Thesis #28: Humanity will almost certainly survive.
by Jason GodeskyAs beneficial as collapse may ultimately prove to be for the state of humanity (see thesis #27), the process itself will likely be horrific. Ultimately, the only sustainable level of complexity is the stone age (though this allows a great deal more complexity still than the popular imagination permits, as we discussed in theses #22-24). But complexity is a function of energy; complexity allows more energy to pass through a society. Most of that energy takes the form first of food, and then, of people (see thesis #4). In short, we face a severe problem of overshoot–and the drop in our carrying capacity to its sustainable level will mean the die-off of some 90% or more of the current population.
We can certainly excuse those authors who have worried for the extinction of our entire species facing such a grim scenario, as with Christchurch’s comments n 2004, “…if we continue our present growth path, we are facing extinction. Not in millions of years, or even millennia, but by the end of this century.” Or, Sun Microsystems’ co-founder Bill Joy’s “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us,” first published in Wired magazine, long acknowledged as the “Bible” of techno-utopians, where he writes about how our technology may succeed in driving us into extinction.
We must remember two crucial facts, both of which are contrary to everything we’ve been raised to believe. First, civilization is fragile, and second, humans are not.
John M. Shanahan once called civilization, “a thin veneer over barbarianism.” That quote was repeated often during the weeks that followed Hurricane Katrina’s 2005 landfall on the Gulf Coast. The exaggerated media reports of looting and violence showed us what we have come to expect of uncivilized humanity, “anarchy,” in all its pejorative meaning. However, in the months that followed, we learned that portrayal was grossly exaggerated. What was underreported, however, was the formation of small, egalitarian “tribes” among New Orleans’ survivors. Allen Breed wrote “French Quarter Holdouts Create ‘Tribes’” for the Associated Press, published 4 September 2005, which began with:
In the absence of information and outside assistance, groups of rich and poor banded together in the French Quarter, forming “tribes” and dividing up the labor. As some went down to the river to do the wash, others remained behind to protect property. In a bar, a bartender put near-perfect stitches into the torn ear of a robbery victim.
While mold and contagion grew in the muck that engulfed most of the city, something else sprouted in this most decadent of American neighborhoods — humanity.
“Some people became animals,” Vasilioas Tryphonas said Sunday morning as he sipped a hot beer in Johnny White’s Sports Bar on Bourbon Street. “We became more civilized.”
By such a definition, civilized behavior is the antithesis of civilization. New Orleans collapsed in the face of Katrina. The rebuilding efforts that have followed are precisely what we see whenever one region collapses in a peer polity sytem. This makes New Orleans a microcosmic preview of what awaits us with collapse.
As we saw in New Orleans, it does not take much to disrupt civilization’s control. More importantly, civilization’s very foundations are extremely weak. Civilization is utterly dependent on cereal grains for the bulk of its diet–a small handful of closely-related grasses. They are extremely tempermental plants, susceptible to even minor fluctuations in temperature, sunlight, and rainfall. A proverb of unknown attribution asserts that every civilization is three meals away from revolution; it is a basic application of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Whatever need we may have to remain memebers of a large-scale, hierarchcial, exploitative society is not the equal to our basic, physical needs. If those cannot be met by a civilization, that civilization will dissolve. With a changing climate, the end of the era of fossil fuels, and the increasing fragility of complexity and its escalating probability of a cascading disaster in an era of diminishing marginal returns, how much longer can civilization provide for our basic needs?
That said, humans are omnivores. Wild foragers enjoy a far more varied diet than we do. To starve an agriculturalist requires nothing more than a dry spell, or a hot year; to starve a forager would require the extinction of nearly the entire of the plant and animal kingdoms (and even then, the forager might have a chance of surviving off of fungi). Before the advent of civilization, humans had adapted to nearly every environment on the planet. Culture allows us a means of adapting more quickly, and omnivorism makes us virtually impervious to starvation. That has made the human being comparable to the cockroach as one of the most adaptive organisms on the planet.
We must understand, then, that collapse is the end of civilization–and not necessarily the end of humanity. Those who depend on civilization for their survival will perish along with it; those who are able to make themselves independent of civilization will enjoy the foragers’ bounty, and as much an assurance of survival as this world ever provides.
If survival is so easy, why are we facing such a catastrophic die-off? That sad fact is a testimony to the power of acculturation. The ultimate cause of death will be lack of food. Violence or disease may constitute proximate causes, but these will be ultimately the result of the contracting flow of energy through society. Lack of food will give rise to food riots; riots will give way to mobs and gangs and ultimately, the grisly cannibalism that seems to mark the final moments of every collapsing civilization. Before that, nation-states will wage war for the resources they need, invading oil-rich countries and maneuvering against each other for those fields. Of course, lack of nutrition inhibits the immune response, and the “Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse,” historically, have always ridden together: war disrupts the growing and harvest seasons, leading to famine, which in turn leads to pestilence, and all of them to death. So why is it that people starve to death? Most commonly, people starve to death surrounded by edible matter–just no food. There is the essential issue, because “food” is not just edible matter, it’s the culturally constructed subset of edible matter. That mismatch has garnered a small fortune for the producers of “Fear Factor.” Bull’s penis is entirely edible–it’s even a high-priced delicacy consumed by China’s elites to bestow sexual potency–but it isn’t “food.” At least not in our culture.
ome of the examples of this mismatch are simply astounding. The single most famous example of cannibalism in American history is that of the Donner party–a group of 31 settlers bound for California who became trapped in the Sierra Nevadas in the winter of 1947. Though fed with pine nuts by Paiute Indians earlier in their travels, they still resorted to cannibalism and ultimately starved to death–in the middle of a large pine grove. They used the pine trees for fuel and even cut many of them down, but they never used them for food. It simply never occured to them: pine nuts and pine bark simply were not “food.” Pine had long been a “starvation food” for Native Americans in these areas; when all else failed, you could always eat the pine. It was rarely the first choice, but in desperate circumstances, it would suffice. The Donner party was desperate, and ate every “food” they could think of–even rawhide, bones and leather. But they didn’t eat things that weren’t “food”–and pine simply wasn’t “food,” even though they had been fed a meal of pine nuts a short time before.
