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Meet the New Survivalists

Mayans Schmayans. In Vancouver, some are still preparing for the coming apocalypse.

Chantelle Bellrichard 2 Jan 2013TheTyee.ca

Chantelle Bellrichard is a Vancouver-based journalist.

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Bow and arrow future? Philip Yuen belongs to BC Sustainable Outdoor Survivalists (SOS). 'I'm like the guy at the campfire telling you horror stories.'

"We must make plans; who looks not before, finds himself behind." -- Pubilius Syrus, 44 BC

An eloquent maxim. The opening text for Vancouver's first commissioned city plan, 1928. It is the foundation of the city, constructed in the days when oil cost less than five dollars per barrel and the Great Stock Market crash was only written in the stars.

Richard Balfour, architect and strategic planner, is making plans today for the crash he is certain looms near. He is poring over land inventories and soil reports, shortlisting places to resettle not just his family but future generations.

"We're at the risk of losing everything because we won't admit we have to change. That's the sick part. That's what really pisses me off," says Balfour. "And that's what makes me worry for my kids and everybody else."

Balfour is a man of 60-something years with a face that shifts from self-assured to furrowed brow when he speaks. He spends his days studying fresh data confirming his conviction that the end of cheap energy is near, and that even lush, temperate Vancouver will soon be buffeted by increased population, rising seas, skyrocketing food prices.

Politicians be damned. Balfour isn't about to wait for any official to tell him that it is time to head for safer ground. He's looking for a new plot of land to call home, ready to leave behind the Kitsilano abode, snugly nestled behind a wall of foliage, he shares with his wife Patricia and a lonesome lovebird that occasionally calls out from the kitchen.

The day I visit the Balfour home I find it cozy and cluttered inside: tall bookshelves crowded with cookbooks and other texts, family photos littered across the refrigerator door, a sky-lit dining area with a chandelier stuffed with purple candles.

In the backyard, plants spill out of the home and onto the rooftop. A pulley system pokes out of the second-story siding, allowing Balfour to lift his potted plants from ground-to-roof. A greenhouse sits sandwiched between the back porch and the workshop.

Balfour moves around this doomed terrain with no trace of sentiment. Though, as in any move, it is hard to decide what comes and goes. Books: stay. Baby grand piano: go.

When Richard Balfour talks to me about this impending dislocation in advance of calamity, he sounds oddly eager to see it through.

"We've always had it in the back of our mind that it should be done. What happens is, like everybody, life moves along and I can't move fast enough."

Embedded in the future

Despite the fizzling of the Mayan apocalypse, we are living at time when concurrent global crises dominate headlines. Worsening climate reports, housing bubbles, resource bubbles, continental economies melting down -- it's a hot mess of doom.

Richard Balfour is an example of a New Wave Survivalist, a loose-knit tribe of the very worried who are able, in the digital era, to get information and act upon it collectively in ways that Cold War catastrophizers never could have imagined.

While Balfour prepares to leave the city behind, others have decided to make their stand by improving the urban environment, encouraging others to change their behaviour so we can maybe, just possibly, make things better.

Jodi Peters embraced survivalism in the name of food security. She is the kind of person who has a difficult time caring about things that are not alive -- those "static digital things" she says, are of little interest to her.

Over the years Peters has accumulated shared-use of four backyards stretching from Vancouver to Burnaby. It's enough land to boast an impressive stash of dried beans, quinoa, squash, and sacks of potatoes. The bounty is the product of Peters and her arborist husband Jeff.

Peters is tall and slender and wears her hair in a loose ponytail parted down the middle the day I visit. In a teal sweater and printed skirt, she sits, one foot tucked beneath her, pulling dry corn from the cob at the kitchen table.

All together, Peter says, the gardens and aquaponics systems require constant maintenance. In peak growing season she estimates they spend up to 12 hours a week working in the dirt. Peters is unfazed by this. "It feels so good to understand that we could actually grow almost all the food we need to live," she says earnestly.

