The point of reducing your personal consumption of anything (water, meat, fast fashion, plastic, etc) IS NOT because you personally have the power to prevent or reverse climate change. You don’t. I don’t. It’s 100 rich assholes making earth unsuitable for the other 7 billion

The point IS to prepare now for a further collapsed society where the every day things we rely on are gone or rationed

My parents remembered the gas rationing in the 1970s. I don’t know the exact details, but I think you were only allowed to fill your car in certain days. Odd numbered license plates MWF, even numbered TThS, something like that

Ask Flint, and Native American reservations around the country, about water rationing. Some communities in the US have NEVER had safe clean water, something I’ve had access to almost all my life at the flick of a tap

I read a woman’s memoir about living in communist Yugoslavia (I think, I only remember that it definitely wasn’t Russia) and she talked about the million recipes developed to try to make potatoes interesting. Stocking up on toilet paper when it was available.

You and I and a million other people could leave our homes and go live in caves and drink only dew and eat only lichen and go naked and climate change would still happen

But we can build skills and invest in alternatives that make sense for our lives now. I’m disabled, I need my car. But I can buy used instead of new when possible, I can live my life closer to sunlight hours and get used to darkness at night, I can get ready in small ways

No one can do everything, and the people who tell you that YOU CAN AND YOU MUST are probably trying to sell you their book or beeswax wraps or whatever.

But we can make small changes to prepare for further collapse

Fuck those food stamp challenges. If you’ve been on food stamps, you already know. If you REALLY want to stretch your imagination and you’ve always been fairly privileged with access to food and beverages, look around your house and see what you could eat w no electricity, no gas

What can you eat when the granola bars run out? What can you store without a refrigerator? What if you lived in an apartment building with 20 units, and you all had to share one chest freezer?

Don’t take your prep/collapse advice from people trying to sell you something. And especially don’t listen to people who have no plan for taking care of the sick, young, old, disabled, etc. WE ARE NOT ACCEPTABLE CASUALTIES

Meet your neighbors, learn to share, probably figure out what kind of passive water filter system works beat for you, make small changes that are sustainable for YOU. FOR YOU. Make the changes that work for your specific needs and limitations

Guilt and shame is not going to stop climate change. Probably nothing is. We’re going to have to learn to live in a different world. And people are going to die. Hopefully not me. Hopefully not you. All we have is each other, so we have to look out for each other