Mod­ern trans­porta­tion, agri­cul­ture and ener­gy pro­duc­tion have brought us to the brink of the 2‑degrees Cel­sius thresh­old — the lim­it sci­en­tists say glob­al warm­ing can reach before it trig­gers cat­a­stro­phe. Even if imple­ment­ed, the last-ditch agree­ment at the lat­est U.N. Cli­mate Con­fer­ence may not be enough to avert it.

It would be very positive to see a generation learning to use their hands and be skilled again in terms of resilience—both personal and community.

As we face esca­lat­ing heat waves, fires, floods, droughts and ani­mal extinc­tions, how human­i­ty can sur­vive is up for debate. Some peo­ple are stock­pil­ing canned beans. Oth­ers say it’s more com­pli­cat­ed — but that sur­vival­ists may have some­thing to teach us.

Andy George, Min­neapo­lis-based host of the YouTube series ​“How To Make Every­thing,” spent six months and $1,500 mak­ing a sin­gle sand­wich from scratch — cur­ing his own cheese, bak­ing his own bread, slaugh­ter­ing a chick­en — then sank his teeth into the sand­wich and declared it mere­ly ​“not bad.”

“It’s one thing to make sure you have food to sur­vive, but anoth­er to be able to make your favorite sand­wich or dessert or to have a book to read,” says George. ​“True sur­vival­ism involves pre­serv­ing the aspects of our cul­ture that we value.”

Do we need to sac­ri­fice some parts of civ­i­liza­tion to sur­vive as a species? If so, how do we get there? Should we focus on indi­vid­ual sur­vival? Work togeth­er to revive old skills? Move back to the land? Or, as jour­nal­ist Leigh Phillips argues in his book Aus­ter­i­ty Ecol­o­gy & the Col­lapse-Porn Addicts: A Defence of Growth, Progress, Indus­try and Stuff, do we need ​“a pro-indus­tri­al, pro-growth left” rather than ​“hair-shirt­ed, anti-devel­op­ment greenery”?

For answers, we turned to George and two oth­er pro­gres­sives explor­ing sur­vival­ism. One is Kim Holtan Lang, a psy­chother­a­pist in Ver­mont who, over 10 years’ time, exper­i­ment­ed with prim­i­tive liv­ing in the wild. Our oth­er pan­elist is Rob Hop­kins, a British per­ma­cul­ture activist who found­ed the Tran­si­tion Net­work, com­posed of towns that ​“have start­ed up projects in areas of food, trans­port, ener­gy, edu­ca­tion, hous­ing, waste, arts, etc., as small-scale local respons­es to the glob­al chal­lenges of cli­mate change, eco­nom­ic hard­ship and shrink­ing sup­plies of cheap energy.”

Kim and Andy, you’ve both tried to for­go con­tem­po­rary tools and tech­nolo­gies. How hard is it?

ANDY: If some­body out in the woods tried to fol­low my direc­tions lit­er­al­ly, they would die. Because it would take them six months to make a sand­wich, and they would starve, and it would take them 10 months to make their own cloth­ing, and they would freeze to death.

KIM: Sur­vival with no tools, no shoelaces or con­tain­ers: That’s pret­ty intense. If you’re stand­ing next to a dead elk, and you’ve nev­er done this before, it’s pret­ty shock­ing. If we all dashed out into the woods to try and live that way, it wouldn’t real­ly be viable.

Giv­en the dif­fi­cul­ties, why try?

KIM: It would be very pos­i­tive to see a gen­er­a­tion learn­ing to use their hands and be skilled again in terms of resilience — both per­son­al and com­mu­ni­ty. That aspect has much to offer young people.

ROB: For me, the clas­sic head-for-the-hills-with-four-years-of-beans-and toi­let-paper-and-firearms mod­el isn’t real­ly a solu­tion. Sur­vival skills are impor­tant. But part of the big work is ask­ing how we bring peo­ple clos­er togeth­er. You can bring those skills into the places where peo­ple live, and that can stim­u­late new enter­pris­es and net­works. Here in Totnes, Eng­land, we have start­ed a num­ber of com­mu­ni­ty social enter­pris­es. We’ve crowd­fund­ed to build, for the first time in 100 years, the infra­struc­ture to mill local­ly grown grain. This eco­nom­ic local­iza­tion approach cre­ates jobs — and good food. This gives us more con­fi­dence that if we’re faced with a prob­lem, we have the skills to respond. But also, there’s huge poten­tial there for reimag­in­ing, redream­ing and rebuild­ing the econ­o­my of the place where we live so it’s appro­pri­ate for the times we’re mov­ing into.

