Peter Goodchild
August 23, 2009
© 2009 Peter Goodchild
All rights reserved
P.O. Box 150
Burj Al-Rudda
Al-Rustaq
Oman
Postal Code 329
odonatus@live.com
“POSM”? Well, a possum is a creature that tries to defend itself by playing dead. But “possum” is also a Latin word meaning, “I can.”
A note on measurements: after years of flipping between metric and non-metric in my writing, or in combinations thereof, in order to satisfy certain readers in a world that has generally gone metric, I have come to the grand conclusion that it is impossible to describe anything of any complexity in non-metric terms. If I want to put a 1-inch layer of cow manure on a 1-acre garden, how many cubic yards of cow manure do I need? (Answer: I neither know nor care.)
INTRODUCTION
Oil is everything. That is to say, everything in the modern world is dependent on oil. From oil and other hydrocarbons we get fuel, fertilizer, pesticides, lubricants, plastic, paint, synthetic fabrics, asphalt, pharmaceuticals, and many other things. On a more abstract level, we are dependent on oil and other hydrocarbons for manufacturing, for transportation, for agriculture, for mining, and for electricity. When oil goes, our entire industrial society will go with it. There will be no means of supporting the billions of people who now live on this planet. Above all, there will be insufficient food.
A vast amount of debate has gone on about “peak oil,” the date at which the world’s annual oil production will reach (or did reach) its maximum and will begin (or did begin) to decline. The exact numbers are unobtainable, mainly because many oil-producing countries give rather inexact figures on their remaining supplies. The situation can perhaps be summarized by saying that about 20 or 30 major studies have been done, and that the consensus is that “peak oil” is somewhere between the years 2000 and 2020. Within that period, a middle date seems rather more likely.
There was always the sense that we could somehow “get by.” But in the late twentieth century we stopped getting by. It is important to differentiate between production in an “absolute” sense and production “per person.” Although oil production, in “absolute” numbers, kept climbing -- only to decline around 2000 or 2010 -- what was ignored was that although that “absolute” production was climbing, the production “per person” was not. In the year 1990 there were 4.5 barrels of oil per person per year. By the year 2000 there were only about 4.3. The same sort of problem was occurring with world grain supplies: although government sources cheerfully tell us that grain production in absolute terms is still increasing every year, what they are not telling us is that because of overpopulation the amount of grain per person is actually declining. There is more grain, but there are more mouths to feed. The same problem of resources “per person” can be seen in the world’s fish catches. We were always scraping the edges of the earth’s carrying capacity, but we are now entering a far more dangerous era. The main point to keep in mind, however, is that, throughout the twentieth century, oil production and human population were so closely integrated that every barrel of oil had an effect on human numbers.
While population was going up, so was oil production: from about 0.1 billion barrels in 1900 to about 4.2 in 1950, to about 27.0 in 2000.) (The data are readily available in many publications, such as BP’s annual “Global Statistical Review of World Energy,” and John Gever et al., Beyond Oil is perhaps still the best reference.) The other side of the curve, however, is a steep drop: 20 billion barrels in 2020, 15 in 2030, 9 in 2040, 5 in 2050.
The relation between oil production and population is one of cause and effect. The skyrocketing of oil production is not merely coincident with the skyrocketing of population. It is the former that actually causes the latter: that is to say, oil is the main source of energy within industrial society. With abundant oil, a large population is possible -- ignoring, of course, the many other things that might wipe out human numbers anyway. Without that abundant oil, on the other hand, a large population is not possible. It was industrialization, improved agriculture, improved medicine, the expansion of humanity into the Americas, and so on, that began the upward climb, but it was oil that allowed human numbers to triple in less than 100 years.
Because oil production was the determining factor in population growth, the “existing population” for any given year in the past was roughly the same thing as the “carrying capacity” for that year. We can deduce an equally useful set of numbers for future years: the “existing population” at the start of any given year in the future must decrease to become the “carrying capacity” for that year. For any industrial society, fossil-fuel production determines carrying capacity. That is an immutable law. Human population must shrink, mainly through famine, during the course of any year in which there is a difference between the initial population and the carrying capacity.
The term “carrying capacity,” as used here, incidentally, is not entirely synonymous with the term as used by William R. Catton. A more-appropriate but lengthier and clumsier term might be something like “temporary feeding capacity.” For the last 50 years or so, human population has always expanded to press against the very limits of what is possible for the oil-production level of any particular year -- although in recent years even that tight correspondence has started to collapse.
In the entire world, there are perhaps a trillion barrels of oil left to extract -- which may sound like a lot, but isn’t. When newspapers announce the discovery of a deposit of a billion barrels, readers are no doubt amazed, but they are not told that such a find is only 2 weeks’ supply. And the only event that could ease the demand for oil would be a global depression; reduced oil consumption would then be part of the overall collapse of the world’s economy.
As the years go by, new oil wells have to be drilled deeper than the old, because newly discovered deposits are deeper. Those new deposits are therefore less accessible. But oil is used as a fuel for the oil drills themselves, and for the exploration. When it takes an entire barrel of oil to get one barrel of oil out of the ground, as is increasingly the case, it is a waste of time to continue drilling such a well.
Coal and natural gas are also disappearing, although coal will be available for a while after oil is gone. Coal, however, is highly polluting and cannot be used as a fuel for most forms of transportation; the last industrial society will be a bizarre, crowded, dirty, impoverished world. Natural gas is not easily transported, and it is not suitable for most equipment.
Alternative sources of energy will never be very useful, for several reasons, but mainly because of a problem of “net energy”: the amount of energy output is not sufficiently greater than the amount of energy input. All alternative forms of energy are so dependent on the very petroleum that they are intended to replace that the use of them is largely self-defeating and irrational. Alternative sources ultimately don’t have enough “bang” to replace 30 billion annual barrels of oil -- or even to replace more than the tiniest fraction of that amount.
Petroleum is required to extract, process, and transport almost any other form of energy; a coal mine is not operated by coal-powered equipment. It takes “oil energy” to make “alternative energy.”
The use of unconventional oil (shale deposits, tar sands, heavy oil) poses several problems besides that of net energy. Large quantities of conventional oil are needed to process the oil from these unconventional sources, so net energy recovery is low. The pollution problems are considerable, and it is not certain how much environmental damage the human race is willing to endure. With unconventional oil we are, quite literally, scraping the bottom of the barrel.
More-exotic forms of alternative energy are plagued with even greater problems. Fuel cells cannot be made practical, because such devices require hydrogen derived from fossil fuels (coal or natural gas), if we exclude designs that will never escape the realm of science fiction; if fuel cells ever became popular, the fossil fuels they require would then be consumed even faster than they are now. Biomass energy (perhaps from wood, animal dung, peat, corn, or switchgrass) would require impossibly large amounts of land and would still result in insufficient quantities of net energy, perhaps even negative quantities. Hydroelectric dams are reaching their practical limits. Wind and geothermal power are only effective in certain areas and for certain purposes. Nuclear power will soon be suffering from a lack of fuel and is already creating serious environmental dangers.
The current favorite for alternative energy is solar power, but proponents must close their eyes to all questions of scale. According to Gerhard Knies, the world’s deserts have an area of 36 million km2, and the solar energy they receive is 300,000 exajoules (EJ), which at an 11% electrical-conversion rate would result in 33,000 EJ. The EIA’s “World Consumption of Primary Energy” tells us that energy consumption in 2006 was approximately 500 EJ. To meet the world’s present energy needs by using solar power, however, we would then need an array (or an equivalent number of smaller ones) with a size of 500/33,000 x 36 million km2, which is about 550,000 km2 -- a machine the size of France. The production and maintenance of this array would require vast quantities of hydrocarbons, metals, and other materials -- a self-defeating process.
Petroleum, unfortunately, is the perfect fuel, and nothing else even comes close. There will never be a solar-powered airplane. The problem with flying pigs (as in “when pigs can fly”) is not that we have to wait for scientists to perfect the technology; the problem is that the “pig idea” is not a good one in the first place. To maintain an industrial civilization, it’s either oil or nothing.
Another unrealistically optimistic thought is that we are shifting from an oil-based culture to an information-based one: computers, we are told, will soon replace trucks. To say that high technology reduces mankind’s need for petroleum, however, is an act of faith that is not born out by the figures on world oil consumption.
Modern agriculture is highly dependent on fossil fuels for fertilizers, pesticides, and the operation of machines for harvesting, processing, and transporting. The Green Revolution was the invention of a way to turn petroleum and natural gas into food. Without fossil fuels, modern methods of food production will disappear.
Petroleum is the lifeblood of our civilization. Even a bicycle, that ultimate symbol of an “alternate lifestyle,” requires petroleum for lubrication, for paint, and for plastic components. The vehicle that delivers the bicycle runs on petroleum, over asphalt that is made of petroleum. “Rubber” tires are often made of petroleum.
The problem of the world’s diminishing supply of oil is a problem of energy, not a problem of money. The old bromide that “higher prices will eventually make [e.g.] shale oil economically feasible” is meaningless. This planet has only a finite amount of fossil fuel. That fuel is starting to vanish, and “higher prices” are quite unable to stop the event from taking place.
Much of modern warfare is about oil, in spite of all the pious and hypocritical rhetoric about “the forces of good” and “the forces of evil.” The real “forces” are those trying to control the oil wells and the fragile pipelines that carry that oil. A map of recent American military ventures is a map of petroleum deposits. When the oil wars began is largely a matter of definition, though perhaps 1973 would be a usable date, when the Yom Kippur War -- or, to speak more truthfully, the decline of American domestic oil -- led to the OPEC oil embargo.
The problem of the loss of petroleum will, of course, be received in the same manner as most other large-scale disasters: widespread denial, followed by a rather catatonic apathy. The centuries will pass, and a day will come when, like the early Anglo-Saxons, people will look around at the scattered stones and regard them as “the work of giants.”
Systemic Collapse
Oil depletion is the most critical aspect in the systemic collapse of modern civilization. Altogether this collapse has about 10 principal parts, each with a somewhat causal relationship to the next. Oil, metals, and electricity are a tightly-knit group, since no industrial civilization can have one without the others. As those 3 disappear, food and fresh water become scarce. Matters of infrastructure then follow: transportation and communication. Social structure fails: government, education, and large-scale division of labor.
Modern civilization is unique partly in the sense that its means of production is not the labor of humans or draft animals, but oil. This substance was rarely used until the late nineteenth century, when it was realized that a steam engine could be modified to run on petroleum. These new engines were soon everywhere. In almost no time, we had created a world that was literally “driven” by oil. The planet Earth seemed infinitely large now, and we not only stopped worrying about overpopulation, but we felt that there would be no limits to industrialization. We just never got around to thinking that every element of our civilization was dependent on that one substance. And so our world started to fall apart.
After the above 10 aspects of systemic collapse, there is another layer, more psychological or sociological, that we might call “the 4 Cs.” The first 3 are crime (war and crime will be indistinguishable), cults, and craziness -- the breakdown of traditional law, the tendency toward anti-intellectualism, the inability to distinguish mental health from mental illness. After that there is a more general one that is simple chaos, which results in the pervasive sense that nothing works any more.
Systemic collapse, in turn, has one overwhelming cause: world overpopulation. All of the flash-in-the-pan ideas that are presented as solutions to the modern dilemma -- solar power, ethanol, hybrid cars, desalination, permaculture -- have value only as desperate attempts to solve an underlying problem that is not being addressed in a more direct manner. Because of the influence of various religious groups, however, American foreign aid includes only trivial amounts for family planning. The most powerful country in the world has done very little to solve the biggest problem in the world.
Future History
When thinking about survival in a world without oil, we must remember that the near future will differ from the distant future. Most of what I will be describing is the near future, a world in which the present political and economic systems are still more or less intact. To get an overview of the all the coming phases, we must consider that history in general (not only the history of oil) will form a sort of bell curve: the events after about the year 2010 will form a downward curve that somewhat reflects the curve of events leading up to that same year. That bell curve will not be perfectly symmetrical, of course: the decline in modern civilization is likely to be fairly swift.
Although my own terms are largely arbitrary, I tend to think of a future transition from what I call a Neo-Victorian Era to a Neo-Alfredian one. In other words, the future will descend from an industrial age resembling that of Queen Victoria (the world of Charles Dickens) to a pre-industrial age resembling that of King Alfred the Great (the world of Viking raids), whose reign was a thousand years earlier. And finally we shall return to the Stone Age, where we started from -- back to the Olduvai Gorge, as Richard C. Duncan says.
1: WHERE TO LIVE
One big question is that of relocation. As hydrocarbons become rare, the economy will degenerate, and certain locations will become uncomfortable. There is probably no highly rational procedure for choosing a hiding spot, but the following may cover some of the issues.
The world’s overall population density right now is 45 people per km2 of land surface, but this number will certainly be untenable in the future. In a pre-industrial society, the population density is only a fraction of that. In a hunting-and-gathering society, each family might need at least 25 km2 of land -- and if that sounds like too much, just ask serious deer-hunters how much land they cover merely to get 1 animal per year.
Most people will be growing their own food, or at least relying on food grown nearby. A society based mainly on subsistence farming can support a population of only about 4 people per hectare, i.e. 400 people per km2. Many industrialized countries are well over that density; staying in such places would be only a slow decline into cannibalism. The first specific question therefore is: Which countries have the best ratio of population to arable land? (Of course, there are also related factors to consider, such as temperature, precipitation, and seasonal variations thereof.)
The answer is at first rather puzzling. In rank order, according to the CIA World Factbook, the best ratios are in the following 30 countries (although the number 30 is rather arbitrary): Australia, Kazakhstan, Canada, Niger, Russia, Lithuania, Latvia, Ukraine, Argentina, Guyana, the United States, Belarus, Hungary, Zambia, Paraguay, Bulgaria, the Central African Republic, Togo, Turkmenistan, Sudan, Moldova, Finland, Romania, Denmark, Estonia, Mongolia, Namibia, Uruguay, Mali, and Chad.
The clearest pattern to be found in the above list is that 24 of those 30 countries are in 3 main geographic clusters: Africa (8 countries), Latin America (4 countries), and a less-clearly defined Eastern Europe, blending into Central Asia (about 13 countries).
Australia has the world’s best ratio -- 43 people per km2 of arable land -- mainly because the figures for arable land include about 270,000 km2 of cultivated grassland.
Kazakhstan is to some extent an anomaly. In the days of the Soviet Union the Kazakhs considerably expanded their agricultural land, but when the country gained independence in 1991 many Russians and Volga Germans left the country. As a result, there is now a good deal of arable land. Disease, low birth rates, and emigration account for the large amounts of arable land in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, and many of these countries were exploited for centuries by Russia and Germany.
The African countries with good population-to-arable ratios (the Central African Republic, Chad, Mali, Namibia, Niger, Sudan, Togo, Zambia) are not restricted to a particular part of the continent. These ratios are not really indicators of well-being. They can partly be explained by saying that the countries have always been largely “pre-industrial.” But war, disease, famine, misuse of land, misuse of money, misuse of human resources, and lack of infrastructure have all had their effects.
