A Doomer's Spring

There’s nothing like Spring to make a doomer like me gloomy. My job in these months is to repair above-ground swimming pools, an activity which keeps me driving around the suburbs of Rochester, New York. If peakoptimists are hoping for a transition to a greener, more self-sufficient future, they better hope next year is better.

There is a fervent hope for a powering down and a greening up of the dreary Nowhereland of American suburbia. Jeff Vail, in one of his carefully-written essays, looked at the “the potential of suburbia to produce some degree of self-sufficiency in food, water, and energy.” Vail admits immediately that total self-sufficiency is unlikely, but that some measure is possible. He goes on to calculate just how much food (calories and nutrition) could come out of the one quarter acre lot that is our Everyperson’s personal fief. The answer is surprising: a decent amount, if the suburban baronet planted a mix of annuals (tomatoes, potatoes), perennials (rhubarb, asparagus), and some fruit and nut bushes.

I was eager to see if Americans had heeded Vail’s advice, or if they had simply been nudged towards the idea by the current economic crisis. I didn’t expect to see front yards tilled up yet (that’ll be a few more years in the coming, in my opinion) but I figured that back by the aluminum beast I was repairing I would see significantly more gardens, or even the odd raspberry bush, newly planted. “Who knows,” I thought, “maybe I’m not giving Joe the Whatever enough credit, maybe he’ll have read up on currant bushes or pawpaw trees or perennial onions.” I even had a moment, just before pool season started, when I thought I might have to hang up my doomer spurs and become an optimist.

That would have been a happy surprise.

What I’ve seen in the past eight days, though, have confirmed what I thought before. Compared to last year’s peak preparedness (as far as home food production), Americans... have made no progress at all. Suburban back yards (and front yards, and side yards) are a multicolored desert of ornamentals, mostly that most ornamental and useless of all, grass. That quarter acre is our perfect opportunity to have our garden at our doorstep (no huffing over to small plots next to the railroad tracks, like Europeans), and we are blowing it.

There are oaks, Scotch pines, Copper Beech, forsythia bushes, iris, peonies (lots of peonies), daffodils that are starting to wither, neglected rosebushes, and grass. Lots of grass, too. Nothing you could eat, except at the one house in Penfield where there were a few cattails growing in the drainage ditch at the property line, though I assume the Baron and Baroness had no idea that the rhizomes, shoots, and (later) flower cones and pollen are edible.

It was an almost deliberate attempt to avoid any food-producing plants. If you have to have a tree, why not throw in an apple? They flower nicely. Skip the forsythia and put in a Blueberry bush. Instead of peonies why not plant Giant Solomon’s Seal? Till up that bald spot in the grass and put in a few members of the deadly nightshade family (e.g. potatoes, tomatoes, peppers).

Antonio Gramsci once recommended, “Skepticism of the intellect, optimism of the will.” So I've mostly given up on exhorting the unwilling to get ready (my occasional, pissing-into-the-wind or preaching-to-the-choir post being hte exception). I myself have been germinating, along with my helpful greenthumb friend Andy McClain, a wide variety of perennials. We hope to plant out Sea Kale, Egyptian Nodding Onions, Chinese Artichokes, and Goji Berry bushes this summer. We’re even going to guerilla-plant watercress from a nearby drainage ditch into a slow-moving stream around the block.

Andy’s philosophy, like Gramsci’s, has always been skepticism: “You’re either right, or you’re pleasantly surprised.” That's my advice for this Spring and Summer. As Peak Oil turns into the Long Emergency, I recommend you get a copy of Perennial Vegetables and start to hunker down. Ignore your neighbor’s obliviousness to the importance of a few zero-kilometer calories, and till up that bald spot in the lawn.

And don’t forget that you layer currant bushes!

Hubbert Schizophrenia

Simultaneously trying to prepare for “the Crash” and to come up with the rent money can be stressful, even for a doomer.

I’ve been a Hubbert Schizophrenic for the past seven years. Perhaps you are one too – the diagnosis is easy. The principal symptom is the attempt by the patient to lead two lives, one involving the Peak and its consequences. One of those two lives is the “normal” one, and includes a future predicated on a series of uneventful jobs ending with a decent collection of pensions, and a house with a half acre of grass and the occasional bunch of dark purple iris at the borders, and plentiful ice creams for many Junes to come.