Or, consider the plight of the Viking colonists of Greenland, as related by Jared Diamond in Collapse. Fish had long been a staple of Norse life, and like other staples (bread in European cultures, or rice in Japan), that entailed two, seemingly discordant attitudes. First, every meal required some portion of it: it is the prescence of some amount of the staple, more than portion size, that separates a “meal” from a “snack.” Secondly, eating just the staple is a sign of poverty, as in “bread and water.” Yet, in Greenland, we find no sign of fish associated with the Viking settlements. Couldn’t it simply be a matter of the fish not being preserved very well, or otherwise hidden from us? Diamond runs through a number of the theories proposed on this account, most of which are patently ridiculous, and comes to a very good point with this:
The trouble with all those excuses for the lack of fish bones at Greenland Norse sites is that they would apply equally well to Greenland Inuit and Icelandic and Norwegian Norse sites, where fish bones prove instead to be abundant.
Yes, fish bones decompose faster, so we need to look at contemporary Norse sites for comparison, to see how much of their fish bones survived. Short answer: a lot. Even more at the Inuit sites, because Greenland isn’t just a fisherman’s paradise–it’s also an archaeologist’s dream. The soil composition and the cold means that nearly everything in Greenland is incredibly well preserved. We have preserved sheep lice and fecal pellets from the Norse colonies–both of which decay far more quickly than fish bones. As Diamond put it:
Every archaeologist who comes to excavate in Greenland refuses initially to believe the incredible claim that the Greenland Norse didn’t eat fish, and starts out with his or her own idea about where all those missing fish bones might be hiding … I prefer instead to take the facts at face value; even though Greenland’s Norse originated from a fish-eating society, they may have developed a taboo against eating fish.
In the end, the Viking colonies of Greenland starved to death–next to a sea teaming with fish. To the end, they never touched them. Their Norse cousins lived on fish; they knew this. They lived in full view of the Inuit, who lived happily as they starved to death. They called them skraelings–”wretches”–because they were naught but ignoble savages. Savages who survived–and quite happily–while the civilized Europeans died a long, agonizing death. They ate their herds of cows, even the young, all the way down to the hooves–a clear sign that they had given up on the future. They ate their dogs. And again, in the end, they ate each other. But to the very end, they never ate fish.
The Arneborg study does show that the Greenland Norse were incredibly adaptive, learning to change their diet to match changing circumstances. It’s not a lack of desperation that’s at fault here; it’s a lack of imagination. It’s the cultural construction of food. We like to point to such stories with modern pride and think how we could never be so foolish, but unlike them, we don’t know that we can eat pine bark, or dandelions, or plantain, or burdock root, or any of the other thousands of plant and animal species that surround us–even in the middle of the city. These things are easily learned, but as Daniel Quinn once suggested, the greatest impediment to learning is not the difficulty of acquiring knowledge–that is done easily–but the curiosity to seek that knowledge in the first place. We have defined “food” to be solely our domesticates. They are clearly packaged and labelled. We need not concern ourselves with those things in the wild that we can eat; they are not food.
We feel the cultural construction of food very deeply, because it is the primary means of our species’ adaptation. Culture can learn far more quickly than biology, and what we are willing to eat or not is very literally a matter of life and death. Acculturation sets our notion of food at a level as powerful as any genetic instinct, and for the most part, this is highly adaptive. It allows us to use culture to learn what is edible and what is poisonous in a new environment quickly, and its deep effects make sure we heed that knowledge and stay alive. However, civilization has abused that adaptation to hold our food supply hostage, as it were, redefining food to a very narrow selection–a selection it can control. Such is the foundation of civilization, and such is the very thing that collapse threatens.
Such collapses have happened before, so we need not reach blindly for some idea of its implications. Many primitivists have expressed fears that, desperate and starving, a “land grab” may ensue; farmers may begin tearing into the forest for more land; people will flee the cities and the wilderness will collapse under the weight of so many human refugees fleeng their collapsing civilization. Such fears seem logical–far more logical than the assertion that people will simply “choose” to die–but they are also unprecedented. Every prevous collapse has seen a contraction of farmland, not an expansion. For the most part, those lands not currently under cultivation are left wild for a reason–usually, that they are useless for cultivation. Even the most ignorant farmers know this; even dead farmland without the fossil fuel-based fertilizers need to eke crops out of it are better than the “useless,” uncleared land beneath our forests. Our zombie movies provide a picture of popular psychology in the kind of catastrophe collapse entails. We do not “run for the hills”; we run to the cities for help.
