I agree, although I think that worrying about what people will do millenia from now is unneccessary. That is for them to figure out. For us now it will more than hard enough to figure out how to make the salvage economy work
It takes a while to move towards a medieval lifestyle. For instance, using a flail to thresh your wheat requires practice and understanding the dynamics of striking the wheat with a swift sharp blow so it flies off the stalk. There is also the question of how long your flail handle is, how long the beater is, and how long the string is between the two. Then there is the context of slipping the wheat question altogether and opting for growing potatoes, corn, beans and squash for your main dose of kilocalories. Then consider what you can trade for the wheat you can get from the neighbors who are happy to produce a surplus of wheat, rye, etc. Now consider what I do. I grow wheat, rye, barley and oats to whack down and use for mulch. In tough times I have a crop to harvest. The grain reseeds itself AND when I spread the mulch on other parts of my garden it plants a new crop of grain and fits into my six-fold rotation: grain, favas, root, fruit, pea, leaf. Good trick eh? I have a thousand more. What YOU the perspicacious reader needs to do is think in these terms for a significant part of your day.
If you don't already have land, you are in a hole. The first step is to stop digging. The second step is to use social relationships to build material relationships. For those of you who have some training in cultural anthropology, check out Bourdieu's work with the Kabyle in Algeria. As for the practical aspect, one can go to a farmers market and offer to do some work with one of the farmers you buy from. Don't buy direct from farmers? You are digging your hole deeper. Another alternative is to find a community garden or even get the city to give you access to open lots. Then there is guerilla gardening (google it). There are many other alternatives. The overriding paradigm is for YOU to take action in your own particular situation. You know what you can do better than anyone else. When the individual needs help, the group can provide it. And I don't mean join Greenpeace. I mean small community groups.
I have plenty of land. I live in a rural area where most people have plenty of land. The land lies fallow or is left to forestry. Some people still grow a few vegetables and have fruit trees as a hobby. None of them want to go back to the old days of subsistence farming just to stay alive. They all know how hard that was. And how easy it was for things to go wrong and to go hungry. This is reality.
Most people live in urban areas now. They depend on supermarkets. Nothing wrong with that if customers pick and choose healthier than average products. The supermarkets will provide whatever the customers desire as long as prices can be kept reasonably low.
Some people grow food in their urban gardens, some have a herb box on their window. This will not feed you all year round unless you are one of the experts that do so for a living and spend all their time on this.
Billions of people in cities are already in that "hole" and they're not getting out of it by getting together in community gardens and growing a few veggies. That's not realistic.
Rural communities will fare better but it is still an uphill struggle if you think people can live off the land again without modern inputs. Most would fail miserably.
As I predicted in my first book (The Laws of Physics Are On My Side), I see dieoff starting sometime between 2020 and 2030, with an 80% dieoff achieved by 2100. (I.e. 8 billion reduced to 1.5 billion or less.) We seem to be on track.
Since you have land, how about doing what I do.
I have more land than I need.
I till up more land than I need.
I plant more crops than I can take care of.
I grow more food than I need.
I harvest more than I can eat or give away.
If and when hungry people start coming down the road, I can feed them and put them to work. This is called The Accordion (expands and contracts as needed). More on this in my second book, Hints for Managing Collapse.
80%? By 2100? That long! Yikes! I was hoping to mop up a bit sooner than that. Guess I'll have to join Max More's cryogenics program so I can be revived in 2100 to see if you got it right!
Yeah... I get it... thanks for the advice and all. I managed a small garden this year and it kept on giving. Gave some away (even though everyone does the same round here) and didn't have enough storage space for the rest, mostly green beans, so had to throw it out.
I believe (in fact I know for a fact) that as a community we can ramp things up if we really had to as long as we can fuel a couple of tractors etc (that would obviously help).
We relied on cow carts before. Every house had one along with a couple of cows. Milk was sold and the cows were high maintenance! A pig was slaughtered every year and everyone had plenty of chickens and ducks and rabbits. Mushrooms in the forest and plentiful seafood just down the road. They've practically all gone.
We have a strong (and recent) history of subsistence farming, mostly individual houses but coming together as a cooperative for larger work and so on. It's practically non-existent today. Plenty of machinery etc but no one really getting together and using it on a large scale. The large industrial farms up the road take care of all of that.
