One day, two tapings: Keith Farnish (UK) and Sean Brodrick (Florida)

For months now, I’ve wanted to videotape a conversation with Keith Farnish, British author of Time’s Up: An Uncivilized Solution to a Global Crisis, and this week showed up as the right time. In the meantime, Sean Brodrick, Florida author of The Ultimate Suburban Survivalist Guide, became available, too. So we had a two-fer videotaping day using a friend’s DSL line and Skype internet video.

Keith spoke to us from Essex, U.K. He and his family are packing to move to a small town in southern Scotland for a simpler life. The packing boxes in his video “set” weren’t visible onscreen, but held up his notes!

I asked Keith what he meant by his book title “Time’s Up.” Time is up for industrial civilization, he replied. It’s rapidly destroying the planet with the economy’s incessant drive for infinite growth.

What we need is to reconnect with the natural world and with ourselves, he said, but the whole system is designed to keep us disconnected. Keith has identified ten tools of disconnection. He gave an example of selected freedom with the upcoming elections in Britain, where people are “free” to vote, but there’s really not much choice, because the two major party candidates are essentially the same.

We only dipped a toe into the water of his “Hundred Ways to Undermine the Industrial Machine” from Keith’s Earth Blog: Giving the Earth a Future. Sounds scary and maybe dangerous, but many of his suggestions are practiced by Peak Moment viewers, like reducing your personal impact on the planet. Keith’s book is available free online at www.timesupbook.com.

He touched us both with his closing words: “The day we lost our connection with the rest of the natural world was the day we started killing our life-support system…” (excerpt).

Sean Brodrick spoke to us from Jupiter, Florida. He’s a natural resource analyst for Weiss Research, Inc. and a contributor to Uncommon Wisdom Daily.com.

Robyn and I have heard Sean in a number of online programs. Besides being really enjoyable to listen to, we feel that Sean has his finger right on the pulse of the economy, the money system, natural resources, and what’s happening both on Wall Street and Main Street.

Sean seems to be one of the few in the financial industry that we’ve come across who acknowledges that climate change and peak oil are real (although he thinks the latter may be a ways off). He’s refreshingly candid about the theft and lies coming from Wall Street, the precarious nature of the American economy and  the high levels of debt (echoes of Chris Martenson’s “Crash Course” conversation, right?).

Sean said he was compelled to write The Ultimate Suburban Survivalist Guide because he lives in Florida, big time hurricane country. He saw many Floridians go through a hurricane and learn nothing from it — like being prepared for the next one! He expanded this book to include emergency preparedness for everything from natural disasters to human-caused emergencies, like economic depression or hyperinflation.

He talked about several preparedness topics. About home security, he noted that the best defense is knowing your neighbors. Sean’s family held a few neighborhood barbecues — and found real riches among the people there.

I had a lot of fun in this fast-paced conversation with Sean — his breadth of knowledge and colorful expressiveness makes for a lively and interesting conversation.

Sean’s content may stretch the envelope of what we’ve generally done on Peak Moment conversations, but then, we like being somewhat out-of-the-box on Peak Moment TV. Even in his own field, Sean Brodrick is refreshingly and certainly that!

Watch Sean’s program “Preparing for Disasters and Hard Times” (episode 170).