Always, however, there is a small minority that chooses to separate itself from civilization and live another, more sustainable way. The Pueblo people retain almost no memory of the Hohokam, the Anasazi, and the other civilizations that preceded them, before they collapsed in the same horrific manner. Those who survived were those who left civilization behind to live a different way, a sustainable way. If they are “Noble Savages,” it is only because of how savagely natural selection did its work–leaving only the most noble to survive. Yet in their myths, many of the Pueblo seem to echo this sentiment exactly. They tell a story that this is not the first world humans have lived in; several worlds have passed before, only to be destroyed by the decadence of humanity. Yet, each time, some minority remembered the ways of their ancestors, and they were permitted to pass into the next world. Natural selection eliminated the civilizations of the Hohokam and the Anasazi; it allowed the Pueblo to survive because they found a new, sustainable way to live.
Ultimately, there is a merciless elegance to the horror of collapse. Its destruction is not arbitrary or random. Every individual human being will be presented with a choice, as to whether or not we wish to die. We will have to choose, whehter we will remain civilized even unto death, or whether we will choose to find a new way to live. It is a choice. The Greenlanders, the Hohokam and the Anasazi all chose to die as civilized men, rather than imagine a different life. They were aware of alternatives that lurked on their periphery. They probably did not understand it as a choice, nor did they ever really concieve of the alternative. The choice was made on a much deeper level. For them, there was never any other choice–they were civilized. So they were born, and so they would die. Nothing else was even concievable. A choice made from such deep convictions that it never enters the conscious mind is a choice, nonetheless.
The collapse will be natural selection in its most amoral, merciless form. We cannot–must not–take away any individual’s choice. That choice is the last sacred thing we have left. We cannot choose death for them through violence; yet it would be just as wrong to force them to choose life. Nearly all of our species will likely choose to die, just like every other time the choice has been posed. That cannot be changed. What we can change is ourselves, and our own choice. We can help as many people as we can to understand the situation we now face, and the choice that they must make. We cannot choose for them–but we can make sure they understand that they do have a choice. We will always be a fringe of a fringe, but every last individual we can reach is a whole world of possibilities we have saved–as the Talmud teaches, “whoever saves one soul, is regarded as if he had saved a whole world.” (Mishna Sanhedrin 37a)
You seem to gloss over the fact that 6.5 billion people CANNOT choose to live as foragers. In fact, if everyone chose to forage that would practically ensure the extinction of the human race.
Comment by JimFive — 17 January 2006 @ 1:43 PM
Gloss over? That was one of the main points above. No, 6.5 billion cannot choose to be foragers. 6.5 billion will never make that choice, either. 90% or more will choose to die. That can’t be changed. What CAN be changed is which group we, individually, choose to be in.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 17 January 2006 @ 2:23 PM
Yes, but JimFive’s point still remains. If 6.5 billion people DID become foragers, it would ensure the extinction of the human race.
Comment by Anonymous — 17 January 2006 @ 2:27 PM
Yes, that is true. But I didn’t “gloss over” it–it was one of my main points. If aliens ate us all, that would ensure our extinction as well. Which is probably a more likely scenario than 6.5 billion people choosing to be foragers. It’s a straw man, and it’s irrelevant. No one is suggesting that everyone become foragers, or even that it would be possible.
My point is there’s going to be a die-off, and there’s nothing we can do to change that. But the human species will survive that die-off. The survivors will be that minority that chooses to become foragers. It will be a very small minority, but each of us, individually, can choose whether or not we will be in it. There’s nothing we can do to change the aggregate, but we can choose what we do ourselves.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 17 January 2006 @ 2:34 PM
How could we ever choose which group we are in?
I’m sure that anyone would do anything to survive.
Won’t the ones with the biggest guns survive?
Or just the ones with a stroke of luck.
No one can tell who will or won’t survive. How exciting!
Comment by Gunnix — 17 January 2006 @ 4:47 PM
Correction: I’m sure that anyone would do anything that they can think of to survive. There’s the key. At all times, 90% or more of the civilized population is incapable of concieving of the possibility of living as a forager. It’s all well and good to postulate hypothetical scenarios, but this has happened before. You may well believe that people would do anything to survive, but in the past, people have always been limited in their options to those things they could concieve of.
Not if they never think to go after you. It doesn’t matter how big your gun is, if it never occurs to you to point it at me and fire it. The Vikings in Greenland starved to death, but they never thought to attack the Inuit for food. The Inuit never really registered for them as an option, or as someone who had food to steal. They simply did not exist inside their mental frame. Even a starving civilized person looks down at the poor, wretched foragers–no matter how well they eat.
It’s actually pretty easy to tell who will or won’t survive. If you’re dependent on an unsustainable system that’s crashing, you won’t survive. If you’re dependent on a stable, sustainable system, you will survive. It’s really as simple as that.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 17 January 2006 @ 4:56 PM
Oh I forgot to say. What a great and inspiring article. Thanks a lot for your effort!
Comment by Gunnix — 17 January 2006 @ 5:05 PM
Er, Jason, the Donner Party was caught in the the mountains during the winter of 1846-1847, not 1947.
Sorry to nitpick.
- Chuck
Comment by Chuck — 17 January 2006 @ 6:47 PM
Oh wow … now that’s a typo.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 17 January 2006 @ 7:23 PM
It would still be nice to have actual proof that such very little land on the Earth is arable.
I don’t understand how you can say people stick together and form tribes and then say there will be cannibal gangs everywhere. I guess the cannibals are cooperating if they are in gangs.
Interesting that computer people like yourself and that Sun Microsystems are so similar.
The Donner Party didn’t eat each other. This is a recent scientific finding. http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060113/ap_on_sc/donner_party
You say they have to choose, but then, you say if they are dependent on an unsustainable system, you won’t live. But you say people will have to choose. Because they will have a choice. Does that mean anyone will be able to get their needs from the wilderness if they put their mind to it, or they need to know these certain skills beforehand that fill books in order to survive?
