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The Long Emergency

17K views 259 replies 83 participants last post by  salmontree 
#1 ·
(Mods, I would like to have a discussion of the issues in this book relating to finances, rather than a literary discussion.)

Are other mamas here familiar with this book by James Kunstler? (There's an article that very briefly recaps the material in the book here, bear in mind the numbers given in that article are from 2005 and the price of oil is already more than double the value cited there.) I read it a couple years ago and it seriously scared the pants off me. I was horribly depressed for like a month. Then I guess I became resigned, like, whatever's going to happen will happen regardless of how much I fret about it.

We're now IMO well into the beginning stage of the scenario Kunstler outlined, where food prices have skyrocketed partly because of the increased cost of oil, and partly because a large amount of food crop has been diverted into "alternative energy".

When I read some of the other threads on this forum, I'm a little shocked at how a lot of people are perceiving the increased food and energy costs as merely an inflation problem, or signs of a recession. In other words, something that will be tough for a while, but will pass or we'll somehow adjust to. I see threads about what kind of car would be a good purchase, or if increasing gas costs would encourage one to move closer to work, with the pros and cons kind of coming down to budget and lifestyle preferences.

I hate to be all chicken little about it, but under Kunstler's scenario, private vehicles wil become obsolete. Subdivisions located beyond reasonable biking distance (or accessible public transport) from employment centers are predicted to become slums. It just seems like by the point the majority of people realize the severity of the crisis, they are not going to have the availability of choices in housing and transportation they are expecting to have.

We have done what we can. We have chickens, and a garden, and live within walking/biking distance of virtually anywhere we need to go. I still have a car, but only because being that it's paid off and I drive very little, there's no financial gain in giving it up. Might as well hang on to the convenience as long as gas can still be bought.

Just wondering where other MDC families are at on this issue. Do you know about it? Have you made lifestyle choices/changes in anticipation? Do you think we're really now IN "The Long Emergency"? Or do you think the predictions are exaggerated and things will somehow work out?
 
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#128 ·
Quote:

Originally Posted by jennlyn View Post
I didn't get through the whole thread, so if these were mentioned before, forgive me. www.pathtofreedom.com and www.sharonastyk.com The first site shows what you can do on suburban acreage and do a search on the second site for her booklist.
I
: Path To Freedom!

They are such an inspiration
 
#129 ·
Quote:

Originally Posted by wednesday View Post
Seriously though DH is an attorney and he predicts that states will pass legislation disallowing the banning of energy-saving practices such as clotheslines.
Neighborhoods forbid clotheslines? OMG. I guess I'm extra happy to have moved into a blue collar neighborhood.
 
#130 ·
Quote:

Originally Posted by henhao View Post
Neighborhoods forbid clotheslines? OMG. I guess I'm extra happy to have moved into a blue collar neighborhood.
Not only that, but in MIL's HOA she is not allowed to run the dishwasher/washer/dryer before 8am or after 10pm.
She has to help pay for the above unit's balcony replacement, all trees must be 10ft & under, and any lost keys to community property (pool, clubhouse) costs upward of $100. There's more. HOA's are, in my view, crazy OCD busybody organizations bent on collecting lots of money while paying out very little.

Of course, that's only my opinion.


Ami
 
#131 ·
Quote:

Originally Posted by JTA Mom View Post
Oh, and with regards to lifespan, the estimate of 40 to 50 is not correct. What lifespans do is total all the range of ages (from one day old to 110 y.o) in a population and divide by the number of people. Therefore, societies where there is a LOT of infant mortality, lifespan is artificially lowered. From what I've read, if a child lived to be older than 3 or 4 y.o. (during the majority of history) then that child had a good chance of living well into their 60s, 70, 80s, etc. The most vulnerable time in a child's life was actually when they were weaned, since they now had to fully sustain themselves without any back-up help from momma's milk.
40-50 in overestimating.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_ex..._human_history
and there is a reason infant mortality is included in life expectancy calculations.
Even removing the infant mortality component, 60-80 seems a bit high to my non-anthropological mind. But I would love to hear your actual resources.
Wikipedia is hardly an absolute authority but it does serve as a good jumping off point.
 