KIM: My expe­ri­ence is more of what hap­pens when you’re on your own in the woods or with one oth­er per­son. I’ve gone out with just a knife and a tarp. It’s very expe­ri­en­tial, very iso­lat­ed. There’s a lot of phys­i­cal, men­tal and emo­tion­al things hap­pen­ing, and those are trans­fer­able. The num­ber one sur­vival skill, in my opin­ion, is atti­tude. That can either keep you alive or it can kill you. What Rob is say­ing about bring­ing these skills back real­ly res­onates with me. What you learn out there are truths that are trans­fer­able to society.

So do we need to go back to a pre­civ­i­liza­tion or sim­ply a pre-extrac­tivist way of life? Or, as Leigh Phillips argues, should we bar­rel ahead with ​“growth, progress, indus­try and stuff”?

KIM: There are plen­ty of places on earth where life is trib­al. I don’t think we’re ever going to get pre-any­thing. So it depends what we’re call­ing civ­i­liza­tion. I’m not anti-resource use, because you need resources to sur­vive. We can’t live if we can’t make tools.

We can exist and do a bet­ter job of stew­ard­ing our forests, water­sheds and resources. We haven’t learned how to not poi­son our water and our children.

ROB: I think the idea that we can go back, that any­body wants to go back, is ludi­crous, because it’s impos­si­ble. It comes down, for me, to this idea of what is progress. My argu­ment is that we should be respond­ing to the cli­mate cri­sis by sug­gest­ing a mod­el of progress based on lim­its, and not on eco­nom­ic growth — a whole dif­fer­ent way of mea­sur­ing progress. Some argue that progress is nuclear pow­er sta­tions and air­planes, and with­out those we’re some­how throw­ing civ­i­liza­tion out with the bath­wa­ter. When we talk about progress, we first need to look at many of the indige­nous peo­ple who don’t live in so-called devel­oped ways, who are hav­ing this mod­el of devel­op­ment forced on them, and say, ​“That’s not progress, as far as we’re con­cerned” — like the buen vivir approach in South America.

So it’s not about say­ing, ​“Can we go back­wards?” There are many things that I cer­tain­ly would not want to go back to. In Totnes, when we start­ed the Tran­si­tion move­ment, we did oral his­to­ry inter­views with peo­ple who remem­bered the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, when we used a lot less ener­gy, a lot less import­ed food, and so on. Peo­ple were delight­ed, for exam­ple, that we no longer used coal ser­vic­ing and that the wash­ing machine had been invent­ed. But also, peo­ple missed grow­ing up in a town where food was grow­ing every­where. It brought a qual­i­ty to life that we’ve just discarded.

It’s about how do we move for­ward in a way that’s most appro­pri­ate to the chal­lenges we have, which is cut­ting car­bon emis­sions 10 per­cent every year to have any chance of avoid­ing run­away cli­mate change, as the Tyn­dall Cen­tre for Cli­mate Change Research argues. That should shift our think­ing to what we imag­ine is pos­si­ble ver­sus what we keep doing because it’s what we’ve always done.

ANDY: In some sens­es I’m try­ing to be that per­son who goes into the woods by him­self try­ing to cre­ate mod­ern stuff. It takes a ton of time and the end result is nev­er that great. I tried to make cloth­ing — a suit. It took 10 months. I made a book. I made root beer floats. It all took ages. It just real­ly illus­trates the dif­fer­ence between work­ing alone ver­sus in a soci­ety where every­body is spe­cial­ized. When you try to do it all your­self, it’s pret­ty much impossible.

I don’t think it’s real­ly prac­ti­cal to try to go back. Most peo­ple won’t be will­ing to give up their cof­fee, or any­thing like that. What we should prob­a­bly go back to is just being aware of where stuff comes from. A hun­dred years ago, peo­ple would have watched my series and been like ​“Yeah, I can do that. Big deal.” Today most peo­ple are obliv­i­ous. But hav­ing that aware­ness makes you less waste­ful. Once you make your own sand­wich, you’re a lot less like­ly to throw away a per­fect­ly good meal.

KIM: I’ve had con­ver­sa­tions with peo­ple who say, ​“Oh, I don’t know how any­one could hunt.” Well, where do you think that neat­ly pack­aged thing in the refrig­er­a­tor comes from? More than once I’ve heard, ​“I don’t want to think about that.” We want the goods, but we don’t want the responsibility.

So are we depen­dent on soci­ety to survive?

KIM: To sur­vive, no. To flour­ish, yes.

ROB: I’m very socia­ble, and I think while it is pos­si­ble that you could sur­vive on your own, it’s not an exis­tence I’d want. Soci­ol­o­gists talk about how we now have an epi­dem­ic of lone­li­ness. For me, it’s about tak­ing sur­vival skills, think­ing about how they might enable us to reimag­ine our local economies, and then get­ting togeth­er rather than tak­ing off on our own up into the mountains.