Reluctant to make grim predictions for the future, Peters is concerned about a number of things when it comes to food security. Like our heavy reliance on food imports -- British Columbia imports over 50 per cent its food supply, a figure that has risen drastically since Canada's commitment to NAFTA in 1998. Peters also points out:

"Global agriculture is not doing well, right now. And with climate change, it's only going to get worse. Because we've actually been farming in a period of relatively stable climate for the last 300 or 400 years."

Teaching the willing to become their own grocer is not only a passion, it is one of Peters' jobs. She works as an instructor at Gaia College, a land management school with an unconventional mission: to cultivate community. She also organizes growing and maintenance at a local community orchard as part of her job at the Environmental Youth Alliance.

Grandpa's garden

Peters was not always a career green thumb (one who happens to breed edible tilapia fish in her dining room). Growing up in Langley produced fond memories of digging her first garden with her grandfather.

The pair started by digging up a small square in the backyard. Peters was in the eighth grade and became captivated with sprouting seeds.

"It started as a total obsession with cucumbers. Like starting them in little planters inside and watching the sprout. I started them way too early and none of them made it into the garden. We grew all sorts of stuff."

Peters' grandfather was diagnosed with Alzheimer's two years later.

For Peters, a university degree led to grad school, where she studied psychology statistics. Her field offered a certain future and, on paper, life looked good.

But it didn't feel that way.

Stuck in a bout of depression, Peters dropped out of university and sought refuge in the garden -- a place of spiritual importance to her. Reconnected to her passion, she left the city behind to study organic farming on Cortes Island for eight months.

"It was just, sort of like, these are such important and basic skills, to keep in human knowledge, to keep alive in people. It can't just sit in books because they don't work in books, because the landscape changes and the climate changes. And if it's not living knowledge it becomes irrelevant really quickly."

Growing food is complicated, something that goes beyond seeds and soil.

Last year Peters fought off an eviction notice from her East Vancouver landlord as a land-use dispute turned ugly. The experience left her and Jeff uprooted and stripped of their most proximate food source. The backyard oasis transformed into a stored pile of materials -- their greenhouse dismantled because it was taking up a parking space.

"It's totally like the aristocracy of Britain who wouldn't let anyone grow anything because they just wanted a great big lawn."

Brave new world

Richard Balfour has co-written a 2007 book with Eileen McAdam Keenan titled Strategic Sustainable Planning: A Civil Defense Manual for Cultural Survival that is crammed with graphs and charts and maps and analyses urging officials to stop investing in obsolete systems like highways and densified cities far from food sources, and instead build light rail infrastructure linking diffused hamlets to precious, protected arable land, all of which should be established safely higher than sea level. In a piece published in The Tyee, Balfour's views were praised by Greenpeace co-founder Rex Weyler as a needed defense "against our own consumption habits and illusions about economic survival."

But commanding into being radically new settlement patterns isn't on the daily to-do list of your average politician. "Eco-Dictator" and "benign member of the Khmer Rouge." Those are a couple of nicknames tossed at Balfour by exasperated officials he peppers with emails rich in prescriptions for avoiding calamity. But his resume makes it impossible to write him off. He helped design for Expo '86, fought to preserve the Agricultural Land Reserve (ALR), and ran war game scenarios through the Vancouver Planning Commission to teach the public about post-oil society.

Balfour commends, and carefully criticizes, the efforts of people like Jodi Peters. He argues that the capacity for people to grow their own food in Vancouver is severely limited by the planning arrangement of the city. It is unrealistic for each person in the city to borrow multiple yards -- like Peters has managed to capture -- to grow their own food.

Put simply: If every family requires one acre of land to grow their own food, then Vancouver is not capable of food security within the confines of the city limit.

An increased land reserve is a possible solution but an unlikely political move. The ALR is under constant threat from developers, infrastructure projects and oil and gas permitting.

