gun big enough nor a wall strong enough to adequately prepare for the latter. So our course is designed to prepare for a dramatic but gradual energy descent into a simpler but still livable way of life based on joining with our neighbors to create what we call a localized Elm Street Economy.

What is an Elm Street Economy?

Sounding like a doctor standing outside an Intensive Care Unit, the Federal Reserve chief recently described the Wall Street economy as “stabilizing but fragile.” Certainly it has left far too many of us just hanging in on life support. On the other hand, the Main Street Economy as we’ve known it is also barely hanging on. Small mom and pop stores are sinking left and right. Both depend primarily on a global economy that’s based on unsustainable growth.

An Elm Street Economy shifts the locus of life away from growth and from the global market to provide for dependable, sustainable local livelihoods that bring access to basic services and products back to our nearby communities in environmentally sustainable ways.

An Elm Street Economy can flourish in a metro city neighborhood, a suburban sub-division, a small town or a rural village. Though it will look a little different from one locale to the next, of course, with urban Elm Street communities growing food on rooftops, perhaps, instead of backyards and so forth, the characteristics of sustainable local communities will be similar from coast to coast. You can see many of its predominant themes in our logo.

The sustainable livelihoods we feature in the course are selected with this kind of future in mind.

How is it different from the Main Street Economy as so often used in the news and by politicians?

The Main Street Economy alluded to the news is nearly non-existent.

In many ways it’s an anachronism. A reference to a way of life long past. What was once Main Street is now composed mostly of strip malls and franchises. Local small business enterprises have essentially become distribution points for consumer goods that are overwhelmingly produced and brought in from elsewhere – metro, regional, national and global.

Consistent with the Transition Movement that’s taking root worldwide, the Elm Street Economy is one in which we provide in our own local communities and neighborhoods for:

• Local production of food, energy and goods.
• Local development of sustainable commerce, government and culture.
• Reduced energy consumption while improving environmental and social concerns.

What criteria do you use in choosing what livelihoods will be sustainable?

We’ve screened the 200+ livelihoods we list in our course materials through criteria such as whether it:

• Addresses a basic local need that is not dependent on discretionary income
• Can be done independently from home
• Has low overhead costs
• Draws on materials, supplies, and help that primarily requires little or no travel or heavy use of other fossil fuels
• And, of the most important characteristics, will be readily barterable

Of course, not everything one can do now to provide income for their own preparation will meet all these criteria, but the closer one can come to them now, the more easily transferable their current efforts will be later.

Give us some examples of sustainable livelihoods for an Elm Street Economy now, in transition and in the future.

Examples of livelihoods one can earn a decent living at now that can be expected to have usefulness in the future either for pay or barter include:

Chimney cleaning, alternative health of all kinds, security services, drug and alcohol abuse counseling, battery reconditioning, repair and handy services, micro-farming, and tutoring.

Examples of livelihoods one can earn a living from now that will be in even greater demand as people need to transition include:

Renewable energy installation, greenhouse construction and maintenance, green burials, well drilling, permaculture design, herbal pharmacology and cultivating medicinal plants, table top manufacturing.

Some livelihoods we can expect to be needed ultimately in our local neighborhoods and communities but which aren’t necessarily widely in demand there right now include:

Ice making; tanning; milling; wheelwrighting, making concrete, brick, tile, terra cotta; horse-breeding, low energy transport; and personal care activities we can do to nurture one another such as cutting hair, massage, and lice management (which one can actually earn a good living at now).

As you can see there is some transferability over time among many of these livelihoods. This is another of the goals in our selection process. We want to identify as many livelihoods as we can, such as nursing that can provide an income now and continue to have some value in a greatly transformed future.

How do we bridge from supporting ourselves now and to how we’ll be able to support ourselves in the future?

We need to begin by assessing our current situation. Are we prepared now to move into a sustainable way of living? If not, do we have the resources to master the skills we will need to have, learn the trades we will need to rely on, live in a location that will support us? If not, we need to generate income now that we can use to make these kinds of preparations by finding positions that are still financially viable so we can get out of debt and begin using whatever time and resources we do have get ready.

If we’re in a position now to undertake a livelihood that will have longevity in the future then we need to take a deep breath and move ahead, and let go as soon as we can of unsustainable sources of income. We don’t have time to wait. Some of the livelihoods we need to begin shifting into may be financially shaky for now. Our income from them may not be anywhere near what we’ve been used to. So we’ll have to start dramatically simplifying the way we live right away.

The sooner we do, the sooner we’ll find ourselves in a more secure position.

What kind of experiences can we expect to encounter in doing that?

For most of us it will take more time than we’d like to find a bridge to a more sustainable livelihood. We may have to downsize sooner than we expected. We may well need to consider lines of work we wouldn’t have previously been attracted to. We may find ourselves becoming discouraged.

But discouragement is a natural feeling that arises when we take on a highly challenging goal and don’t see the progress we expect.

Certainly what we’re facing today could easily put us in such a situation. If, we shoot so high that we repeatedly fall short of our goals and can’t sense any progress, naturally we will begin to feel discouraged. So we need to focus on attainable, incremental progress toward our goals.

So if we begin to feel discouraged, it’s a sign that we need to step back and aim at a target that we can actually hit for now, something we can make some headway on toward our eventual goals. We need to take a moment to notice and compliment ourselves on what we have accomplished, allow ourselves to feel proud of the movement we have made, and become curious about what we can do next that will take us a step further.

Then, especially when we are working together with others in our community, we can tap into our collective imagination and postpeakliving.com.

Thank you, Carolyn. It’s been a pleasure talking with you and sharing our perspective on what we’ll all needing to do to support ourselves in a sustainable world.

Thank you Sarah, and I want every reader to also know that you wrote the foreword for my 2009 book Sacred Demise: Walking The Spiritual Path of Industrial Civilization’s Collapse. That foreword can be read at the top of the home page of the Speaking Truth to Power website.

[Sarah Anne Edwards, LCSW, PhD Ecopsychologist, provides continuing education courses for helping professionals through the Pine Mountain Institute and directs Let's Live Local, a non-profit organization working to build local resilience. She's the co-author of Middle-Class Lifeboat, and a trainer for the US Transition Initiatives Network.]

CAROLYN BAKER, Ph.D., was an adjunct professor of history and psychology for 11 years and a psychotherapist in private practice for 17 years. Her latest book Sacred Demise: Walking The Spiritual Path of Industrial Civilization's Collapse, is unique in its offering of emotional and spiritual tools for preparing for living in a post-industrial world. Her other books include: Coming Out From Christian Fundamentalism: Affirming Sensuality, Social Justice, and The Sacred (2007), U.S. History Uncensored: What Your High School Textbook Didn't Tell You (2006) and The Journey of Forgiveness (2000). All may be purchased at her site, Speaking Truth to Power. She is available for speaking engagements and author events and can be contacted at carolyn@carolynbaker.net.