It’s also unrealistic to imagine that you can start from a “typical” suburban or urban lifestyle, and move immediately to a self-sufficient one. You will NOT be able to grow all your own food during your first season as a gardener. It’s unrealistic even if everything stays the way it is now. If you are downsized unexpectedly and facing foreclosure on your home, you will have to learn really fast. We don’t want it to get to that, because at that point any failure could be a mortal one.
The ideal, of course, is that you start from a position of strength and stability, and merely add new knowledge and skills. That’s the ideal, but you do what you have to do. It will take you several years at the very least to become a decent food grower, for example. Begin where you are, right now. You don’t have several years.
Support
Unless you develop an independent social group now, such as an extended family, that meets all its own needs in vegetables, fruits, grains, meats, fiber, building supplies, future relationships, child-raising, arts and music, classical education, mechanics, health care, electricity, and repairs of all kinds, you will still have to learn to trade/barter with an outside community. When times get hard, families, whether blood relatives or simply like-minded individuals, will come together for mutual support. And, your group will interact with other groups. This is what humans have done since the beginning of time.
Historically, the largest group of people who can live together in self-supplying mutual assurance, before bureaucratic social systems start developing, is about 140 individuals. Hutterite religious communities keep this as the cap number, and when they reach this size, the community divides. In a group this size, there is generally sufficient labor and ability to cover all the basic needs of everyone. Each person will recognize all other members. Each person will have “close” friends and relations, and more distant ones – but everyone will know everyone else, as well as everyone else’s personal details, skills, quirks, and talents.
There’s good sides to this: it tends to keep everyone honest, and strangers stand out. The down side is that there is reduced privacy. Almost everything becomes public knowledge, eventually. That’s why it promotes honesty.
Assume, therefore, that you must either provide the place, or go to another place, where your group can live for at least the next several generations, until 2060, possibly longer. Life will never return to “normal” as it was at, say, 2015. That time is done forever.
Clearly, you will have to do some serious thinking about this – you won’t survive the Cold Time holding a 9-to-5 job at a cubicle or living in an apartment or suburban home, no matter how tactically it is outfitted. If you choose to stay there, you, your spouse, and your children risk succumbing, right there.
Grid and Power
Also, a major portion of our framework in this book, is that we cannot assume that the electrical grid, propane, gasoline, or diesel will continue to be available at a reasonable price – or even exist at all. Generators, solar, or wind power can be a temporary, gap-filling option as the system devolves, but eventually your people will have to live as our ancestors did, that is, without it.
Electricity and gas/diesel machinery have been enormous “force multipliers” – one man with a tractor could plow a field in a day that would have taken a week with a horse-drawn plow; one woman could bake bread and wash a household’s laundry in a couple hours instead of a taking a day or longer. Without those tools, physical labor and skill once again come into their own. Ideally, you will have sufficient backup resources so that your transition to more hand-labor will be gradual, over several years. Additionally, having a group working together hoeing vegetables or hanging laundry promotes bonding and solidarity while lightening the load for each contributor.
Geological Upheaval
John Casey makes a remarkable case for the correlation of low sunspots (as occurred during each solar minimum of the past) and the increase in earthquakes and volcanos. His book, Upheaval, graphically connects major quakes in the US over the past several hundred years with solar minima; there’s other indications the same is true of the rest of the world.
Many reports from the past indicate that major volcanic eruptions helped worsen the climate by sending up clouds of dust that blocked the sun.
The combination of poor cold weather, with further reduced sunlight because of high volcanic particulates in the upper atmosphere, along with the risk of being hit by a major quake…well, “interesting times”. A great earthquake on New Madrid would not only shake the entire Midwest and much of the northeast and east coast, it also could break every oil and gas pipeline that crosses the Mississippi and bring down railroad and highway bridges. The loss of food and heating supplies during a northeast winter would be unthinkably devastating.
Even so, since historically solar minima are associated with increased major earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, it would be foolish to ignore the possibilities.
Specialization
Part of our assumed framework is that each member of your group will have specific skills or natural orientation toward certain interests: music, for example, or healing arts. Initially, group members will arrive with the unspoken personal assumption that they will specialize in their preferred discipline.
However, over time everyone becomes a generalist, with multiple duties that contribute to the group’s function and survival. The doctor can also be a gardener. The artist is also the bread maker. The machinist is also part of the security team. Each person who is a current specialist can likewise become a teacher of the next generation, taking on one or more “students” in an apprenticeship model so that their skills are passed along.
Division of Labor
Division of labor within our framework is also assumed. This arises in part from innate biology, and in part because life simply works more efficiently with work divided among those who can best do it. Men, in general, excel at skills involving equipment and machines; women, in general, shine in person-centered activities.
