One of the things I learned when I first read about Social Security funding that, at least in the early days of funding calculations, those doing the calculations were very much interested in how many people would be alive in a given year, and of those, how many would be working and how many would be retired and expected to receive benefits. In more recent years, there has been a change to more attempted pre-funding, but the principle remains the same--retired people can only get a percentage of what is available at a point in time.

Kurt is talking about much the same thing. If the amount of resources goes down, each of us can only hope to get a share of what is available at a given point in time.

We live on a finite planet, so is fair to say that we will eventually run out of the resources needed for survival no matter what.

Maybe if we are extremely careful and frugal the party can go on for a very long time. Could be that the sun will become “unfriendly” before we get to that point if, if we are very careful.

However, we are living in a way that is horribly wasteful and flippant toward our resource stewardship responsibilities. This seriously compromises/destroys our chance for long-term existence.

It does seem to be all about flow. Slow, careful and easy can go for a long, long time. Fast and furious burns us out of existence at a breathtaking speed. Large stockpiles will give us a few extra moments at best.

"And the great owners, who must lose their land in an upheaval, the great owners with access to history, with eyes to read history and to know the great fact: when property accumulates in too few hands it is taken away. And that companion fact: when a majority of the people are hungry and cold they will take by force what they need. And the little screaming fact that sounds through all history: repression works only to strengthen and knit the repressed." steinbeck grapes of wrath

It would certainly be possible to store a lifetime's worth of NPK, or sugar, or rice, or solar panels, etc. However, the society around you will relieve you of it at the point it becomes useful. A prepared community is a great thing to have; but in many places the shortsighted majority will be out in force with "death to hoarders" signs and shotguns. So stockpiling might have to be done with a bit of finesse; you might want a cave on your property both to store stuff and to discard the chocolate wrappers.

Now in a case where things didn't get "very" bad, and private property was still respected - a big "if" - a stockpile of something like NPK could be traded to others at a high rate of exchange for a portion of their crops. However "wealth" has a tendency to be coveted.

The trouble with a balanced personality is all those around you who don't have one.

Humans have been storing fat on their bodies for longer than we’ve been able to think about it and there may even be a portion of our brains that has evolved to discriminate against the obviously obese. Many of the obese have defended themselves by acting jolly and harmless and accepting lower positions in the dominance hierarchy. But for a small band of roving hunter and gatherers, the fat boys and girls may have been the only way to pass-on the group’s genes during stressful times. I think the Hawaiians loved their fat people and it was probably a sign of great success to be fat.

Extricating yourself from the body of civilization and getting as far away and as independent as possible may be the best strategy. Become your own single-celled organism amongst many and hope the colossus doesn’t fall on you when it collapses. Those trapped deep in the tissues of civilization will likely die in place when the oxygen and glucose stop circulating and the trash builds up at the curb. However, I expect the authorities will search every house and storage building for resources if hunger becomes widespread and perhaps rip that little glucagon vacuole right out of your carefully constructed doomstead.

Given all this, why is it that some people believe they can really store up much of anything?

And why does this belief seem so exclusive to the USA? One rarely finds it on European energy sites (including TOD:Europe) except when it's brought in by commenters from the USA.

The illusion that we can stock up for a lifetime is given to us by money.

Perhaps that's too facile: Europeans use money too. Money may make it easier to hold the belief, but the belief itself must have some sort of cultural origin or it would be more evenly distributed. Maybe it owes to the lone-ranger element of American culture.

Within a larger area (like a country), you might notice smaller areas where material cycling (flows of material, food, consumer products) is either slower or faster, relative to the other areas. Call them "micro-flow areas". Usually they are in rural areas. People are forced to move things around more slowly because of the distances. We say that "the pace of life is slower" in these places. Often we like them, or we like to visit them. Things are on a smaller scale.

Big cities have high material cycling (or flows). Everything is fast. It is so exciting for us---all the paper, the machines, the shops, the ideas, the trains, buses, museums, hospitals.

If you want to be readier for the collapse, then a slow-paced place might be better because things are already slow there. They won`t notice so much if things get slower.