The 4 Latin-American countries -- Argentina, Paraguay, and Uruguay in the far south, and Guyana in the northeast -- can probably be explained on the basis of good soil and good climate. A great deal of the land, however, has been bought up by large international companies that practice monoculture and have no interest in gearing agriculture to the needs of the inhabitants. The implementation of land-reform policies could do wonders for the general population of those countries.
Another clear pattern is a negative one. The 170 or more countries that do not appear on the list are mainly those of eastern Asia and western Europe (e.g., the United Kingdom, Germany, and the Netherlands). In most cases their exclusion can be explained by sheer overpopulation. The Arabian Peninsula and most of eastern Asia are far too crowded. The United Kingdom scores badly at 1,069 people per km2 of arable.
Nearly all of the small Pacific islands have strict immigration policies, are very densely populated, or are lacking in arable land. Coral islands -- most of Micronesia, for example -- lack both arable land and fresh water. Fiji rates much better in most respects.
One might be tempted to suggest a “sour grapes” theory of the population-to-arable ratio: one could argue that countries with better ratios are merely indicating poor living conditions of some other sort. To some extent this is true, as we have seen, but there are many important exceptions. The U.K. and the Republic of Ireland, for example, are very similar in geographic respects, but the U.K. has 3 times the population-to-arable ratio; from the standpoint of subsistence farming, the Republic of Ireland would be a far more habitable country.
On the other hand, there may be a miscellany of reasons for avoiding any sort of relocation, even to countries that seem in many ways ideal. Many countries have severe immigration policies, or there may be quotas that favor certain potential immigrants over others. We cannot complain about the “curse” of immigration into our own country, and then assume that we are granting a “blessing” when we want to turn around and do the same. Language barriers can be serious, especially for those who are brought up speaking only one language -- although a gift for languages (as is said of genius in general) involves far more perspiration than inspiration. Jobs can certainly be a severe hindrance: not many of us are lucky enough to have skills that can be exported.
There can be more personal reasons for not moving. It may be impossible to give up family, friends, and the rest of your social network. Homesickness can be truly crippling, although those who have previously led a nomadic life may have developed emotional strengths. The move itself can be painful: beside the emotional strain of traveling to a distant land, there is what is called “the $10,000 cure”: selling half of your possessions, moving to another country, and then buying replacement possessions -- and perhaps giving up 2 years later and moving back home again (although in some cases a little more perseverance might have done the trick).
The fear and anger that can accompany exposure to the unknown are 2 sides of the same coin. Even with the best of intentions, the average person does not find it easy to adjust to a culture where the day is filled with minutiae of body language, etiquette, and so on, which clash with one’s semi-conscious everyday expectations. Even climate can be a deciding factor: extreme heat or cold can be devastating to anyone who was not brought up in such conditions.
The converse of both culture shock and xenophobia is that of the emotional tie to your native land -- even if you have only been “native” to such a land for only a few years. Such ties are not entirely irrational. Our reasons for putting down roots in a particular country may be somewhat accidental, but if we examine ourselves more closely we may find that when we have stopped our youthful wanderings there is a curious match between personality and landscape.
Of course that reluctance to leave could be fatal. History is filled with stories of people who failed to heed warnings. The usual cry is, “It can’t happen here. This is a civilized country.”
But the most important question about location is one that is frequently overlooked: How will we obtain food when agri-business has no hydrocarbons for fertilizer and pesticides, and none for cultivating the crops or transporting them? Answer: unless we plan on living off a basement of canned goods, we will have to obtain food by gardening, hunting, or some similar means.
You may find that it is cheaper to buy land with a house on it, than to buy land and put a house on it later. The exception could be the “fixer-upper”; beyond a certain stage of decay, a house is not really a fixer-upper but a tearer-downer. Or if you’re in physically good shape, you may even want to cut down some trees and build yourself a log cabin.
My own choice would be a place where population density is low, but where the soil and climate are still reasonable. Many parts of the United States or Canada might be suitable. The general rule is that west of the 100th meridian the United States is rather dry, so the availability of water then becomes a primary consideration. Anywhere in the Boston-New-York-Washington megalopolis is too crowded. Generally speaking, I wouldn’t look for land that was within 2 hours’ drive of a large city, because it would be too expensive. Yet prices can be surprising: land within an hour’s drive of city is sometimes cheaper than similar property much further away, simply because of what might be called accidents of geography -- perhaps in the past there was nothing there to interest the average farmer or miner, so the land was unexploited. Don’t buy land right on a seacoast, because it will be too rocky, and the salt in the air won’t be good for your crops.
You may want to ask a real-estate agent about high-crime areas. In rural areas, it may take a couple of hours for police to arrive, so stay away from an area if a family of crazies is already living there. On the other hand, don’t let Hollywood movies convince you that country people are dangerous -- generally speaking, the loonies live in the cities.
One should also look into various pro-and-con issues involving proximity to neighbors. Having close neighbors makes you less of a target for human predators, but then you have to hope that the neighbors aren’t worse than the outsiders.
If at all possible, try to move close to people you know and trust. Obvious choices, if you have such an option, would be people related to you by blood or marriage. Even “close friends” can be less “friendly” as time goes by, whereas family members may be more predictable.
One thing is certain: without motorized transportation, the cities of the world will become death traps. Tadashi Nakashima points out that cities would be crippled rather quickly if farmers were no longer sending food. Modern business methods only intensify the weakness: while business-management experts take pride in the cost-effectiveness of “just in time” inventory, they ignore the fact that “just in time” is only a step away from “just out of time.” During the Second World War, Leningrad turned to cannibalism when the city was besieged by the Germans, but such events were far more common in ancient times.
2: RURAL PROPERTY
Around the year 1985, when I was about 35 years old, I bought a piece of land: 19 hectares, about 2 hours’ drive northeast of Toronto, Ontario. I didn’t have a car, so I usually had to get there by taking the bus along the highway, and then either walking or hitchhiking 20 kilometers north up a narrower paved road to the road allowance that led to the property. That road allowance was shown on the topographic maps and aerial photos as a mixture of woods and fields, but in reality a lot of it was beaver swamp. Over the years, the beaver had built endless dams in that area, and as a result there were countless patches of water where these animals made their homes. A beaver swamp is a unique kind of terrain: it’s largely filled with sphagnum moss, willows, and alders, and that vegetation means that it’s impossible to get even a canoe from one shore to another — yet the water is far too deep for one to wade across it. I would somehow manage to find my way into the property, nevertheless, carrying my heavy pack, pushing aside the undergrowth (or getting my face scratched), waving away the clouds of mosquitoes, and wiping away the sweat of a summer heat-wave, trying to follow my compass needle even though walking a straight line was impossible. After a half-hour of struggling, I would reach the nearest edge of my property and set up my camp. In many ways, however, those trips were a lot of fun. In spite of the effort of getting there, the pleasure of sitting around my campfire, far from any other sign of human life, was often considerable. A campfire is its own “civilization”: the bright glow of the coals, the incense of wood smoke.
I even built a tiny log cabin there, during a 10-day vacation, although I discovered that there are limitations on how large a log a single person can carry. A log of about 15 centimeters by 3 meters is getting close to the maximum that one person can carry on his shoulder — certainly one person struggling through thick bush, after uncertain sleep, while dealing with mosquitoes, heat, and general fatigue. If I’d left the logs to dry for a year, they might have lost about a quarter of their weight, but not enough to enable me to build any large habitation.
(By the way, there are several good books on building log cabins, but Kephart’s Camping and Woodcraft gives the best description of a really basic dwelling of that sort. Several years later I built an octagonal cabin, which uses much shorter logs to cover the same floor space; the catch was that I couldn’t find a way to perfect an eight-sided roof. In any case, whenever you’re building, consider using local materials: logs, bark, grass, moss, stones, clay. Local materials cost less, require less transportation, and are more easily replaced.)
While I was in the process of building the cabin, I started to wonder about a possible visit from a building inspector. My tiny shack was made of unpeeled logs joined at the corners with an upside-down “saddle notch,” and I had used nothing but an ax, a hatchet, a saw, a hammer, and a dozen nails. Surely, I thought, that construction would not meet with his approval. One day, back in Toronto, I met an elderly geologist and mentioned the problem of building codes; he laughed and said it was highly unlikely that any building inspector would go plowing through beaver swamps just to look at my log cabin.
That land, however, was almost solid rock, quite useless for gardening. I hung onto the land for a few years, but the problems finally became too much. I sold the land for about the same price I had paid. Since I’d received quite an education from my visits, nevertheless, I considered it all a good bargain.
Then I began to think about a piece of land that I’d bought long before and still owned. It was much further from Toronto, 30 hectares of cheap vacant land southeast of Lake of the Woods, near the Ontario-Manitoba border. The property was very flat. About one third was grass, one third was willow and alder, and one third was mature poplars. Access to the land was over a road allowance that ran west from a gravel road and crossed a farmer’s pasture. Two branches of a creek ran through the land. The soil seemed suitable for gardening or farming, and deer were quite numerous.
Now, after so many years, I began to think about doing something with that property near Lake of the Woods. I started planning to put a house there. When I wrote to the township clerk to tell him of my idea, however, I ran into huge obstacles. He told me that according to the bylaws it was illegal to build a house that was not on a “maintained municipal road.” There was a road allowance to the property, but a road allowance is only an imaginary line, not a physical structure. To build a real road I would need the cooperation of all the adjoining property owners, and the road would have to be built at my expense — many thousands of dollars. Even if all those problems were solved, I would still have to pay for the septic system, electricity, and perhaps a telephone line. Because of the distance to cover, each of these would be very expensive. I decided I would never again buy land without an adjoining road. Nor would I buy land without talking to a lawyer.
I realized that while such things as governments still exist, the biggest problem with buying rural property is the laws: the building codes, zoning restrictions, health codes, and so on. Once you decide to live in anything more civilized than a beaver swamp, you are automatically hit by the most amazing variety of laws. In plain English: it’s illegal to live in a log cabin. In most of Canada and the United States, it’s simply against the law to live in a house that does not meet the requirements of the standard building codes.
For the United States, there are about 3 major building codes, for different parts of the country. For Canada, there’s only 1 code, with some regional variations. But all of these codes are basically the same. They all largely restrict housing to the familiar type of wood-frame construction. They all have strict requirements for electricity and plumbing. Don’t think about living in a yurt, a tepee, a geodesic dome, or an octagonal cabin, not unless you’re far from any road or trail that would tempt a building inspector to visit you. A “log home” (versus a primitive log cabin) may be permitted, but by the time you’ve conformed to all the laws the house is not worth the bother; it’s the same as a frame house but takes a lot more wood. Even mobile homes are illegal in many areas, although even in those areas you may get away with living in a “legal non-conforming” mobile home, meaning a mobile home that was put on the property before the building code was established in that area.
Rural properties nearly always need wells and septic systems, and the construction of these will add another few thousand dollars in expenses, although some areas still allow the old-fashioned pit-type outhouses.
Exactly what is allowed is a difficult thing to say, because the specific building codes actually vary somewhat from one area to another. In the United States, these laws are determined by the county, while in Canada the decisions are made by the township. There is no easy route: you need to check with the clerks or inspectors of any and all areas that you are interested in. But there really are not many places where there are no building codes to deal with.
Such laws put wilderness-dwellers in an ambivalent situation. People who live in the country are certainly “nature lovers,” or they wouldn’t be there in the first place. At the same time, because of the horrors of global overpopulation, resource-consumption, and environmental destruction, legislators everywhere are introducing laws that severely restrict access to the wilderness.
It’s hard to say whether the present building codes and zoning restrictions do more harm than good for the “back-to-the-landers.” They certainly make life complicated -- and expensive -- for the buyer. On the other hand, since my neighbors have to follow the same laws, they make it less likely that I will not be shocked by the sound, sight, or smell of whatever is going on down the road. And if I buy a house, I can be fairly sure that it will not blow down the next day.
To a large extent, the laws about rural property are simply ignored. You need a building permit to do major renovations to your house, but not small ones. The difference between the 2 often gets intentionally blurred, and I know of one contractor who does his work first and deals with any building inspector later. Often an owner and an inspector get into a war of nerves; someone else I know kept up an argument about whether his mobile home was permanent (hence illegal) or temporary, until the inspector decided to try his luck elsewhere. To a large extent, if none of your neighbors complain, it’s quite likely no one will ask you to stop what you’re doing. In my own case, however, the fear of getting caught keeps me reluctantly law-abiding.
As I grew older, I became less attracted to spending the night in a sleeping bag on bare rock. I also began to have a few more pennies to rub together. By that time, I was married, and my wife was also not in the mood for a terribly primitive way of life, although we had the same wish to get out of the rat race. We bought a house on the edge of Toronto, with a large backyard. For 4 years we grew vegetables and even grains there. Each summer we grew about 20 or 30 kinds of food plants, constantly experimenting.
But we wanted something bigger and more remote. We looked at many real-estate listings and put together a shopping list that was roughly as follows: a house or mobile home in fair condition that could be used for year-round occupancy in accordance with the building code and other local laws, a few hectares of arable land, a year-round road, a well, and a septic system. Based on what we saw and what we could afford, we were looking for a house that would cost about a quarter or an eighth of the price of a house in the city -- even though the new house would have far more land.
Eventually we found what we were looking for. It was a mobile home sitting on a full basement, a few steps from a minor highway, about 2 hours due north of Toronto. Closer to the road there was an enormous pine tree. Behind the house there were 2 hectares of flat land, mostly treeless, where we eventually had garden of about half a hectare that produced about 30 different types of crops. At the other end of the property there were grasses, shrubs, and trees that led down to the bank of a beautiful river. The venture turned out to be more expensive than we’d anticipated, however, as I’ll explain later.
Finding the money to buy rural property is always ironic. The people who most need to get out of the city and away from the endless expenses of city living are those who have the least money, while the people who find it easiest to get out of the city are those who are rich enough to be hauling huge motorboats behind them as they travel. Sort of like Marie Antoinette dressing up in a shepherdess outfit. There are a few ways out of the bind, however. Try working at tough but high-paying jobs that no one else wants. Or buy a run-down house in the city, renovate it, and take advantage of the profit that comes from the renovation. If at all possible, save enough money that you can buy rural property without having to pay off a mortgage.
When you start looking at properties, one of the trickiest questions is water, and the topic often gets omitted from the advertising. Unless a cottage or cabin is stated to have a well, then it probably does not. If a rural house has no well, there is no guarantee that one can drill for water later and actually find it. A hydrologist could come and take a look and then make an educated guess. By looking at surface water and neighboring properties, you could probably make a good guess yourself. The presence of willows, alders, cattails, reeds, rushes, and so on, would also indicate water -- perhaps too much. A test drill would give a definite answer, if you were willing to pay for it. Other than that, there’s always the chance that there’s no water below the surface.