The other life is darker. It’s one that may have to be hidden from friends and even family, as its implicit apocalyptic visions don’t make for polite dinner conversation. This life is lived furtively, in the interstices of the “normal” life. Its future involves no job at all other than survival, a house with gardens that have no iris, and few sweeteners, artificial or otherwise.

What I am trying to say, maybe too elliptically, is that it’s been hard for me since I “found Hubbert.” It’s been difficult to balance keeping my everday life moving forward – keeping my career on track, paying the rent, buying the occasional book or beer or weekend away – while trying to prepare properly for What May Come.

I am a “doomer,” one of those people who makes solar cell and powerdown enthusiasts fret. I don’t think we can invent our way out of this current energy crisis, nor do I think we’ll find the easy path “down” – down to lower energy consumption, a smaller population, and a more local life. I earnestly hope for this, because it will make survival a heck of a lot easier, but I think it’s decently unlikely. The only thing that I can use to treat my schizophrenia is doomer insurance.

Webster’s New Twentieth defines insurance as “a system of protection against loss in which one agrees to pay certain sums for a guarantee that he or she will be compensated for a specified loss.” More broadly one can think of insurance as giving a percentage of one’s time, money, or energy for the guarantee of compensation in an emergency. Coming from a family with a history of melanoma, I have to pay a “certain sum” every year to the Schering-Plough HealthCare Products, makers of Coppertone sunscreen. SPF 50 is expensive, and there’s no certainty that I would have gotten melanoma without it (or that I won’t with it), but it’s a risk I have decided to take.

Another certain sum that I have to “pay” is dedicating several months a year to fact-checking and rewriting my main writing product, a guidebook to the city in central Italy where I live most of the time. My investment of time is insurance against the calamity of no one wanting to advertise in an out-of-date guidebook. Another job of mine is translating. I could perhaps make more money doing this in August, but this summer I’m working on my second novel. I’m certainly writing partly for the pleasure of it, but there is a part of the writing that is an investment. I could make x euros if I spend the rest summer translating, but if I write a decent mystery, I could perhaps make 3x euros in the future.

The problem is that I also believe, as a doomer, that a Crash is possible, even likely. I don’t know if it would be the starving hordes, or rather a slightly less chaotic Long Emergency that writer James Howard Kunstler imagines, but either way, food, fuel, and work will be issues. Perennially, though, I have to ask myself how much time, money, and energy to devote to “insuring” myself against the possibility of a Crash.

In the summer, should I stay on in Italy and work, or should I head back to upstate New York and plant currants? Should I put out that anthology with my little publishing company, or should I buy more books on making cheese? Is the Crash far enough off that I can take a trip to see friends in Boston – or should I transplant more lovage and make more raised beds? There’s stress too in discussing what I think about the future with my friends. What do you say when a coworker comes to dinner and asks you why you have a scythe, or why on earth you make pickled ramps? It’s not hard to imagine for those of you who aren’t doomers that listening to those of us who are is depressing – we don’t make good dinner guests because if talk turns to the price of gas, we tend to follow the segue quickly to Hubbert, and right on to the Crash.

I’ve learned to keep quiet, but then I feel like I’m repressing my real self, or one of my real selves. The self-sufficiency-obsessed yeoman is just as real as the translator/publisher who lives in Italy, but the former is a lot less socially-acceptable than the latter. The doomer in me is like the strange uncle I’m embarrassed about but can’t leave home, because he’s me too.

What to do? First, recognize, O doomers, that you are not alone. Read comments from doomers’ and non-doomers’ alike at Kathy McMahon’s Peak Oil Blues site. This peak oil shrink is part of “a small but growing group of professionally trained psychotherapists who know the stress the dawning awareness of Peak Oil brings.” Second, try to integrate as much as possible your two lives. Take up beekeeping and jam-making as Crash skills and give honey and preserves as Christmas gifts. Garden outside the box and reduce your consumption as practice, not solely as virtue. You’ll likely not be cured of your case of Hubbert Schizophrenia, but it’ll at least make your alter ego more acceptable to your neighbors and let you prepare for an uncertain future without sacrificing your nine-to-five job.

