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I live in a rural area so Im a little ahead of most. We just put a wood stove in this weekend. Have well water. Need to get a generator. We have stocked some gas and kerosene and lamp oil. Have plenty guns and ammo. Grow a garden so we have home canned veggies. Currently raising rabbits for food. I guess I could use the horses for transportation and if things got too bad I could slaughter them for food.
Back during the Y2K scare my stbx put up a bunch of 5 gal buckets of rice, beans and wheat. We are using them now.
Actually thats chapter 2 in my manual. Send a fire team to blow the tracks at one end of town and stop the daily coal train.( this will also cut town access from the east) Another will secure the one grocery store in town and another (mine) will secure the power plant. got to be ready!!!!
What happens if the town before you on the rail line reads your book and takes your coal train?
This sounds completely doable, even for a citified (that'd be me) person. anybody remeber that man who started the Earthship Colony in New Mexico? I've read several articles about the houses. It was based on a collaborative ideal, but now that self-sufficient houses are so popular, prices on Earthships (fancy ones) are in the 400K range! Just give me a small adobe house in the mountains of northern New Mexico ~
$400,000??? That's crazy. You could do it for a lot less than that. You'd be better off with the adobe I think, adobe works well in the southwest, but I don't think I'd try adobe in the North where it's wetter.
What happens if the town before you on the rail line reads your book and takes your coal train?
Well if you live near me you can just mine the tracks... At the turn of the century before automated stokers came on the market smaller sizes that are in quite a demand now were used to build railroad beds. If a railroad is going to get ripped up around here there's scramble to get the job. You could do it for free and still make a bundle.
With a population of 300 million a loss of the basic services for more than a few days would mean a lot of death and disorder within just a few days.
When I was in my teens and 20's I had the skills to survive with nothing but a Buck knife, a .22 Rifle and fifty rounds of ammo, some warm clothing and a few feet of monofilament line and a package of fish hooks. However I am in my sixties now and have mobility problems and medical problems. I live in a city of 250 thousand or so. If the S*** hit the fan all over the whole country I would probably just last as long as my medicines lasted. I have gout and if I ran out of my Allopurinol I would be in so much pain within a week I would not want to live. If any of you have suffered with gout you know what I am talking about LOL.
$400,000??? That's crazy. You could do it for a lot less than that. You'd be better off with the adobe I think, adobe works well in the southwest, but I don't think I'd try adobe in the North where it's wetter.
Yes, it sure is crazy. The whole concept didn't start out like that...back in the day, everyone pitched in to help others build their homes. It became an actual community of people who lived off-grid, with individual and cooperative food planning. Check out that guy's website...people have their homes built for them now, then sell to those who have the $$, and are looking for "an experience." (I just don't remember the guy's name).
Maybe you could build a home, but I doubt that I could pull it off without a whole lot of help. I've seen "fixer", traditional abobe homes (albeit, very small ones) under $100,000 in the foothills up north which were around 100 yrs old, and which were quite capable of being completely off-grid. I like the independence factor of being able to go off-grid if necessary.
While one still needs to work and have an income ambitions can be somewhat stiffled! And Gunluvver2 has a good point about all of this - if one needs med. help, young or old, living way out in the sticks is not really the best plan.
If the SHTF, there won't be any place to run and hide...we're all going down with the ship! But, I'm still looking forward to my54ford's survival manual.. ~
Last edited by Wicked Felina; 11-11-2008 at 12:33 AM..
The fact is that any post TEOTWAWKI existence is going to more like "Clan of the Cave Bear" and not "Red Dawn." The only way to truly survive longterm (I'm talking 10+ years-human society isn't going to just remake itself overnight) will be to revert to a hunter/gatherer type existence. Instead of lusting over the latest issue of guns and ammo, you ought to be learning how to make a longbow and arrows from scratch as well as how to shoot it accurately. Snares and pit traps are worth studying too. Find yourself a knowledgeable Native American to talk to-they're the original survivalists. It's humorous that some folks think that we're going to go back to a bucolic simple time a'la the Waltons with the occasional firefight with looters if the world totally collapses.