Of course, one way of ensuring a water supply is to buy land that adjoins a river or lake. Lakeshore property, however, is rarely worth buying. It costs about 10 times as much as other land, and you will be crammed in with other cottages and their attendant motorboats and portable radios, unless the lake is only accessible by canoe -- in which case, you’ll find it nearly impossible to build or renovate a house that requires materials from outside. Property on a river or creek is somewhat less expensive, and if the water is too shallow to be navigated by motorboat then the land is less likely to be crowded.
You may very well intend to live where the soil is suitable for growing food. That means, obviously, that you should not buy bare rock; in fact, you should really have soil that extends down for at least 1 meter. Land that is too wet is also unsuitable, because the crops will just rot; wet lands include swamps (roughly speaking, wet land with sphagnum moss) and marshes (roughly speaking, wet lands with cattails, rushes, or reeds). Land covered by shrub willows and alders is likely to be underwater in the spring. Flat land is fine, but make sure that it isn’t in danger of flooding. A gentle slope is really the ideal topography, since the slope will ensure good drainage. Too much of a slope is not a good thing, since you’ll find all your soil washing away as soon as you remove the natural vegetation; you could devise some sort of terracing, Tibetan-style, by collecting stones from the fields, but to produce a large enough garden by that method would entail an impossible amount of labor. Land completely covered with trees would provide firewood but make gardening difficult; the trees could be chopped down, but removing the stumps would be a major task. On the other hand, don’t be discouraged by land that has tall weeds, since they indicate fertile soil; it’s land that has little or no vegetation that should worry you. Whether the soil is clay or sand might not be terribly important, although somewhere between the 2 would certainly be preferable. Even land that has been “farmed out” -- impoverished by misuse -- should not necessarily be avoided, since there may be ways to improve the fertility of land.
You’ll need about 2 to 4 hectares of forest for firewood. That amount of land can be cut indefinitely, relying on what is called the “annual increment.” Even if you don’t have a large piece of land, it’s a good idea to start getting rid of some of the dead and overcrowded trees on your property (but save a few for wildlife habitat). For firewood, hardwoods are superior to softwoods such as pine, cedar, or spruce, but any wood is better than none. If the hardwoods include sugar maple, save some good ones for a maple-syrup operation; 3 or 4 maples will provide enough syrup for an entire family. What is more important is that you do not burn wet or rotten wood. For your first year of firewood, any dead tree will do, but it’s better to use trees that are still standing, not lying on the ground and absorbing moisture. You can use live trees for later fires, but you’ll need to cut them down and store them for at least half a year before burning them. You would need about 15 m3 (4 full cords) of wood to heat a well-insulated small house in central Ontario; other types of houses, or houses further north, might require 36 m3 (10 cords).
As a long-term “survival skill,” operating a chain saw is rather questionable, of course. And according to some experts, if you calculate the money required to operate a chain saw, and the time involved in maintaining the equipment, you may find that you’re better off using a simple bow saw. (Conserve your strength by cutting wood that is less than 15 cm wide — also, pieces of that width will not require splitting.) The modern blades are too hard to be resharpened, but a lifetime supply would cost very little money. Another part of the answer to the heating question is to use less firewood by sealing off unnecessary rooms in winter and covering windows, or even by living in a smaller house.
The House
If you’re going to live in a standard “frame” house (i.e. the usual sort of house, made of 2x4s), what you need is small dwelling that is in good shape. Most houses today are nearly 3 times as large as those of the 1950s and hold fewer people; don’t get caught in the tide of consumerism. Another big question is: Are you going to buy a ready-built house, or build a new one? Probably you’re going to buy a ready-made one, and there are 2 reasons for that.
The first is financial. It’s generally cheaper to buy a house with land, rather than to buy land and build a house later. That’s particularly true if you’re buying a fair amount of land. If a farmer is trying to get rid of a piece of vacant land, he can wait until someone is willing to pay his price. If he’s trying to get rid of a piece of land that has a house on it, he’s in rather a bind, because he’s going to be paying high taxes on it (well, higher than on vacant land) every year until someone buys it. That problem of taxes can work in your favor; the seller will keep his price low enough that he can get rid of the property fairly quickly. That rule isn’t always true, by any means. Obviously the condition of the house is a major variable, for one thing. But you’ll probably find that a house and land separately are more expensive than a house and land together.
Having said all that, though, I should point out some exceptions. For one thing, you might not have the money to buy both land and a house, in which case you might want to buy 1 at a time. Buying the 2 separately might also give you more to choose from. In Ontario, for example, there are endless opportunities to buy vacant land ranging in size from 4 to 20 ha, with a good road adjoining the land, and the list price in the early twenty-first century will be about $10,000 in every case. You could camp on the land until you had built a permanent home with some further cash. If you find an area that is tolerant of mobile homes, you might find that the most economical approach is to buy the land and later put in such a home.
The other reason why you would probably buy a ready-made house is that it is difficult for 1 or 2 people to build a house that meets the restrictions of today’s building codes. I’ve met men and women who’ve built their own homes, but such people are not common. If you’ve spent a few years doing construction jobs, then you might consider building a house with your own hands, but otherwise you’re facing quite a challenge. Building codes are complicated. Even if you could follow the regulations, it would take a great many hours of labor to finish the job.
Buying a house, rural or urban, involves a certain ritual, and to deviate from that ritual can be fatal. If you see a listing that tempts you, call the real-estate agent whose phone number is shown, and make an appointment to look at the property. If possible, book 2 or 3 trips in the same area on that same day. When the agent shows you an interesting property, have a good hard look at the house. Start by having a look at the outside: if the walls are leaning or badly cracked, the house cannot be repaired and should not be bought. Look at the roof: if the shingles are so old and wrinkled that they look like potato chips, then there’s a fair chance that the plywood underneath is rotten, which means thousands of dollars in repairs. Go inside: any water stains on the ceiling or walls? If so, are the stains still damp, or have the leaks been repaired? Check the floors: if they sag like a trampoline, they’re rotten. Check the plumbing (turn on the taps, flush the toilet). Check the windows (are they single pane or double, and what’s the condition of the frames?). What kind of electrical system is in place? Don’t worry about dirt -- you’re bound to find enough of that, especially if nobody is living in the house -- but pay attention to serious defects that will need to be fixed and that will therefore add to your labor or expenses. There’s a mysterious border between “fixable” and “unfixable,” and if you buy a house that’s in the latter category, you’ll just end up reselling the place for less than you paid. Then look at the land: is there really enough arable land, enough water, enough sunlight? Don’t go on your gut feelings; it’s far too easy to fall in love with a property -- it’s almost instinctive, that cave-dweller’s craving for a place of one’s own. A more practical approach would be to start taking notes on the back of the listing page; by the time you get home you’ll have forgotten half of what you’ve seen.
It would probably be a good idea to hire a professional home inspector, if you can find somebody in that area. Unfortunately, the qualifications for that job are often rather vague, so try to get a name from someone you trust. Make sure the inspector isn’t also a renovator, or you may get conned into repairs you don’t need. If you find someone reliable, make it a condition of the sale that the inspector be allowed to look at the house and submit a written report.
You’ll need a good wood-burning stove. You might not need what is called a “wood-burning cook-stove,” a 300-kg monster with an oven, a hot-water reservoir, and so on. A small, simple, 150-kg wood-burning heater can be used for boiling or frying, costs far less than a cook-stove, and will heat an average-sized house, even in the colder parts of North America.
If you’re new to a certain area, it’s considered ethical to shop around from one agent to another for a while. Once an agent has taken you on a number of trips, however, it’s generally considered your responsibility to stick with that agent. It’s hard to say when such a partnership begins, but if you’re willing to place your enquiries with one agent you’ll find that the benefits are mutual -- loyal customers tend to get better service. On the other hand, if you feel that you’re being taken on too many wild-goose chases, it may be better to find another someone else.
Be careful with real-estate agents. Most are honest and efficient, but some are better than others. Beware of agents who try to con you with certain expressions. “This’ll sell quickly. You’d better put in an offer fast.” “Don’t worry about that clause. I don’t know about you city folks, but around here we generally settle things with a handshake.” “What do you mean, the roof is caving in? What do you expect for that kind of money?” “Gee, you want to see inside the place? What’s the matter, you don’t trust me?”
In some places, real-estate agents must state whether they are acting as vendors’ agents or as buyers’ agents -- i.e., whether they are working for you or for the other guy. The distinction is not entirely necessary, since most areas have laws stating that agents must fully disclose all relevant information; they aren’t allowed to tell lies or to omit critical facts.
If you find a property that seems to meet all your requirements, go home. Take a deep breath. A day or 2 later, if you’re still convinced that the property is worth buying, call the agent and put in an offer. How much to offer is always a difficult question. Very roughly speaking, a property can be bought for about 80 percent of its list price. But that’s very rough. It may well be the case that the owner is desperate to get rid of it, in which case you might even get a 30-percent discount. Or the opposite can happen: maybe the owner is quite happy to wait for ages until someone is willing to cough up the asking price. That question of price involves some real talent at haggling. It gets to be a war of nerves: you don’t want to pay the entire asking price, but you may still be afraid of letting a nice piece of property slip through your hands. But when you’ve told the agent what you’d like to pay, you’ll be sent a purchase-offer document, with standard clauses inserted, and of course with your name and your offering price.
Be certain to give this paper to a lawyer before you sign anything. Yes, you’ll have to pay the lawyer a few hundred dollars to do the legal work, but it still works out to be cheap insurance. You’ll save yourself a lot of suffering if a lawyer can spot errors right away; 6 months later is not a good time to find out that you don’t own what you thought you owned.
During the negotiations, don’t be shy about calling that lawyer. You’re paying that person to do a job, so you have a right to ask questions. Don’t sit by the phone, waiting for the lawyer to call you instead; your phone may never ring. Some lawyers do an excellent job, whereas others seem to think they’re being paid all that money just to sign a piece of paper. For various reasons, lawyers sometimes take on too many clients, which again means your case might not get much attention if you say nothing. In any case, informed questions get better responses than dumb ones, so read the purchase agreement carefully; if you don’t understand the terminology, go to a library or bookstore and get a few books on the subject of real estate.
Be especially careful with all clauses involving wells and septic systems. Is it a dug well or a drilled well? What kind of pump does it have? Get a potability test. What kind of septic system is installed? How old are the well and septic system? Ask your lawyer to get copies of all relevant documents regarding construction and maintenance.
If both you and the lawyer are satisfied with the purchase offer, sign it and fax it back to the agent. The offer will mention 3 dates: the irrevocable date (the last date on which the vendor can agree to your offer), the title-search date (the latest date on which your lawyer can check the title), and the most important one, the closing date (when you officially take possession, which can be anywhere from 1 month to 3 months after you sign the offer). The agent will show the offer to the vendor. If the vendor is satisfied, he or she also signs the offer, and it is sent back to you. There may be some last-minute haggling, but at some point both parties have to decide when to stop quibbling and just sign the paper. Practically speaking, the property is now yours. You must then send a deposit to the agent (whatever deposit amount you stated in the offer). If you need a mortgage, you must be sure that your bank is ready to lend you the money, although a general agreement with the bank should have been worked out even before you started looking for property.
Now that the property is yours, you can start thinking about the future in more detail. Ideally, you should have plenty of time to clean the new house thoroughly before you move in. When the cleaning is finished, paint anything that needs to be painted. Keep the paint simple, and don’t get involved with wallpaper, because it takes longer and costs more. When the painting is finished, you can move in the furniture. And unless there’s snow on the ground, you can start preparing a garden.
The Economics of Country Living
Ultimately you must try to get away from “earning a living” in the sense of bringing in money. If you need money, it would be far better for it to come from whatever life savings you’ve put together. (Or live without money, as our ancestors did for a million years.) Earning a living in the country is no easier than earning a living in the city. Also, if you are living in the country and working at a money-based job, you are stuck in the same trap from which you have probably been trying to escape: you are tied to the global economic network. In order to work at a job, you will need to live in a modern home with electricity, a telephone, and perhaps even an oil heater, all of which will eat up a lot of your paycheck. You will pay property taxes, and you may be paying a mortgage. In order to get to that job, you will probably need an automobile, and that vehicle might be taking the biggest part of your income.
Until modern governments and economies have collapsed, however, you may still need to find a way of bringing in some cash. If so, you should at least keep in mind 2 basic principles: (1) don’t move to the country until you have money coming in (from that actual location); and (2) be realistic in your choice of venture. Most of the imagined money-making ideas don’t fit the reality of the commercial world. One of the silliest stories I ever heard of was somebody who claimed he had a good income from making baskets. Since I’ve made baskets myself, I’d say his income must be about 5 cents an hour.
If you’re determined to work at a job, you are more likely to have success with what might be called a manual or physical job -- plumbing, carpentry, electricity, renovations. Part of the reason is that a large fraction of the rural population consists of retirees, people with a fair amount of money but neither the knowledge nor the physical strength to do work on their houses. The other reason is that too many young people thought it was beneath their dignity to be trained in such things. But non-physical jobs -- astrology, aromatherapy, or computer programming -- are just not in demand.
I would even say that market gardening is somewhat questionable as a source of income, especially in the early years of the twenty-first century, although it may be done with the best of intentions. I have always advocated “the localized economy,” not because it would reduce the pollution caused by fossil fuels, but simply because those fossil fuels are running out, and “alternative energy” is just a silly fantasy. As the century progresses, there won’t be any more California fruit being sold in Canada. However, it’s easy to be unrealistic about the localized economy.
Farmers’ markets are often not quite the epitome of country living as they might appear. At the present time, growing crops for money often disrupts the basic purpose of agriculture. Tourists want salad ingredients: high-end stuff, hard to grow, low on calories. For survival purposes, on the other hand, what one should be growing is root crops and starchy items: high in calories, easy to grow, easy to store for winter. Besides, a cottager who drives a 2-ton SUV to a farmers’ market to buy a handful of lettuce isn’t doing anything “environmentally friendly.” Many of the people who shop at farmers’ markets are actually just doing it as a form of snobbery, so that they can brag to their lakeside friends about the exclusivity of the salad ingredients that they’re serving.
As the years go by, it will be more and more apparent that the type of localized economy that makes the most sense is subsistence farming. By that I mean growing food to support one’s own household or immediate neighborhood, rather than selling it at a market. Such a practice is very rewarding in terms of health, psychology, and economics.
Growing food for sale, in any case, is economically self-defeating at the present time, whether it involves localized or non-localized sales. The world’s agriculture is dominated by a very few companies (Monsanto is perhaps the most familiar name), and by the giant farms that form the second tier of that feudal structure. One day agri-business will collapse, but that event may take a while. For now, however, those multinational companies can undercut the prices of any small-scale farmer. The average shopper really doesn’t know -- and doesn’t care -- how much hard labor goes into a handful of vegetables.
