I got an e-mail from a health professional last week, asking me what I thought about the types of training that might be useful to prepare for peak oil. I had been thinking about this issue for some time on a personal level, and thought that I would make some jottings to guide myself (and perhaps others), as well as answering my correspondent?s question.

Dealing with uncertainty
Firstly, let?s consider the setting. We need to acknowledge that the events of the coming decade or two are essentially unknowable. Even though there has been in-depth discussion about the collapse of previous societies (Diamond?s Collapse and Tainter?s The Collapse of Complex Societies spring to mind), there has never been a continent-spanning, interdependent, instantly-linked global civilization like ours. I would contend therefore that although there have been many useful predictions about possible futures (see for instance David Holmgren?s Permaculture: Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability), as well as the example of Cuba (but also Zimbabwe), they are ultimately conjecture. All that we can depend on is that we can?t depend on any one future prediction, no matter how desirable.

The only person you can rely on
So in times of uncertainty one must turn inwards and examine one?s self; after all, if you can?t depend on yourself, then who can you depend on? With this in mind, I believe that the only real, useful and anxiety-lowering way to manage future unpredictability is to manage your own inner environment ? your thoughts, feelings and skills. Psychologists call this having an internal locus of control (being ?the captain of your own ship?). It is having the confidence that you will find a way, no matter what happens. Siebert?s The Survivor Personality discusses this issue, as does Lundin?s 98.6 Degrees: The Art of Keeping Your Ass Alive.

You might also see some of my previous writings on the need to take personal responsibility:

• Personal responsibility and health care after peak oil
• Personal actions to improve your chances of post-peak survival
• Why ?healing? & ?wellness? are different to ?medical care? and what it means for peak oil.

Upgrading your current profession or skills
With that in mind, let?s consider a possible process for picking a peak oil upskilling course. Where possible, think about how your current work or profession might make the transition to a post-peak future. For instance, if you?re a farmer, perhaps you might pursue information about organic farming methods, or start breeding draught-horses. In contrast, if you are currently in a profession that you think won?t make the change to an energy descent future, you might consider changing careers altogether. Keep in mind that you will have gained a lot of ?transferable skills? since you became an adult (no matter what your job description), many of which will stand you in good stead to make the transition.

Minimum knowledge required
We will all need a minimum level of self-care skills and knowledge (like darning a sock or cooking a meal on an open fire) that you can begin to practise now, so don?t despair if you can?t think of anything to do ? just learn the basics. My other initial thoughts are to pick something that appeals to you, or that builds on a current hobby - you need to like something to learn and remember it, especially if you don’t have books and other resources in the future. Remember that any knowledge will be helpful if you know more about a certain topic than anyone else in your local community.

The rest of this article presents a framework that can help you to decide which courses to do, how long they should be, and whether you need formal qualifications or not. You should be able to apply these criteria to everything from choosing an alternative health field to weaving, blacksmithing and farming. A bold statement I know, but let?s see what develops.

A decision-making framework
Siebert says that the people who have survived major challenges and subsequently documented their experiences are those who have remained flexible and creatively used whatever resources were available. I think that the future may be so desperate that we cannot afford to neglect any possibly useful skill or body of knowledge (no matter how unpopular or marginal it seems at the moment). We must be willing to put our biases and prejudices aside.

Professional qualifications versus personal knowledge
You need to differentiate between knowledge that you’ll use for yourself and your family, and that which you?ll offer to your post-carbon community professionally.

The latter group needs more skills / training and (at least at the moment) a formal qualification. The former group you can do just with a book or two and a little practice on willing crash-test dummies (ie your family and close friends).

The main drawback of a formal course is the opportunity cost (time, expense, and learning other things). What does that mean? It means that if you commit to one thing, you can?t do something else at the same time or with the same money, and if you?re studying hard you can?t be working in your veggie garden. A second issue is that if the major societal changes that we all fear begin when you?re half-way through your course, you may never finish it. Still, half-finishing a nursing course gives you a great knowledge base to start from, and allows you to be an important resource for your community if no-one else has any nursing experience.