However, many productive jobs in a self-sufficient setting can be done by any sensible person, including children. There is no reason to treat the very young or very old like incompetents or invalids – feeding chickens, collecting eggs, cleaning livestock pens, hoeing weeds, stringing and shelling beans, mending clothing, and so on can be done by those with little physical stamina, mental acuity, or high level skills.
Everyone contributes; there are no free rides.
Family Primacy
Along with division of labor, is the primacy is family life – that is, a male and female partner as the stable foundation from which a home is developed, and in which children are raised and the elderly are cared for. With division of labor, the wife is able to attend to child-rearing and education, as well as making and repairing clothing, cooking healthful meals, caring for small livestock, keeping the stoves fed, canning and storing food, and maintaining family discipline, all critically important activities that require a huge investment of energy and skill. The husband takes care of large livestock, heavy labor, equipment construction and repairs, security and defense, and other outside chores, also critically important. Each of these are valuable full-time jobs that together accomplish the many tasks that keep a homestead running.
Although all various permutations of human relationships are possible (male/male, female/female, male/female/female, female/male/male, etc.), social stability is stronger with the traditional relationship – that’s why it is traditional, because it worked for long term survival. Open gay and lesbian relationships historically flourish within civilizations that are past their peak, and are a marker of that stage.
Children
Young civilizations require high levels of reproduction in order to grow. Collapsing civilizations require children in order to care for the parents in their old age, since there is no longer a social safety net to do that job. Today’s parents who took little interest in their children’s growing years will find that their children take little i
nterest in their aging years, and no one else will, either. Sterile unions have no future. Consider how many members of the celibate Shaker religion you know. Hint: none. They died out a hundred years ago, childless.
Therefore, family must be encouraged within the group social community itself, because family is the foundation from which the group, community, society, and the future itself eventually springs. Childless couples can take on orphaned children, as they have in other Cold Times. There will be many who need homes.
After the current generation is gone, there will be many fewer people who postpone childbearing or who choose voluntary sterility. Children are practical immortality, and the future of your clan.
Shared Purpose
Unity of purpose is a critical element in a group’s survival, and some basis for that will be assumed in your group as well. This unity may be as simple, and primal, as blood-ties – that is, a family, tribe, clan, or other kin-relationship that results in members favoring relatives over outsiders. This is a basic us-vs-them condition. In addition, unity of purpose can extend to group survival in order to propagate an idea, belief, or skill – say, a religiously-based order such as the Amish; or a clan that is formed around, for example, moonshine production or metal working.
Each group passes along its unifying concept to the next generation, and that becomes a deeper unifier to succeeding descendants.
Ideally, a unifier would include elements of blood-kinship PLUS a universally-needed skill or product that is marketable within and outside the group such as food production, or herbal medical knowledge, or construction skills, or even mercenary defenders, though rogue warriors have limited lifespans and tend not to reproduce successfully. As time goes by, make an effort to have your group “known” regionally as providers of some valuable service. Then, your wider community, reliant on your service, will help protect you when the inevitable marauders come through.
Value
All things have some value to someone. Generally today, we determine value by comparing to currency, that is, my object is worth X dollars. This pound of coffee is worth $15. That car is worth $20,000. That loaf of bread is worth $4. Price, however, is NOT the same as value, true value. If you are desperately hungry, you might be willing to trade your car for a loaf of bread; the bread has greater value to you than the car.
During the Weimar Germany hyperinflation in the 1920s, starving people traded gold and diamond jewelry, mink coats, fine art, and concert-quality grand pianos, for a bag of potatoes. A bag of potatoes.
So, what is the real value of object X? Only what someone else is willing to pay for it.
The real question is: what are the items that retain value, no matter what is going on in the world? The real answer is: food, water, shelter, security. Extras include: medicine, ammo, distilled liquor, marijuana, and tobacco. Sex, too, but that only has value to someone who isn’t getting any otherwise -- another reason to encourage devoted family structures.
Keep in mind: anything written on paper is only as good as the paper. That applies to stocks, bonds, mining certificates, contracts, licenses, registrations, gold shares, and even paper dollars themselves. After a collapse has run its course, historically gold and silver value return as tokens for trade. But always remember: real value is in food, water, shelter, security. Everything else is just a tool to achieve that end.
This Century and Beyond
One of the biggest assumptions I make in this book is largely unprovable – until it happens or it doesn’t. It is the assumption that we are heading into what is effectively a mini-ice age, a period of global cooling initiated by changes in the sun’s energetic output and resulting changes in earth’s magnetic shielding and climate. It might be worse and convert to a millennia-long ice age, but it won’t matter for planning since the needs are the same.
