Here is an interview posted at henandharvest.com on Jan 14th, 2009, conducted as part of the process of writing A Nation of Farmers, by Sharon Astyk and Aaron Newton, which is available for pre-order now and will be published in March of 2009 by New Society Publishers. An edited version of this interview appears in the book.
In the interview, Albert says,
I think the key theme that I’m harping on these days when I go out and talk or lecture or give permaculture courses or speak to groups of students is that what we need more of is resilience. That’s essentially the quality of defense in depth that allows a community to provide for most of its essential needs: food, energy, water, raw materials, from multiple sources, most of them local. So that in the event of large-scale system failures, collapse is averted because there’s smaller-scale, local community resilience, and that has the wherewithal to fend for itself.
Albert blogs at The Great Change. His Financial Collapse Survival Guide and Cookbook is now available in Kindle format from Amazon.com.
2 users commented in " Financial Collapse: An Interview with Albert Bates "
Follow-up comment rss or Leave a TrackbackHej, Albert! Good luck in launching sustainable lifeboats from the Titanic. Thanks for keeping the farmacy open
Val
Ivan Illich wrote along time ago:
I can only conjecture on how the breakdown of industrial society will ultimately become a critical issue. But I can make rather firm statements about the qualifications for providing guidance within the coming crisis. I believe that growth will grind to a halt. The total collapse of the industrial monopoly on production will be the result of synergy in the failure of the multiple systems that fed its expansion. This expansion is maintained by the illusion that careful systems engineering can stabilize and harmonize present growth, while in fact it pushes all institutions simultaneously toward their second watershed. Almost overnight people will lose confidence not only in the major institutions but also in the miracle prescriptions of the would-be crisis managers. The ability of present institutions to define values such as education, health, welfare, transportation, or news will suddenly be extinguished because it will be recognized as an illusion.