Happy? New Year

Seems like an increasing miracle every new year that begins against the backdrop of escalating global chaos. My social media feed nowadays contains news from WP birding friends at war in Israel, birding friends struggling in the shadow of the Ukraine situation in Bulgaria, the usual global and climate emergency stuff, planning system meltdown at Beddington and the expectation of financial system collapse, the threat of AI, environmental authoritarianism, social credit and digital currency totalitarianism or the next pandemic. 

Trying to make personal and small enterprise decisions in an unstable global context is a bit of a lottery but the key principles of personal resilience, risk exposure limitation and a diverse and flexible strategy seems to make sense in order to generate better odds.

Our main aim of 2024 is to move into our new family homestead and set up the garden food growing again before the global economy collapses which is all a bit worrying as it might happen tomorrow or in months/years time. In my opinion after the bailouts of the 2008 global financial collapse and the resulting QE and business as usual approach, a new bigger and more devastating financial bubble was inevitable. That bubble has now got a name - the Everything Bubble HERE and when that bubble bursts the world will presumably enter some kind of post-fundamental Capitalist epoch- new AI-powered digital currencies, multi-indices, social credits, carbon credits, natural capital etc. The bubble could deflate slowly or suddenly and the impacts are anyone's guess - new opportunities will appear and old ones will disappear.   

So hopefully before anything too dramatic happens we can get to safe ground and have a bit of land to live off and focus on wider efforts from a safe position.  We also will have a chance to improve the EPC rating of the property and build in some energy self sufficiency to try and get things as cost effective as possible. We hope to move into an area where nature reserves, beaches and other natural resources are within walking distance so if we do experience lockdowns and movement limitations (due to becoming broke!) there could be worst places to be.

If I was still living in an urban or communal setting I would do what I did back then too and do community food growing and local community building around nature and natural resilience. The thing about this stuff is global collapse or not, it still increases personal well being and adds value so you can't lose.  

So the most powerful personal resilience (next to being global elite, engineering the collapse and gorging off the death and destruction that follows) in the face of so many uncertainties is connecting to nature and mainly living off the sustenance that watching birds and wildlife and cultivating nature brings detached somewhat from human systems and costs. While it might seem not a great thing if the global financial system collapses it's almost inevitable that some stress will be taken off  nature as a result and new opportunities will emerge for more people to reconnect to nature. Leaning on nature when the consequences of our collective short-term wiring back fires is one of our best hopes for a happy new year .