While living in the country in the early years of the twenty-first century, you may be simply engaging in what might be called “urban living in a rural setting.” If you have all the “mod cons” such as electricity, a telephone, and the 4 major appliances (electric stove, refrigerator, clothes washer, drier), then what you are perhaps doing is living in an urban style but with a slightly larger stretch of grass in all directions. You are then facing what I call the Financial Reign of Terror but without the defenses that a denizen of the inner city might have -- might have temporarily, I mean. The Reign of Terror is that period of high prices and low wages that follows the peak of oil production until people lose confidence in the entire idea of money. (See the section on “Money and Labor” in the last chapter below.)
My wife and I lived in a rural part of central Ontario for 7 years, from 2001 to 2007. The financial costs were greater than we had ever imagined. Soon after moving there, we paid cash for a fairly average used car. Even though we did far less driving than any of our neighbors, we could not avoid the car entirely, and it was always our worst cost. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average vehicle costs $8,003 per year to own and operate. When I passed on this piece of information to my friends, I was thoroughly scolded; most said their own cars cost only a fraction of that amount. Some of their claims were perhaps just self-delusion, however. My wife and I later did some calculations, and we discovered that the annual cost for own car had been $5,510.
It was a good thing we had also paid cash for the house and land, because if we had been paying off a mortgage we would really have had trouble making ends meet. Even with a level of frugality that shocked some of our neighbors, our monthly expenses were $1,440. A third of that was for the car. In descending order, the next most expensive items were food (although we grew a great deal of our own food, and we bought little meat), house renovations, electricity, telephone, property tax, and firewood (although we soon started producing our own firewood), with an additional $200 for miscellaneous items.
In fact, rural wages tend to be lower than those in the city, on the grounds that costs are lower, although in reality not all costs are lower. Yes, the cost of housing is much lower, but the cost of transport is high for many people because of the greater distance from home to work. The cost of supermarket food is high, and the costs for electricity and for a telephone are high, again because of the distances involved.
On the positive side, by living in that rural part of Ontario we acquired so many skills that we could put to use for the rest of our lives, and which will certainly be useful during the changes that are starting to take place all over the world. We slowly learned a few things about house repair and renovation, even if electricity remained a rather esoteric subject. We learned a great deal about heating with wood. We discovered so many things about vegetable gardening that we didn’t know before. And, perhaps above all, we started to learn how to live with some independence from the dubious blessings of modern civilization.
Hand Tools
Start weaning yourself away from power tools, if you haven’t already, and get yourself a good collection of hand tools. The first and most important tool, for almost any purpose, is a knife. An ordinary sheath knife with about a 10-cm blade has the most general application.
For most indoor jobs you could get by with a hammer, crosscut saw, tape measure, pliers, and a small set of screwdrivers. A more complete collection might require consist of: vice, crosscut saw, hammer, screwdrivers, combination wrenches, adjustable wrench, socket wrenches, pipe wrench, wrecking bar, tape measure, pliers (blunt and needle-nosed), wire cutters, squares (combination and rafter), level, hand drill and points, brace and bits, chisels, files, wire brush, sharpening stones, chalk line.
For gardening tools you would need a shovel and hoe. You might also want a pick ax, a rake, a scythe, and a sickle.
When dealing with logs for firewood or other purposes, you will need a felling ax and a splitting ax, and either a motorized chain saw or a bow saw, or even an old-fashioned timber crosscut saw.
Many tools or their accompaniments do not last forever. Stock up well on such items as files, drill points, and saw blades. Nails and screws, and perhaps nuts and bolts, are always needed; use them frugally, and re-use them as much as possible. Wire, rope, string, tape, and glue have endless uses.
Start thinking about how to do things without spending money. If you don’t happen to have a store-bought sharpening stone, for example, you can experiment with rocks in their natural state: micaceous schist (a common layer-forming rock that glitters with mica particles) is quite useful, but there are many kinds of rocks with a fine to medium grain that will do as well.
Paintbrushes will ultimately have no use, because paint and similar materials will be expensive or unavailable. In any case, wood that is not in contact with ground moisture should last a long time with no coating; there are log buildings hundreds of years old.
Modern axes and saws are often are made of hardened steel, generally carbide steel. That means that they will keep an edge for a long time, but it also means you may not be able to sharpen them with an ordinary file. Try to find tools that are soft enough to be filed; that may involve buying antiques if they are not too rusty.
3: SUBSISTENCE FARMING
Only about 10 percent of the world’s land surface is arable (depending somewhat on definitions), whereas the other 90 percent is just rock, sand, or swamp, which can never be made to produce crops on a permanent basis, whether we use “high” or “low” technology or something in the middle. In an age with diminishing supplies of oil and other fossil fuels, this 10:90 ratio will create a big problem. Humans are not living only on that 10 percent of arable land, they are living everywhere, while trucks, trains, ships, and airplanes bring the food to where those people are living. Admittedly, the parts of the earth with the best soil already have the greatest density of population, but there are nevertheless many people now living far from such land. What will happen when the vehicles are no longer operating? Will everyone be moving into those “10 percent” lands where the crops can be grown? Nevertheless, you may be lucky enough, or clever enough, to find a patch of fertile soil that will provide a fair amount of your daily food.
I tend to think of “subsistence farming” as having 3 characteristics. In the first place, as much as possible it involves less-advanced technology; reliance on machinery and chemicals will not be possible without a global economic network to support them, whereas a shovel, a hoe, and a wheelbarrow (with a non-pneumatic tire!) are probably a once-only purchase.
Secondly, it is water-efficient. Without a municipal water supply or a motorized pump, water for agriculture will no longer be abundant.
Thirdly, subsistence farming might entail a largely vegetarian way of life: the growing of crops takes less land than raising animals (although some animals can make good use of less-fertile land), and it is less complicated. With a largely vegetarian diet, of course, there can be a danger of deficiencies in vitamins A and B12, iron, calcium, and fat, all of which can be found in animal food. Most of these deficiencies are covered by an occasional taste of meat; daily portions of beef and pork are really not necessary.
Initial Preparation of Land
New land should be broken with a plow, a device that generally requires either a tractor or a draft animal, but a fair amount can be done with hand tools. Much depends on the time of year and the weather. In the spring after a good rain, it is possible to dig up 50 m2 in a day, even if one is not especially muscular. In August after a long drought, however, digging even 5 m2 in a day might be hard. But there are ways to the task easier: if the grass or weeds are long, they can be cut with a scythe before the digging begins, and hot weather can be avoided by starting work at dawn. When perennial grass such as couch grass has been dug up, it should be shaken thoroughly to release the soil, and then it should be piled up and burned, or it will just put down roots again.
Actually many of the native North Americans preferred forest, rather than grassland, as sites for agriculture. The forest land was more fertile, and digging up heavy sod would have been arduous with the available tools. The native people girdled the trees (i.e., cut a ring of bark from around each tree) to kill them and get rid of the shaped-producing leaves, and then felled the trees much later, with fire and axes.
Choice of Crops
Besides grains and fruits, the most useful food plants in temperate climates belong to about nine families, including the Amaryllidaceae (garlic, leeks, onions), Chenopodiaceae (beets, chard), Brassicaceae (broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cabbage, collards, kale, kohlrabi, rutabagas, turnips), Leguminosae (beans, peanuts, peas), Umbelliferae (carrots, parsnips), Convulvulaceae (sweet potatoes), Solanaceae (peppers, potatoes, tomatoes), and Cucurbitaceae (squash).
A good general rule is to choose old-fashioned (including “heirloom” or “heritage”) varieties rather than modern, big plants rather than small (but small fruit rather than big), pole or vine rather than bush. Popular varieties over the last several decades, unfortunately, have been heading in the opposite direction. Commercial growers want faster varieties, urban gardeners want small ones. Choosing varieties that are hardy and drought-resistant means going in the opposite direction. The rule does not always work -- bush beans are not necessarily worse than pole beans, for example -- but it serves as a guide. A somewhat similar guide is to look for something that closely resembles a wild plant, or is roughly the same thing as a wild plant -- dandelions, mustard, or purslane, for example.
Modern-day city-dwellers who live sedentary lives are likely to focus on low-calory food. Those concerned about subsistence farming, however, will want to do the opposite: country living requires substantial meals. Subsistence farming means the production of a large number of kilocalories (“calories”) with a small amount of labor and a small amount of risk, and perhaps with not much land. With these factors in mind, one could say that there are not so many crops worthy of attention. There is no such thing as a perfect type of food to grow, because there are advantages and disadvantages to every type. Reliance on a single crop would be dangerous, and variety is essential. We never know exactly what will happen, and no rules are absolute.
Many of what might seem obvious choices may be questionable. Potatoes are highly susceptible to Colorado potato beetles, blight, and several other pests and diseases. Most grains might be difficult to grow without a plow (with a horse or tractor) and other specialized equipment. The brassicas are excellent for vitamins and minerals, but some of them are bothered by pests and diseases; kale is perhaps the least trouble-prone.
A good starting point might be to focus on corn (maize), beans, and squash, the main crops grown by the native peoples of North America. These 3 crops are easy to grow, and they require little or no watering if the plants are well spaced. Corn and beans, eaten together, provide excellent protein.
Corn has the scientific name of Zea mays and several confusing common names. There are basically 2 types of corn, sweet corn and field (grain) corn, although these are not botanical distinctions. The former is the type that is usually eaten as “corn on the cob.” Sweet corn, unfortunately, is unsuitable for drying, and it has more problems with diseases and insects. Field corn, on the other hand, is definitely worth growing. It has a higher yield per hectare than any other temperate-climate grain, and unlike other grains it requires no complicated threshing or winnowing.
It is essential to grow only open-pollinated varieties of corn; hybrid types do not reproduce properly. In modern times, however, one is unlikely to find varieties of corn that qualify as both field corn and open-pollinated, with the exception of those colorful varieties that are generally known as “Indian” or “ornamental” corn. Of those, the hard (flint) types do better in areas where spring or fall frosts may be a danger.
Beans (e.g., Phaseolus vulgaris) and other legumes are another important part of the diet, especially for people on a vegetarian or largely vegetarian diet. Beans are high in protein, they are not demanding in terms of soil or climate, and they need little or no irrigation, at least after they have produced a few leaves. Unlike most other plants, legumes actually add nitrogen to the soil; traditional agriculture has always relied on their vital service.
Squash can be divided informally into the soft-skinned “summer” types and the hard-skinned “winter” types. Summer squash, however, provide only 167 kcal/kg, as opposed to 475 kcal for winter squash, so it is the latter that are more important. All squash are members of the genus Cucurbita, and of these the 3 main species are C. maxima, C. pepo, and C. moschata. C. maxima includes Buttercup, Hubbard, and Delicious, all of which are drought-resistant. C. pepo winter squash worth growing are Acorn, Spaghetti, and the true pumpkin (a lot of so-called pumpkins are a type of C. maxima); these are also drought-resistant, but Acorn squash is not especially good for storing. Of the C. moschata types, the most familiar is Butternut; while it is not noteworthy for being drought-resistant, it is one of the best squash for storing. In general, vining squashes are more drought-resistant than bush types.
For green vegetables and fruit, one can always supplement the diet with wild plants. There are dozens of species of wild fruit to be found in North America, even in its least fertile areas, although blueberries are by far the most important wild fruit in most of the north.
Amount of Land
The amount of land needed for subsistence farming depends on several factors, including the type of soil, the climate, and the kinds of crops to be grown. The following, however, may provide some rough figures.
The production of corn can be used as the basis for calculations, if we pretend for the moment that someone is going to be living entirely on corn. A hardworking (e.g., farming) adult burns about 5,000 kilocalories (“calories”) per day, or 1.8 million kcal/year. With fairly primitive technology, corn yields about 2,000 kg/ha, or 6.9 million kcal. One adult, therefore, would need about 0.26 ha of land; it would be safer, of course, to use twice that much land. (Incidentally, the world even now has a density of only 3.3 people per hectare of arable land, but that does not account for unevenness of distribution, or for other use of the arable land.)
Oddly enough, if other crops are substituted for corn, there is generally no enormous difference in the number of kcal produced per ha. Beans (as “dry beans”) produce about half the yield of corn. Root crops (turnips, carrots, beets, etc.) are impressive in terms of their bulk -- mass -- per ha, yet they do not differ greatly from corn in kcal/ha.
Soil Fertility
Anyone intending to buy a piece of land should take a sample of the soil and have it tested by a government-approved laboratory, while that kind of service is still available. The quality of the soil is also indicated by the types of wild plants that grow on it. (Most of the information below is taken from the 1957 edition of Rodale’s Encyclopedia of Organic Gardening; the lack of more recent documentation is a strange reflection on our state of readiness.) If the soil is really poor to begin with, and especially if it is very low in potassium or phosphorus, there is not a great deal that can be done about it, at least with the resources available in a survival situation. If prices are still low enough, you might want to go to a farm-supply store -- not a hardware store -- and buy a lifetime supply of high-grade fertilizer, although fertilizer can destroy humus.
If most of the trees are evergreens, the land is too acidic. Acidic soil may also be indicated by chamomile, garden sorrel, mayweed, or sheep sorrel. Land that is excessively wet due to poor drainage may be growing buttercup, cattail, ferns, ironweed, Joe-Pye weed, or loosestrife. Other weeds might be indicators of reasonably good soil: amaranth, burdock, lamb’s quarters, purslane, ragweed, or thistles.
Soil used for the growing of crops must have adequate amounts of organic matter (humus), which can come directly from decomposed vegetation or from animal manure. Organic matter holds water and air in the soil, contains -- often to an inadequate extent -- some of the elements needed for plant growth, and provides an environment for small organisms that are essential to the fertility of the soil.
Farmland must also have adequate amounts of about 16 elements -- naturally occurring or otherwise. Of these 16, the most critical are phosphorus (P), potassium (K), and especially nitrogen (N). Calcium and magnesium are probably next in importance. Some of the elements may be found in organic matter, but the quantities are often insufficient. These elements might be abundant in the soil before any cultivation is done, but whenever crops are harvested a certain amount of the 3 critical elements is removed.
The problem of inadequate amounts of the 16 elements is generally remedied nowadays by adding fertilizer, which can be artificial or can come from such sources as rock dust -- the latter a fashionable “soil amendment” that will no longer be available without hydrocarbon-based mining and transportation. Acidity can be counteracted by adding crushed limestone (again, not likely to be available) or wood ashes, which contain calcium. Nitrogen, however, can be provided by planting any legume, such as beans or peas, since bacteria in the roots take nitrogen from the air; the plants (preferably entire) must be dug back into the soil, of course.
Primitive societies had a simple but imperfect solution to the problem of maintaining fertility: abandonment. No fertilizer was used, except for ashes; as a result, the soil became exhausted after a few years, so the fields were abandoned and new ones were dug.