#132 ·
Most HOA wont let you have a clothes line or a Garden
:

My area the weeds in the yard cant be 6 inches high...so when the dandelion flowers pop out the day after you mow...you get a happy little letter telling you to take care of them or you get a fine
:

Only less then a week till I'm in my little country home and the zoning people can bite me
:
 
#133 ·
Quote:

Originally Posted by p.s View Post
40-50 in overestimating.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_ex..._human_history
and there is a reason infant mortality is included in life expectancy calculations.
Even removing the infant mortality component, 60-80 seems a bit high to my non-anthropological mind. But I would love to hear your actual resources.
Wikipedia is hardly an absolute authority but it does serve as a good jumping off point.
It is in the last 2 sentences of the first paragraph on wikipedia. I don't have any direct sources at hand right now, just what I learned while getting my degree in Anthropology. I can try to look some up, but I don't think there's one place for that info, so it may take me some time.


Mind you, I'm not talking about life expectancy in cities or other urban areas, or agriculturalists. Until very very recently, cities were cesspools that only expanded through immigration. I'm not debating that infant mortality is not important, it is. But one has to remember that until recently, and amongst pretty much all other animals, the death rate for the young is incredibly high. Simple colds & flus can turn deadly on infants very quickly. Nowadays we have antibiotics plus other medical support to help infants through this.

Also, agriculturalists, even to this day, suffer from poor nutrition. There's a reason that people were much shorter 100 years ago compared to today. If you look at hunter & gatherer info, a good amount of the people who survived early childhood had a good chance to live to be quite old. And they were also pretty tall, like us nowadays.

If you look at the wikipedia chart, they explicitly state that they include infant mortality. It's statistics and math that skew life expectancy lower. Like a curve in a class, those doing poorly bring the curve down a lot. Even if the majority of the class got 75% on a test or better (say 2/3 of the class) the other 1/3 who completely flunked it would cause the curve to settle on a much lower mean than exists in reality. Am I making any sense?
lol

Oh, and that's why 'farming' families have so many babies. It's not so they have more hands on the farm, but because only 2 or 3 of the 10 might survive into adulthood. So having 10 surviving siblings was an anomaly. It's only with modern medicine that this has become possible.

Ami
 
#134 ·
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#137 ·
I have not read the book but have heard predictions of continually rising gas prices, and a prediction of $9 - $10 gallon gas within 10 years. It's kind of shocking, but I think it's worth thinking about how our lifestyles will absolutely change. We live a modest but comfortable life right now.

The things I see changing for us, on a household level:

-- Next vehicle will likely be a hybrid or some sort of more fuel efficient vehicle. Not sure what will be out by the next time we purchase a vehicle.

-- We'll not do any flight travel vacations. We don't do any flying travel right now, but we'd scrap our plans for air travel vacations. I am kind of hoping to do something like a NYC weekend when our kids are older, but that kind of thing will not be affordable.

-- If our kids go to college or universit, they will likely go to a school that is close to home and not across the country. Same with their first jobs and getting married, etc. It will be too expensive to do cross country visits, and yes they can move,but we'll have to use technology to stay in touch -- web chats instead of personal visits. Maybe that would work out just fine.

--Less shopping, maybe biking to the grocery store -- it's close enough. There would be less road traffic to worry about. Public transport is not convenient for where we live, but there is shopping, parks, etc. nearby so that's nice.

--If food prices go up a ton, we may do more gardening. We may get more lean with our food, but I'm not sure exactly how we would do that. We may all become thinner and healthier.
 
#138 ·
Quote:

Originally Posted by Ary99 View Post
I just picked up the book from the library today. I have found myself looking at my neighborhood differently. that's no longer a neighborhood swimming pool.. .it's an emergency water supply!
even with all the chlorine in it??
 
#141 ·
Quote:

Originally Posted by Ary99 View Post
that's no longer a neighborhood swimming pool.. .it's an emergency water supply!

Quote:

Originally Posted by A&A View Post
even with all the chlorine in it??
I assume you're thinking chlorine is an issue if you'll be drinking it? Chlorine dissipates from pool water into the air pretty quickly. That is why it keeps needing to be added. If a swimming pool had been sitting dormant and wasn't completely disgustingly mucky yet (it would get that way pretty fast when the chlorine was gone) AND if I had a good water purification system, AND if I was out of better options, I would consider it. Water is essential to human life, and I imagine I'd choose drinking pool water over death by dehydration, if it came to that.