In contrast, the main reasons in favour of seeking a formal qualification include:

1. Greater depth of information (as opposed to just reading a few books).
2. Regulatory requirements (for instance if you want to change careers soon and become a herbalist).
3. Peer recognition and access to continuing education, courses and conferences.
4. Ability to conduct research, publish results, and write authoritative articles.
5. Greater experience (as a component of a formalised course ? for instance the clinical experience component of a university nursing course). Remember that although knowledge is important, it remains theoretical until put into practice.

Reliance on external supplies and transport
Once you decide on whether you need a formal qualification or not, you next need to consider the amount and cost of supplies required to keep your chosen vocation going. For instance, consider the difference between psychotherapy (no supplies) and herbalism (ongoing supplies).

Because the future is unpredictable, it’s impossible to tell what will happen, and how stable it might be. A corollary is that no-one will be certain if supplies will be available, which ones they will be, in what quantities, or for how long. One of the problems with conventional medicine is its reliance on globalised supply chains that need oil to keep running. Now consider herbalism as currently practised: many practitioners seem to use liquid extracts and capsules that they buy from large wholesalers - in terms of the reliance on oil-fuelled transport there is no real difference between it and conventional medicine! Of course this is different where the herbalist grows their own plants and prepares their own extracts.

There are two possible ways around this supply issue. Firstly, if the best visions are turned into reality, it is likely that organic agriculture / permaculture (including medicinal herb growing) within a local setting will be a dominant method of living. In that case, herbalists, weavers, spinners and other craftspeople might be able to source their supplies locally. Secondly, consider the idea of salvage. There are going to be a lot of rusting motor vehicles (and other oil-age artefacts) hanging around. They will be a great source of steel for the budding blacksmith (not to mention vinyl and fake leather for multiple domestic uses), and may partly overcome the possible lack of raw materials.

Appropriate knowledge and equipment
It is likely that the information that you will need to know for any contemporary course will be ?21^st century? and oil-dependent. So as you learn the information in your chosen area, always consider how you can apply it to a scarce oil future. You should also think about obtaining a basic set of tools and equipment while you can still get them. I would suggest a focus on well-made, reusable (and resharpenable) hand tools rather than power ones, or those that need ?consumables? (for example a hand drill, wood plane, files and hand saw rather than a power sander, cordless drill and circular saw).

I have noticed that the level of skill and types of techniques described in books published between 1880 and 1920 are approximately ideal in terms of their level of technology and lack of reliance on oil. Why? This was the period when predominantly ?oil-less? craftsmanship was at its peak, before descending into the oil-drenched future. So if you want to be a herbalist, buy some books from that period and learn how to prepare remedies from basic ingredients. Likewise, if you want to be a blacksmith, learn how to make your own tools, forge, and bellows.

Putting it all together
I have designed some simple tables with worked examples to hopefully make the decision-making process clearer. There is also a table that allows you to compare the costs and time commitments of specific courses once you?ve picked a broad discipline. You can download the file by clicking here to see the download page: PeakOilUpskilling

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So why do people go into a type of shock when they first hear about and accept the implications of peak oil? It’s the same as when you break bad news to someone - in both cases a grief reaction is initiated as they begin the process of dealing with their loss (by the way, nowhere is the journey more important than the destination than when healing grief - the journey IS the process of healing).

A grief reaction happens in response to an actual or perceived loss. Grief is the way that a biopsychospiritual being makes sense of the pain of loss, eventually resolves it, finds some sort of meaning, and move on with life despite what has happened.

You can define loss widely as any threat, either real or perceived, to the integrity of that same biopsychospiritual being. So a person goes through a grief reaction after the death of a loved one, but also after a limb amputation, moving house, losing a job, or experiencing a spiritual crisis [for example a religious person may mourn the loss of their relationship with God if they lose faith or feel that they have been abandoned, etc].

Pretend for a moment that your spouse gets a job in a new city, and you decide as a family to move to the new location. If you are ATTACHED to where you currently live-the people you know and the lifestyle you lead-then you are likely to experience a grief reaction, beginning once you accept that the move will be ‘real’. From the existential viewpoint, the energy that you have invested beginning and maintaining the attachment that you have formed must be released when the attachment ends - you feel the absence of the reciprocal energy loss as the emptiness of grief.

Another aspect of the pain of a grief reaction is that your subconscious mind is saying that it doesn’t know how it will cope once the thing is gone. The grieving process allows the subconscious to heal over the hole left by the lost thing, by coming to terms with the loss and working out ways that it can repair its “intactness” and regain safety and normal function.