Another common response to the N-P-K problem, used in many countries for centuries, has been to turn crop waste into compost and put it back onto the land. The problem with that technique, however, is that one cannot create a perpetual-motion machine: every time the compost is recycled, a certain amount of N-P-K is lost, mainly in the form of human or animal excrement after the crops are eaten, but also as direct leaching and evaporation. One can come closer to sustainability by recycling those human and animal wastes, but the recycling will always be less than perfect. After all, nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium are elements, and by definition they cannot be created. Of the 3 main elements, nitrogen is by far the most subject to loss by leaching, but to some extent that can also happen with phosphorus and potassium.
There are partial solutions that are worth considering. Besides using vegetable compost and animal manure for increasing the sustainability of agricultural land, many societies have employed such related techniques as crop-rotation, fallowing (leaving land uncultivated for a year or so), cover-cropping, and green manuring. Such practices also replenish the humus content of the soil. Some of these practices can even partly replenish the phosphorus and potassium, since plants with deep roots can draw such elements to the surface. Some of these techniques are difficult with hand tools, however. In other countries, vegetation was brought in from the hills, or mud was taken from streams that ran down from the mountains.
Water
The term “irrigation” refers to any use of water other than the direct use of rainfall or other natural precipitation. In a post-oil economy it will not be possible to use a motorized water supply for irrigation. Yet if one were to try using an old-fashioned hand pump to get the water out of the well, a good deal of manual labor would be involved. A garden needs about 2 or 3 cm of water a week. On a garden of half a hectare, for example, that amounts to 66 m3 of water. That would mean carrying a bucket to the pump about 2,300 times a week, except when it rained. Not very practical.
What the North American native people and pioneers did was to give the plants plenty of space, and then just rely on the rain. Almost any type of crop, given enough room, can be left to the mercy of the weather, although some crops need to be watered as seeds or seedlings. The essence of water-efficient gardening is to space the plants out so that the distance between them is greater than most modern gardening manuals recommend. That way the roots can spread out and explore in all directions to find the water that has been stored there over the previous months.
To keep that underground moisture from evaporating, a hoe must be used to remove all weeds, because most water vanishes through plant leaves. Hoeing also keeps the surface of the ground watertight by creating a “dust mulch”: water does not easily pass through a layer of well disturbed dust, since the lack of water and the separation of particles prevent capillary action. (“Organic” mulches, such as wood chips or hay, are not much use on an entire garden; even if one could find enough material for so much land, there would be further trouble with bugs, weeds, and cold soil.)
Steve Solomon explains that if the garden has at least 1 meter of soil, and if there is also close to a meter of precipitation annually, with that moisture spread out fairly evenly over the 12 months, then it is possible to garden without irrigation. On the other hand, if there is only about 30 cm of soil above the bedrock, or if there is less than about 50 cm of precipitation annually, gardening without irrigation is still possible, but the plants need to be spaced out far more.
Contrary to popular belief, in other words, “intensive” gardening is not practical without a garden hose and an unlimited supply of water. More plants per unit of land simply means using more water per unit. With such a method, the lack of bare ground between rows also means that it is not easy to get a hoe to the weeds; as L.H. Bailey said long ago, intensive gardening is just “cultivating the backache.”
Control of Pests and Diseases
The following methods of control apply mainly to insects, but roughly the same are relevant to more primitive forms of life, such as fungi, viruses, and bacteria: (1) selection -- choosing resistant species and varieties; (2) diversity -- growing a fair number of species and varieties at the same time (avoiding monoculture); (3) rotation -- not growing a crop in the same place in the following year; (4) health -- keeping plants strong by providing good soil and enough water, light, and space; (5) sanitation -- removing and burning any dead or dying plants, and avoiding contact with wet plants; (6) tillage -- digging up the ground each year to destroy insects; (7) direct attack -- fighting insects by handpicking; one might also want to experiment with sprinkling wood ashes or spraying solutions of garlic, hot pepper, or soap.
Storage
One way of storing vegetables for winter is to keep them in a root cellar or something similar. The basic idea is to keep the food just above freezing. In pioneer times a root cellar was often little more than a cave dug into a hillside and provided with a door. The earth provided the necessary coolness and humidity to keep the vegetables fresh all winter long. Nowadays a root cellar can be made by walling off a northern corner of a basement, including a window that can be opened to regulate temperature.
Rutabagas, carrots, beets, and parsnips require packing in damp hay, sand, or some other damp material to prevent shriveling. Turnips do not store as well as rutabagas. Potatoes and onions should be kept in loosely woven bags or at least open boxes, in a dark room. Winter squash need slightly warmer conditions than other stored crops.
Another simple method of storing is to build a clamp, which is an outdoor mound of vegetables placed on a 30-cm layer of dry vegetation (hay, leaves, or similar material), then covered with another 30-cm layer of dry vegetation, and finally covered with a layer of earth. Usually some sort of drainage is provided by digging a trench around the clamp, but that is easily done as the soil is dug to be put on top of the clamp. Clamping is simple and cheap, but it is not always successful: a winter might be extreme, freezing and ruining the food or solidifying the mound too much for it to be opened.
Drying is a good technique for preserving almost any crop. Grains and beans are very easy to dry. Squash can be peeled and cut into strips or spirals 1 or 2 cm wide, then hung up to dry in the sun. Beets, turnips, rutabagas, and carrots can be dried the same way. Fruits can also be spread out in the sun. Leafy vegetables can be tied in bunches and hung in the shade to dry for a few days before being packed into jars; in winter, these dried leaves can be crumbled and added to soup.
Saving Seeds
Producing one’s own supply of seeds means keeping an eye on the more-desirable plants, and earmarking those for the next year’s crop. The best plants should be chosen, not the earliest; contrary to popular belief, seeds that appear late in the season do not produce slower plants the next year. Hybrid vegetables should always be avoided, of course, because they do not reproduce properly.
There are 2 methods for producing seed, although they overlap considerably. For the first method, crops are just be left in the ground until they to go to seed. Annuals are the simplest crops to deal with, since they go to seed in the first year, and often the seed is precisely what is eaten; grains and beans are obvious examples. Biennials (2-year plants) -- most brassicas, for example -- are also possible candidates for this method. The main question is whether the biennials can be left in the ground over the winter, and the answer to that depends on the species or variety, on the climate, and perhaps on whether the selected plants are covered in winter with something such as leaves, grass, straw, or even twigs.
The second method is to dig up the plants at the end of the first summer, store them carefully over the winter, and then replant them. This second method requires more work, but it is safer, and it also allows one to “rogue out” (remove) stunted or deformed plants.
In most cases it is best not to grow more than one variety of a vegetable for seed, because varieties will cross and produce offspring with uncertain qualities. Growing more than one variety is possible, however, if they are allowed to go to seed in alternate years, or if the varieties are planted several weeks apart so that they do not blossom at the same time.
Seeds need proper care if they are to stay viable. The longevity of seeds can be a single year or it can be many years, depending on the species, but that longevity can be increased by careful storage. Most seeds need to be kept very dry, and most also need to be kept away from light, so they should not be stored in glass jars, and it is important that they be sealed against insects or larger creatures.
4: ANIMAL FOOD
If you’re determined to raise animals for food, you may find that chickens are the least troublesome, but do it in a simpler manner than that described by most of the modern books, which are based on maximized (commercialized) production. A chicken lays about 1 egg a day, so you wouldn’t need many birds. Feed them grains and greenery. Chickens get calcium and phosphorus from the soil they eat; if your land is lacking these elements, you would have to use supplements such as mollusk shells or crushed limestone -- but it might be impossible to obtain these. A coop must be built solidly as a defense against predators. Another problem with chickens is that they’re always pecking each other, unless they’re completely free-running -- but then they’ll get into your garden and eat your vegetables. If you can’t raise chickens in the above conditions, then ultimately you would need to find (or create) a breed of chicken that looked and acted like its early ancestors: strong but small and not so productive in terms of meat or eggs.
If you’re adventurous you could try raising goats, sheep, or pigs, whereas cows might take up too much room. Without touching on all the complexities of animal husbandry, it might be worth pointing out that most of the modern textbooks on the subject are largely filled with descriptions of the various diseases of animals and the methods of treatment. If we look at the way domesticated animals are raised in pre-industrial societies, on the other hand, the most obvious difference is that treatment of disease is largely ignored. Any Medieval European chronicle, for example, has references to the effect that in the year such-and-such the herds were wiped out by one nameless disease or another. These things used to be regarded as the unavoidable caprices of Nature, and even if human hunger was the consequence the only solution was to wait for the disease to run its course.
Going after wild game may be more productive than trying to raise chickens or other domesticated creatures. A gun or 2 would be very useful, at least until the world’s ammunition runs out. Do plenty of target practice, well before your life depends on being able to shoot accurately. In a survival situation you should generally not go hunting in the usual manner, carrying a specific type of gun and looking for a specific type of prey, in accordance with the time of year and particularly in accordance with the type of license you’re carrying. On the contrary, if you’re truly living off the land you need to be prepared for any sort of wild meat, whether it’s frogs or moose.
There’s no such thing as a perfect gun, so you have to make your own decisions. (As they say, “First you choose the ammunition. Then you choose the gun to go with it.”) A .22 is quiet, with very lightweight ammunition; even large animals can be killed with such a gun, if you fire repeatedly and hit the vital areas. A 12-gauge shotgun is certainly powerful and will take a variety of ammunition, but it’s only good for short distances. You could use a shotgun for deer, or you might prefer a rifle, perhaps a lever-action .30/30 (light and easy to carry), a .270, a .303, or a 30-06. Bolt and lever actions are less trouble-prone than either pump or semi-automatic. It’s really hard to say, though, what constitutes the one best survival gun. Based on what native people do, and what military survival experts seem to prefer, it would seem that a single-shot .22 is the best single gun. On the other hand, in most of North America it is illegal to shoot big game with something as small as .22 ammunition.
Buy your gun or guns as soon as possible, and buy as much ammunition as your budget will allow, before it becomes too expensive. Unfortunately the laws regarding the possession of guns and ammunition can change in irrational and unpredictable ways over the years; throughout history, economic collapse has tended to be correlated with repressive legislation.
A possible problem with hunting for game, in post-collapse times, is that there might be far too many people doing it. That’s especially likely when many people start to ignore the game laws, and every day is “open season.” On the other hand, there are 3 good reasons (all somewhat interrelated) why there might not be such a problem of excessive hunting. The first is that the shortage of fuel will cut down the number of motorized vehicles -- cars, trucks, ATVs, snowmobiles, motorboats -- on which the modern hunter depends. The second and related reason is that the average member of modern industrial civilization lacks the physical stamina to go wading through a swamp all day, looking for a moose. A third reason is that there are simply not that many people who have the skills for serious hunting.
Don’t laugh at bows and arrows; some of the best hunters use them instead of firearms. Arrows are silent, so you have a better chance at a second shot, and for the same reason you have less worry about human intruders. Unlike rifle cartridges, arrows can be re-used immediately, and the materials to make new ones can easily be found. Don’t underestimate the killing power of a sharp broadhead.
Deadfalls and snares can be used for many species. Many books show dozens of types of traps, but in reality you’ll only use about 2 or 3 types. Generally speaking, snares are more useful than deadfalls, partly because the former usually do not require bait. As long as metallic wire is still available, you might as well use it. For rabbits and similar-sized creatures, you need copper or brass wire (or steel wire, which may be easier to find) between about 20 and 24 gauge. Some people use braided number-2 picture-hanging wire, but single-strand wire is fine.
In northern regions it is snowshoe hares that are most commonly snared. They can only be snared in the winter, when they make distinct trails. The snare wire should be 50 cm long. Make a loop 10 cm wide, and fasten it to a horizontal pole so that the bottom of the snare is 5 to 8 cm above the trail. Snares that use natural materials are usually more complicated, since they require a mechanism for lifting the animal from the ground, so that it doesn’t chew the snare material.
Almost any creature in the animal kingdom can provide food, but there are a few exceptions in North America. Some Pacific mussels, oysters, and clams are often dangerous in the summertime because of a poisonous organism that gets into them. You can eat most types of insects, but there are a few kinds to be avoided, mostly butterflies, moths, and adult beetles; the usual rule is that if it tastes bitter, it probably isn’t digestible.
Insects are high in protein and certainly worth considering as food. The most practical insect dish is grasshoppers, which are a common item of food in many parts of the world. Catching grasshoppers can be a community affair; people can dig a pit near the grasshoppers, 1 or 2 meters deep, and then make a big circle around the pit and the insects. They can then walk inwards towards the pit, hitting the ground with branches, forcing the grasshoppers to jump into the pit, from which they can be scooped up to be boiled or roasted. Roasted grasshoppers can later be crushed into a powder to be used in soup. Grasshoppers aren’t bad tasting; they’re a bit like unsalted peanuts.
Other sources of animal food are the many kinds of shellfish. Not only can the bivalves, such as mussels, oysters, and clams, be eaten (except sometimes on the Pacific during the summer), but also the univalves: periwinkles, whelks, and other kinds of snails. There are several kinds of clams. They are generally found below the surface of mud or sand, somewhere between the high-tide and the low-tide areas, and each kind of clam has its own preferred place to live. Some kinds prefer to burrow near the high-tide zone, other prefer the low-tide zone. Some kinds live in mud, others prefer sand. The easiest way to spot clams is to watch for their squirts as you walk near them. When you see them spurting water in this way, dig a hole beside some of these spurts, and then start digging sideways towards the clams to get at them.
Another important source of animal food, of course, is fish. They are an excellent source of protein, even though most of the freshwater varieties don’t provide enough fat for a steady diet.
There are several good books on modern sport-fishing available, and there would be little point in trying to include all that information here. For the most part, these methods involve a rod and a reel. From a survivalist perspective, perhaps all that should be added is that while the types of fishing gear include “spincast,” “spinning,” “baitcast,” and “fly,” the first is really more suitable for a beginner than for a more serious person, while the fourth is of questionable use as a survival tool precisely because it is intended for use with artificial bait. In general, natural baits are more effective than artificial ones, although it takes time to find such things. I should also point out that along with the above types of gear, there is also the much simpler device of a 3-meter pole with a line of the same length attached to one end, and with a hook, a float, and a weight at the other end of the line -- with not much practice, such a rig might catch as much fish as more sophisticated gear. In a true survival situation, of course, you might also not hesitate to use a torch or other fire to attract fish at night, and you wouldn’t worry too much about sizes or catch limits.
You can certainly use a hook and line to catch fish, but this can sometimes be a slow way of getting a meal. Other methods include the use of traps, spears, harpoons, or bows and arrows. Sometimes fish can be caught in slow-moving water by adding substances to the water that will poison or stun the fish without making it poisonous for humans: the natives of North America used buckeye nuts, amole, turkey mullein, Indian hemp, pokeweed, Indian turnip, walnut bark, and devil’s shoestring. The most effective methods of fishing involve the use nets of various sorts.