A doomer's garden

[Originally published on Energy Bulletinon 3 June 2008]

Now that oil is up over $130 a barrel and the subprime debacle is making everyone think that there may just be a Big Problem in the future, I would like to reopen the discussion on the menu du jour, post-Peak. Tractor trailers may not be able to bring in our Krispie Flakes and California oranges, and we may have to “make other arrangements,” as James Howard Kunstler often says, to feed ourselves. I am worried with the frequency that I see “gardens” as a solution to a breakdown in the food supply, and I would like to disabuse the peaknik crowd of this dangerous illusion.

“If there’s a problem with the food supply, I’ll just garden,” you say! If the Peak comes and causes disruptions in the food supply, your Hubbert Victory garden will see you through the winter months. I’m sure most of us love to picture ourselves putting up forty quarts of tomatoes and salting beans for the winter in a large beige crock. With your green thumb and Mason jars you’ll can enough to last until next year’s first corn comes in.

This is a nice fantasy, but I would ask the more serious to do a simple survey. Each of us likely has a friend who has a fairly large garden. Ask him or her what percentage of their family’s yearly food intake comes from the garden – I would be astounded if any say more than two percent. Annual gardening, like agriculture, takes an enormous input of energy for the return you get, and that is assuming you are good at it.

Are you good at it? How much do you know about gardening? To have a truly successful large garden you need to eliminate as many of the risks as possible. Unfortunately, the risks are myriad: poor germination, premature planting (or a late frost), garden pests (from aphids to groundhogs), too much rain, too little water, and so on. Taking each of these individually, we can see that annual gardening has a lot of luck involved in it. A good gardener buys high-quality seeds, uses cold frames to start plants before the last frost, knows the growing periods of each vegetable well, is prepared for the various “enemies” of his/her plants, and spends hours watering if need be.

What happens, though, if it doesn’t work out well? If gardening is your hobby, it’s not a problem. But in a post-Peak situation where food is tight, it just may be. Ask yourself what you know about gardening, and whether that is enough to risk your life on the tomatoes coming in and rows of corn ripening. Horticulture alone is not a valid answer unless you are already an expert, and even then it is tough. I am emphatically not saying that you should not garden – a large garden will be essential – but simply that it is dangerous to depend on gardening alone.

What then, is the answer? Lowering your inputs, increasing your outputs, and redundancy. In other words, get more food from plants that don’t require such babying, and don’t rely on just a few main crops. The key is diversification with hardier, low-maintenance crops: perennial vegetables, bush- and vine-fruits, and trees. If you’re a gardener you likely already have the two most common perennial vegetables, asparagus and rhubarb (the latter we often eat as a fruit, with strawberries), but don’t limit yourself to these! There are a number of perennial onions that come up every year without the hassle of planting sets, tubers like Jerusalem artichokes that are easy to the point of being pesky, and even old-fashioned favourites like lovage. Fruits like currants and gooseberries are easy to propagate and can, and you can even have kiwi fruit growing along your fence (it’s a smaller, hardier relative than the kiwi in the grocery stores). For trees, go beyond apples and peaches to hazelnuts, quinces, and persimmon trees. All have fewer pests than their more common cousins and produce fruit and nuts earlier and more steadily.

Of course a bountiful harvest just begs more questions, like are there other methods of preservation that are less energy-intensive than canning? This is an optimistic problem, one you should be happy to face. A much more immediate problem is feeding yourself in an uncertain world. Don’t get me wrong, I will still have an annual garden long after Hubbert’s Peak – I can’t be without tomato sauce or fresh corn – but having tried my hand at gardening, I’ve realized that it’s a gamble as far as what you get, and not one most people should make. Peakniks with green thumbs, go buy some currant bushes!

Of doomers, realists, powerdowners and fantasists

[Originally published 6 October 2007 by Energy Bulletin]

Several days ago Rev. Sam Norton published an article called The Holiness of Stuart Staniford. This careful, thoughtful piece talked about “wishcasting,” which Norton uses to mean “a very widespread human tendency to interpret evidence and information according to an already existing intellectual and emotional structure.”