But some rather restless people just can`t stand living in the country, no matter if it is the only place where they they will later be able to survive. If there is a city (offering complexity) they will choose it and try to compete there until the bitter, bitter end. They will never back down, they will never give up, they will never opt out, they will never stop trying until the insititutions themselves (the governments, the research labs, the universities, the museums, the large hospitals) are shut down. They have professional considerations and they are terribly bored by the idea of living in a village where nothing much happens. And they believe that their level of professional expertise guarantees that they will be the saved ones.

So there is the conundrum, the puzzle, the catch. It will be a fight every step of the way. Many people will not be happy to live with lower, slower flows in the country. They will first choose lower, slower flows in the city, with budget cuts, hiring freezes, grant unavailability, lower salaries will make the lower/slower flows in the city a reality.

I have commented before of an infinte source of enegy.

I think I know why it is such a passionate subject. It is not that it without promise, but that it is with threat.

There have been 4 unexplained benchtop explosions Bad guys might find this interesting. Imagine 4 million times more umph than chemical.

How does this relate to the thread? Unlimited energy means practically unlimited resources. (From seawater for a start).

Kenneth S. Deffeyes Lecture

http://gustavus.edu/events/nobelconference/2007/deffeyes-lecture.php

Major T. J. "King" Kong: Survival kit contents check. In them you'll find: one forty-five caliber automatic; two boxes of ammunition; four days' concentrated emergency rations; one drug issue containing antibiotics, morphine, vitamin pills, pep pills, sleeping pills, tranquilizer pills; one miniature combination Russian phrase book and Bible; one hundred dollars in rubles; one hundred dollars in gold; nine packs of chewing gum; one issue of prophylactics; three lipsticks; three pair of nylon stockings. Shoot, a fella' could have a pretty good weekend in Vegas with all that stuff.

And later in the movie.

[Strangelove's plan for post-nuclear war survival involves living underground with a 10:1 female-to-male ratio]
General "Buck" Turgidson: Doctor, you mentioned the ratio of ten women to each man. Now, wouldn't that necessitate the abandonment of the so-called monogamous sexual relationship, I mean, as far as men were concerned?
Dr. Strangelove: Regrettably, yes. But it is, you know, a sacrifice required for the future of the human race. I hasten to add that since each man will be required to do prodigious... service along these lines, the women will have to be selected for their sexual characteristics which will have to be of a highly stimulating nature.
Ambassador de Sadesky: I must confess, you have an astonishingly good idea there, Doctor.

Right or wrong, I have made a set of assumptions about the future as a basis for my personal planning.
1. Within the decade, social order will break down and martial law will be imposed. However, initially we will be too timid (compassionate) to take action that is sufficient to restore order. The result will be cessation of production and distribution of essential goods.
2. The eight family members on the farm potentially expanding to sixteen/twenty family members have insufficient skills and fire power to maintain a sustainable life style. Therefore cooperation with a wider community is essential.
3. The family stock pile (hoard) is extensive but will only serve as a cushion as we transition to a community level sustainable life style.
4. Within a decade following collapse a greatly reduced but functioning production/distribution system will evolve to service a greatly reduced population. Think 1880 - 1900.

In September 2007, I started distributing a monthly Economic/Peak Oil Analysis letter to selected people in our community. The distribution list soon grew to a significant number. In December 2007 our community was flooded. As a volunteer, I coordinated the recovery process. This function gave me the opportunity to gain more Peak Oil converts. We now have a sizable cadre that has a wide range of ‘survival’ skills. We meet for dinner frequently and spend an evening planning based on the above assumptions.
We are preparing plans to train people when the pain of their present circumstances exceed the pain of change. My hope is that by sounding a general alert the unprepared will be more observant and have a bit of time to start preparing for transition to a new life style.

Community security is given a high priority in our planning. At this time we do not have a clear vision of how other communities and government agencies will behave in times of great need. We will prepare as best we can for several potential scenarios and modify as required.