Comment by planetwarming — 17 January 2006 @ 8:20 PM
I wonder what contradiction you have to the possibility of people cutting down trees not for agriculture but warmth.
Comment by planetwarming — 17 January 2006 @ 8:30 PM
One thing to keep in mind is that is has been relatively common for people to become cannibals when starving, it is very rare for people to kill eachother for food. The exceptions are almost entirely in cultures where cannibalism was already practiced ritually or in the context of war (easter island, etc). In most cases people have chosen to die rather than kill eachother. Maybe it’s partly because by the time they are hungry enough to so completely disregard cultural propriety, they are to weak to follow through.
Comment by limukala — 17 January 2006 @ 8:35 PM
“I wonder what contradiction you have to the possibility of people cutting down trees not for agriculture but warmth.”
Well, dead people don’t need much warmth, and it doesn’t take all that long to starve if all the food is cut off. Also, most people live in cities and there aren’t all that many trees left withing walking distance of most cities, so people may be cutting down a lot of trees, but it will be limited temporally and geographically. In the end it would probably be a lot less trees than are cut down to make toilet paper and 5,000 square foot mcmansions every year.
Also, the worst deforestation is occuring in the tropics, where people don’t need fire for the heat, and most poor already use wood for cooking. The deforestation will actually probably lessen with the collapse of lumber hungry industry, even when increased woodfuel consumption is taken into account.
Comment by limukala — 17 January 2006 @ 8:47 PM
Actually, it’s really not as simple as that, because if you have no “hands-on experience” in the sustainable system, you still won’t survive.
Primitive living skills can only be acquired through “field-training,” not by reading survival books or watching survival videos while wrapped up in the comfort of our favorite recliner. It just doesn’t work that way. So even if 6.5 billion people suddenly decide to head for the woods, 6.49+ billion of them will die within the first week because they won’t have a clue about how to survive in such a harsh environment. And it will be harsh.
The true test, before the test, will be who among us has the courage of their convictions?
Assuming we agree that collapse is the inevitable outcome of the converging crises that we face, and assuming that we agree with your assessment that the hunter/gatherer/forager will be in a much better position to survive than the rest of humanity, we really need to demonstrate the courage of those convictions.
We need to invest the time and money to be “field-trained” in primitive living skills and, in order to hone our newly acquired skills, we need to have the discipline to voluntarily “field-test” that training at least a few weeks per year in the wilderness area of our choice. Only then will we be ready when the time comes.
However, if we choose to just talk-the-talk from the comfort of our favorite recliner, and order our survival books online through Amazon, then, sustainable as the hunter/gatherer/forager concept might be, not only will we be among the first to head for the woods, we will also be among the first to be claimed by the woods. RIP
Comment by George — 17 January 2006 @ 8:59 PM
Tom Brown Jr. has great books, and I assume his classes are pretty killer too, but I’d rather save my money to get some land. It might be more fun to live in a foraging society, but seems horticulture would be an easier transition and more stable, provided you have enough time to get things set up right. If that fails, then out to the woods. At least Hawaii has the advantage of being comfortable year-round and totally full of edible plants and animals I am familiar with. I have already done quite a bit of foraging and have friends who have done that exclusively for 3 months at a time. I also know an uninhabited valley that used to be a thriving hawaiian village, and so is full of banana, breadfruit, guava and avocado trees (and easily captured wild goats and pigs, all you need is a 5 foot length of rope). I wouldn’t want to try roughing it in the cold lands, brrrr.
Comment by limukala — 17 January 2006 @ 9:18 PM
Shit, I’m fucked. You just described me, George.
Comment by planetwarming — 17 January 2006 @ 9:37 PM
Well, don’t feel alone because I just described myself, too. Depressing.
I’m in the very early stages of researching primitive living schools. BOSS seems to have about the best primitive living field training I can find. So far, anyway. Be prepared to spend a lot of money, though. I’d like to go, but not sure I could ever afford it.
To make matters worse, as I recall, I read that right before the Y2K crisis, enrollment in survival and primitive living schools quadrupled. Once peak oil hits the mainstream media and more and more people get spooked by it, you can only imagine what the enrollment in survival and primitive living schools will be then. So, even if you can afford it and want to go, if you wait too late, you probably won’t be able to get in.
We may have to talk “limukala” into taking us with him to his secret valley in Hawaii!!
Comment by George — 17 January 2006 @ 10:32 PM
What would you consider proof, if not the foregoing?
Well, yes. Cooperation isn’t always warm and fuzzy. But I’m talking about a diversity of approaches. Some will go it alone, and die. Some will try to stick it out in the cities, and die. Some will try to hold out in their bunkers, and die. Some will try to make the cities sustainable, and die.
That’s what makes it natural selection–the only ones who will survive will be the ones who work together to form a community that isn’t dependent on an unsustainable system. Ideology has nothing to do with it; in fact, I suspect rednecks will outnumber us. But there it is.
You should read your own link, where it says:
Now, I have no doubt they’re right, that cannibalism in the Donner party was not nearly so rampant as sensationalist claims have made it. But they did resort to cannibalism, and more importantly, many of them did starve to death. The cannibalism is less relevant to this argument than the fact that they starved in the middle of a large pine grove.
You can choose to make yourself independent of our unsustainable system, or you can choose to remain a part of it. In so doing, you choose to live or die. The skills necessary are not as difficult to learn as is the initial leap to even consider them in the first place. That’s the choice; it’s the choice of whether to remain as we’ve always known, or try something new.
