When the great Wesleyan Blackout of 2011 hit, I was alone. In search of that friend I had been chatting with on Facebook only ten minutes prior, I cautiously made my way to the exit of my dorm and stepped into a moonlit Junior village.

At best, I expected a state of communal generosity. Actually, at best, I expected the power to be restored in the morning, but that’s a different article. At worst,  talk of bonfires and of burying food in the snow led me to expect a Lord of the Flies-type scenario. I decided to leave campus with three friends as soon as I could.

Shortly before the disruptions caused by Fall Break and then the blackout, Gillian Goslinga, the Anthropology professor whom I TA for, was discussing Marxist theories of resource consumption with her class. Under the capitalist system, our economy survives on the continual illusion of scarcity. In societies that do not have money, or in which money is used only for exchange, there is often a sense of abundance. At the time, I scrawled my objection in the margins: don’t we, in the United States, always have more resources than these societies due to our advanced technology, particularly in agriculture?

During the blackout, however, Wesleyan, which normally works hard to ensure that its students never lack so that we can focus on our work, was suddenly plunged into a state of scarcity. I don’t think the administration was at fault for the lack of warm sleeping areas and the long food lines, especially in the beginning. I think it was genuinely unprepared because the University takes electricity, heat, and a continual flow of resources so much for granted.

In this era of climate change, our little campus, with its well-manicured lawns, electric door locks, and increasingly electronic methods of handing in assignments, is relying on the good will of nature a bit too much. As much as Wesleyan seems to deny it, we’re all beholden to nature. Our bodies either stay healthy or get sick every semester.  Our campus is built on what was originally a deciduous forest, and it is prone to increasingly erratic ocean currents that determine temperature and precipitation.

There may be the perception of bounty, but we are fighting for our existence on earth every day.

Despite our reliance on electricity and other resources, the perseverance of Wesleyan students in the face of this adversity makes me wonder if we have access to more resources than we need. Speaking about the blackout, my Literary Theory professor Indira Karamcheti  commented, “We certainly got thrown back to the pre-Benjamin Franklin era. But grading papers by candlelight, I really thought, we don’t need very much, do we?” Indeed, I think this episode proves that we don’t.