The leaders of the Community Church, Grange, and Volunteer Fire Dept. are all on board and support the planning activities. Within two miles of my house there are two small sheep farms, a large organic dairy, a fifty acre organic vegetable farm and I raise beef cattle. None of these producers can continue their operation at present levels without input from the economy. However, I believe that we will have less trouble adapting than some of the more industrialized operations.

I believe that placing confidence in a stockpile rather than community is folly.

Then again, there's the option implied by my nickname. If the reindeer on St. Matthew Island had the ability to schism off a predatory subspecies, they would have survived pretty well in balance. As omnivores, this option is open to us.

Yeah, it sounds yucky to me too. Yet there's a certain ecological logic to it; the one thing there will be too much of, no shortage of, is human biomass. The non-yuckiness meme for serving one's fellow man has a bright future.

This will manifest one way or another, such as a person in a famine area furtively cracking a neighbor's head with a rock and eating the brains; but that's less an explouted niche than last-ditch survival. On the other hand, upbeat cannibal religions or communities would have an "edge" over others. Surprising there hasn't been a TOD keypost on it. There's a much stronger case to be made for it than for corn ethanol.

It wasn't too long ago that we humans were living without oil, and before that coal. We have preserved memories of those times, including how things were done. It may be that as these large energy inputs disappear, we transition back to that mode of living, instead of everything going Mad Max on us. Humans are quite adaptable, and might in some places make these transitions gracefully.

It gets me when people put some home grown lettuce on a sandwich then imply it mostly came from the garden. Er, not really. What about bread, butter, ham, cheese, condiments etc? I think most of us are kidding ourselves about self sufficiency. Those who have ample PV, big gardens, edible (non-pet) livestock and water wells probably spent many years in the fossil fuel economy to pay for all of that. Those who make fuel out of waste vegetable oil should question what happens when the fast food industry dies out. Or the roads don't get repaired.

My attitude is do what you can at home but hope that society doesn't disintegrate too fast.

Tainter (in the Collapse of Complex Societies) says that the elites in the cities feel the problem of this slower flow quicker (that makes sense). The people out in the countryside may not even be aware. Their suffering would be more muted, drawn out. Can`t get to the hospital to have a baby, or can`t get ahold of some drug, so oh, well, do what can be done at home. Tainter even says that the country people would welcome no longer being taxed by the elites if the system to extract taxes falls apart.

I dunno! I'm starting to think it will boil down to luck and flexibility. We are having a serious drought in parts of Japan, record heat for weeks. So someone with farmland around here would maybe be facing their own crisis. It seems like a crapshoot......

I have stopped thinking about any possible preparations----it seems like this heat and drought has everyone irritated. There is nothing to be done, if you are a rugged type who likes the country, making things, fixing things, fishing, hunting, then I think it you are in a place with water, then this could be your moment. If you like writing, spending lots of time reading and sitting behind a desk while you wait for your meal to appear, then perhaps the last century would have been a better time for you! Unfortunately I am more of the second type..........I don`t see that people can change themsleves. The "tests well" type, the "paper" smarts type had their moment, their time to profit. Now I think their brand of getting ahead is losing its steam.

But who can really change? I think that is impossible.

It's possible to create a "lifeboat" farmstead that negates the need to stockpile massive amounts of supplies as it will create its own energy and foodstuff flows. Such an entity need only be properly developed and worked, and could even be stand-alone beyond any larger community. But there are few potential locations for such a lifeboat, so the choice must be made carefully. I'm looking at such a site that is rural but not remote, has very good soil and plenty of rainfall and a shallow water table, and a small number of neighbors with similar plots of land that provide an oppotunity for exercising synergy to maximize food and energy flows between the several households. There is also the village design where the houses are grouped together with the arable land surrounding. Such an arrangement that provides most needed items with no outside inputs is unlikely to notice the greater collapse occuring elsewhere.