They certainly will. But in crises, people go to the cities. They’ll cut down the trees near the cities. They won’t be able to import a lot of timber when there’s no gasoline, after all. Of course, there aren’t many trees in the cities, so arson will become a problem. But you’re not going to go clear-cut a national forest for fuel–how would you get there? Where’s all that energy coming from? And how are you going to take it back?
Easter Island? The Anasazi and the Hohokam? Listening to Jared Diamond’s Collapse audio book on the ride up to Poughkeepsie, it became almost comical how every account ultimately ended the same way: with people hunting each other for food.
In small-scale cases where they all know each other, you’re right. But in cases of civilization collapse … not so much.
That is true. Once you’ve made the choice, you still need to learn how. The basic education of any six-year-old forager is lacking for us. In 1744, an offer of higher education with paid tuition was made to the Onondaga. Their chief, Canasatego, answered:
That said, the basics of identifying wild edibles can be learned in a weekend. The basics of hunting can be learned in a weekend. In a week, even an adult can learn the basics necessary for the most rudimentary survival. It may take a lifetime to perfect those skills, but such perfection is a matter of quality of life, not bare survival. I agree with everything you say about needing to learn the skills necesary, but one can get up to the level of being able to survive very quickly once one chooses to do so.
Several months ahead of you.
I’m just getting my theory in order before I start talking about more practical experiences publicly. But, I’m also phasing myself in gradually, because that’s a luxury I can afford right now. And I’m going to spend some time on those very quality of life issues. I have no doubt there’s a marginal return curve–new skills become more difficult to learn, and add progressively less to quality of life. But for now, what I learn is very simple, and has huge advantages.
Schools aren’t necessarily the only way to learn these skills, though. You want to learn the basics from someone who knows what they’re doing, but ultimately, perfection is just a matter of doing it–and that’s something you can do on your own. People who know what they’re doing don’t necessarily have to be paid tutors, either. Know any good hunters? Take them up the next time they ask if you’d like to come along. My dad’s a great fisherman, and I’m hoping to get him to come with us in the spring.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 17 January 2006 @ 11:28 PM
Remember, freshly cut down trees don’t burn well. People will burn things that are easy to burn first. Books, furniture, clothing, their homes, etc. The first winter should kill off most of the people who will die, if only because they’re all a bunch of pansies. “Put on a damn sweater you nitwit!”
All in all there is about a 1 in 10 chance of survival (sounds better than over 90% of people will die, no?). But is an average. In the cities, your chances are about 1 in a million, litterally. In the woods, knowing what to do, in an established and practiced tribe, etc? Your odds are probably whole numbers.
Note: 1 in 10 would indicate the survival of about 700 million people. (assuming a population of 7 billion at the time of collapse)
Comment by Benjamin Shender — 18 January 2006 @ 12:11 AM
While it may not take too much time to learn the basics of survival, I still think George has a very valid point about experiencial knowledge. Especially when it comes to finding food in winter. Hunting is a lot harder than you make it sound, especially without guns. It not only took native americans a lifetime (or at least a couple decades) to perfect it, but it took generations of inherited knowledge to encourage the process. It’s also a lot easier to learn something when you are a small kid. I just can’t imagine that a 30 year-old suburbanite could ever possibly match the tracking abilities of your average australian aborigine or apache scout, and if you can’t find the game, you can’t eat it.
Wild edibles are much easier to find and identify, but winter is a very hard time to find edible plants, which is why most foraging and horticultural cultures eat much more meat during the cold months. The best advice I can think of is to find a swampy area with a lot of cattails. Cattails produces 8 edible food products that span all four seasons. In a study by syracuse U they were found to produce “140 tons of rhizomes per acre near Wolcott, NY. That represents something more than 10 times the average yield per acre of potatoes. In terms of dry weight of cattail flour, the 140 tons of roots would yield approximately 32 tons.
http://www.backwoodshome.com/articles/duffyk43.html
You can get that in the winter. So if any of you live in a swampy area, your set. If not, come on out to Big Island, land is still pretty cheap and food is everywhere. The only problem is that there are still a lot of Hawaiians pissed of at the american invasion, so anti-haole sentiment is pretty strong in places, and who know how that will play out after collapse.
I have to say though, that with my limited knowledge (limited, but still more than a weekends worth) my wilderness survival experience was largely cold and hungry, and that was in the late summer (damn those summer nights are cold though if you only have shorts and a t-shirt). It seems optimistic to think that you could fend for yourself in the woods after a lifetime of pampered city life with only a weekend crash course in necessary skills. I think George is right when he says you’d better practice before your life depends on it. Now, JG, you say you can learn the basics of survival in a weekend, but you still admit to plans to practice. You are right in that you could learn the basics in a weekend, but I contend you would need substantial real-world experience to make that work fulltime, even if it is mostly self-taught. If you don’t have the advantage of being raised as a forager, than you either need good knowledge of the specific area you plan to live in during all seasons, so you know where to find what (such knowledge is crucial in the fact that foragers almost never starve), or you need at least some practice in all conditions.
If the crash comes slowly enough it won’t be a problem, but if it happens suddenly at the beginning of winter, it will be pretty tough for all but the most experienced survivalists.
