make art out of premodern materials, she said, she now had to get her oak galls from a seller in Germany who imported them from Southeast Asia.
“You can’t ever return to the pristine place,” she said, with a certain rueful humor. Even a small measure of aesthetic abstinence from modernity required submission to its operations.
I had cause to reflect upon this delicate balance of resistance and accommodation when I noted a small animal skin pouch laid on the table in front of her during one of our conversations. When I asked her about it, she told me it was her smartphone case. She had made it, she said, using the materials and techniques that would have been employed by a Neolithic craftsperson, had there been any requirement for smartphone cases in the Neolithic era.
One evening, Caroline told me about how she’d recently become preoccupied to the point of obsession with Easter Island. She was fascinated in particular, she said, with the idea that the demise of the once-thriving island civilization formed an uncanny reflection of our own particular impasse. There was a theory, she said—albeit one that had been fiercely contested by many historians—that the heads themselves, the giant humanoid constructions known as moai for which the island was primarily known, had been a major cause of the civilization’s collapse. When the first Polynesian settlers arrived on the island in the thirteenth century, it was a lush and densely forested environment. Over time, though, population growth and environmental degradation caused by agriculture led to fierce competition over resources, and to tribal conflicts. Deforestation was greatly exacerbated, according to this theory, by the relentless construction of the moai. The construction and transport of these gigantic monoliths, built by tribal chiefs in veneration of their ancestors and as symbols of their own prestige, required massive quantities of wood. Even as the evidence of ecological collapse became overwhelming, the islanders kept constructing the monuments, kept chopping down trees in order to transport them, until there were no more trees to chop. By the time the first Europeans arrived in 1722, soil degradation and deforestation had caused a total collapse, and the population of the island was down from its peak of ten thousand to a few hundred.
Caroline was convinced, she said, that what had happened on Easter Island was what was happening right now, what we were doing to ourselves. Our whole planet, she said, was Easter Island. Here we were, she said, doggedly persisting in the practice of our idolatrous consumerism, heedlessly continuing in the way of life we knew to be causing total ecological collapse, knowing full well the gravity of its consequences, persisting until the last tree was gone, until the soil could no longer support life.
“The way we build our gods,” she said, “is the way we build the apocalypse.”
She was, in her way, a kind of prepper, though she had nothing but contempt for the actual doomsday survivalists she frequently encountered in her involvement with the bushcraft scene. They were always men, she said, and they came along to classes, but they didn’t seem to want to learn. They were interested ultimately not in making things but in equipment. They were always talking about their kit, she said, about their stockpiled foods and their secure locations, about their plans and preparations for absolute self-sufficiency should the shit hit the fan. But the fact of the matter, she said, was that if civilization did collapse these men would be entirely useless to themselves, and worse than useless to everyone else. What they didn’t understand, she said, was that the thing that would allow people to survive was the same thing that had always allowed people to survive: community. It was only in learning to help people, she said, in becoming indispensable to one’s fellow human beings, that you would survive the collapse of civilization.
She knew what every plant was, every fungus, and took a quiet pleasure in informing you whether it was edible or whether it would kill you. She could probably survive alone in nature if she needed to, she said, and I believed her. But this didn’t mean, of course, that she would necessarily want to. She told me one evening about a little carved wooden box she kept locked away on her boat on the Thames, in which she stored thirty seeds she’d gathered from a yew tree. A handful of these, she said, would cause almost immediate heart failure and death. They