December 16, 2006
Preparation for an uncertain future means it's a all a guess. Some things are basic, food, light, water, shelter. Others are not so easy. Preparation for what? Do we expect tsunamis, meteor strikes, rising sea levels, crazy weather (oh yea!), currency collapse, collapse of the "just in time" Walmart/China supply line that leads to your door. How about food? I read that the average bite of food on your fork traveled an average of 1200 miles to get to your mouth (USA). In Canada it traveled over 4500 miles on average. How's that going to be sustained since oil has peaked and all other technoolgies needed to be developed 20 years ago so that we still had surplus oil to fuel the construction of the new technologies.
Many people feel the earth is alive and is about to shrug us off and that it will be many doomsday scenarios, all at once, starting with a depression and collapse of currency no matter what the trigger event.
So what do you prepare. The answer is the same for every scenario. You prepare yourself. Part of that is education. We need to let go of thinking that what we have must be sustained and defended at all costs. Many sites linked throughout Aftershock will get you thinking, exercise your brain and remind you that you indeed part of the earth, the natural processes of that earth and that we are a consuming blight on all the resources of the planet. If there was a United Nations of all other plants and animals it would have sanctioned humans a thousand years ago.
So we begin together do our exercises of the mind. The shock of course is that this is NOT your birthright. Everything around you is of oil, either in the very stuff, or in the production of it. Even your food is natural gas and oil, and the earth it is grown on is dying and being used as a neutral medium just to pour the oil and natural gas derived fertlizers and poisons on. I read 8 calories of oil for every calorie of food in your mouth. And oil has peaked. We've used have the tank that took 5 billion years to fill, and we used it in the blink of a geological eye. So we're in a new world now, and it doesn't matter at all what you beleive, as it is the reality of using everything up. We use everything up, it is our nature, and it is how we got into this mess.
Besides educating yourself what you can do - wait - it reminds me of the joke, when the two of us are chased by the bear, I don't have to run faster than the bear, just faster than you. So getting prepared mentally and putting a few critical things aside allow you to weather the storm for a while better, and maybe that gives you and your loved ones an edge, because no one knows what is coming, but we all are aware it is almost here.

Rick wrote this morning about the storm in the Pacific Northwest, with 100 mph winds two days ago. He talked about what happened in Bellevue Washington. Remember this was one storm and it just knocked power out for a while.

"Belevue was down all day basically; and they're showing trees
down etc and people crowding the stores to buy supplies because power may
not be restored for another day or so and lines at the gas stations because
people don't have enough gas to drive to other stations so they're waiting
in lines for hours at gas stations..just like the gas crisis (1978). And this is
just one storm that lasted overnight, a nothing in terms of disasters, and
there were lines. Of course they didn't' show the people, if any, who had
full tanks and supplies and heat and light etc. I hope there were a few.

I think being able to create your own power will be the difference between
surviving and thriving (that's not quite the right word,) maybe between
existing and surviving? But assume you have heat (fire, propane ) light,
food, water, shelter. Then power lets you go beyond surviving. When man
didn't have to spend all his time finding food, water, heat or shelter, he
could think beyond to stay alive one more day. He could create, ponder,
imagine. That's what put us on top of the food chain. Necessity the mother
of invention." - Rick T.