Comment by limukala — 18 January 2006 @ 1:32 AM
I live in Australia. I grew up on a farm. I was hunting pigs, kangaroo and goats from the age of 10. I also spent time on the coast fishing and snorkeling for fish etc. We had a vege garden and an orchard. My parents taught us everything we need to know in order to survive.
i am an engineer (mechanical/sructural) as well and know how to fix almost any engine or device. i can also build as my parents built most of the houses we lived in.
I am ready for whatever happens.
Me and my partner recently moved back to a remote coastal region, one of the places I grew up. We have set up a garden and got the hang of the local game and fishing areas.
you are right about the experience thing. Lots of tricks to learn. One of the hardest is how to outsmart the food-source in order to hunt it and be sure of your next meal. Its about allowing your instincts to work again. that depends on how buried they are under the tonne of shite we have to deal with these days…..
Comment by holotropik — 18 January 2006 @ 6:05 AM
He does indeed! But forming a community, learning the basics, choosing to learn the more advanced skills … these are simply a matter of making a choice. There are ways to accomplish these things–if you choose to do so.
It is hard, but doing it well is a matter of practice, not learning. It’s fairly easy to learn how to kill and properly dress an animal. Now, becoming good at those things is another story, but it’s not a matter of learning, so much as practice.
Probably not–but 30-year-old suburbanites routinely learn the basics well enough to provide for themselves. Ability is easy; mastery is hard. But mastery is not necessary for survival–just abilty.
He is right–because your life does depend on it! But, again, we’re talking about the difference between ability and mastery–the difference between living cold and hungry and not living at all. Though, with a community, you’ll generally not be cold or hungry, either.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 18 January 2006 @ 10:45 AM
But how can we have a community when even mentioning something to any people you know they look at you like you are crazy and it’s totally out of their sphere of reality that they are willing to deal with. I guess primitive schools are good for meeting those people too.
It would be nice if during the crash I could meet all these people from primitive skills schools in the woods that know what they are doing. But it seems that they probably wouldn’t teach me and allow me to be a part of their tribe. I guess I have to bring something to the table first and there might be a relatively lot of people to the ratio of people who know what they are doing who will be around these primitively-smart people who they will turn away.
I think having a rat trap (a mouse trap only bigger) and mouse traps might be good to have. I don’t have any experience with making traps.
I’m kind of doing a training for a career that will take two years, and I’m scared of all this freaking out about 2006/2007 that maybe I should just get trained in truck driving for a few weeks, earn some money and then go to a primitive school as soon as I get enough money to pay for it.
Thanks for the BOSS suggestion.
Comment by planetwarming — 18 January 2006 @ 12:12 PM
They are–but they’re not the only places. I felt very alone when I started, too, but over time, sticking to it has brought like-minded folk out of the woodwork. We’re appealing to human nature itself with a message that’s universal to all humanity–you just need to figure out the right way of putting it.
I know we’d expect you to bring something to the table before we let you join us. Don’t you have any friends that you go fishing with, go camping with? That’s more important than ideology.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 18 January 2006 @ 12:26 PM
Jason,
I think you take the 90% die off in past collapses and all the survivors being foragers as your premises and draw a conclusion that 10% of the people became foragers and survived. However it is possible to draw a conclusion that some unknown number of people (more than 10%) decided to become foragers but only 10% could be supported by foraging.
So even if you switched to foraging there may not be enough food for you because there is too much competition.
This is assuming a relatively undamaged ecosystem. When you are in the middle of suburbia with seas of asphalt all around then it gets harder to find food. Then there is the loss of species and destruction of habitats.
On the plus side there is probably more deer now than ever because all the wolves are gone.
Comment by DigitalDjigit — 18 January 2006 @ 1:56 PM
Actually, quite the opposite. The number that decided to change their lifestyle was the greatest bottleneck. With the Pueblo, for instance, we see them separating from the Anasazi and the Hohokam in the last days of the empire, but it’s much less than the ecosystem can support, so once the Anasazi and the Hohokam are gone, the Pueblo population rises up to what the environment can support.
I’d make a wild guess that it will be something closer to 1% that ever even tries to make a living beyond civilization, which wil be much less than the ecosystem can support. I think that 1% will have excessive room and resources for so few people, and that those survivors will see a population boom as they rise up to the natural carrying capacity.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 18 January 2006 @ 2:18 PM
I learned of the imminence of civilization collapse by this website. Where did you learn that civilization collapse was so imminent?
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They are–but they’re not the only places. I felt very alone when I started, too, but over time, sticking to it has brought like-minded folk out of the woodwork. We’re appealing to human nature itself with a message that’s universal to all humanity–you just need to figure out the right way of putting it.
Comment by planetwarming — 18 January 2006 @ 2:39 PM
I started the blog here with my autobiography: my beginnings as a faithful Catholic, the impact Daniel Quinn’s Ishamel had on me, my two attempts at a “tribal business” (Tribal Dawn and Anthropik Media), and my eventual turn towards primitivism. It was no single factor that convinced, so much as a continual investigation which, frankly, I undertook hoping to exonerate civilization from Quinn’s accusations. Instead, I found out that Quinn had drastically understated the case.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 18 January 2006 @ 4:10 PM
It’s most likely that the collapse will occur in stages. The first stage will be when food and energy are no longer available in urban areas. At this point many urbanites will die and some will try to migrate to rural areas. At this point the government will probably collapse, as there will be no food or supplies for the military. If only 10% survive this stage, there will still be 30 million people in this country. People in rural areas will be desperate to survive due to lack of energy and fertilizer. They will not allow a peaceful migration of urbanites. In spite of all of its flaws, agriculture will be the most effective method of providing food at least in the short term. Maintaining control of arable property will be the means of insuring survival. Land will be defended vigorously.
