The Great Outdoors -- Peak oil, energy descent... and camping!

Sun Mar 8 19:49:41 GMT 2009

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#! please forward to anyone you think would be interested !#

The Great Outdoors:
A practical approach to learning the skills of energy descent... outdoors!

New web site launches Monday 9th March -- http://www.fraw.org.uk/outdoors/

The Great Outdoors is a initiative by The Free Range Network and Paul Mobbs on 
the simplest route that people have to learn how to reduce their consumption 
and practice the skills required for a low impact lifestyle -- living 
outdoors.

The Great Outdoors arose out of ideas developed from the Free Range Network's 
Less is a Four Letter Word initiative. We had to solve the problem of 
communicating the need for change encapsulated in the question, "in a world of 
excess consumption and luxury, how do you develop a means of teaching people 
to live simply?"

It's actually quite difficult to communicate these ideas because they represent 
such a divergent view of the world from the view that dominates our lives 
today -- that more is better. To find a suitable means to deliver this message 
in a clear and unambiguous way we've had to be quite inventive in designing a 
format to get these points across. After much deliberation we hit upon a quite 
novel approach -- we go camping!

The focus of The Great Outdoors initiative is communicating the most basic of 
skills that are essential to life -- cooking, making fire, heating water and 
finding shelter -- so that we can rediscover our potential as 'human animals'; 
functional beings who can look after their own needs irrespective of what's 
happening around them. What fifty years of consumerism has done for Britain is 
de-skill its citizens; if we look at the practical skills possessed by our 
grandparents or great grandparents, by comparison people today have only the 
vaguest idea of how to manage without mains services and ready-prepared food.

It's not just that camping offers you a way to learn the skills of simple 
living by living simply. Camping, or just relaxing on a long walk in the 
countryside, encourages you to slow down, sit back, and operate at the speed 
of the natural world rather than that of our 'technological society' -- and 
this is a far more effective means of reducing energy use and carbon emissions 
than any gadget that you can buy!

Whilst we might often use the term "simple" to describe this approach, when 
say "simple" we do not mean easy or painless. What we mean is that, given the 
various options available, for the average person today their quickest option 
to explore what skills they have, what skills they lack, and finding a cheap 
and easy means of addressing these problems is to practice camping -- perhaps 
conventionally at first but then progressively decreasing the level of input 
required to support themselves.

There are two sides to the process of transition to a lower energy way of 
living:

Firstly, we need to reduce our physical demand for energy and resources. The 
idea of "green consumption", "sustainable consumption" or the "green new deal" 
is spurious -- present ideas of how we can "go green" whilst keeping our 
present lifestyle and patterns of consumption are based on principles which 
not only do not take into account the future problems with energy supply, but 
purely in physical terms they are technologically unattainable. Instead we 
must physically reduce consumption and that requires a real-terms change in 
the way we live our lives. To make this transition we need to re-skill 
ourselves to support our lives with our own physical "life energies" rather 
than rely upon highly inefficient external energy sources.

Secondly, we need to change our psychological outlook on how we relate to our 
lives (as they have been and as they might soon be), society and the natural 
environment. That's actually quite difficult to do because in the UK we have no 
comparable, low energy options to contrast our present lifestyles with. Even 
the present offerings from most mainstream environmental and alternative 
technology groups are based on the premise of maintaining our present 
lifestyles, but we merely shift from fossil to non-fossil energy sources 
(which, for a variety of reasons, is physically not possible). Understanding 
this concept is difficult in a community hall or front room, but if you live 
outdoors for a few days -- most importantly, you slow down and disconnect from 
the large-scale consumption system -- these issues become more perceptible, 
and hence manageable, so that we can understand how we might adapt our lives 
and accommodate the changes required.

The most important message from the initiative is this -- We all must realise 
a fundamental truth, which presently the mainstream environmental movement 
fails to convey, despite the evidence to support it: You cannot consume your 
way out of a crisis of consumption!

For the average person, pressured by work (or lack of work) and debt, the 
simple and cheap option of "going camping" offers the best way to learn not 
only the simple skills of self-reliance, but also to find the time, space and 
quietness in order to envision a new way of living for themselves, their 
family and their community.

There are presently three segments to The Great Outdoors initiative:

# The 'Great Outdoors' Sheets
A new series of ten sheets/handouts (three more will be added by June) 
produced by the Free Range Network on issues related to camping and energy 
descent. Although the aim of the sheets is to improve your outdoors skills, 
the focus in the sheets in on the basic skills required to live in a way that 
utilises less resources. You can find the sheets on the Free Range web site at 
- -- http://www.fraw.org.uk/download/ebo/index.shtml#outdoors 

# The Presentation
The presentation has been developed with Paul Mobbs (who presents it) and 
provides the context for why these changes are necessary; in short, get 
camping or else! The presentation outlines the current stresses in the global, 
and the UK, energy system, and why energy production is going to be a critical 
factor in the "recovery" from the present economic recession. It then outlines 
why going camping is such an excellent physical and psychological tutor of the 
skills for energy descent, and proposes some methods for how people can use 
camping to extend their own skills for self-reliance. Details about the 
presentation (which will be available on-line from around June onwards) can be 
found on the Free Range web site at -- 
http://www.fraw.org.uk/outdoors/presentation/

# The Weekend Workshop
The experimental "weekend workshop", of which there were a few during 2008, 
has been the platform where The Great Outdoors concept was developed. The Free 
Range Network are now offering to assist in organising similar events in order 
to help groups develop their outdoor skills. Details about the workshop can be 
found on the Free Range web site at -- 
http://www.fraw.org.uk/outdoors/workshop/

Over the Summer of 2009 we hope to organise a few events to continue our work 
on the 'Great Outdoors' theme. It is possible that we may also organise an 
informal trek sometime in the Autumn. For details of these events see the Free 
Range events page -- http://www.fraw.org.uk/events/

Finally, there is some outstanding in the work yet to be finalised and 
published. This new material should be finalised by June 2009, and we'll make 
it available via the web site.

For an introduction to the issues related to energy descent and peak oil/gas 
see the Energy Beyond Oil Project's main web site -- 
http://www.fraw.org.uk/ebo/

For more information on the Free Range Great Outdoors initiative contact:
Paul Mobbs -- email mobbsey at gn.apc.org or phone 01295 261864.

Finally, Paul Mobbs and the Free Range Network would like to thank The Green 
House in Llandeilo for their support in completing and publishing our 'Great 
Outdoors' research.

- -- 

"We are not for names, nor men, nor titles of Government,
nor are we for this party nor against the other but we are
for justice and mercy and truth and peace and true freedom,
that these may be exalted in our nation, and that goodness,
righteousness, meekness, temperance, peace and unity with
God, and with one another, that these things may abound."
(Edward Burroughs, 1659 - from 'Quaker Faith and Practice')

Paul's book, "Energy Beyond Oil", is out now!
For details see http://www.fraw.org.uk/ebo/

Paul Mobbs, Mobbs' Environmental Investigations
3 Grosvenor Road, Banbury OX16 5HN, England
tel./fax (+44/0)1295 261864
email - mobbsey at gn.apc.org
website - http://www.fraw.org.uk/mei/index.shtml

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