Established in 1972 in order to set limits to urban growth, the ALR protects some of the province's most precious farmland. When the NDP rolled out the reserve, Balfour was busy rioting in the city of Athens while, at the same time, working with Greek colonels to redesign the equivalent of Vancouver's West End.

Six months later the government of Greece was toppled and democracy was won.

Within a year, the ALR found itself under the siege of the Socred government. Balfour was back in Vancouver, ready to fight again.

The future is Harrison Lake

Balfour co-authored Strategic Sustainable Planning: A Civil Defense Manual for Cultural Survival as a flicker of optimism against a terrible forecast, wanting to reassure readers that "civilized" survival is possible if we adopt new ways of living. If you ask him why government hasn't moved on his ideas, he will say that a political aversion to "scaring the public" has curbed reasonable planning initiatives.

Nobody knows, for certain, how much the sea could rise, how quickly this will happen or by exactly how much. But levels are rising faster than many climate models predicted. According to an exhaustive report produced for the British government -- the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change -- "by the middle of the century, 200 million people may become permanently displaced due to rising sea levels, heavier floods and more intense droughts."

Balfour reads the implications for his own region this way:

"In the future, if there is a civilization and southwestern B.C. has a city, Vancouver will be a little set of islands. And if there's a seaport, it will be somewhere up at the head of Harrison Lake because that will be the new inlet and there will be a settlement at the top of that."

That is the vision guiding Balfour's decision to move his family far from Vancouver. He prefers not to reveal where he will make his new home, though one may presume it will be to higher ground.

Standard Operating Procedure

If you think Richard Balfour sounds radical in his point of view, move outward towards the fringes of the survivalist scene. There you will find people preparing, in other extreme ways, for their own imagined futures.

It is Saturday night at a White Spot in New Westminster. Half a dozen people have gathered for the second official meeting of the B.C. Sustainable Outdoor Survivalists (SOS). Tonight's agenda: escape plans.

Philip Yuen has pinpointed the region's major exit routes on a Google Map. It is part of a carefully drafted Standard Operating Procedure.

The group disagrees on many things, but members display a serious commitment to getting along together. Yuen, at 38 years old, is among the youngest at the table. He is animated as he talks about his experience in the Canadian Forces. His khaki cargo pants and black boots conceal the fact that he once attended a program for fashion design and Vancouver Film School.

Yuen has been getting ready for economic collapse since 2006. "I'm like the guy at the campfire telling you horror stories," he said. "Nobody believes me."

The spectre of doom he sees on the horizon is economic collapse leading to widespread unemployment, hyperinflation, loan defaults and an urban exodus.

All of this plus a revived and violent Occupy movement.

Studying past plagues, depressions, civil wars -- a number of unfortunate times in human history -- helps Yuen to plan for the future. Earlier this year he told me he's convinced that the Eurozone and American economies will topple sometime in 2012 leading to global chaos shortly after.

"Being prepared is being knowledgeable," said Yuen, who refuses to keep a bank account and trades his cash for physical commodities like gold bars and silver coins.

Yuen has no appetite for a future surviving in destitute Mad Max mode. He is trying to build a community that allows, to borrow a phrase of Richard Balfour's, for "civilized" survival. "Trust is going to be the currency of the future," said Yuen, who has been alone in his survivalist efforts until finding the SOS gang.

It is not unusual to draw lines between the economy and collapse. The American banking crisis and the Eurozone mess exemplify how uncertain the world economies truly are right now.

Yuen's views are supported and challenged by a growing number of economic apocalyptics who discuss their predictions online through a collection of forums and websites.

Check your oil

When Richard Balfour spins his vision of dark times ahead, he talks less about central banking and more about the economics of energy. Our communities are built on a model that assumes access to a cheap and abundant supply of oil.