While I appreciated the tone, I would play the devil’s advocate (as well as the “doomer”) to show that Norton himself, as well as others who hope for a powerdown, may be indulging in the wishcasting they would avoid.

Norton gives several definitions of wishcasting, among them “an analysis governed more by a desire for something to be true than a humble appraisal of what is true.” He links this to the Peak Oil debate by implying that the so-called “doomer” perspective might indulge in “an extravagant claim of certainty or else a distracting and relishing discussion of the potential havoc that might be caused by, e.g. a second Katrina.”

We are told that the doomer perspective is characterized by “an insistence that the future must take a particular shape, one constrained by the laws of physics and envisioning a necessary decline in human population as the inevitable corollary of the decline in available energy. The desires here might be a juvenile wish to see big explosions, or, more likely, a deeply rooted hatred for the present order and a wish to see it destroyed.”

I have left out of this quote Norton’s admission that he shares some of these feelings, but despite that I can’t help but sigh to see the “doomer” perspective described as being based on some illogical chaos-for-chaos’-sake or a vague hatred for the status quo. I’ve talked before (Homeowner’s Insurance and Fire Extinguishers) about powerdowners’ misguided psychoanalysis of the doomer perspective. My thoughts about Peak Oil and its outcomes are based on my honest analysis of the data available, or an extrapolation of current trends, not on some repressed pyromania. I am as fallible as the next person, but no more fallible simply because I can imagine a future that might be unpleasant. Further, I fail to see why anyone would actually desire a second Katrina, not to mention a civilizational crash. Heck, I don’t even like to think about having to use graphite to write instead of petroleum-derived ink from my ballpoint, not to mention a die-off. If one outcome is a peaceful powerdown and the other is chaos and death, who is more likely to be wishcasting: the powerdowner or the “doomer?”

Some of Reverend Norton’s more visceral arguments hinge on his word selection, rather than logic. “Doomer” sounds gloomy and illogical – what if I told you I considered myself a “realist,” and those of Rev. Norton’s persuasion a “fantasist?” Would that change the emotional impact of my argument? “Doomers” in the article are also used in an analogy with religious fundamentalists, people normally charged with being (as Sinclair Lewis put it) superbly trained in reconciling contradictions. But in my opinion, anyone who maintains that biofuels will save the day, that voluntary simplicity is a feasible solution to Peak Oil, or that energy can decrease and population stay the same, is hard at work at contradiction reconciling.

Reverend Norton ends on a Christian note, one that states that an idol is “is anything placed in the position of God and worshipped as a God.” I would submit that the sentiment hope, which he mentions directly thereafter, is just such an idol. Hope is just a teleological hook to which to tie the end of one’s powerdown wishcasting. Thucydides, in the Melian Dialogue of his Peloponnesian War, writes that “Hope, danger's comforter, may be indulged in by those who have abundant resources, if not without loss at all events without ruin; but its nature is to be extravagant, and those who go so far as to put their all upon the venture see it in its true colors only when they are ruined…” Hoping that everything will be fine on the far side of Hubbert’s Peak seems to be indulging in just such the wishcasting that Reverand Norton wished to condemn.

Reverend Norton says that what he is not persuaded of is “that human civilisation is about to come to an abrupt end.” Neither am I. I have argued elsewhere, however, that it is much more logical for one’s plan for the future at least to entertain that possibility. I will not repeat those arguments here. I simply would like to make the point that we realists (Oh fine, “we doomers”) think what we do because of our logical analysis of the facts, not because we like bombs, hurricanes, or death, or because we have a problem with the police, the Man, or whatever status quo. To imply otherwise, especially when one admits to hope (a synonym for “wishcasting” if ever there were one), is vaguely offensive, though I hardly think the Reverend Norton meant it that way.

If we truly want to have an open dialogue about what the future holds and how we may be able to change it, we all have to do a little less wishcasting and a little more practical planning for all the possible futures, peachy and otherwise.

Homeowner’s Insurance and Fire Extinguishers

[Another early Energy Bulletin post, one of my first defending the so-called "doomers." Published 11 December 2006.]