Those few wild areas left will be “homesteaded� by “country boys that know how to survive�. In these areas hunter-gathers will be as popular as Native Americans were on the frontier.
Although this will not be a sustainable situation it could easily last a generation. By the time population declines to carrying capacity, the wild areas will look like Haiti.
In order to be one of the 1% that are left to hunt and forage it will be necessary to survive this first generation. I think the chances of surviving this far will depend much more on being well-armed and proficient with modern weapons than having hunter-gather survival skills.
Comment by Bob Harrison — 18 January 2006 @ 4:58 PM
Hey Bob –
I read that and my gut instinct says, yeah, that makes sense, you’re probably right… however, as I have come to understand it, this is exactly the opposite of what has actually happened in previous instances of collapse… so I think the strong money is on Jason’s scenario.
Janene
Comment by Janene — 18 January 2006 @ 5:04 PM
Those stages may bear out, but collapse accelerates itself. The occurence of each element makes the next occur all that much faster. It feeds on itself, and begins to happen more quickly. Those stages may hold up, but they will pass very quickly–a matter of months–leaving the entire process over the course of perhaps as little as a decade.
The key is the same key to survival that foragers have used all this time: don’t live on arable land. What wilderness is left, is left precsely because it is not arable. They may not like you, but if your land is worthless to them, they’re not going to fight you for it.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 18 January 2006 @ 5:06 PM
Me too I have the problem of where to learn the skills to survive in nature. I live in Belgium (Flanders) and there’s not much nature at all. There aren’t many interesting courses either (I’m following one to become herborist), and I don’t know people who have the same ideas (even many people in the squats seem uninterested in living in nature). On the internet the only courses I find which look interesting are in the US. Other survival courses here cost so much that I’d never be able to pay for them and many of them are not teaching many primitive skills at all.
I’m learning stuff by myself, but I would learn it so much faster from someone who’s experienced.
Comment by Gunnix — 18 January 2006 @ 7:08 PM
Much of the wilderness that remains in this country (parts of Appalachia for example) is wild because it would not be useful for commercial farming. Federal and state forests and land held by timber and mining companies can and would be homesteaded.
Comment by Bob Harrison — 18 January 2006 @ 9:07 PM
To take some land I know well, let’s consider the Allegheny National Forest.
This is an area in northwestern Pennsylvania, an area well known for extensive corn farming. For hundreds of years, farmers have been trying to make inroads into the Allegheny National Forest, but they’ve never gotten very far. The forest is very tough, and as verdant as the soil is for forest, it’s useless for corn or wheat. All attempts to tame it have failed. Today, the government’s opening it up for logging, but even that isn’t going so well–the trees aren’t very good lumber material.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 18 January 2006 @ 10:21 PM
Did I also mention that there’s some really good oil underneath the Allegheny National Forest? Wikipedia:
But even that isn’t enough to counterbalance the sheer, overwhelming problems that civilization faces in trying to tame that wilderness.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 18 January 2006 @ 10:23 PM
I think we need to differentiate between survival skills and primitive living skills. They are not the same. Survival skills are meant to keep you alive for a week or so to give rescuers time to find you. If they don’t find you, the odds are you will die. Primitive living skills are meant to keep you alive forever. In the scenario that we are describing, primitive living skills are the only thing you should be interested in learning.
How long it takes to learn the basics of, or perfect, primitive living skills is not the issue. The basics will not keep you alive. It’s how long it will take you to develop enough proficiency in those skills to enable you to live for an extended period of time in the wilderness of your choice. Proficiency takes time and you cannot and will not get that level of proficiency over a weekend or even a few weeks or even “very quickly.”
As I have said, you first need to learn those skills in a field setting from someone who knows what they are talking about. Then, you need to put yourself through a “realistic” drill at least once per year. That drill should last enough consecutive days in the wilderness of your choice to really test your abilities.
My guess is that the drill needs to last at least a solid two weeks and a month would be even better. And I’m talking no contact with the outside world during your drill. Otherwise, you are not testing your primitive “living” skills, you are simply testing your primitive “visiting” skills. Becoming proficient in the first may keep you alive when/if the time comes. Becoming proficient in the second will simply sacrifice you to the wilderness.
Yes, but are you several months ahead of me in the right direction?
That is why I asked the above question. If you think primitive living skills means learning the “civilized” way to hunt and fish using “civilized” hunting and fishing gear, then, right off the bat, you are setting yourself up for failure when/if the time comes to make your move. Any “civilized” stuff you take with you into the wilderness will ultimately break, malfunction, or simply wear out from overuse. Then what will you do?
And every “civilized” item you bring with you into the wilderness binds you to the very collapsing civilization you are trying to escape, and also increases the chance that you will be consumed by that wilderness when those items are no longer available for use. If the situation develops where you are forced into the wilderness, it should be viewed as a permanent transition, not a temporary one. Or do you plan on hiking 50 miles back to the nearest town with your trusty Visa card when you run out of ammo or snag and lose your last lure? That is not the mindset of a hunter/gatherer/forager. That is the mindset of a weekend warrior.
I would be willing to bet that none of us knows even one person that truly possesses primitive living skills. I am talking about someone who can head off into the wilderness with virtually nothing and make it work. A person who can do that is a true hunter/gathere/forager. Given that, BOSS-type operations are about the only place to learn these skills — books and videos will only give you a “feel” for what it’s all about. However, if you can’t or won’t “seriously” drill yourself once per year in a “realistic” field situation, I’m not certain you should spend the time or money on it.