It's a commodity that we can't fathom parting with. After all, "The motor car is a pleasure-giving device of extraordinary value. With little effort ... the city can secure many miles of pleasure drives of great merit." So stated the original Vancouver plan of the 1920s, explaining, in the process, why the city should be laid out the way it has come to be.

The shape of the future, for Balfour and his eco-tribe, takes root in a wonky diagram based upon Hubbert's Peak Oil theory. Back in 1956, Hubbert predicted that conventional oil production in the United States would peak in the 1970s. People thought he was crazy. But, go figure, the guy was right.

The world oil supply is not limitless. Using estimated reserve levels, along with rates of consumption, some experts argue that the production of conventional reserves has already peaked. According to a forecast by the International Energy Agency, these supplies will never again reach the level of production we had in 2006. The potential of unconventional sources is unknown.

Bill Rees, an emeritus professor at the UBC School of Community and Regional Planning and co-creator of the "ecological footprint" believes not only are we getting close to feeling the harsh effects of peak oil, but we are on track to triggering the collapse of civilization because of self-delusions that allow us to continue on a path of destruction. And while we all need to sleep at night, staying positive could have some downfalls, "Excessive optimism is counterproductive because it makes people inactive," Rees cautions.

Rees, who knows Balfour and shares many of his concerns, has spent a lot of time writing and thinking about the roots of human inaction in spite of a fairly gloomy reality:

"There's a basic cybernetic principle that says this: we cannot regulate our interaction with any aspect of reality that our model of reality does not contain."

582px version of Balfour_TidesMap.jpg
Map of B.C.'s Lower Mainland after a 60-meter rise in sea level, created by Richard Balfour, edited by Erick Villagomez. Source: Re:Place magazine.

Rees uses a simple analogy to explain this principle: It is as if we are trying to fly a 747 jumbo jet using a manual for a Volkswagen: "We're in much deeper trouble than what most people think."

Rees agrees with Balfour that we have the potential to plan for the future, except we're doing all the wrong things -- like extracting oil from Alberta's tar sands to feed "our voracious appetite for more energy," and relying on economic models that ignore climate externalities. He is not alarmed that Balfour is opting to leave town. His own sister purchased a farm in the interior for similar reasons:

"I think it would be fruitless to think that most people could leave the cities and descend on our farmland. We don't have enough of it. On the other hand, certain individuals I think are quite justified in thinking that maybe the time has come to give myself a little bit of an insurance policy."

Rees has since left the world of teaching at UBC. His students may or may not proselytize the words of their mentor, but he's left them with some decent planning tools, just in case.

Out of here

The last time I checked in with Jodi Peters she was happily settled in her new home, gardening catalogs mixed with parenting books. Expecting their first child next spring, Peters and her husband are entertaining the idea of moving to a more rural community.

Philip Yuen was spending his days refining his archery and knife fighting skills, researching world events -- and looking for temporary employment. The survivalist group was having fun testing out their newly purchased two-way radios. Since then Yuen has become unreachable. It's unclear if he's still in the Lower Mainland.

Meanwhile Richard Balfour is still getting ready to check out, but has evolved his plan. Having invested so much in the value of his three-story home, he and his wife are considering lifting it off its foundation and barging it up the coast to the "area of refuge" Balfour has selected. He says there are seven such areas of refuge in British Columbia, that what all have in common is farmable land on hillsides with room to establish communities.

The place where Balfour is thinking about relocating his Kitsilano dwelling is "at least 60 meters above sea level," he says. He realizes that it will take many decades for the oceans to inundate where most British Columbians today reside. It's not like scrambling to get out of town to avoid a tsunami. But the way Balfour sees it, "You don't choose your home just for yourself, but for your generations to come."

Where, then, does Balfour intend to establish this new family colony? As he said when I visited him months ago, "I'm not telling you that. Because if you publish it, then everybody will be coming, too. They'll be saying, 'He's got food.' "  [Tyee]

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