Everybody is a shrink at heart, and we have seen it on the pages of Energy Bulletin lately. The powerdowners are working like sixty to figure out why we “doomers” are so damn stubborn and won’t sign up for their permaculture classes. I refer to the recent articles by Rob Hopkins from Transition Culture and Toby Hemenway , both of whom dig deep into the soul of our doomer gloom. In this essay I would like to change the debate a bit, shift it from reasons for believing, in a collapse, to reasons for preparing for a collapse.

A quick review of the reasons for believing in Peak Oil is in order, though. The first reason given is that all of us doomers are, well, gloomy – we sit in our rooms and brood, counting backwards from our secret Last Judgement day. This does not fit the peakniks I know who believe in a crash (two do sketch comedy!), but perhaps there is another explanation. Rob Hopkins says it is because we feel useless – we are a generation of men who have no practical skills, ergo we believe in doomsday. I do not understand the gender difference, nor do I understand the segue. It is just as reasonable to say that men in the last fifty years have become largely urban dwellers, or have multiple jobs during their work careers, and therefore they believe in doomsday. It is a correlation, not causation, and a fairly questionable correlation at that.

Toby Hemenway on the other hand would have us believe that we are doomers because we are steeped in a Judeo-Christian-medieval-scientific apocalyptic tradition. What about those who are from Western Europe and do not believe in doomsday like (I suppose), Toby himself? Are they immune, smarter, or just more rational? And what of the people in India and Japan who believe in a collapse? Do they too have apocalyptic traditions? Interestingly, Hemenway seems to want to use his extensive (and, ultimately, rather tedious) list of collapses-not-come-to-pass to convince us that it never will, an argument I think we are all familiar with: surprise, it is that same old faulty logic of economists who ridicule past predictions of an oil peak. Read your mutual fund prospectuses: past trends do not guarantee similar future results, as those of us who have General Motors stock may know.

We could debate why doomers believe in a collapse and powerdowners do not, but while it is obviously an interesting debate (Rob’s blog has eighty-eight comments), it does not seem terribly useful. A better debate, and incidentally one I think is more rational anyway, revolves around reasons for preparing for a crash, whether you believe one will occur or not. Here I will trundle out a tired metaphor, but one which I think best represents the case. Without trying to offend anyone, I would bet that both Rob and Toby have homeowner’s insurance on their houses (if they do not rent – in that case the bet is that their landlords have it), and I would bet further that neither Rob nor Toby would exchange that insurance for a fire extinguisher or two.

Were I to begin plumbing the depths of these two men’s souls, trying to divine the font of this apocalyptic belief in houses burning, I would be considered, as they say on that side of the pond, daft. Did Toby once get a rather nasty burn? Rob may make great cob and wonderful marmalade, but perhaps in the Scouts he never was able to earn the Fire Lighting merit badge. Or is it the Prometheus complex we all carry around with us – or better yet, a psychological reaction to global warming? Heat, fire, fire insurance – it’s all in their heads.

No, assuming Rob and Toby have insurance, it is not because they believe in the likelihood of a fire, but rather that they recognize the severity if it were ever to occur. None really believe Home Sweet Home will be reduced to ashes by a freak December lightning bolt, but we know that if it were ever to happen, it would be ruinous. And having a fire extinguisher is simply not an adequate enough protection against that.

What I am trying to get at is a basic rule of emergency preparedness, whether it is for a flat tire or a hurricane: prepare for the worst-case scenario, not for what you believe likely. I have never had a flat, but I certainly have a jack in my car, as well as flares and a small medical kit. As we all saw last year, the US government ignored this rule with its levee-building. They built for what they expected to happen, not what could only happen once in two hundred years and which was extremely unlikely. Yet it happened nonetheless. One cannot go to extremes – I cannot carry in my car a new engine, all the tools necessary to change it, as well as an emergency ham radio and an EKG machine. One has to balance out the diversion of energy, time, and other resources, and there is no clear formula.

So how are peakniks and doomers the same, and more importantly, how are they different? I think I would like first to respond to the annoying and vaguely patronizing subtext of many commentators, the unwritten suggestion that we doomers are crazy, psychologically off, antisocial, gloomy, unhappy, unloved, irrational, computer nerds, all generally desirous of the destruction of a world that has treated us badly. We’re not. We are your neighbors and friends and colleagues. We are just as sane as you, and likely we do not want to see a collapse. We just want to live out our everyday lives with the wife/husband, dog named Fido, a car (biodiesel if possible), and two kids. Perhaps you do not like to accept that reasonable, rational people with the same aims as you think differently. We are also remarkably similar in our reaction to Peak Oil. Our libraries overlap to a great degree, we have learned many of the same skills, and we try to do the “little things” (e.g. fluorescent lightbulbs, walk instead of ride, etc.), too. I made fun of permaculture before but I own three books on it and hope to take a more in-depth course soon. But therein is the main difference.

