What's up, Doc?

Our post carbon world will be, is, rich with materials held in the body of our physical civilization. Mining that stream will be the work of transition. What we do with that decaying body, our current world, determines our children's future.

In 1985 I was walking through the Belizean jungle and like so many before me I was struck by a sense of awe. There at the Mayan City of Laminai, it smelled exactly like my mother's spice cabinet. The second stange observation was that the ground was not rich and thick and moist, but bare and orange sterile looking soil.
Where was the top soil? I learned that the the jungle in the tropics is so hot that soil activity is so fast that everything is simply decayed and gone in a very short time. HOWEVER, the plants of the tropics are thick and hold water and all their nutrients in their own bodies. In most of American temperate zones our carbon and nitrogen, and all other nutrients, including water, stay in the mass of decaying vegetation, fungi, insects, worms, animals, and bacteria that make up the temperate living top soil.

In our modern world, we have exhausted the easy oil. We have exhausted the easy metals. We have only a few decades of coal, and again, we've got the easy coal. Of course you can argue until as my mother used to say "the cows come home" about how much coal etc., been then like VIRP in the last post's comments, you're focusing on the irrelevant detail of time and missing the message. The message is that all the easy energy and materials are gone and going and we have so fucked up the planet in getting them that we may all die in any case (I don't personally believe the last part. In a pinch people are like cockroaches - hard to get them all)
We took the goodies off the top, and they are and were finite, and while there are some left, it soon comes to a point where we cannot get it. When it costs more than one barrel of oil in energy to get one barrel of oil, you quit. It is simply economic. The message is that this articular way to make life is done.

Like that tropic rain forest, when you remove the supply of oil from underneath our society then you can work only after the economic collapse with the dying body of this civilization. While currencies, stocks, bonds; all paper instruments can collapse in a moment, the physical "stuff" of our society is massive. Just a small example to clarify the size of this beast.
I read that there are 2 million alternators in junk yards just in the USA. That doesn't count the 300 million cars that are running right now in the USA.
There is in this societies stuff the seeds of a future kinder gentler world or of resource wars, the Mad Max devolvement that Terrie pointed out in a previous post comment. We will have many years to salvage this society. The steel, the plywood, the stored fuel, the future wind generators we will build, the solar to build with the last of that precious petrochemical gift of the gods, petroleum. We will have giant tools, those genies of industrialization, the big machines, that will be coveted, pampered (no replacement parts except those made by hand), and running on waste stream bio diesel (any animal fat - and america is FAT!) to build sane housing in sane locations (not the desert, not the far north), for those fraction of humans who will survive this transition. The projected best guess is 1.5 billion people world wide might survive out of 6.8 billion. Many who have been doing the heavy lifting mental work think as low as 500 million. Very sad, but I've had that sad thought much too often for it to have much impact on me now, no, instead I see that we will have much more body of society to salvage. More stuff for any who make it through.
So how we make best use of this bloated body?

There is so much that could go wrong and produce the scenario that Phil (flintknapper) sees - that each for ourselves and turn 90 degrees from civilization and hold out for a few years in the most primitive areas you can find. In two or three years you begin making contact with the few survivors. Perhaps the answers lie in intentional communities of which many are forming which of course makes them targets. As Terrie said in her comment, you hardly know which cliff to fall off.

So what's up with Alan? What's he doing privately? I don't have any special information that is available to all of you. But I just can't stay in grief and despair too long. I'm a diabetic and I'm just happy not to be dead today. So maybe that changes my perspective every time the needle goes in. I have a physical reminder of my mortality about eight times a day.

I have heard that I'm basically selfish, building my shelter so to speak and cutting myself off from the world. Yes and no. Each of us must find a way not to be pulled down by the great sucking whirlpool of need that will reach out to drag us down as this society falls apart. You cannot save everyone. Chefurka's math models put the height of the die off at 2032.
So where is the humanity.

I pull back and in because it is so self destructive to defend what seems obvious to me. I'm not trying to convince anyone else. Virp said to me long ago, cut yourself off from them, those in denial won't be convinced, just polarized, and they will burn your energy and emotional strength shouting "it ain't so!" So this summer I have buckled down, had fun growing a garden, planting fruit trees, fixing the trailer up and putting in a year's supply of food. I have joined with a permaculture group in Eugene.
However the larger body of thought has been around saving those who are close to me. I have been working out the construction of a loose knit tribe, and the tribes communication triggers and actions allowing each member action of their own but giving them alternatives at a time when there will few paths that will be clear.