I may repeat next year, even experimenting with other crops that don't need so much water. Traditional crops here are potatoes, beans, greens, peppers, squash, melon, and all kinds of fruit trees. We used to plant American corn but unless it's really well protected the wild pigs make quick work of it (and it's GM anyway).
And there is no going back to a primitive way of life:
There are 4000 Spent Fuel Ponds Around the Globe…
If you don’t cool the spent fuel, the temperature will rise and there may be a swift chain reaction that leads to spontaneous combustion–an explosion and fire of the spent fuel assemblies. Such a scenario would emit radioactive particles into the atmosphere. Pick your poison. Fresh fuel is hotter and more radioactive, but is only one fuel assembly. A pool of spent fuel will have dozens of assemblies.
One report from Sankei News said that there are over 700 fuel assemblies stored in one pool at Fukushima. If they all caught fire, radioactive particles—including those lasting for as long as a decade—would be released into the air and eventually contaminate the land or, worse, be inhaled by people. “To me, the spent fuel is scarier. All those spent fuel assemblies are still extremely radioactive,” Dalnoki-Veress says.
It has been known for more than two decades that, in case of a loss of water in the pool, convective air cooling would be relatively ineffective in such a “dense-packed” pool. Spent fuel recently discharged from a reactor could heat up relatively rapidly to temperatures at which the zircaloy fuel cladding could catch fire and the fuel’s volatile fission product, including 30-year half-life Cs, would be released. The fire could well spread to older spent fuel. The long-term land-contamination consequences of such an event could be significantly worse than those from Chernobyl.
Japan’s chief cabinet secretary called it “the devil’s scenario.” Two weeks after the 11 March 2011 earthquake and tsunami devastated the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, causing three nuclear reactors to melt down and release radioactive plumes, officials were bracing for even worse. They feared that spent fuel stored in pools in the reactor halls would catch fire and send radioactive smoke across a much wider swath of eastern Japan, including Tokyo.
The Chernobyl accident was relatively minor, involved no spent fuel ponds, and was controlled by pouring cement onto the reactor. This was breaking down so a few years back they re-entombed.
Estimates of the cancer burden in Europe from radioactive fallout from the Chernobyl accident
However, many of the radioactive elements in spent fuel have long half-lives. For example, plutonium-239 has a half-life of 24,000 years, and plutonium-240 has a half-life of 6,800 years. Because it contains these long half-lived radioactive elements, spent fuel must be isolated and controlled for thousands of years.
'Global warming is real and human-caused. It is leading to large-scale climate change. Under the guise of climate "skepticism", the public is bombarded with misinformation that casts doubt on the reality of human-caused global warming. This website gets skeptical about global warming "skepticism".'
Mono no aware is a key term in Japanese culture. ‘Mono’ means ‘thing’ or ‘things’; ‘aware’ means ‘feeling’ or sentiment, and the particle ‘no’ indicates something an object possesses. So mono no aware signifies the deep feeling or pathos of things, the powerful emotions that objects can evoke or instill in us. It is often associated with a poignant feeling of transience, a beautiful sadness in the passing of lives and objects, like the glorious color of autumn leaves as they are about to fall.”
Decades ago i read Ernest Callenbach's "Ecotopia" - an ecological Utopian novel...It challenged me then, and still does, to try to imagine a post-capitalist-consumer, ecologically benign society... Though the tale has flaws, It suggests a blueprint of one such possible (future) society. I believe such 'blueprints' can assist us in focusing, teasing out, developing ideas of a (future) society we'd like to live in - for without engaging in such we remain at the mercy, in the total grip of the technological dystopias being promoted by this very world we must leave...Our failure of The Imagination (or the capture of our imagination) is The Enemy's Fifth Column...
Thank you B🙏
Ironically, this all seems “hopeful” somehow. Like getting back to basics.
Modern Nuclear like Chins
I agree, although I think that worrying about what people will do millenia from now is unneccessary. That is for them to figure out. For us now it will more than hard enough to figure out how to make the salvage economy work
It takes a while to move towards a medieval lifestyle. For instance, using a flail to thresh your wheat requires practice and understanding the dynamics of striking the wheat with a swift sharp blow so it flies off the stalk. There is also the question of how long your flail handle is, how long the beater is, and how long the string is between the two. Then there is the context of slipping the wheat question altogether and opting for growing potatoes, corn, beans and squash for your main dose of kilocalories. Then consider what you can trade for the wheat you can get from the neighbors who are happy to produce a surplus of wheat, rye, etc. Now consider what I do. I grow wheat, rye, barley and oats to whack down and use for mulch. In tough times I have a crop to harvest. The grain reseeds itself AND when I spread the mulch on other parts of my garden it plants a new crop of grain and fits into my six-fold rotation: grain, favas, root, fruit, pea, leaf. Good trick eh? I have a thousand more. What YOU the perspicacious reader needs to do is think in these terms for a significant part of your day.
