Not Quite a Collapse
2022-04-06
I’m not much of a prepper, I live in an apartment. But i share a lot of sympathies with them, and as well with collapseniks in the last few years (really since collapseOS got started). Consider this a bit of a mild critique of prepping, with a side dish of collapsenik skepticism mixed in. I’m not out here to argue that they’re bad habits or useless or anything, but hopefully it’s food for thought.
It should be noted that this isn’t really prompted by any specific current event - the confluence of wars, supply chain disruptions, viruses, and all the usual impending natural disasters just has me working more towards these things.
Preparing for what?
I’m never quite sure what a given prepper is preparing for. Sure, shtf and you have to bug out. A bugout bag is great, but it’s useful for a narrow range of things. And worst, almost everything it’s useful for is something you have to foresee and actively choose to run away from. I’m leaving out stuff like zombie apocalypses and speaking purely in practical terms. In what scenario could you actually use a bugout bag? There are a couple natural disasters I can think of (hurricanes and tornadoes) that are predictable enough that you could make the decision to do so, but i rarely find preppers have committed to that sort of operational decisionmaking. The bag is just "just in case".
Preppers don’t really make shelters anymore (that was a bit of a Cold War sort of concern, although who knows anymore). But plenty will stockpile resources. This is also pretty reasonable - I’d argue that everyone ought to be able to survive a single week without food, water, or fuel services; we’ve seen what supply chain shocks and unexpected infrastructure failures (burst pipes) look like. But the problem is that the stockpiles that are created with the belief that everything will go back to normal after some short period of time. This is a more obvious sort of scenario - a flood, earthquake, or volcano could rip out critical infrastructure but your house is fine.
Both of these prepping strategies revolve around something that you can probably guess at - the assumption that if you just get far enough away, or wait long enough, someone will save you. They’re focused on disasters, on temporary changes that receive immediate emergency aid. In other words, these are the scenarios that are most survivable anyway - how many hurricanes and floods does the US get, and how few people die compared to anywhere else on Earth? Believe me, even without the bag or stockpile, you’re covered.
Collapses
This is, rightly, where collapseniks would bring up peak oil, the energy trap, supply chain disruptions, wars, maybe my personal favorite - a Carrington Event that permanently destroys electronics on Earth. Such as the one in 2012 that missed us by a mere 25 days (a hair, in solar terms). These are existential threats to modern human civilization - if they occur they wouldn’t just stop all human progress, they’d permanently put us back in time. Without going into a huge detail, we’ve taken all the surface oil, surface iron, minerals, etc from the Earth. We could never rebuild our electronics without using electronics, and the energy generation and convoluted supply chains would never be recreated. We would, in effect, never rebuild. Humanity would be forever doomed to live and die on this planet, and our descendents will be stuck with pre-industrial technology for the rest of our species’ history. The industrial age would be a short 200-year detour on the otherwise constant human endeavor of growing wheat to survive.
That’s pretty bleak.
You can see why collapseniks have my sympathy - these are very real threats that have a serious likelihood (if not inevitability) of happening. If they happen, there really is no bugout bag that would save you, because there’s not really anywhere to run. No stockpile would make the difference, because nobody is coming to help.
The problem, as i see it, is that collapseniks often don’t really propose any kind of solution. Sure, they’ll think about how it’d go down and bemoan the losses, but everything is focused on prevention rather than, well, mitigation.
Enough Criticism
At this point i’ll underline that i’m not a prepper, and i live in an apartment. So for anyone reading this who sees my suggestions and laughs at how basic it is - I agree.
On a long enough time scale with a true disaster and permanent loss of technology, everyone becomes a dirt farmer. But you can take knowledge and experience with you. Someone with a stockpile and no knowledge is useless a year after the event, but someone who printed out copies of a handbook for clever ways to start a fire or preserve food is going to be valuable forever.
Food preservation is a good place to start. Before refridgeration, the world came up with dozens of clever ways to keep food from going bad. These days, we don’t think much about winter. But in the old days, winter meant zero food, you had to survive based on what you harvested in the fall - with perhaps some meat from hunting scattered in. If a collapse occurs in the late summer (after planting season and right before harvest), and your stockpile runs out at the beginning of winter, you’re in bad shape.
If you want the simplest way to keep food, lactofermentation is an easy skill to learn and essential for surviving a winter. Here’s the one-sentence explanation - "make a jar with 4% salt-water brine and seal vegetables inside, so that air can get out but nothing gets in." That’s it, that’s all there is to it. Try it, pickle some ginger, some peppers, some carrots, celery, whatever. Take a vegetable you like (nothing leafy) and dunk it in 4% saltwater and leave it for 2wks - 4mo. It’ll be there for you.
On the note of harnessing microbes, alcohol production is going to be a vital ability. If you can brew beer, you’re basically in the business of preserving water - alcohol kills pathogens. You and your yeast will be essential for survival. If you can make moonshine you’ll be even more valuable, since that’s a potent painkiller and antiseptic. Better yet, with the tails you can make vinegar (acetic acid), which is a great cleaner and cooking ingredient. Science-minded people will thank you for easy production of an acid, too.
If you don’t have a garden you can eat from, you’re missing out on another obvious skill - after a disaster you cannot count on others to give you food. Crow all you want about how those with guns can just take what they need, but everyone’s got to sleep sometime, and bullets aren’t something that can be made without infrastructure. Unless you plan on a short, violent life, figure out how to grow your own potatoes at least. This may sound obvious, but every region has different planting seasons (some are deceptively late! There’s usually a warm period before a cold snap, followed by the actual start of spring), and every region has different soil and sunlight. Conditions matter, and while something like potatoes or marijuana might grow unattended, most crops you will want are going to require some experience.
Some people might think of baking as a useful skill - and I have a mixed opinion. Baking at its simplest only requires yeast, water, and flour. But flour requires wheat to be harvested and ground, which means a farmer and miller need to be involved. You didn’t think you were going to grind all that by hand did you? This is a good skill, but once the previously-ground flour goes away you’re going to be out in the cold for at least a couple years. On the other hand, if you’re thinking of taking up milling, that’s not a bad idea.
Skills, not items
The thing I most want to impress here is the notion that if a disaster is recoverable, you won’t need to worry. But in an irrecoverable disaster, nothing you own will meaningfully improve your odds (except in the very short term). Instead, your odds will be based on how useful you can make yourself to others. A fat tech nerd will be nothing but a liability compared to a fat tech nerd who can grow his own fruits and potaoes to brew alcohol, distill spirits, and preserve food.
I focused a lot on food, here. Because in the old days, the vast majority of humanity was focused strictly on food production. And immediately following a collapse, food will be an obvious necessity and an easy way to ingratiate yourself with others who can form a tribe. But other skills make sense too - woodcutting/woodworking, ranching, animal training, sewing/weaving/knitting, etc. Whatever you bring to the table is valuable.