Currently each of us must exist in this current bloated insane society and survive it while we prepare for what comes. We also need to be preparing ourselves, insulating ourselves from the suction that will emotionally, mentally, and physically seek to make us sheeple at the moment when we must be anything but! When we have to act we will have to act quickly, definitively without much discussion the disabling effects of grief shock.

So I have been building a framework of ideas that will work for many of my "close" people whether they believe any of this or not. This includes my family who have little concern for my "vision" other than to think me slightly deranged. I would give anything that they were right. They are having babies and making new lives in this ending time. In this mental equation is the fact that I will last to see only a small fraction of the next 70 years, so tribe must allow for living, humanity, art, celebration and the continuing on of rich personal lives. So from 72 hour survival packs to visions of a coastal community of traders, hunters, protectors, farmers, smiths and barn dances where town hall meetings direct the future away from this capitalist machine that ate the world, and now threatens our little planet completely. Can it be done? Certainly events will evolve totally different than I can foresee, but to paraphrase Eisenhower, all planning is useless, but to plan is essential.

Geographically I'm looking at climate, population centers, sites lying at the confluence of rail, sea, river and far from large city centers. I also have a distributed idea of how to bring us all together in emergency, and let each of us know when it is time to gather and when it is time to disperse. IT is an impossible task to hold all this in my head as the "perfect storm" of collapse can start from any direction - the collapse of the dollar, a natural disaster, bird flu, crop failures, water failures, power grid collapse. Therefore my framework that I have been sketching out has trigger events, like the music form of "call and response."

The first triggers are likely to be in - rapidily rising fuel costs, brownouts and black outs, and a break down in food distribution. Regardless of what TV and radio tell you the answer for you personally is rarly to wait and stand still. IN any national emergency you are a problem not a resource. You must be controlled for your own good, made safe and static. Personally for your own survival and those that you love, your path is do exactly the opposite. The key is in moving quickly, before security forces close off your movement.

Waiting for the first triggers is not an excuse not to try to follow all roads - that is what I'm spending my time at when I'm not working (storing cash as gold and food) and working out every morning. I've also put in short wave radios, 3 CB radios, standard radio and a scanner. Whereever I place the trailer I will be able to "hear" and communicate locally with other close members of the tribe. I am looking to expand my ears to ham bands in Europe. Shortwave is commercial and will withhold information just like the federal government and US media do.


So your work if you except it is to find what you bring to the group that the group needs. Love is not enough, bring skills, land, materials, skills, skills, skills, energy, attitude and tolerance for others.

In times of collapse, sex and your ability to look good will have near zero value. There are too many people, many will die and will be willing to do anything to survive. I really suggest that each person who thinks sex and personality are survival skills learn to weld, to grow food, tend rabbits, raise pigeons, become a dentist or go to medical school.

Picture 20 years from how. 2 people come to our encampment along the river. Both are dirty scruffy and alone. We have so little food and are doing our best with fishing and waiting for fruit trees, nut trees, vines and new gardens to produce, but another mouth to feed is a very bad idea. Of the two, one is a young Pamela Anderson type. The other is a short obnoxious ugly man who picks his nose. He is a doctor. She is, well, what? You choose. Who lives, who dies? I suggest dental school medical school, EMT training or a skill at breaking and entering, military training, cooking, building. Can you even now consider making a choice of who lives or dies? Because if you plan to keep social units together, instead of heading out to the wilderness a few miles from Phil, you will definitely be making those decisions, or worse, having them made about you.

While change may be scary, what we live in right now is horrible for us in more profound ways. The changes coming may be immense, but a guilty corollary is that we each will get a chance to be alive again. I know it must sound laughter at a funeral, but fuck we're going to get to be alive again!

A last note about media - it is not wrong for the government/media to lie to us. We are the flock. You do not talk about wolves to your sheep. You also never talk to them about their slaughter. All you ever say to sheep is - all is well, be calm, eat, eat.

mcnalan