Depends on the level of collapse one is girding against.
The Walton model does not go as far as the Cannibalism model, but neither model is necessarily correct.
The author is TOTALLY been there, done that, lost the t-shirt off his back with the Soviet collapse.
His observation is that most collapses only go a little past the "Waltons." (Stage 3, below). But as you have observed the full anarchy (e.g. Rwanda) collapse is possible.
Speaking specifically towards your observation:
Quote:
Although many people imagine collapse to be a sort of elevator that goes to the sub-basement (our Stage 5) no matter which button you push, no such automatic mechanism can be discerned.
The whole article is a very worthy read. A too brief cut of his summary is:
Quote:
Stages of Collapse
Stage 1: Financial collapse. Faith in "business as usual" is lost. The future is no longer assumed resemble the past in any way that allows risk to be assessed and financial assets to be guaranteed. Financial institutions become insolvent; savings are wiped out, and access to capital is lost.
Stage 2: Commercial collapse. Faith that "the market shall provide" is lost. Money is devalued and/or becomes scarce, commodities are hoarded, import and retail chains break down, and widespread shortages of survival necessities become the norm.
Stage 3: Political collapse. Faith that "the government will take care of you" is lost. As official attempts to mitigate widespread loss of access to commercial sources of survival necessities fail to make a difference, the political establishment loses legitimacy and relevance.
Stage 4: Social collapse. Faith that "your people will take care of you" is lost. As local social institutions, be they charities, community leaders, or other groups that rush in to fill the power vacuum, run out of resources or fail through internal conflict.
Stage 5: Cultural collapse. Faith in the goodness of humanity is lost. People lose their capacity for "kindness, generosity, consideration, affection, honesty, hospitality, compassion, charity" (Turnbull, The Mountain People). Families disband and compete as individuals for scarce resources. The new motto becomes "May you die today so that I die tomorrow" (Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago). There may even be some cannibalism.
I would think the US seems to presently be flirting with mid-stage 1, and Iceland is somewhere into Stage 2.
I moved to my current location for just this reason. I was running the Boston rat race and decided my life had more worth. I am almost completely self sufficient in my New Hampshire home. I raise my own livestock, heat by woodstove (wood I cut and split myself). Can the veggies and jar the fruits we gather and raise through the summer months. I do not have television service. That is to say - I have a television and can watch DVD's but I don't receive service. I do, however, use a track phone but I am partial to writing letters.
Currently I am looking into a windmill to off grid our electric bill but I'm only starting the research process now.
I prefer to cook over eating out, I make many of my own clothes and recycle old clothing into new creations. I barter with neighboring farms. Homeschooled the kids, etc etc etc.
I really had to laugh at my neighbors when they banded together during the Y2K hysteria. They all pooled their cash and bought huge amounts of grains and flour. This resulted in stale waste and infestation issues for them. We live in New Hampshire - we will never go hungry here. There are deer in my backyard daily and plenty of fish in the streams. There is an abundance of natural wild fruits, nuts, roots, etc. in our location.
I still have a long way to go to get to where I want to be and I think the only thing I would miss is my computer. As an online student I value the ability to earn my degree on my time. But even then.... I would just realign my direction.
There are deer in my backyard daily and plenty of fish in the streams. There is an abundance of natural wild fruits, nuts, roots, etc. in our location.
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One of the issues with that is there would be a heavy reliance on these resources. There is huge population of deer in Pennsylvania but that wasn't the case always as they were over hunted. The only reason its so big is because its managed. There's also a huge population of hunters and they cull a significant amount of the herd every year in a very short hunting season.
The same thing goes for the river I live near, apparently a hundred years ago the river was teeming with fish. I've seen pictures of fisherman with stringers of muskellunge from back then with sizes that simply do not exist today and I'd be lucky to catch one of those fish of any larger size in my lifetime. All over fished and the population was decimated and never recovered to those levels.
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At the turn of the century before automated stokers came on the market smaller sizes that are in quite a demand now were used to build railroad beds. If a railroad is going to get ripped up around here there's scramble to get the job. You could do it for free and still make a bundle.
~
