REAL Green is about a journey and the behavior during that journey that manifests itself in the building up of localism. REAL Green is green prepping which is a hybrid prepping of enhancing localism to boost resilience and sustainability. Normal prepping is often about isolation with a bunker mentality. REAL Green recognizes the need for strategies to protect your local from outside shocks but the key is recognizing that no amount of prepping will ensure survival. Instead REAL Green recognizes that shocks can vary with the shock of the steady decline of the planet and human system being a priority. Addressing this type of shock also enhances one’s ability to deal with specific shocks that are more dramatic and more localized.
The journey is first and foremost one of behavior, attitudes, and lifestyles. One of the most important aspects to this mental condition is the acceptance of decline with the corresponding pessimism but a pessimism that is optimistic. This juxtaposition is because the journey that is a way of life creates meaning and hope. The meaning is active efforts at survival strategies. This is an art lost on the modern human. Our ancestors lived the constant threat of a collapse in their local. Back then globalism was not present to jump in and mitigate localized failures. The hope comes from feeling your preparedness will allow a better chance of survival.
REAL Green is more than the preoccupation with decline and collapse because it is a green way of life. This green way of life involves permaculture strategies, embraced simplicity, and restoration of nature in the local. This means even if the techno optimists are correct and the human experiment will succeed long into the future a REAL Green who embraces decline is still a success because of the rewards of permaculture and localism. Real Green is for everyone and every local because it is a way of life that seeks relative change in hybridization of the old and new. The relative part allows anyone to adapt and mitigate their local away from delocalization and towards localism. It allows a guilt reduction and a way to address helplessness. REAL Green acknowledges and accepts we are carbon trapped in path dependencies so there is no way to transcend this determinism. This difference allow meaning to all adaptation and mitigation strategies. It allows a spiritual dignity of decline when one realizes this decline is the force present with the planet but also human systemness.
So, this REAL Green journey is a spiritual one that manifests itself in action. Prepping and permaculture come from the realization the status quo is going in the wrong direction. Limits and diminishing returns are recognized. More efficiency and power do not make life better beyond a point. This then leads to efforts at scaling. This scaling is relative to a local, the people in that local and one’s position in that local. This influences an attempt to lower one’s footprint for the planet but also resilience. This is done respecting the fact we are trapped so one can only disengage so much from the delocalization of modern life. Most can’t quit their job or move. Those who can should if it is determined that a local and their community is not a positive one.
REAL Green is economic. Embracing permaculture, prepping, and localization means less economic return. The old ways of carbon capture involve small value returns that require much more labor. Therefore, REAL Green is hybrid and involves relative efforts. You will have to remain status quo too and this means behavioral strategies are essential. You are going to be poorer in things but richer in value. You will need to triage out the superfluous to get lean. This leanness is boosted by the redundancy of prepping. Stocking up and adding equipment that is not immediately put to work has a cost. This lowers the return to REAL Green, but it also offers insurance and strength. The key becomes the balance of the status quo with scaling. Each local and individual has a different profile, but many similarities exist. This involves farming but also home economics and crafts.
Advanced REAL Green becomes a monastery of knowledge and things that is a seed bank for future change. The future is our youth and they will need education. Once the basics of REAL Green scaling are accomplished and there is a functionality to the effort then efforts at training and restoration can be applied to neighbors and nearby space. This must often be done in stealth because it is an alternative lifestyle that carries a risk of being seen as nutter. Be careful in how much is revealed. The gift of REAL Green is for the awakened to planetary and human decline not status quo promoters. These promoters are both green and brown. Fake greens want affluence and green and this is not green. Browns want whatever produces growth. Both mindsets are delusional about limits and decline. They can be harnessed to enhance a REAL Green local because REAL Green is about using the best products and practices of the status quo of delocalization to enhance the old-world ways proven for a millennium of human survival. Instead of globalism destroying the local in delocalization a REAL Green uses these delocalizing forces to boost the local.
Finally, this is about humility to the planet and to your significant others. The humility to the planet is the understanding the planet acquiesces your living. Second is the fact that you are awakened to acceptance and honest science means it is your duty to be other oriented. You are tasked with helping others to be REAL Green not as one preaches a religion or a cult because REAL Green is local and individual, it is about offering an add-on to one’s existing higher power meaning by including nature and the decline process into their meaning. The humility comes with being a shaman. A shaman allows the planet to speak through them and that power is not for their own possession. This is important because one usurps this planetary power for one’s own gain it is lost.
“The Four Dimensions of Change”
https://tinyurl.com/voqoucr resilience
“The first dimension consists of “holding actions,” that is, efforts to slow down the damage of our current ecologically-destructive consumptive society. In essence, saving what we can of Earth and biodiversity and “caring for those that have been damaged” by “the unraveling of our social fabric.” While essential, these are defensive acts, as Macy and Johnstone explain. “For every acre of forest protected, many others are lost,” and therefore will never, alone, get us to a Great Turning… The second dimension is one of “Life-sustaining systems and practices.” These are the efforts to transform our cultures to reorient them on sustainability instead of consumerism and growth. I’ve explored this dimension for years and they occur on a vast array of scales, from the micro- to the macro… “these new structures won’t take root and survive without deeply ingrained values to sustain them.”… Cultivating and sustaining these values is the third dimension, the “Shift in Consciousness.” In the Yale article, Buzzell described it this way: “Raise your level of consciousness. And that could be getting more scientific information, or it could be doing some kind of consciousness practice like meditation or perhaps spending time by yourself alone out in nature.”… We take part in this third dimension of the Great Turning when we pay attention to the inner frontier of change, to the personal and spiritual development that enhances our capacity and desire to act for our world. By strengthening our compassion, we give fuel to our courage and determination. By refreshing our sense of belonging in the world, we widen the web of relationships that nourishes us and protects us from burnout. In the past, changing the self and changing the world were often regarded as separate endeavors and viewed in either-or terms. But in the story of the Great Turning, they are recognized as mutually reinforcing and essential to one another… But in this case the fourth dimension could simply be time. Our culture exacerbates time stress in myriad ways—from obsession with aging and mortality, to “buy now” advertising and constant tech upgrades, to poorly communicated environmental warnings like we have just “12 years to limit climate catastrophe.” But truthfully this may all be counterproductive and anxiety-producing, and frankly, is just wrong. The window to “save the planet” probably closed 40 or 50 years ago… Instead, we need to look at this as a lifelong journey (or even our own personal hero quests) rather than a sprint. And as we embark on these journeys, we have to ask ourselves: How, over the course of my lifetime, will my actions, my relationships, my work, and words help in healing Gaia?… In that process, we must also recognize that the only scale to measure this should be oriented on you—on your position in society”
REAL Green Adaptation 
Great article with very good points! Beat the rush & prep now. 😏
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