Primitive hooks can be made of wood, bone, antler, or shell. Some are made of 1 piece of material, some are made of 2. One-piece bone hooks are made by first taking a large flat piece of bone and scratching the curved design of the hook on it. By deepening these scratches, the hook can finally be lifted away from the rest of the bone. The hook is sanded to shape, and a groove is cut around the top of the shank to hold the line.
The 2-piece kind of hook has several variations, but basically it involves tying a pointed bit of bone or hard wood -- a thorn would also work -- to a wooden shaft. The top of the shaft is carved to form a knob to hold the line, or a groove is cut around the shaft. Tie the string to the shaft, and weave it back and forth around the shaft and the point in a series of figure-8s about a dozen times. If you make the hook entirely out of wood, you’ll have to tie a small piece of stone or bone to the top of the shaft, to get it to sink.
Another simple device used for catching fish is the gorge. Sharpen a sliver of bone at both ends, and carve a groove around the middle, or drill a hole through it, to hold the string. When the fish swallows the gorge, it turns sidewards and catches.
The hook or gorge is fastened to a string, which in turn is fastened to the end of a pole. Hooks and gorges can be baited with meat, dead fish, or insects. An artificial lure can be used instead; it is usually dangled from the end of a separate line.
A very common kind of fish trap is the weir, basically a fence or wall built across a river. Often the weir is V-shaped, with the point of the V usually downstream, so that the force of the current carries the fish down into the center. The point is kept open wide enough for the fish to swim through into some sort of corral. The Inuit made the trap (straight, not V-shaped) out of boulders placed across a shallow river, while further south the trap was usually made of poles planted in the riverbed.
An improvement on this setup is to place a basket trap at the point of the V. Basket traps can be made in all sizes, from about 1 meter to over 6 meters in length. To make one, take several dozen long thin poles and fasten hoops inside or outside them. Fasten a shorter cone inside the mouth of the first one. Tie the trap to the point of the V, with a few heavy rocks inside to hold it down on the bottom of the river.
Perhaps the most effective of all devices for fishing are nets, but they represent quite an advanced stage of “primitive” technology, especially if we consider that before the net can be made someone must produce great lengths of cordage. Only the basic idea can be presented here. Nets can take many forms, from long-handled dip nets to much larger seine nets that are drawn around whole schools of fish, but perhaps the most common is the gill net, so called because its mesh is large enough for a fish to put its head through, but small enough that the fish will get caught by the gills.
A fishing net is really just several rows of girth hitches (or you can use sheet bends). You’ll need a good deal of cord, and you’ll also need a gauge for measuring the squares of the net, and a shuttle to hold the cord as you weave. The gauge is simply a rectangular piece of wood about 10 cm wide. The shuttle is a flat piece of wood about 15 cm long and about 5 wide, with a deep notch at each end; the cord is wound onto the shuttle and then unwrapped as you go along. In an emergency, you can get by without either a gauge or a shuttle, just using your left hand as a gauge and keeping the cord wound up in a ball instead of on a shuttle, but it isn’t as easy to keep things tidy that way. You’ll also need a length of heavier cord, which you’ll later run all around the net.
Plant 2 poles firmly in the ground, or fasten them to 2 trees, about as far apart as the length that you want your net to be, perhaps 6 m. Tie the cord to top of the right-hand pole, maybe 1 or 2 m off the ground. Let out enough cord to reach to the left-hand pole, bring the cord back around the pole, and then make a knot loosely around the top length of cord about every 10 cm. Insert the gauge into the big loop that you’re tying off; pull the knot tightly up against the gauge. Let out a little more cord as you move to the right and make another knot in the top cord. And so on. When you’ve worked your way all the way back to the right-hand pole, take another turn around the pole and do another row of loops and girth hitches underneath the first row, going in the opposite direction.
Keep going back and forth, with each row under the previous one, until you reach the ground. Keep everything tight, so that the net retains an even shape. The knots slide, so you can always adjust them a bit afterwards, but you can’t really adjust the overall size of each square, so it’s important to keep the cord pulled up tight against the gauge each time, before you tighten the knot.
When you’ve finished the bottommost row, run the heavier cord through each of the topmost loops, then down through all of the loops on one side, along and through the bottom loops, and then up the second side, where the 2 ends of this heavier cord can be tied together. This cord will protect the net from strains that might otherwise damage it. Remove the poles, and the net is complete. When you want to put it in the water, though, you’ll need to tie pieces of wood or bark along the top edge, and small rocks along the bottom edge, so that the top of the net floats and the bottom of the net sinks.
There are various ways of setting a gill net. If a creek is narrow enough, it might be possible to fasten the net right across from one bank to another. If not, then 1 end is tied to a tree or stake on the shore, and the far end is pulled out into the water by someone swimming or in a canoe, and fastened to a long pole planted in the river bed, or the end can be kept in place by a big float at the top and a big anchor-stone under the water. One good place to put a gill net is in a bend in a river, on the outside curve, preferably where the river widens slightly and has little whirlpools; fish often rest and feed in these spots.
Reptiles and amphibians can be clubbed or speared for food. Snake is certainly a worthwhile emergency food; there isn’t a great deal on a snake fillet, but it tastes fine. Turtles can be caught with a piece of meat fastened to one end of a line, with the other end of the line tied to a pole stuck in the riverbank. Frogs are an excellent source of food. Bullfrogs can easily be speared from a canoe (split a stick partway, to make a 2-pronged spear); peel the skin off the legs and cook them.
Grouse and other birds can be caught in snares, which might be set up in a circle around some grain thrown down as bait. Ducks and geese are most easily shot or corralled during the summer molting season, when they are unable to fly. A bola can be used to bring down birds from a passing flock. The bola is simply 3 rocks encased in leather pouches, which in turn are attached to cords joined together at the end. The cords are whirled around the head and let loose at the right moment.
Mammals can be caught in traps, which can be roughly divided into 2 types: deadfalls and snares. A deadfall is a log or rock held by a support attached to some sort of trigger mechanism; when the trigger is moved, the support falls, and the log or rock lands on the animal. Usually some sort of food (bait) is attached as to the trigger in order to attract the animal. Snares, on the other hand, sometimes have triggers and bait, but they don’t always have, since the trapper often just sets the snare in the animal’s regular path, hoping that the snare will be invisible to the animal.
Porcupines can be easily clubbed, and hence form a good source of food in emergencies. Deer and moose are common big-game animals, while sheep, elk, and antelope are taken in other areas. In parts of the southwestern United States, smaller animals, including mice and pack rats, once provided a large part of the diet. Rabbits can be killed with throwing sticks, sometimes after they have been driven into long nets by community drives -- long lines of people walking towards the rabbits, driving them towards the nets.
Game should bled and gutted soon after killing. The blood can be used to make soup, and the liver, kidneys, and most other organs should be eaten right away, since they can’t be preserved easily. About the only organ that isn’t edible is the gall bladder (although deer don’t have one), next to the liver.
Preserve fish by splitting them in half and hanging them up to dry in the sun, or a smoky fire can be built underneath. The flesh of larger fish can be slashed a few times to speed up the drying. Very small fish sometimes don’t really need to be split or gutted, but just strung up and smoked.
The meat of mammals is preserved in very much the same way. In fairly warm and dry areas, the meat can be just cut into strips and hung over poles to dry in the sun, but in other areas a small fire should be kept lit under the meat; the fire shouldn’t heat the meat or even smoke it very much, just kept it dry. The meat should be dried for several days, until it is somewhat leathery in texture, then packed away until it is needed, at which time it can be softened by boiling.
When you kill an animal, don’t waste the hide. Preparing a hide begins with skinning the animal: cut from the anus to the throat, along the inside of each leg, and around the head and feet. The sooner you do the skinning after killing the animal, the more easily the hide will come off. Remove all meat and fat, and scrape off the thin membrane between the skin and the flesh. In the case of deer or moose hides (which tend to shed), you’ll probably want to do the same to the hair side. You may want to stretch the hide in order to do all this. In any case, it will need to be stretched on a frame before it dries, or you can just pull it repeatedly with your hands. (You can also roll up the hide, tie it all in a big overhand knot, and then insert 2 short poles that can be twisted in opposite directions.) The final result is rawhide. If you want a more flexible product, mash and briefly simmer the animal’s brain with a little water, and rub the mixture into the hide as you’re stretching it. To prevent later attacks by vermin, suspend the hide above a smoky fire for an hour or so. The hides of rabbits and hares, however, need no treatment other than air-drying, once they’re removed from the animal.
5: FURTHER BACKGROUND INFORMATION
Perhaps the most common response to the peak-oil problem is: “The oil isn’t going to disappear overnight. We have a century to prepare.” Unfortunately, the fact that the decline in oil is a curve, not a vertical line, makes it difficult to comprehend. What matters is that the serious damage will be done long before we get to those tiny remaining drops a century or so from now.
The same statement, “We have a century to prepare,” also raises the question: Who is the “we” here? All human beings? A small group of dedicated survivalists? If the answer is the former, then the statement may be false: humanity, as a whole, is not good at making decisions. The human race, taken in its entirety, is not inclined to behave in such a sophisticated manner; human beings often prefer ignorance, superstition, cruelty, and intolerance.
Infrastructure
Most schemes for a post-oil technology are based on the misconception that there will be an infrastructure, similar to that of the present day, which could support such future gadgetry. Modern equipment, however, is dependent on specific methods of manufacture, transportation, maintenance, and repair. In less abstract terms, this means machinery, motorized vehicles, and service depots or shops, all of which are generally run by fossil fuels. In addition, one unconsciously assumes the presence of electricity, which energizes the various communications devices, such as telephones and computers; electricity on such a large scale is only possible with fossil fuels.
To believe that a non-petroleum infrastructure is possible, one would have to imagine, for example, solar-powered machines creating equipment for the production and storage of electricity by means of solar energy. This equipment would then be loaded on to solar-powered trucks, driven to various locations, and installed with other solar-powered devices, and so on, ad absurdum and ad infinitum. Such a scenario might provide material for a work of science fiction, but not for genuine science. The sun simply does not work that way.
It is not only oil that will soon be gone. Iron ore of the sort that can be processed with primitive equipment is becoming scarce, and only the less-tractable forms will be available when the oil-powered machinery is no longer available -- a chicken-and-egg problem. Copper, aluminum, and other metals are also rapidly vanishing. Metals were useful to mankind only because they could once be found in concentrated pockets in the earth’s crust; now they are irretrievably scattered among the world’s garbage dumps.
The infrastructure will no longer be in place: oil, electricity, and asphalt roads. Partly for that reason, the social structure will also no longer be in place: intricate division of labor, large-scale government, and high-level education. Without the infrastructure and the social structure, it will be impossible to produce the familiar goods of industrial society.
Without fossil fuels, the most that is possible is a pre-industrial infrastructure, although one must still ignore the fact that the pre-industrial world did not fall from the sky as a prefabricated structure but took uncountable generations of human ingenuity to develop. The next problem is that a pre-industrial blacksmith was adept at making horseshoes, but not at making or repairing solar-energy systems.
Fossil fuels, metals, and electricity are all intricately connected. Each is inaccessible -- on the modern scale -- without the other 2. Any 2 will vanish without the third. If we imagine a world without fossil fuels, we must imagine a world without metals or electricity. What we imagine, at that point, is a society far more primitive than the one to which we are accustomed.
The End of Electricity
As Richard C. Duncan points out, the first clearly marked sign of systemic collapse may be the failure of electricity. Throughout the world, electricity comes mainly from coal, natural gas, nuclear power plants, or hydroelectric dams, and all of them are bad choices. Most North American electricity is produced by fossil fuels, and in the United States that generally means coal, although natural gas is often the first choice for future supplies of fuel. Coal is terribly inefficient; only a third of its energy is transferred as it is converted to electricity.
The North American grid is a hopelessly elaborate machine -- the largest machine in history -- and it is perpetually operating at maximum load, chronically in need of better maintenance and expensive upgrading. But most North Americans still cannot think of a failure of electricity as anything more than a momentary aspect of a summer storm. In other parts of the world, the future is already here: the lights fade out daily after 4 or 5 hours, if they come on at all. Actually North Americans are in far better shape than the citizens of other countries. Thanks to political bungling, even “civilized” Britain will apparently be losing 40 percent of its electrical power between 2008 and 2014.
The Long-Term Reliability Assessment, a lengthy document by the North American Electric Reliability Council, is disquieting. Each area of North America, according to this text, will be in some danger of outage over the next few years, due to inadequate supplies of electricity. Texas may be in the greatest danger, whereas Quebec (with the advantage of hydroelectric dams) may be the safest area.
North Americans should have been warned about the threat to electricity by the great blackout of August 14, 2003. Jason Leopold describes the aftermath of that event:
Congress called for spending of up to $100 billion to reduce severe transmission bottlenecks and increase capacity so the transmission lines could carry additional electricity from power plants to homes and businesses. But the money that would have funded a reliable power grid was spent on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
I remember that day in 2003 very well. No gasoline, because the pumps required electricity. Still, many Torontonians came up to cottage country, where I was living, to wait out the troubles. Also no bank machines working, so it was cash only. There were big sales of batteries and candles. Also bottled water.
.
It’s amazing how much pure water is needed, even by frugal people -- about 8 liters per person per day is about the minimum comfortable amount, and that’s only for drinking, cooking, and perhaps a little dishwashing. All other water, such as for flushing the toilet (if you don’t use an outhouse), must come from a pond or a river, although you might want to install a hand pump for a well long before such an emergency occurs. You might also want to keep candles, matches, batteries, wind-up electric devices, and so on. And in winter you would of course need several cords of firewood, and plenty of warm clothing and bedding.
Money and Labor
Almost everything in our modern economy is either made from oil or requires oil for its functioning or its transportation. As the price of oil begins to skyrocket, therefore, so will the price of everything else. (The same happened on a smaller scale during the temporary oil crises of the 1970s and ’80s. It was referred to as “stagflation” -- stagnation of income combined with inflation of prices, something that economists used to say was impossible.) The hardest hit will be those with debts: car payments, house mortgages, credit cards, student loans. But everyone will find that a dollar just doesn’t “stretch.” High prices will be combined with low wages.
At first, money will be an immensely important issue. It will take a handful of bills to buy anything. And largely because of the high prices, unemployment will rise dramatically. For the first few years of the collapse, there will be a Financial Reign of Terror, and in fact this era has already begun to some extent, if we can judge from a number of related events. In 1970 U.S. domestic oil production went into a permanent decline. Although global oil production must be dated to the first years of the twenty-first century, production per capita reached its peak much earlier, in 1979. In the U.S., gasoline prices, which had been steady for decades, started to increase annually by 18 percent in 2003. And around 2005 the energy required to drill for a barrel of oil began to exceed the energy gained from it.