But even under less stringent circumstances, water is good for more than drinking. Washing dishes, clothes, and bodies, for a few things. Flushing toilets, if you're still using a water toilet (I highly recommend a sawdust toilet if water gets scarce). Irrigation. As I said, the chemicals will most likely dissipate fairly quickly.

Yes, chlorine is not great for human consumption or skin exposure. But most Americans get it in their municipal water anyway, and a significant number of Americans use it in their laundry at least occasionally.

Before I made our sawdust toilet, I used swimming pool water for emergency flushing when the power went out and our well pump was rendered unusable.

Granted, I'm making assumptions here about what was meant in the quoted threads, but my point is, there are lots of important uses for water besides drinking.
 
#142 ·
Quote:

Originally Posted by JTA Mom View Post
If you look at the wikipedia chart, they explicitly state that they include infant mortality. It's statistics and math that skew life expectancy lower. Like a curve in a class, those doing poorly bring the curve down a lot. Even if the majority of the class got 75% on a test or better (say 2/3 of the class) the other 1/3 who completely flunked it would cause the curve to settle on a much lower mean than exists in reality. Am I making any sense?
lol
Everything you say makes sense, and I don't really disagree with most of it. Except for antibiotics for a common cold, and if you look at infant mortality, it doesn't have much to do with cold or flu, the latter influenza is rare in infants. Reduction in infant mortality has everything to do with prenatal care, nutrition, and the banned V word which I won't mention, except to say that the things that used to kill, don't do so much here in the US b/c of that. Hence why Bill and Melinda are spending billions to try to reduce infant mortality in other countries. And the answer is not flu vaccine.

I think the difference of opinion is in the definition of miserable or mean existence. This is all just opinion, but IMO life pre-1900 was not buccolic, i.e. kill a cow now and then, and catch up on local gossip in the interim.

It's all perspective. If only 30% of your offspring make it to adulthood, that would make a pretty horriblle 20 years for me. Every couple of years burying a child? Even if you lived in Versailles, it would be depressing. But to live instead in a hut or tent, no indoor plumbing, no electricity, no library. Plenty of moms on MDC complain of cloth diapers being too much work. Washing cloth diapers by hand when 70% that you're washing for will die? I don't know if Europeans ever did EC.

Re: the hunter/ gatherer being tall IMO has a significant genetic component, i.e. there are definite hunter tribes in Africa that tend to be tall. Plenty of other hunter/ gatherer communities are known for their shortness: coastal Italian, Corsican, Okinawan, Alaskan, Northern Scandinavian, etc.

Which brings us back to the Long Emergency, and why I think it's important to have a desired commodity,... and my vote is for knowledge or expertise.
 
#143 ·
Quote:
Washing cloth diapers by hand when 70% that you're washing for will die? I don't know if Europeans ever did EC.
Not EC as such, but "swaddling cloths" were essentially diaper and clothing all in one for infants. And they didn't get changed as frequently as we do today! Also, they're easier to wash/dry since there is no "bulk" to the fabric itself... the bulk came from the layering.

I agree that definitions make a big difference in terms of "what is comfortable". And so much of that is culturally conditioned and/or what people are used to or expect simply because it's "the way it's always been". There are early adopters and late adopters for all technology... and people tend to want to "trade up". It's the generations and groups that (for one reason or another) are forced to "trade back" that feel they've lost something crucial for comfortable living.

If we become the first generation in the long emergency scenario, many of us will feel un-comfortable. Our children will probably also feel un-comfortable due to the transitional stresses passed along from adults as well as the changing environment. Their children will probably be more or less ok with the situation... bikes, composting toilets, local/limited diet options, barter for services, a more specific or localized educational system, etc. It's only the one or two transitional generations who really feel the pain... our grandchildren will most likely be cofortable within what they consider "normal life" and find the stories told by their elders about as believable as our own "when I was a kid we walked uphill through the snow ten miles to school" jokes.
 
#144 ·
Quote:

Originally Posted by wombatclay View Post
If we become the first generation in the long emergency scenario, many of us will feel un-comfortable. Our children will probably also feel un-comfortable due to the transitional stresses passed along from adults as well as the changing environment.
Is anyone else trying to ease their children and/or their family into a transitional mindset, to ease the stress of what you anticipate?