Most people today don't have land.
If you don't already have land, you are in a hole. The first step is to stop digging. The second step is to use social relationships to build material relationships. For those of you who have some training in cultural anthropology, check out Bourdieu's work with the Kabyle in Algeria. As for the practical aspect, one can go to a farmers market and offer to do some work with one of the farmers you buy from. Don't buy direct from farmers? You are digging your hole deeper. Another alternative is to find a community garden or even get the city to give you access to open lots. Then there is guerilla gardening (google it). There are many other alternatives. The overriding paradigm is for YOU to take action in your own particular situation. You know what you can do better than anyone else. When the individual needs help, the group can provide it. And I don't mean join Greenpeace. I mean small community groups.
I have plenty of land. I live in a rural area where most people have plenty of land. The land lies fallow or is left to forestry. Some people still grow a few vegetables and have fruit trees as a hobby. None of them want to go back to the old days of subsistence farming just to stay alive. They all know how hard that was. And how easy it was for things to go wrong and to go hungry. This is reality.
Most people live in urban areas now. They depend on supermarkets. Nothing wrong with that if customers pick and choose healthier than average products. The supermarkets will provide whatever the customers desire as long as prices can be kept reasonably low.
Some people grow food in their urban gardens, some have a herb box on their window. This will not feed you all year round unless you are one of the experts that do so for a living and spend all their time on this.
Billions of people in cities are already in that "hole" and they're not getting out of it by getting together in community gardens and growing a few veggies. That's not realistic.
Rural communities will fare better but it is still an uphill struggle if you think people can live off the land again without modern inputs. Most would fail miserably.
As I predicted in my first book (The Laws of Physics Are On My Side), I see dieoff starting sometime between 2020 and 2030, with an 80% dieoff achieved by 2100. (I.e. 8 billion reduced to 1.5 billion or less.) We seem to be on track.
Since you have land, how about doing what I do.
I have more land than I need.
I till up more land than I need.
I plant more crops than I can take care of.
I grow more food than I need.
I harvest more than I can eat or give away.
If and when hungry people start coming down the road, I can feed them and put them to work. This is called The Accordion (expands and contracts as needed). More on this in my second book, Hints for Managing Collapse.
80%? By 2100? That long! Yikes! I was hoping to mop up a bit sooner than that. Guess I'll have to join Max More's cryogenics program so I can be revived in 2100 to see if you got it right!
Yeah... I get it... thanks for the advice and all. I managed a small garden this year and it kept on giving. Gave some away (even though everyone does the same round here) and didn't have enough storage space for the rest, mostly green beans, so had to throw it out.
I believe (in fact I know for a fact) that as a community we can ramp things up if we really had to as long as we can fuel a couple of tractors etc (that would obviously help).
We relied on cow carts before. Every house had one along with a couple of cows. Milk was sold and the cows were high maintenance! A pig was slaughtered every year and everyone had plenty of chickens and ducks and rabbits. Mushrooms in the forest and plentiful seafood just down the road. They've practically all gone.
We have a strong (and recent) history of subsistence farming, mostly individual houses but coming together as a cooperative for larger work and so on. It's practically non-existent today. Plenty of machinery etc but no one really getting together and using it on a large scale. The large industrial farms up the road take care of all of that.
I may repeat next year, even experimenting with other crops that don't need so much water. Traditional crops here are potatoes, beans, greens, peppers, squash, melon, and all kinds of fruit trees. We used to plant American corn but unless it's really well protected the wild pigs make quick work of it (and it's GM anyway).
Man has minimal impact on the climate...
And there is no going back to a primitive way of life:
There are 4000 Spent Fuel Ponds Around the Globe…
If you don’t cool the spent fuel, the temperature will rise and there may be a swift chain reaction that leads to spontaneous combustion–an explosion and fire of the spent fuel assemblies. Such a scenario would emit radioactive particles into the atmosphere. Pick your poison. Fresh fuel is hotter and more radioactive, but is only one fuel assembly. A pool of spent fuel will have dozens of assemblies.