The “economic” problem of peak oil is occurring when North Americans have already been battered by other economic problems. One serious issue is globalization: for many years, big companies have been getting their work done by sending it out to whatever countries have the poorest people and the most repressive governments. The result is that people in “developed” countries lose their jobs. Although the official unemployment levels are low, the figures are misleading; large numbers of the “employed” are not working at well-paying, permanent, full-time jobs. Closely related to the problem of globalization is that of automation, which increases production but decreases payrolls. (The “Historical Income Tables” of the United States Census Bureau have shown, over many years, the widening gap between the rich and the poor: in particular, while most incomes have either fallen or not changed, the upper 5 percent of families have seen their incomes climbing dramatically.) As a result of all these vagaries within the capitalist system, government services are perpetually being cut. The common expression is that “money is tight these days,” although very few people ask why that is the case. Taxes continue to rise, but the individual receives little in return.
(But, no, contrary to rumor the international credit collapse that began in 2007 was not due to oil depletion; all that the two had in common is that the former can be ascribed to government corruption, which like oil depletion is an aspect of systemic collapse.)
At one point, the money problem will be everything. A few decades later, the money problem will be nothing, because money will disappear. Money is only a symbol, and it is only valuable as long as people are willing to accept that fiction: without government, without a stock market, and without a currency market, such a symbol cannot endur, as George Soros has pointed out. Money itself will be useless and will finally be ignored. Tangible possessions and practical skills will become the real wealth. Having the right friends will also help.
The answer, in part, is to try to give up the use of money well ahead of time, instead of letting the money economy claim more victims. Barter would allow people to provide for their daily needs on a local basis, without the dubious assistance of governments or corporations. Such a way of doing business, unfortunately, is illegal if the participants are not paying sales tax on their transactions. Politicians disparage the age-old practice of barter as “the underground economy” or “the gray economy,” but of course their own income is dependent on taxes. In any case, the transition would not be simple: there are so many rules, from building codes to insurance regulations to sales- and income-tax laws, that make it difficult to provide oneself with food, clothing and shelter without spending money. Nevertheless, as the economy breaks down, so will the legal structure; where there is no law, there are no criminals.
I think Jay Hanson has been right to stress that systemic collapse (and specifically oil depletion) really cannot be explained in terms of economics in the usual sense of the word. Economists have no equations for dealing with the problem, since they cannot comprehend the simple fact that resources have limits. I personally find it frustrating to answer scientific questions when, so often, they get twisted into financial ones. The simplest response is to point out that the cost of oil sometimes bounces up and down with little relation to the amount that is being produced. But this answer rarely seems to satisfy anybody. I assume the reason is that many people live in fear of losing their jobs and their paychecks, and it is hard for them to see what academic discussions of systemic collapse have to do with buying groceries today or tomorrow. Economists and financial experts make a living from obfuscation, so we must make some attempt to clarify terms.
The words “inflation” and “deflation” are misleading, and in most cases are used improperly. Strictly speaking, they refer to government decisions to increase or decrease the money supply. However, what the average person is thinking about, really, is the question of the ratio of wages to prices. If the second goes up, and the first doesn’t, there’s trouble. (If the 2 go up together, it isn’t important, since the only people who will suffer are the financiers, people with very large savings accounts -- with such a wage-and-price spiral, a billion dollars won’t buy as many yachts as it used to. But I digress.)
Nevertheless, in terms of money, one legitimate question is whether or not to move to another part of the globe. To what extent is 1 part of the world more expensive than another? This question in turn must be broken into 2 others. The first might be rephrased as: Assuming that comparisons involve living at the same level of comfort, in which city will a thousand American dollars (for example) last me the longest? The answer is that Asuncion (Paraguay) is the cheapest, followed by Harare (Zimbabwe), Buenos Aires (Argentina), Manila (Philippines), Karachi (Pakistan), Bangalore (India), Montevideo (Uruguay), Chennai (India), Caracas (Venezuela), and Quito (Ecuador). But ironically, there isn’t an enormous difference between 1 city and another, because of that very phrase, “the same level of comfort.” Between the least expensive city in the world and the most expensive (Moscow), the ratio is only 1:3, and in most cases the difference is far less. If you lived like a middle-class American while residing in a poor foreign city you’d look rather odd, but you might not be saving as much money as you expected. At the same time, such issues as crime, crowding, corruption, and pollution might make you wonder if the benefits of saving a few pennies were offset by the disadvantages.
The second question about the cost of living in various cities might be: What city is the cheapest in terms of the cost of living of the average person living there? But the answer to that question has no practical value, since no middle-class North American would be able to tolerate living in the manner of the world’s poorest. A backpacking 20-year-old American in Bangkok would find life quite uncomfortable even while spending several times as much money as a Bangkok truck-driver.
Leadership and Social Structure
The decline in the world’s oil supply, the biggest news story of modern times, rarely appears in the conventional news media, or it appears only in distorted forms. Ironically, the modern world is plagued by a lack of serious information. Today’s news item is usually forgotten by tomorrow. The television viewer has the vague impression that something happened somewhere, but one could change channels all day without finding anything below the surface. But television is only the start of the enigma. What is most apparent is the larger problem that there is no leadership, no sense of organization, for dealing with peak-oil issues.
One might consider as an analogy the Great Depression. During those 10 years, everyone lived on his own little island, lost, alone, and afraid. It was a “shame” to be poor, so one could not even discuss it with one’s neighbors. The press and the politicians largely denied that the Depression existed, so there was little help from them. In general, it was just each nuclear family on its own -- for those who were lucky enough to have a family. Barry Broadfoot, in Ten Lost Years, records the memories of one Depression survivor:
Every newspaper across Canada and in the United States always played up the silver lining. . . . There were no such things as starvation, hunger marches, store front windows being kicked in. Yes, they were reported, but always these were called incidents and incited by “highly-paid professional agitators.”
A related problem is the lack of ideological unity. While one person has a sort of Armageddon-like vision, stocking up ammunition for the Last Battle, someone else is busy on the Internet asking for ideas on how to make a still for the dozen corn plants he intends to grow. There is a complete lack of agreement on first principles.
Part of the reason for these problems is that many modern societies, including that of the United States, are “individualist” rather than “collectivist.” There is a sort of frontier mentality that pervades much of modern life. In many ways, this has been beneficial: freedom from tradition, freedom from onerous family duties, and freedom from manorial obligations have perhaps provided much of the motivation for those who came to what was seen as the “New World.” That spirit of self-sufficiency made it possible for pioneers to thrive in the isolation of the wilderness.
Yet we must not forget the truism that there is strength and safety in numbers. Individualism might be more beneficial in good times than in bad; North Americans seem to adjust poorly to crises. The defects of individualism can seen right within what is mistakenly called the democratic process: political leaders can tell the most blatant lies about economic trends, about warfare, or about transgressions of civil liberties, and the response is a numbed, silent obedience which is puzzling only until one realizes that most people have little means of behaving otherwise. They are generally lacking in family or friends with whom they can share information or compare ideas, and they are therefore entirely dependent on the news media for mental sustenance. The television set in the living room is the altar on which common sense is sacrificed.
Faced with such challenges, one would at first be lucky to produce a “post-oil community” much larger than one’s own nuclear family, before sheer destitution forces people to take a more serious attitude to survival. Fair-sized groups, however, would eventually develop. The society of the future has never been described, but at least some numbers are available. Chester G. Starr’s statement, in A History of the Ancient World, is probably as good as any: “Whereas Paleolithic packs numbered perhaps 20 or 30, Neolithic farmers either lived in family homesteads, in villages of 150 persons (as at Jarmo), or in even larger towns (as at Jericho).”
In any case, the question of the ideal political system is essentially not a political matter but a psychological one. Humans spent thousands of years living in small groups, hunting and gathering. The group was small enough so that each person knew every other person. Democracy could work because both the “voters” and the “politicians” were visible. It has only been in a tiny fraction of the life span of humanity that political units have been created that are far too large for people to know one another except as abstractions. Small groups have their problems, but in terms of providing happiness for the average person, the band or village is more efficient than the empire.
Shock and Denial
To judge from previous large-scale disasters, it seems likely that as the oil crisis worsens there will be various forms of aberrant behavior: denial, anger, mental paralysis. There may be an increase in crime, there may be strange religious cults or extremist political movements. The reason for such behavior is that fundamentally the peak oil problem is neither about economics nor about politics. Nor is it about alternative energy; there’s no such thing. It’s about geology. It’s about humanity’s attempt to defy geology. But it’s also about psychology: most people cannot grasp what William Catton refers to as “overshoot.”
We cannot come to terms with the fact that as a species we have gone beyond the ability of the planet to accommodate us. We have bred ourselves beyond the limits. We have consumed, polluted, and expanded beyond our means, and after centuries of superficial technological solutions we are now running short of answers. Biologists explain such expansion in terms of “carrying capacity”: lemmings and snowshoe hares -- and a great many other species -- have the same problem; overpopulation and over-consumption lead to die-off. But humans cannot come to terms with the concept. It goes against the grain of all our religious and philosophical beliefs.
When we were children, nobody told us that any of this would be happening. Nobody told us that the human spirit would have to face limitations. We were taught that there are no necessary boundaries to human achievement. We were taught that optimism, realism, and exuberance are just 3 names for the same thing. In a philosophical sense, therefore, most humans never become adults: they cannot understand limits.
Yet there is really nothing irredeemable in all this. We live in a “consumer” society, and we are all under the wheels of the juggernaut of capitalism. But if we look beyond civilization, both spatially and temporally, we can find many cultures with an outlook based more on the seasons of the year, rather than on an ever-expanding, ever-devouring “progress.”
The Cycle of Civilization
From a Darwinian perspective, civilizations constitute a rather brief interlude in the story of mankind. Humans and humanlike beings have existed for about a million years, but civilizations have existed for only about 5,000 years. Humanity’s “uncivilized” past, therefore, is greater than its “civilized” phase by the enormous ratio of 200:1. Considering the brevity of the latter, it might almost be said that civilization is merely an experiment, the results of which are still uncertain.
All civilizations grow too large to support themselves, and their leaders have little foresight. These civilizations then collapse and are buried in the mud. The same will happen to the United States, but human shortsightedness prevents us from seeing that country as only one among many civilizations. The U.S.A., in other words, is seen as “civilization” in a generic sense, not as merely one civilization in a quantifiable sense.
Ancient Rome serves to a large extent as a mirror of modern times. The fall of the Roman Empire has been ascribed to various factors, from laziness to lead poisoning. The impoverishment of the soil, and the consequent lack of food, may have played a large part. No doubt it was also a combined military and economic problem: there wasn’t enough money to pay for all the soldiers guarding the frontiers. Pestilence may have been another significant factor. Perhaps a more correct answer would actually be a more general one: the empire was too big, and it was poorly led.
The main difference between the United States and previous civilizations is that, from now on, the cycle of “civilization” cannot be repeated. Oil is not the only mineral that will be in short supply in the twenty-first century. Industrial civilization has always been dependent on metals, but hematite, for example, is no longer sufficiently common, and mining companies now look for other sources of iron, which can be processed only with modern machinery.
The technology of one century built the technology of the next. The technology of the past -- the hammer, anvil, forge, and bellows of the ancient blacksmith -- made it possible for later generations to extract the low-grade ores of the present. Very low-grade iron ores can now be worked, but only because there were once better, more accessible ores. This “mechanical evolution” is, of course, liable to collapse: when Rome fell, so did literacy, education, technology. But after many centuries, the Classical world returned. The western world experienced its Renaissance, its rebirth, after the Dark Ages because the natural world was fundamentally unchanged.
In the future, after the collapse of the present civilization, the necessary fuels and ores will not be available for that gradual rebuilding of advanced technology. The loss of both petroleum and accessible ores means that history will no longer be a cycle of empires, contrary to the descriptions of Spengler and Toynbee.
There will no doubt be successful communities arising over the next few decades or centuries, but they will have to be highly isolated and self-sufficient if they are not to be affected by the general die-off to which the rest of humanity will succumb. To a large extent their technology will be quite primitive, since present-day technology is highly dependent on the long tentacles of international commerce, as well as on the enormous manpower that sustains the industrial division of labor. Nevertheless, the knowledge acquired in more-recent times could be combed for appropriate inventions.
BIBLIOGRAPHY I: SURVIVAL ISSUES
Adams, Chuck. Bowhunter’s Digest. 3rd ed. Northfield, Illinois: Digest Books, 1971.
Angier, Bradford, and David Foster. Field Guide to Edible Wild Plants. 2nd ed. Harrisburg, Pennsylvania: Stackpole Books, 2008.
Ashworth, Suzanne. Seed to Seed: Seed Saving Techniques for the Vegetable Gardener. Decorah, Iowa: Seed Saver’s Exchange, 1991.
Bailey, L.H. Manual of Gardening. New York: Macmillan, 1910.
---. The Principles of Vegetable-Gardening. New York: Macmillan, 1921.
Bradley, Fern Marshall, and Barbara W. Ellis, eds. Rodale’s All-New Encyclopedia of Organic Gardening. Emmaus, Pennyslvania: Rodale Press, 1992.
Brengle, K. G. Principles and Practices of Dryland Farming. Boulder, Colorado: Colorado Associated University Press, 1982.
Buchman, Dian Dincin. Herbal Medicine: The Natural Way to Get Well and Stay Well. New York: D. McKay Co., 1979.
Cooper, John M. Snares, Deadfalls, and Other Traps of the Northern Algonquians and Northern Athapaskans. Reprint. New York: AMS Press, 1978.
Emery, Carla A. The Encyclopedia of Country Living: An Old-Fashioned Recipe Book. 10 th ed. Seattle, Washington: Sasquash Books, 2008.
Flagler, Gordon. The North American Wood Heat Handbook. Rev. ed. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1982.
Forgey, William. Wilderness Medicine, Beyond First Aid. 5th ed. Guilford, Connecticut: Globe Pequot, 1999.
Fry, Alan. Wilderness Survival Handbook. Rev. ed. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1996.
Gibbons, Euel. Stalking the Wild Asparagus. Chambersburg, Pennyslvania: Alan C. Hood & Co., 1988.
Goodchild, Peter. Survival Skills of the North American Indians. 2nd ed. Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 1999.
Graves, Richard. Bushcraft: A Serious Guide to Survival and Camping. New York: Schocken Books, 1987.
Guillet, Edwin C. The Pioneer Farmer and Backwoodsman. 2 vols. Toronto: Ontario Publishing Co., 1963.
Hamm, Jim. Bows and Arrows of the Native Americans. Guilford, Connecticut: Lyons Press, 1992.
Hunt, W. Ben. How to Build and Furnish a Log Cabin. Reprint. New York: Macmillan, 1974.
Hunting in North America: Big Game, Small Game, Upland Birds, Waterfowl, Wild Turkey. Minneapolis, Minnesota: Creative Publishing International, 2000.
Kelso, Dave. Moose Hunting: Calling, Decoying, and Stalking Tactics. Florida, New York: Woods N’ Water, 2006.
Kephart, Horace. Camping and Woodcraft: A Handbook for Vacation Campers and for Travelers in the Wilderness. Reprint. Knoxville, Tennessee: University of Tennessee Press, 1988.
