John Shuttleworth, Founder of Mother Earth News, Interview Part II

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PLOWBOY: That doesn't sound good. Not good at all.

SHUTTLEWORTH: Well that's what I expect to happen — in some variation — if we continue our present policy of "muddling through" while we attempt to recreate the windfalls of the Great Frontier by magic. On the other hand, it doesn't have to be that way at all. Not if we listen to men like M. King Hubbert who, as you'll recall, warned us more than 25 years ago that we'd eventually suffer a "debacle" if we didn't stabilize our population and learn to operate society on renewable resources.

PLOWBOY: Do you think we'll do that'?

SHUTTLEWORTH: I hope we will but , no, 1 don't think we will.

PLOWBOY: And so the slide you envision is inevitable.

SHUTTLEWORTH: I believe it is. But that may not be quite as bad as it sounds. Most of the known world at the time went through roughly the same kind of experience once before, you know. It was called the Dark Ages ... and a fair number of people managed to stay alive back then. A few even prospered on a minor scale and some — although certainly not all — of the arts and crafts and skills and books and knowledge amassed by man before the Dark Ages were preserved during that troubled period and passed on down through the centuries that followed.

So we might do well to examine that last Dark Age in an effort to learn how we can survive the coming Dark Age with some comfort and grace. And, if we do, it seems to me we find that our best bet is the immediate construction of small, decentralized, self contained, agrarian communities that can — if need be — be defended. Such communities, after all, were the most important "secret weapons" — they were called "monasteries" and "walled towns" — used by the survivors of that earlier Dark Age.

Only this time, we should go those previous survivors one better. We should begin building our communities right now and we should make them completely operational on nothing but renewable resources ... solar energy, wind power, locally grown trees, recycled metal, etc. And maybe, just maybe, if we build enough of these self contained agarian towns fast enough ... and if we immediately put some rational population control into effect ... and if we make up our minds that that's the way the world has to be run from now on ... then maybe we can head off the next Dark Age before it has a chance to head us off.

PLOWBOY: That's a lot of "maybes" and "ifs."

SHUTTLEWORTH: Yes, it is. And I don't like it any better than you do. I often tell people that I feel as if I'm constantly being forced to come up with answers to questions that should never have been asked in the first place. Or, to quote that fine ole gospel song, "I don't feel at home in this world anymore."

I'm still trying to do the same things that Jane and I set out to do five years ago when we founded the Mother Earth News: [1] help little people take back control of their own lives and [2] ease us all into placing the interests of the planet over and above the personal greed that contemporary society rewards so lavishly.

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