Toby Hemenway, if he is interested in wild edibles, is interested perhaps insofar as he can use some wild onions to spruce up a stew, or nasturtium buds for a salad. I am interested in wild edibles because there may come a day where they provide fifty percent of my calories. I need to know not just how to pick and wash them, but also how to store them. Can you store daylily tubers in a clamp like those used for potatoes? How long does acorn flour keep? What is the time-calorie return for collecting cattail roots in Spring? This is a qualitative difference. Perhaps Toby too has tried making sausage – does he have a large supply of saltpetre? Or two extra parts for each of those that make up his hand-turned grain grinder? These are the questions that separate us, not our psychologies or cultural mileu.

I personally do not believe in a “hard crash.” James Howard Kunstler’s theory of a long-term, ever-deepening depression, outlined in his book, The Long Emergency , seems like the most likely scenario to me. I am not, however, preparing for the scenario I believe most likely (nor the one that I want, to happen, which is a suspicion I have of many powerdowners). I am preparing for the what I do not expect will happen, the worst-case scenario, because that is logically what makes the most sense. It makes sense because all my preparations would be just as helpful in the Brave New Organic World we are all (me included) hoping for as in the Long Emergency. But there is an asymmetry of emergency preparations – less rigorous preparations will not be so helpful if there is a collapse.

We have been distracted by the debate about why some of us believe in a possible crash, and why some do not. This debate cannot be resolved and even if it could be, is only marginally useful. Much more important is the quite rational and eminently resolvable debate on the logic of various preparations, or their value in different situations. I would argue that it is better to be over-prepared instead of under-prepared, and I challenge those who think differently to turn in their isurance policies for a bright red fire extinguisher.

Preparing for a Crash: Nuts and Bolts

[The first time I chimed in for a peak discussion. This essay was posted at www.energeybulletin.net on 31 August 2006, and throroughly bubbled the peaknik bloggers' soup. It is the skeleton of my new book, Crash Course:Preparing For Peak Oil.]

This essay is intended to address the serious “peaknik,” that is to say a person who accepts as axiomatic that Peak Oil will occur and that the consequences will be devastating for most of the world’s Homo sapiens sapiens. As one of these people, I am often frustrated by the lack of practical suggestions for what to do to survive the Peak and the Crash. Recently I read a list of things that the people who participate in the forum of a noted Peak Oil site were doing “to prepare for a future that can no longer depend on cheap oil.” These included having a rain barrel, a one-month supply of canned goods and a one-week supply of bottled water, “adjusting my stock portfolio with more energy and other commodity stocks,” setting the thermostat at 62, and replacing the light bulbs in the house with compact fluorescents. While all of these are good things to do now, they fail to even minimally prepare for a world with no food distribution, no electricity, and lots of hungry people, things that I think are an acceptable picture for a post-Peak future. Therefore I would like to set out my suggestions, assuming that the worst-case scenario is the one we may have to deal with.

Before action one needs theory. My first suggestion in this regard is, if you’ve read three or more books on oil depletion, stop. You have reached a point where more statistics will not convince you any more. Use your time to read other books. First you need a basic understanding of how we got here, of why our subspecies of Homo sapiens sapiens is in this pickle. Essentially, our hunter-gatherer ancestors reached the limit of the carrying capacity for hunting and gathering and so needed to intensify food production. The solution was called agriculture, and while it requires more calories in for fewer calories out, it allows more people to live in the same area. In other words, twenty square kilometres could support many more agriculturists than it had supported hunter gatherers, but the agriculturalists needed to work a lot harder for their calories. This last part may come as a surprise: to “earn” the daily minimum of 2000 calories, an agriculturalist “spends” 1000, the hunter gatherer 400. For more information on the “agricultural solution,” read Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel, Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael or Beyond Civilization, and Overshoot (William Catton).