Secondary to that, and possibly connected via some mechanism of which we are largely unaware, are a set of changes in both human perception and behavior. It’s a switch from reliance on large-scale governance to local control along with a generalized failure of the economic and financial system. Once again, Martin Armstrong has observed this as a repeating cyclical pattern in human behavior going back thousands of years within multiple nation’s histories.
There are also strong indications that the solar changes initiate increased volcanic activity and stronger earthquakes. Author John Casey has made a good case correlating solar output lows with very large and destructive earthquakes in the United States.
Teasing out which effect leads and which follows is quite the challenge. I suspect that solar energetic changes affect humankind in ways we don’t understand, and those properties also impact planetary climate and geography as well. In our historical past, climate and geographic changes caused crop loss, which in turn caused famine, which caused disease, which caused populations to die off and survivors to migrate – which generated wars, which initiated regime changes. When sun and climate stabilized, people settled down, formed cities and nations, built and grew, and assumed it would always be that way.
Infrastructure
Today, we have the additional problems of an enormous and complex society that is built on a fragile energy infrastructure, and on accounting principles – that is, the philosophy of “just in time” (JIT). These are the greatest weaknesses in our culture today, and the very large seeds that will inevitably lead to our social destruction, whether now or later.
The energy infrastructure – by which, I mean the electrical generating architecture of power plants and the extensive powerline grid that distributes that power – is itself a large centralized system of power governance. It is rather like the central government, reaching over great distances into our homes, and controlling our day and our behavior. Like the federal government, it requires enormous financial and manpower inputs to sustain itself….both of which are now drawn to their physical limits
Meanwhile, the variety of upgrades and even routine maintenance that it requires to keep pace with society’s energy needs, is simply not being done. Temporary patches have kept power flowing from ancient, inefficient, centralized plants, but without the expenditure of more non-existent funds, the situation proceeds exactly where it is obvious that it is heading. At the very least, brown-outs and power-down days are in our near future. We are one terrorist attack on a critical substation, or one hard solar coronal mass ejection (CME), or high altitude nuke-generated electromagnetic pulse (EMP) away from “lights out,” permanently.
Our system of fossil fuel extraction and distribution is also in extremis, having utilized all the easily-pumped surface oil. Today’s attempt to pull the dregs by fracking has its own unintended consequences – earthquakes directly underneath large fracking operations in Oklahoma, where there is no plate boundary and consequently shouldn’t be quakes, according to current seismic theory; and in California, Colorado, and elsewhere. At some point, the financial and energy cost of fracking will exceed the value of the return, and then it will be done. No, ethanol is not the answer, and neither is solar or wind power which return less power than they consume to create and deliver. Neither are electric or hybrid cars. Where does the electricity for the hybrids come from, again?
JIT represents another oil/electric/computer/internet/truck/delivery/communications structure that was designed to increase efficiency and reduce the need for on-premises warehousing and the associated costs. When the JIT system works as it was intended, an in-store purchase of, say, toothpaste, goes through several systems. It is recorded at the cash register computer, sent immediately to the store’s main computer, then out to the conglomerate’s central computer, then to the company regional warehouse, and a tube of toothpaste is pulled from storage and packed onto a pallet for today’s shipment back to that very store where it was sold. Additionally, a new order for one more tube of toothpaste is sent to the manufacturer’s center, and they begin the process of generating more toothpaste.
It is an incredible symphony of buying and s
elling going on at a million stores nationwide, for literally billions and billions of products every hour of every day. Without a fully-functioning computer/internet interface, AND an active grid, AND a functioning financial system to buy products with, AND diesel and running trucks, AND an unobstructed highway system, JIT breaks down. That’s why when something as commonplace as a big predicted weather front moves into an area, store shelves are picked clean – the JIT system has taken a hit, and resupply cannot be done on time to keep product on the shelves.
The underlying false premise for both our energy infrastructure and JIT is that things will continue as they are now. There is no backup plan for any significant interruption to the systems. Typically, there is about 3 days of food ready to roll in any given city. In a shutdown of any element in the chain of the JIT system, everything stops. That’s where the saying, We are 72 hours away from starvation, came from – 3 days, stores are empty, and you are on your own. JIT must work perfectly all the time…or it doesn’t work at all.
Fragility Plus
Without getting into further details of industrial agriculture, where 50,000 chickens can die in a single chicken-raising house, on a farm with, perhaps, a dozen similar houses due to something as simple as a blocked air vent; consider how fragile this system has become. A hurricane like Katrina, Sandy, or Harvey which is expected, followed, predicted, and with days to prepare for – can virtually immobilize an entire region. Years later, parts of Katrina’s path remains a desolate and unlivable area. And that was just a hurricane, a weather event that is extreme but understood, with a wealthy and intact nation surrounding and able to come to the rescue.
Cold Times — How to Prepare for the Mini Ice Age Page 2