Shrinking the Technosphere by Dmitry Orlov

Author:Dmitry Orlov
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781550926330
Publisher: New Society Publishers
Published: 2016-04-17T04:00:00+00:00

Village life

“LIFE IN HARMONY with nature” has the ring of a hackneyed phrase: everybody talks about it but nobody does anything about it. So far, the discussion of what naturelike means has been rather theoretical. But to me it is not an abstraction: I have seen it for myself, and I have lived it. Let us now shift gears and dive straight into the topic. I will focus on what I know; the world is big, and it is impossible to say anything specific about it without talking about a specific piece of it. And so I will talk about the northern half of the Eurasian landmass. But I hope that my observations and extrapolations can be extended to other habitats around the world—at least the ones that will remain survivable as the planet warms, the seas rise and climate chaos reigns.

• • •

WHILE I WAS growing up in the USSR in the late 60s and early 70s, every summer, from age five to age nine or so, my family would take off in some direction, east, west or south, on trips that could, in some respects, be described as trips back in time. We spent one summer in a village so out-of-the-way that the locals demanded to know how we ever found out about it. We hadn’t known about it, neither did the authorities in the regional center, and the locals seemed keen to keep it that way.

We simply tagged along with a geological survey team that was doing seismic testing, blasting its way along a hydrocarbon seam. Our method of transportation was the smótka—a reel truck that bumped along rutted dirt roads running cable between sensors stuck in the ground, triggering small explosive charges and recording the resulting seismic data as jagged lines on spools of graph paper spewed out by a seismograph inside the truck. We simply stumbled across this village during our wanderings and decided to stay for the summer and catch the smótka again for the trip back to civilization. The locals were happy to provide us with accommodation by opening up a disused log cabin, laying down floorboards and providing us with a starter kit of sorts for making it livable.

It was a very poor village, with half of the intact log cabins boarded up, its few remaining residents in rough shape. At night wolves and bears roamed the village, and meat, when we managed to get some from passing truck drivers, had to be buried outside in a pit with boulders piled on top. As the summer wore on and the wolves and bears got better at digging, the pit became deeper and the boulders larger.

We spent another summer in a village in the vicinity of Rybinsk, near lands flooded by the construction of hydropower dams, where most of the transportation was by boat over flooded land and where the older people spoke an impenetrable Finno-Ugric dialect whose name they didn’t know. This village was more prosperous; many households had cows, and their

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