Now you need some theory about where we are going. While there has never been a world-wide collapse, history offers us numerous other examples of societal collapse. They are best presented in Jared Diamond’s aptly-titled Collapse and Joseph Tainter's classic The Collapse of Complex Societies. Tainter’s book is especially important because he searches for a comprehensive theory for collapse, and concludes that it is essentially diminishing marginal returns – the same theory that explains why oil that is further away (underwater, in Siberia) is less attractive. He also presents us with a picture of what happens when collapses occur (e.g. decline in constabulary duties by the state, hunger, occupation of public buildings for shelter, etc.). Another much-maligned source of information on how the future could be are books of the so-called “survivalist” genre. These novels give us an idea of how people could react to a collapse. The best of these is perhaps Parable of the Sower, which deals with an America of the future where energy is at a minimum and a pseudo-fascist government takes over. Finally, if we do indeed return to a stone-age level culture, we need to know how to live in it. Luckily there are well-documented examples in anthropological literature of just how hunter-gatherers do it, how they eat and how they self-govern. Limited Wants, Unlimited Means is a collection of essays on the economics of hunter-gatherers and includes an essay from the groundbreaking book Stone-Age Economics by Marshall Sahlins, the first to understand that hunter-gatherers do not live on the edge of starvation, but rather are “the original affluent society.”

That done, you need a place to retreat to, if necessary. I hope that the collapse will be gradual enough that we can shift to an organic agriculture slightly less harmful to the environment, and that this gradual collapse will allow us to develop local currencies and smaller, more understanding communities. I am not, however, planning for this future. I am planning for one with lots and lots of hungry people that are desperate. In that case a small, energy-efficient condo in the suburbs with fluorescent lights (that don’t work), a tiny garden, and a one-week supply of food just doesn’t cut it, rain barrel or not. You need a place where you can be safe, far from the vast majority of people and out-of-sight, i.e. not a target for marauders (“marauders,” by the way, means hungry, desperate people, not bad people). This means a smallish house in the country with some outbuildings (for storage, food preserving operations, etc.). Yes, it’s hard to see an investment on that level, but see it as insurance. If Peak Oil and Collapse arrive, you’ve insured yourself. If not, you have a vacation house that is off-the grid and therefore has a higher resale value.

I can’t go through the intricacies of finding and buying rural property, but look for something relatively isolated, out of view from the road, with a large woods (and swamp if possible) and some areas for gardening as well as an existing structure. Having acted, you now need to return to theory. Begin your lists: lists of priorities to make your property a lifeboat, lists of books you need to buy, lists of supplies you need on-hand. For the first list you need to consider what I call “systems”: heating, cooking, hygiene, water-supply, and energy. Does the house have a super-efficient “Swedish stove”? Can you use passive solar energy? Can you cook for ten people, day in and day out, and with what energy (solar ovens, wood, etc.)? To avoid sickness and maintain good hygiene, are their suitable bathrooms and shower or sauna facilities? Is there a source of drinking water – if it’s a well, is the pump solar? Are there solar panels or a windmill? DC lights?

Obviously you may know little about all these things, hence the book lists. I find www.amazon.com fantastic for this part, as for each search you do you turn up other topics you may need to look into. You search for raising barnyard animals and they offer you a book on common diseases, or slaughtering and preserving their meat. Spend a thousand dollars and buy a lot of books on a lot of topics: passive solar construction, active solar energy, windmills and microhydro, using greywater, composting toilets, gardening, orchards, preserving food, etc. These books will then help you develop the lists of tools and other supplies you need to survive. Chelsea Green (www.chelseagreen.com) and Storey Publishing (www.storey.com) are great places to start. These lists will give you many practical things to do, other than reading about greywater systems, the advantages of saunas, and windmill-solar cell combinations. You’ll soon be scouring yardsales for old tools and canning jars.