King, F. H. Farmers of Forty Centuries; or, Permanent Agriculture in China, Korea and Japan. Reprint. McLean, Virginia: Indy Publish, 2005
Koller, Lawrence R. Shots at Whitetails. Iola, Wisconsin: Krause Publications, 2000.
Kugach, Gene. Fishing Basics. Harrisburg, Pennsylvania: Stackpole Books, 1993.
Lewis, Jack, ed. Bow and Arrow Archer’s Digest. Northfield, Illinois: Digest Books, 1971.
Logsdon, Gene. Small-Scale Grain Raising. Emmaus, Pennsylvania: Rodale Press, 1977.
Mayo Clinic Family Health Book. 4th ed. New York: HarperCollins, 2009.
Nelson, Richard K. Hunters of the Northern Forest: Designs for Survival among the Alaskan Kutchin. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986.
Olsen, Larry Dean. Outdoor Survival Skills. 6th ed. Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 1997.
Ormond, Clyde. Outdoor Life Complete Book of Hunting. Rev. ed. New York: Harper & Row, 1972.
Phleps, Hermann. The Craft of Log Building: A Handbook of Craftsmanship in Wood. Trans. Roger MacGregor. Ottawa, Ontario: Lee Valley Tools, 1982.
Rodale, J.I. The Encyclopedia of Organic Gardening. Emmaus, Pennyslvania: Rodale Press, 1957. Reprint, 2000.
Scher, Les, and Carol Scher. Finding and Buying Your Place in the Country. 5th ed. New York: Kaplan Business, 2000.
Seymour, John. New Complete Guide to Self-Sufficiency. Rev. ed. New York: Dorling Kindersley Publishing, 2003.
Solomon, Steve. Water-Wise Vegetables: For the Maritime Northwest Gardener. Seattle: Sasquatch Books, 1993.
Tresemer, David. The Scythe Book: Mowing Hay, Cutting Weeds, and Harvesting Small Grains with Hand Tools. 2nd ed. Chambersburg, Pennsylvania: Alan C. Hood & Company, Inc., 1996.
Wagner, Willis H, and Howard Bud Smith. Modern Carpentry: Essential Skills for the Building Trade. Tinley Park, Illinois: Goodheart-Willcox, 2007
Weatherwax, Paul. Indian Corn in Old America. New York: Macmillan, 1954.
Wheat, Margaret M. Survival Arts of the Primitive Paiutes. Reprint. Reno, Nevada: University of Nevada Press, 1977.
SERIES: Many of the Peterson Field Guides and the National Audubon Society Field Guides are extremely useful.
BIBLIOGRAPHY II: GENERAL
Bagdikian, Ben H. The New Media Monopoly. 6th ed. Boston: Beacon Press, 2004.
Booker, Christopher. “Fuel Crisis: Forget warnings of panic at the pumps. Britain is set to lose nearly half its electricity in six years.” Daily Mail, 10 June 2008.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1025586/FUEL-CRISIS-Forget-warnings-panic-pumps-Thanks-decades-government-neglect-Britain-set-lose-nearly-half-electricity-years.html
BP Global Statistical Review of World Energy. Annual. http://www.bp.com/statisticalreview
Broadfoot, Barry. Ten Lost Years 1929-1939: Memories of Canadians Who Survived the Depression. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1997.
Campbell, Colin J. The Coming Oil Crisis. Brentwood, Essex: Multi-Science Publishing Company, 2004.
----- and Jean H. Laherrère. “The End of Cheap Oil.” Scientific American, March 1998. http://www.dieoff.org/page140.htm
Catton, William R., Jr. Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change. Champaign, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 1982.
Central Intelligence Agency. CIA World Factbook. Annual. U.S. Government Printing Office. http://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook
Deffeyes, Kenneth S. Beyond Oil: The View from Hubbert’s Peak. New York: Hill and Wang, 2006.
-----. Hubbert’s Peak: The Impending World Oil Shortage. New ed. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2008.
Duncan, Richard C. “The Peak of World Oil Production and the Road to the Olduvai Gorge.” Geological Society of America, Summit 2000. Reno, Nevada, November 13, 2000. http://www.dieoff.org/page224.htm
“Earth Policy Indicators.” Washington, D.C.: Earth Policy Institute. http://www.earth-policy.org/Indicators
Energy Information Administration, U.S. Department of Energy. “Renewables in Global Energy Supply. An IEA Fact Sheet.” Annual. http://www.iea.org/textbase/papers/2006/renewable_factsheet.pdf
-----. “World Consumption of Primary Energy by Energy Type and Selected Country Groups.” Annual. http://www.eia.doe.gov/pub/international/iealf/table18.xls
-----. “World Energy Reserves.” Annual. http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/iea/res.html
Finfacts Ireland. “Global/World Cost of Living Rankings 2006/2007.” http://www.finfacts.ie/costofliving2006.htm
Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. “Food Outlook: Global Market Analysis.” Biannual. http://www.fao.org/docrep/010/ah876e/ah876e16.htm
Gever, John, et al. Beyond Oil: The Threat to Food and Fuel in the Coming Decades. 3rd ed. Boulder, Colorado: University Press of Colorado, 1991.
Greider, William. One World, Ready or Not: The Manic Logic of Global Capitalism. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998.
Grove, Noel. “Oil, the Dwindling Treasure.” National Geographic, June 1974.
Hanson, Jay. “Energetic Limits to Growth.” Energy. Spring 1999. http://www.dieoff.org/page175.htm
Hirsch, Robert L. “The Inevitable Peaking of World Oil Production.” Bulletin 16.3, The Atlantic Council of the United States, October 2005.
Kaplan, Robert D. The Ends of the Earth: From Togo to Turkmenistan, from Iran to Cambodia -- A Journey to the Frontiers of Anarchy. Gloucester, Massachusetts: Peter Smith Publisher, 2001.
Klare, Michael T. Resource Wars: The New Landscape of Global Conflict. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2002.
Knies, Gerhard. “Global Energy and Climate Security through Solar Power from Deserts.” 2006. Trans-Mediterranean Renewable Energy Cooperation in co-operation with The Club of Rome. http://www.desertec.org/downloads/deserts_en.pdf
Kunstler, James Howard. The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century. Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2003.
Leopold, Jason. “Dark Days Ahead.” Truth Out. 17 October 2006. http://www.truthout.org/docs2006/101706J.shtml#
Martin, Hans-Peter, and Harald Schumann. The Global Trap: Civilization & the Assault on Democracy & Prosperity. Trans. Patrick Camiller. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997.
McChesney, Robert. The Problem of the Media: U.S. Communication Politics in the Twenty-first Century. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2004.
Nakashima, Tadashi. Down with the Cities. http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/578
North American Electric Reliability Council. Long-Term Reliability Assessment. Annual. http://www.nerc.com/pub/sys/all_wpdl/docs/pubs/LTRA2008.pdf
Pfeiffer, Dale Allen. The End of the Oil Age. Napa, California: Lulu Enterprises, 2004.
Pimentel, David, and Carl W. Hall, eds. Food and Energy Resources. Orlando, Florida: Academic Press, 1984.
----- and Marcia H. Pimentel. Food, Energy, and Society. 3rd ed. Boca Raton, Florida: CRC Press, 2007.
Rifkin, Jeremy. The End of Work: The Decline of the Global Labor Force and the Dawn of the Post-Market Era. New York: Tarcher/Putnam, 1995.
Salisbury, Harrison E. The 900 Days: The Siege of Leningrad. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Da Capo Press, 2003.
Simmons, Matthew R. Twilight in the Desert: The Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the World Economy. Hoboken, New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, 2006.
Smith, Lisa. “The True Cost of Owning a Car.” Investopedia. http://www.investopedia.com/articles/pf/08/cost-car-ownership.asp
Smith, Rebecca. “U.S. Foresees a Thinner Cushion of Coal.” Wall Street Journal. 8 June, 2009. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124414770220386457.html
Soros, George. The Crisis of Global Capitalism: Open Society Endangered. New York: Public Affairs, 1998.
Spiedel, J. Joseph et al. “Making the Case for U.S. International Family Planning Assistance.” United States Agency for International Development
http://www.jhsph.edu/gatesinstitute/_pdf/policy_practice/Papers/MakingtheCase.pdf
Starr, Chester G. A History of the Ancient World. 4th ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.
Thurow, Lester C. The Future of Capitalism: How Today’s Economic Forces Shape Tomorrow’s World. New York: William Morrow, 1996.
Trainer, Ted. “The Death of the Oil Economy.” Earth Island Journal, Spring 1997. http://www.dieoff.org/page116.htm
United Nations Population Fund. “World Population to 2300.” New York: United Nations. http://www.unfpa.org/swp/
United States Census Bureau. “Historical Income Tables -- Families.” U.S. Government Printing Office. Annual. http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/income/histinc/f03ar.html
Woodham-Smith, Cecil. The Great Hunger: Ireland 1845-1849. New York and Evanston: Harper & Row, 1962.
Youngquist, Walter. “Alternative Energy Sources.” Oil Crisis. October 2000. http://www.oilcrisis.com/youngquist/altenergy.htm
-----. Geodestinies: The Inevitable Control of Earth Resources over Nations and Individuals. 2nd ed. Portland, Oregon: National Book Company, Education Research Assoc., 2008.
END
7 comments:
An excellent summation of the situation we face Peter. It's a very bleak prospect which few indeed of us can look at with eyes wide open, without resorting to an escapist fantasy of one sort or another.
The only way forward as I see it is to ask the following question: will human beings survive as a species? If you believe the answer is yes, then how will the survivors of the coming collapse be living and where? Who will they descend from? And then what is to be done by us, the living, to try and ensure their future existence?
I'm egotistical enough to want to be one of their ancestors, either spiritually, intellectually or materially.
Thank you for your contribution to the most important conversation we can now have.
Regards
Lloyd Morcom
If nothing else, it's a relief to hear from someone other than optimists.
That's the hardest thing about mental life in America: exceptional views are immediately thrown out if threaten complacency. Or aren't going to make someone rich.
And nothing makes you feel more complacent or more like you're about to hit the jackpot than optimism.
I think it's time someone gave us unpleasant news about the life expectancy of this civilization. Living in it has made us such dim bulbs on just about everything except getting more.
At this point it would be a damned shame if this civilization could recycle itself after collapse. Why the hell would we want to go through this again?
Whoever comes next might actually learn something (god knows we didn't) and do something smarter than we ever did: figure out when to stop. And I mean stop everything: eating, breeding, wanting, owning, roaming, all the dimensions of hating having to live on earth so much that we're willing to destroy it so it'll feel more like Dreamland.
Nice read.
As an aside, here is a neat image that could be used on your main page:
http://www.autolife.umd.umich.edu/Design/Gartman/D_Casestudy/ID38014_1_NoGas.gif
I'm sure you could get permission.
The doom and gloom crowd forgets one very important fact about resource depletion. We are entering the era of genetic and nano engineering. As resources become more scare, nano robots building everything from raw meat to skyscrapers from scratch, could keep humanity ahead of the depleting oil. The line between machine and organism is going to become quite blurred in the next 20-40 years. Never underestimate science (or a better word perhaps is intelligent individuals armed with good info) to ultimately defeat every big resource shortage that comes our way.
Solar panels that grow them selfs after a technician programs the cells to do so. That is just a sampling of the sort of tech we as humans are going to be accustomed to. Fifty years ago somebody who said that humans could communicate at the speed of light, sending ideas and money across contentments would have been dismissed as a science fiction writer. Today we are now using the internet. That tiny fraction of geniuses that lifted humanity out of the dark ages will also lift humanity out of the sort of inefficiency and physical want we are again experiencing.
Unlike animals: Humans can remake the physical world by unlocking many of the physical laws that make the universe function. Human intelligence would have eventually come up with industrial civilization even with no hydro carbons in the ground. It may have taken longer to get to the tipping point but humans would have reached it.
The question is can humanity overcome some of its age old superstitions? For instance many humans were killing cats in mid-evil Europe because they were believed to be witches in animal form. This placed no population check upon the rats that actually carried the black plague. Is this superstition so different from today objections to bio medical research that will keep us ahead of resource depletion? Another example would be how the repressiveness of governmental/educational institutions in most of the world keeps human potential locked away. If enough of the old tradition and ignorance can be stripped away, the young will solve problems their elders could only despair over. It happens over and over through history. Physical limits on growth only become a problem when the growth of human knowledge slows down too much. Oil is only irreplaceable to a mindset that has no room for what has yet to be invented. Solar, nuclear and many other forms of power are in their pre-modle T phase if you liken them to a automobile development. Such early beginnings will seem primitive against what will be available in even so short a time as 10 years.
Their is some cause for gloom in the short term. This recent "recession of democracy" is in large part due to resource depletion. On the plus side is that outer space has plenty of room to allow humans to truly matter in the cosmic sense.(instead of being a biological also ran waiting for the next big asteroid impact) Governments that give inventors a dis-incentive to ply their mankind saving trade is the real threat that gives "resource depletion" a chance to catch up to a humanity that has outpaced poverty with knowledge for some time now.
Terra formation of Mars and other suitable worlds, asteroids, and other heavenly bodies made habitable by technology will likely make population problems on earth as quaint a problem as in breeding is to a modern resident of any major city. Even with the primitive tech we have today, a major self supporting outpost on Mars or even a city is not out of the question (and less impractical then you might imagine).
Sincerely Gordon Angelino (Raptoreyes)
Sources
(Nano technology)
Nano by Ed Regis (accessible to a non technical individual)
Engines of Creation by K Eric Drexler.(recommended only for engineers)
(Terra forming)
Entering Space by Robert Zubrin
Look up NASA's "Mars Direct" plan in early stage implementation now!
Nanobots and ninnybots. While you are up, build me a sandwich. I'll be waiting. From your tone it should take about fifteen minutes. I will notify my monkey-butler to expect you.
The biggest problem in today’s world is to make people aware of the consequences of the excessive life style, It is NOT normal is based on cheep energy we steeling from the future. We taking much more than our share and the reality is going to deal with us. Even a factual and alarmist article like this one won’t probably convince many people.
On the other end life for humanity it is not going to end (it will get worse though) there was no gas when humanity build the pyramids in the desert (well not atomic bombs too :-( or that big wall across the mountains, and certainly there was no gas before the gas was found :-). But is almost criminal (or that’s the way I feel) to drive the car around and wasting (steeling) this amazing source of energy to do shopping a block away. But everybody does it and yes, I do it too (shame)! I cannot even convince my wife to just understand my (this) perspective.
It is the burden of the people with this knowledge to raise awareness, buying guns and storing food might secure a better chance but it would not save the world or the future. It is greedy short sighted people who set up this trap (lifestyle), maybe we can change it. Let’s hope, let’s try it.
Don't forget:
Food Production fuels population growth, not the other way around.
If we grew less food globally, and had better distribution methods, we'd buy some time by keeping population growth at zero.
Post a Comment