Poly- Meta- Perma-

I’ve been thinking through my slow motion response to climate crisis, political instability, ai and post-capitalist doomsterism. For a long time my response has been about exploration of ‘prepping’ – preparing for apocalypse and thinking about the aesthetics of that: digging shelters, collecting non-perishable food and water, wind up radios and lights, solar panels, batteries etc. When I was a kid, I bought a copy of ‘The Nuclear Survival Handbook’ by Barry Popkess from a charity shop, more as a joke than anything else, but the images and content stuck with me… Iodine pills to mitigate against radiation, cooking rodents, that kind of thing.

Staring into that existential abyss for too long is hard to cope with. Amazingly, as of Octobter 2026, even the government is advising we stockpile basic items (food, water, candles etc.) for future emergencies.

It occured to me that uncomplicated abundance and consumption were prerequisites of the machine art of Francis Pacabia, or Warhol’s ‘business art’. These works gloried in the very thing that is destroying us. We’re in such a different cultural space right now – the planet is no longer imagined to be inexhaustable or invulnerable; but these kind of images bubble back up for me now as a kind of hideous after image of the market. They represent our hubris. But also, read differently, they’re also images of what we need to survive. In the case of Picabia we’re going to need to understand basic tools, mechanisms and machines. In the case of Warhol, we may need to stockpile food (and then, move on more positively to subsist by growing for ourselves).

In a way it gave me hope – to move from a ‘prepping’ frame of mind, into a permaculture context – how do we surive and thrive after crisis? The same way we survive and thrive before it: by right sizing our lives to an appropriate scale, and starting to understand how to grow food, keep warm, build things in local, sustainable, co-operative ways.