And let’s not forget that Mother Nature is a two-faced bitch.
She will entice you with her pristine beauty. She will seduce you with her vast resources. But if you come to her unprepared, she will do everything in her power to kill you. She will send snowstorms and frigid temperatures to freeze you. She will send lighting to fry you. She will send flash floods to drown you. If she can’t get you that way, she will send crazed animals to eat you. She will send venomous reptiles and insects to poison you. And if you are lucky enough to escape her still, she will send clouds of flies and mosquitoes in an attempt to drive you insane. You don’t want to mess with this bitch.
I wouldn’t either. In fact, if the wilderness of your choice has extreme winter or summer conditions, the more skills you will have to know in order to live there for an extended time. And field-testing your skills during those extreme seasons becomes even more important if you want to ensure your survival when the time comes.
I think a wilderness area with a moderate climate is best. I agree with limukala, Hawaii is probably ideal, assuming the locals don’t barbeque you. Other than that, I think the lower levels of the Cascades or the Sierras and even central Arizona would be best. Anyplace else in the US just gets too cold in the winter, or too hot in the summer.
Famous last words. Sorry, but I have to agree with Jason on this. I think you will be better off than most, but only initially. If law and order break down in the cities, there will be a wholesale exodus. There is a name for groups of desperate, starving people roaming the country side. They call them uncivilized marauders. If they happen to stumble upon your little patch of heaven, in the twinkling of an eye, they will turn it into your little patch of hell. They will not respect your ownership rights. They will eat your food. They will steal your belongings. They will rape your women. If you put up any resistance, they will slaughter you without hesitation.
Think I’m exaggerating?
Better do some research on the farmers who tried to defend their land in Zimbabwe after Mugabe took over and any semblance of law and order vaporized. I’ve seen the pictures. Farmers hacked to death. Farmers with half their faces blown off. Both men and women. Young children — still in their school uniforms — left hanging by the neck from the shower head.
Okay. So there is a lot of pent up hatred over there and, given the history of the country, that hatred may be warranted. But guess what? Maybe it’s different Down Under, but there is also a lot of pent up hatred in the US and, given the history of the country, that hatred may also be warranted. Hope for the best, but prepare for the worst, and the worst is Zimbabwe in the USA. I would not want to be in a position where I felt I had to defend a piece of land in order to survive, especially in the US.
I think you should stay on your career path and do what you can with whatever time and money you have. Remember, even though the signs of crisis are everywhere, there is a saying that those who live by the crystal ball are forever doomed to eat crushed glass.
No one really knows that collapse is imminent. You simply do the research and make a call based on that research. To get you started, check out this link that Jason provided in an earlier thesis pertaining to collapse, and read through Savinar’s site and follow the links he provides. In fact, if you Google any of this stuff, you’ll have more reading material than you ever wanted.
I don’t see collapse happening within a decade, assuming it does at all. We will first go through a worsening of the energy crisis that we are already in. That will probably lead to a recession either this year or next. That may lead to a depression around 2010. If collapse does come, I think it will “start” during the depression, but, I agree with Bob, I think total collapse will probably unfold over a period of decades. In fact, didn’t Tainter say that even a quick collapse occurs over a generation or two?
Comment by George — 19 January 2006 @ 12:09 AM
I lived in the Appalachians 350 miles south of the Allegheny National Forest. Although there will be differences, I think the conditions are very similar. To live off of this kind of land, you clear only flat areas and allow grass to grow. You raise sheep, a cow, some free running pigs, maybe a couple of beef cattle. Pigs will graze and also forage for mast in the woods. Trees are not cut on the slopes. You use manure to fertilize a vegetable garden. You can grow a little field corn for the animals in winter. You use a work pony or mule for planting and to bring in hay for the winter. In the 80’s my wife and I, with no experience, left jobs in D.C. and lived off 100 acres in this manner for five years. We moved into a 100-year-old popular log house. From gravestones on the property it was inhabited since at least the 1880’s and the soil in the 30 cleared acres was still able to grow ample grass. No fertilizers or chemicals were used.
Comment by Bob Harrison — 19 January 2006 @ 12:14 AM
I’ve got to agree with George on this. How many of the people here have hunted (successfully) not with rifle and ammo, but with a spear alone? How many of you know _anyone_ that has? I’ll allow iron-tipped spears. (I’m confident the number of succesful stone-tipped or wood-only spear-hunting expeditions is going to be nil.)
Jason might be right that some people will survive the collapse, but I really doubt people like us will be amongst that number, ‘prepared’ or not. The people that will inherit the earth are those that have not yet given up hunter-gatherer ways, or who are only a generation removed from those ways and still have some practical connection to them and to the body of knowledge their parents had. In Australia, I imagine some of the traditional Aborigines will survive. No one else will, once the bullets run out.
I think we are completely overestimating the capacity to adapt suddenly by modern people. Take Tasmania, which has a temperate climate. Hikers lost in the Tasmanian south-west die within days-that’s equipped with down sleeping bags, waterproof gear, cooking stoves, and so on. That does not mean people couldn’t survive there. Indeed, the Tasmanian aboriginals, who had the lowest level of tech recorded amongst pretty much anyone, could survive even in the south-west (they’ve left cave paintings on the West Coast).
The point is, they could do it, but we can’t. Our link with that sort of adaptability is gone. We need tech-Iron Age tech specifically, and more probably gunpowder age.
Comment by Eric — 19 January 2006 @ 1:02 AM