So when someone hears about peak oil for the first time, and begins to understand the implications and possible future events, a grief reaction can very easily occur. Why? Because we have become attached to this life that we live - its comfort, convenience, relative safety and luxury. And suddenly we discover that a plausible and near threat exists. And that we could possibly lose a lot of the things we have grown used to. And it could happen within our lifetime. Maybe very soon. In effect our subconscious has been woken from its somnolence and harpooned with the hard reality of the massive losses that could follow oil peaking, including:

• Loss of life (self, loved ones, friends, co-workers, pets)
• Loss of health
• Loss of the future (for self and especially children - both born and unborn)
• Loss of dreams and ambition
• Loss of purpose (why bother if the world is going to end?)
• Loss of control (especially of life events)
• Loss of lifestyle and material goods
• Loss of comfort and laziness
• Loss of faith in God (depending on ideology and point of view)

No wonder people experience a grief reaction. But it is only those people who understand the implications and ACCEPT them that really have the reaction. Which brings us to coping styles and the stages of grief. DENIAL is a very effective (and commonly used) strategy: just look at our politicians. SELF-EXCLUSION is a subtype of denial (”I could never get lung cancer, even though I smoke.”). Denial is, according to Elisabeth Kubler-Ross (author of the book “Death and Dying”) the first phase of grief. Her stages are:

1. Denial and Isolation
2. Anger
3. Bargaining
4. Depression
5. Acceptance
6. Hope

In a previous posting on Peak Oil Medicine, Jim Barson also quoted the work of Kubler-Ross in his article on people’s reactions to peak oil. Her ideas about the stages of grief have proven themselves invaluable when counselling the bereaved, and I think that they will also be very important for us to understand how people might react to the implications of peak oil. They should also allow us to design educational strategies that anticipate and subsequently overcome the denial stage of grieving, thereby helping ever larger numbers of people to understand and prepare for peak oil.

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I?ve been thinking about how one might deal with anxiety as we transition to a post-oil world. Obviously it depends on the speed of change and the degree of social stability, but it?s fair to say that the ?age of anxiety? that we are in now probably won?t be finishing any time soon.

I have been most pre-occupied with how primitive societies dealt with anxiety. Did anxiety exist as we know it? Did the level of violence prevalent in much of our history raise or lower anxiety levels? On the one hand, there was the ever-present threat of the appearance of some horde ready to rape and pillage. On the other, violence was used routinely to settle disputes. Now, assuming that one was the victor in such a dispute, was your anxiety lessened after you ?fixed? the problem? Or did you worry incessantly about a payback attack?

I presume that the processes that emerged as primitive societies attempted to make sense of their surroundings (for example rituals and sacrifices) may have been a response to anxiety, and an attempt to lower it. Take as an example the uncertainty of the weather. A sacrifice or ceremony in the name of the rain god would have displaced some of the anxiety onto an invisible deity, thereby reducing personal worry. And if the rains failed to come, and presuming you survived, did your personality remain fairly intact because you?d done all you could?

I also think that anxiety must have conferred a survival advantage, due to its prevalence in our society. The release of adrenaline and other hormones, as part of the fight or flight response, obviosuly helps one survive threatening encounters. I wonder if anxiety was an integral part of that (for example by increasing alertness and arousal), or rather an unwelcomed side effect that impaired performance?

I?m not sure of the answers to the questions I?ve posed. There must have been some people better at dealing with anxiety than others, and some societies, locations, and periods of time where the degree of personal safety, food, water etc was high and personal risks relatively low.

But also consider this - you live in a small village in a mud hut somewhere. And while the Mongol hordes aren?t over the next hill, there is a significant degree of violence in your area, directed at all groups in the population. And the violence has been going on for years, and is unlikely to stop any time soon. How do you go about your daily routine with calmness and peace of mind? How do you nurture a family? Are you able to get a good sound sleep at night?

I?ve done a few Google searches but haven?t really found any information that can help. I?m going to have a look at Victor Frankl?s book Man?s Search for Meaning as a possible source of inspiration, but I would also be grateful for any contributions you can make. Just click add a comment at the top of the post to contribute your opinion or reference material. I?ll be thinking about this topic over the next few weeks and will write some more about it as I develop my ideas - check back soon.

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