The Crash Course - Chris Martenson [32]
By failing to appreciate the nature of our collective predicament, we place ourselves at greater risk, because the longer we dither, less time and fewer options remain. As you read this book, it will be helpful for you to be on the lookout for predicaments and problems, and to recall the important distinction between the two.
CHAPTER 9
What Is Wealth?
(Hint: It’s Not Money)
When Becca and I first decided to move away from our suburban location in Mystic, Connecticut, we drove around southern New Hampshire, Vermont, and central Massachusetts looking for a place to settle. Our list of criteria included typical things such as a nice neighborhood and proximity to culture and shopping, but I had one additional thing on my personal list: good soil. Knowing that I wanted to have a big garden, and knowing that it’s much easier to start with good soil than to build it up from scratch, I had good soil in the “non-negotiable column” on my mental list.
As we drove around, I kept a trained eye on the types of trees and plants in each area, looking for the plant-based clues that would let me know if the soil underneath was good quality or not. I knew that an excess of pine trees often indicate that weak, sandy, and acidic soils are underneath, while maple trees suggest rich, sweet soils.
After passing through a succession of small towns, each established 150 or more years ago, a relationship suddenly became apparent to me. In the towns surrounded by pine trees, the historic churches were small, modest affairs, generally without steeples. The churches looked poor. But in the towns with maple trees, the churches were invariably grander, with large, ornate steeples attached. Small, modest churches in the poorer soil communities; large, ornate churches in the wealthier soil communities. All at once, the saying “dirt poor” took on new meaning to me.
The phrase originally dates from the Great Depression and may well have meant “poor as dirt,” but to me, from that trip on, it could only convey that one is as rich as one’s soil. It must have been axiomatic to our ancestors, whose lives and livelihoods depended on agriculture, that if your dirt was poor, you were poor, too. They knew, in a way that most of us have either forgotten or never learned, that wealth comes from the ground. If two people work just as hard as each other, but one enjoys fine, rich soil and the other struggles with poor dirt, they will reap very different rewards for their efforts. One will be wealthy and the other poor; one is dirt poor and the other is dirt rich. Very simply, all wealth originates with resources from the earth.
We have lost sight of this connection in recent decades because we have been bestowed with the most amazing abundance of magical, wealth-producing stuff ever pulled out of the ground: petroleum. It has masked the previous direct relationship between wealth and land-based resources, which has been a central part of true wealth for every generation except for the most recent ones. It’s unlikely that the nature of this relationship can remain hidden for much longer.
A Hierarchy of Wealth
Let’s begin by describing what we mean by “wealth.” We can think of wealth as coming in three layers, like a pyramid of sorts. At the bottom of the pyramid sits primary wealth, then secondary wealth, and finally tertiary wealth.
Rich soils, concentrated ores, thick seams of coal, gushing oil, fresh water, and abundant fisheries are all examples of primary wealth. The foundation of the wealth pyramid comprises these concentrated resources. Today we might call this our “natural resource base,” but once upon a time your access to these things (or lack thereof) meant the physical difference between a life of ease and a life of hardship.
Secondary