And just how will the collapse everyone expects transpire? Will there indeed be a collapse, or will it be just a slow decline in living standards along with decomplexification of the culture, which is already happening. What about people who already have lifeboat-like farms engaged in subsistince farming and handicraft production; will they experience a collapse too? More examples could be made, but I think the point is clear--if there is a collapse, it will effect people in differing ways in differing places, and a rather large number of people, well over 1 billion, won't see any substantial change in their lifestyle or culture as they were never industrialized.

I would probably write something different if I lived in a Virginia suburb of DC or someplace similar, but I don't. I also think much depends upon who emerges as new leadership if collapse occurs. I'm reminded of the frustration during the later 1970s when stagflation wouldn't abate. We are now just starting to encounter a stagnation that will continue for decades in the USA, while other nations are still dynamicly growing economies because they still have the input flows to do so.

But can one really stock up for a lifetime?

The only thing one can stock for a lifetime is knowledge, a couple of good knives and a whetstone. Hand tools and hand power tools are a good stock.

Everything else would be the tools/storage materials to capture energy flows. Rainbarrels, a garden, nickel-iron batteries, glass greenhouses - all things that can last a lifetime. Bicycles can be a long-term item.

In some respects I can't believe I'm reading these comments, then I guess I try to consider background here. Do you "Go with the Flow" or "Stock up just in Case"? Is meaningless until you take COMMUNITY into account. Do you live in Bloomington or Portland? They have peak oil planning don't they? Are you aware of the Amish? they are living post peak oil right now.

It seems to me that everyone here is totally unaware of the term CARRYING CAPACITY. Whether you live or die simply depends on the carrying capacity of the nearby environment. That is the way all plants and animals live. For about one hundred years (give or take) the human animal has cheated this simple equation, and we are not going to cheat it very much longer.

Preppers quickly learn that it is impossible to cover every contingency. And, further, that "forever" is a long time. I believe the philosophy that most of us have is to buy time so that decisions do not have to be rushed but rather can be deliberated upon. In crisis situations the worst thing a person can do is snap decisions. So, by having a store of essential needs one can wait until action is appropriate.

Todd

Found this a couple of days ago. I think you can watch it outside norway.
http://www.nrk.no/nett-tv/klipp/454076/

A small introduction:
Its a norwegian program about people that live on isolated places, or places where you never tought anyone could live.
On this episode its about a american woman who was born into a rich amerikan family, but now lives on a farm without electricity here in norway. Its amazing how self sufficent they are, they produce candles, clothing, meat and cheese. But its always something to do there.
The host talks norwegian but she answers in english so you will understand most of it even if you dont understand norwegian.

The key to survival is the community. To get an idea of how this could work read “The Pillars of the Earth” and “World Without End” by Follet. He describes life in feudal Europe and shows how the community banded together to prevent the more powerful from taking the resources of the middle class and the poor; and how the people managed to survive in a Kingdom ruled by an all powerful Magistrate.

Or read some of the Outlander Series by Galbadon about people from modern times who can travel back into the 1700’s. With their modern knowledge they can pull off a few miracles but mostly they create communities with the right mix to sustain themselves either in Scotland or the Carolinas in revolutionary times

In both cases the society is made renewable with a reliance on agriculture and ingenuity.
And in both cases the wiser and harder working people triumph over the foolish and greedy.

Whether one believes in the concept of central planning or the concept of the rugged individualist, if the society collapses it will be the rugged individualist who has taken it upon himself (herself) to prepare, hoard, isolate, hide, and build the right community who survives and those communities – after the death of society as we know it – will once again set up the kind of lifestyle seen several hundreds of years ago. The central government will be as incapable of solving this problem as it has been of solving every other problem it has addressed.

The preparation would involve the idea of groups of specialists who can manage to bring in foodstuffs, create shelter, and defend the homestead against outsiders. Individuals with special skills would be included such as doctors, motivators, renewable energy managers, and negotiators.

Even rugged single survivalists will seek to join such a community after the initial set of supplies is gone.

Of course timing is important here as well. In the above novels, the people had the time (after undergoing some hardships of course) to create their community. If things happen to collapse rapidly, then the people with preplanned communities (Like Vivos, http://www.terravivos.com/home.htm ) will have the advantage over the rest of us.