One report from Sankei News said that there are over 700 fuel assemblies stored in one pool at Fukushima. If they all caught fire, radioactive particles—including those lasting for as long as a decade—would be released into the air and eventually contaminate the land or, worse, be inhaled by people. “To me, the spent fuel is scarier. All those spent fuel assemblies are still extremely radioactive,” Dalnoki-Veress says.
It has been known for more than two decades that, in case of a loss of water in the pool, convective air cooling would be relatively ineffective in such a “dense-packed” pool. Spent fuel recently discharged from a reactor could heat up relatively rapidly to temperatures at which the zircaloy fuel cladding could catch fire and the fuel’s volatile fission product, including 30-year half-life Cs, would be released. The fire could well spread to older spent fuel. The long-term land-contamination consequences of such an event could be significantly worse than those from Chernobyl.
http://science.time.com/2011/03/15/a-new-threat-in-japan-radioactive-spent-fuel/
Japan’s chief cabinet secretary called it “the devil’s scenario.” Two weeks after the 11 March 2011 earthquake and tsunami devastated the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, causing three nuclear reactors to melt down and release radioactive plumes, officials were bracing for even worse. They feared that spent fuel stored in pools in the reactor halls would catch fire and send radioactive smoke across a much wider swath of eastern Japan, including Tokyo.
https://energyskeptic.com/2017/the-devils-scenario-near-miss-at-fukushima-is-a-warning-for-u-s/
The Chernobyl accident was relatively minor, involved no spent fuel ponds, and was controlled by pouring cement onto the reactor. This was breaking down so a few years back they re-entombed.
Estimates of the cancer burden in Europe from radioactive fallout from the Chernobyl accident
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16628547/
However, many of the radioactive elements in spent fuel have long half-lives. For example, plutonium-239 has a half-life of 24,000 years, and plutonium-240 has a half-life of 6,800 years. Because it contains these long half-lived radioactive elements, spent fuel must be isolated and controlled for thousands of years.
'Global warming is real and human-caused. It is leading to large-scale climate change. Under the guise of climate "skepticism", the public is bombarded with misinformation that casts doubt on the reality of human-caused global warming. This website gets skeptical about global warming "skepticism".'
https://skepticalscience.com/
"There are 4000 Spent Fuel Ponds Around the Globe…"
https://www.facebook.com/JoseBarbaNueva/posts/pfbid02LHk7C55cbtZy5naDu4prn3TbBTzQbEQyacjYjSmGSawQaLUyBMDSDHr6NktCyZzQl
"plutonium-239 has a half-life of 24,000 years, ..."
And thus remains highly toxic for about 500,000 years.
We are going extinct
もののあはれ
mono no aware
Mono no aware is a key term in Japanese culture. ‘Mono’ means ‘thing’ or ‘things’; ‘aware’ means ‘feeling’ or sentiment, and the particle ‘no’ indicates something an object possesses. So mono no aware signifies the deep feeling or pathos of things, the powerful emotions that objects can evoke or instill in us. It is often associated with a poignant feeling of transience, a beautiful sadness in the passing of lives and objects, like the glorious color of autumn leaves as they are about to fall.”
https://berkleycenter.georgetown.edu/posts/mono-no-aware-the-transience-of-life
Hello B,
I think you are not entirely correct. My response was too long for just a comment so I did write a 2 part response to your Article
Part 1 - What’s The Deal With ‘Sustainability’?
(https://open.substack.com/pub/kaykluz/p/why-ditching-sustainability-is-not?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web)
Part 2 - Why Ditching ‘Sustainability’ Is Not the Answer: A Counter Perspective
(https://open.substack.com/pub/kaykluz/p/why-ditching-sustainability-is-not?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web)
Decades ago i read Ernest Callenbach's "Ecotopia" - an ecological Utopian novel...It challenged me then, and still does, to try to imagine a post-capitalist-consumer, ecologically benign society... Though the tale has flaws, It suggests a blueprint of one such possible (future) society. I believe such 'blueprints' can assist us in focusing, teasing out, developing ideas of a (future) society we'd like to live in - for without engaging in such we remain at the mercy, in the total grip of the technological dystopias being promoted by this very world we must leave...Our failure of The Imagination (or the capture of our imagination) is The Enemy's Fifth Column...
"How you gonna keep 'em
down on The Farm
after they've seen Paree ?"
(Top of the 1919 Hit Parade)...
And i'm still wondering "How, indeed ?"