Without Delay

My principle suggestion is: start now. Of course, there are people who don't know how to grow food - they also don't know how to hunt, build shelter, or any other skills that imply direct contact with the earth. Hi-tech civilization has allowed us to forget these skills, and we are personally responsible for re-acquiring them. If they don't know, they need to learn! If you're serious about surviving, make plans in the next few months to do a couple of things.

1. want to make a house without using power tools? make a chair? sliding door? Go to the Library of Congress and get blueprints of all these things from the notebooks of Thomas Jefferson.
2. want to learn low tech living? Go study with those who actually do this successfully, like the Amish or native Americans. Let's re-learn the age-old skills of growing crops, washing clothes, and cooking that have been lost in our hi-tech amnesia.

Now, I'm using Thomas Jefferson as a representative example. An ingenious man with a mechanical mind, he lived in an era when electricity was unknown. He was also not a member of a culture 1000s of years old; colonial Americans had to remake everything for themselves. What they didn't do, however, was to reinvent the wheel, because there were plenty of already invented low tech solutions for: plumbing, flush toilets, lighting, heating, etc. He started from the technical knowledge common to the 18th century, not from ground zero. For us, though, trouble is that we no longer respect or even know these long-standing human ways of making conveniences and running a civilization sans computer and sans electricity.

Is Jefferson too recent for you? Write to the British Museum for blueprints of aqueducts, roadwork (and again flush toilets) from the Celto-Roman period, circa 300 AD The Romans were magnificent engineers, with much less in the way of technical knowledge than we will have after the holocaust. The one thing they didn't have that we will be prey to is panic.

Being without anything - plant food, seeds, water, shelter - at the time of the great disaster is an indicator of wishful thinking and an absence of foresight. All of us happily do not fall in that category. If others do, and they turn a deaf ear when we try to warn them now, we can't help it. We are certainly entitled to protect ourselves and our families against their too-late desperation. But we should avoid such panic ourselves. In my opinion, we should try very hard, since we do have foresight, to arrange a mutual collaboration so we are not protecting ourselves against each other. They will probably perish; we won't. I think that it's important for us, the survivors, to understand that destruction to technology and buildings does not equate with destruction to civilization.

Offered by Jenny.