That brings me to the most important part of your refuge, and that which is least-discussed in other “Peak Oil planners”: food. You can go without a shower, melt snow in the winter, burn wood in a stove for heat, but eating is something that is hard to improvise. Assuming the average person needs 2000 calories to live, you have around ten people to feed, and that you’ll need a year to “figure out” how be self-sufficient (an extremely optimistic estimate), you’ll need about 7,300,000 calories stored. That’s seven million, three hundred thousand calories. Let’s imagine for a moment it weren’t a problem to get all of these calories from wheat (it is): you would need about thirty-five 55-gallon drums of wheat. Do the calculation yourself – there’s an extremely helpful Excel spreadsheet available from Walton Feed (waltonfeed.com/grain/calc.html) which gives you the values for sixty-five nutrients as well as calories for over one hundred and sixty foods. Already we have some major problems, the first of which is that even the Bible recognized that “man cannot live on bread alone.” You need a variety of foods to stay healthy, and monotonous diets in stressful situations causes bad health and “food refusal,” especially with the old and the young. You need other foods, and “comfort foods”, i.e. low-calorie and high taste. Then there’s the problem of storage: you can’t just throw all that wheat in fifty-five gallon drums and seal them with silicone. You need to put in desiccants (to absorb bacteria-breeding moisture), oxygen absorbers, and diatomaceous earth (to kill little bugs already in the grain). Foods are difficult to keep fresh, and buying that much canned food will put a hole in your budget.

“I’ll just garden!” you say! Remove this illusion from your Refuge plan. Ask friends who are gardeners and have large gardens what percentage of their yearly food intake comes from the garden and I’ll be astounded if any say more than two percent. Gardening, like agriculture, takes an enormous input of energy for the return you get, and that’s assuming your good at it. Ask yourself what you know about gardening, and whether that’s enough to risk your life on the tomatoes coming in and rows of corn ripening. Horticulture alone is not a valid answer unless you’re already an expert, and even then it’s tough. In addition to your stored food and the [initially meagre] returns from your garden, you will need another source of calories, and these (I have come to think) must come from wild plants. Pick up a book about wild foods (a classic is the entertaining book by Euell Gibbons, Stalking The Wild Asparagus) and you’ll be surprised at how much food (read: calories) is available all around you, with no planting, fertilizing, or other care. But you must know what you can eat and when it’s collected. While you may not get all your food from the wild (also because it takes a lot of rural area to support a small number of people), you can supplement your diet of stored and home-grown food. Wild foods, in my opinion, will be the difference between life and death, and becoming an expert in them is a lot easier than becoming an expert in gardening.

But whether or not lots of calories are available at a certain time of the year (Summer, early Fall) doesn’t mean that they will be in the winter or early Spring. You need to be able to store the harvest from your gardens and from the woods; this is both food preservation and food storage. You must, I repeat, must become an expert in this. You need to know about drying, canning, and fermenting foods in order to store them for the winter. Once again there are lots of available books (start with Keeping Foods Fresh from Chelsea Green and Janet Greene’s Putting Food By). You should start now with store-bought and garden-grown food try making pickles, drying zucchini and tomatoes, and making sauerkraut. You can speed up the process of educating yourself with good books but need to hone these skills with practice. Remember that botulism is not a big threat in First World conditions when canning twenty jars of pickles but imagine three hundred jars in Third World conditions. Learn about pressure canners and check out Lehman’s website (www.lehmans.com) for special tools. I personally am counting on making pickles and chutneys and fermented dishes from a mix of wild food roughage (to provide the bulk of the calories) and normal vegetables (to provide taste). Your research will be greatly helped by the freely-downloadable FAQ at rec.food.preserving compiled by Leslie Base (www.faqs.org/faqs/food/preserving/part1), as well as the files on Prudent Food Storage by Alan Hagan (www.waltonfeed.com/grain/faqs). The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (the Mormons), because they believe in the “End Times,” also instructs its members to have a large store of food on-hand. Mormons often run so-called “Mormon Canneries” and these can be a wealth of information. Call your local Mormon church.

This is a tall order – find isolated rural property, add solar panels and other “systems,” buy hundreds of books, begin experimenting with canning and fermenting, become a food-storage expert, learn to identify and eat wild foods – but if you really believe that Peak Oil and collapse are coming, then turning down your thermostat and investing in energy-sector stocks are doing nothing to save you. Realize that things may potentially get much uglier than you can imagine, and plan for that reality. You may be pleasantly surprised, and if not, you’ll save your ass.