I am doing this and I see my friends doing it to some extent as well, whether intentionally or not. We're rationing our gas usage and talking with our kids about why. We buy used as much as possible, and talk about the repercussions of people only buying new. We strive to eat simply in season, and talk about why we aren't buying (fill in the blank out-of-season or overprocessed food shipped from faraway). We conserve water and electricity, we garden, I take it seriously if food gets wasted and we try to compost or recycle everything we can. We avoid mainstream advertising influences and shun the "gimmes" that often arise from that. And on and on.

I do have this little fear in the back of my head that I'm being too stringent (compared to some of our friends in our old town, who were unabashed consumers), but I was hoping maybe others here could relate.

We have some friends who have plenty of money and still choose to live this way and keep their kids' expectations low (or more accurately, realistic, given what we anticipate is to come). I don't want to unnecessarily deprive my kids, but I think it's better for them to already have it as part of their thinking that food, water, gas, paper products, and other resources are precious. I also want them to know that if we can't afford or choose not to buy something, we can manage without (most things, anyway). Know what I mean?
 
#145 ·
Quote:

Originally Posted by amyamanda View Post
I assume you're thinking chlorine is an issue if you'll be drinking it? Chlorine dissipates from pool water into the air pretty quickly. That is why it keeps needing to be added. If a swimming pool had been sitting dormant and wasn't completely disgustingly mucky yet (it would get that way pretty fast when the chlorine was gone) AND if I had a good water purification system, AND if I was out of better options, I would consider it. Water is essential to human life, and I imagine I'd choose drinking pool water over death by dehydration, if it came to that.

But even under less stringent circumstances, water is good for more than drinking. Washing dishes, clothes, and bodies, for a few things. Flushing toilets, if you're still using a water toilet (I highly recommend a sawdust toilet if water gets scarce). Irrigation. As I said, the chemicals will most likely dissipate fairly quickly.

Yes, chlorine is not great for human consumption or skin exposure. But most Americans get it in their municipal water anyway, and a significant number of Americans use it in their laundry at least occasionally.

Before I made our sawdust toilet, I used swimming pool water for emergency flushing when the power went out and our well pump was rendered unusable.

Granted, I'm making assumptions here about what was meant in the quoted threads, but my point is, there are lots of important uses for water besides drinking.
Nope, you got it exactly right! Actually, our pool is salinated, but with a make shift solar distiller it could be made potable.
 
#146 ·
Quote:

Originally Posted by wombatclay View Post
... our grandchildren will most likely be cofortable within what they consider "normal life" and find the stories told by their elders about as believable as our own "when I was a kid we walked uphill through the snow ten miles to school" jokes.
as in ....." when I was a kid, there used to be disposable plates, and spoons and forks.
And people used to drive cars the size of a house!
And there used to be something called a lawn, and neighbors would compete on who had the greenest, weed free lawn.
And some places, everybody had a swimming pool."

maybe change is a little good, huh?
 
#147 ·
WRT infant mortality: think waterborne diarrhea illnesses. That's your big worry, not respiratory stuff. Blah blah Nestle boycott blah blah yay breastfeeding etc.
I figure we all know that song here!

We're scaling down too, as pps have said, to get into a transitional mindset and all that.

Oh, about diapers and EC: a lot of non-Euro cultures do it. Not exclusively warm-climate cultures, either!
 
#148 ·
About the water and chlorine, yeah I was just coming on to say what Amy wrote - even if the water was gross, it would still have uses for washing, cleaning etc.

As for transitioning kids - well we just do it through the way we live our life. We are modelling and making changes to the way we live so the kids are naturally picking up new skills (gardening, energy/water conservation, living without reliance on a lot of convenience items, we cook from scratch etc), they hear me rationalising about what groceries to buy based on price, I talk to DS about the price of fuel going up and how that means that we will be cutting back on when and how we use the car (as in bundling errands together on one or two days a week instead of jumping in whenever we get the thought to). I don't talk doom and gloom to them, but I talk of the positive changes we are making and how we can still make our lives fulfilling and happy.
 
#149 ·
Quote:
as in ....." when I was a kid, there used to be disposable plates, and spoons and forks.
And people used to drive cars the size of a house!
And there used to be something called a lawn, and neighbors would compete on who had the greenest, weed free lawn.
And some places, everybody had a swimming pool."
Yeah yeah great-gran... pull the other one, it's got bells on. Come on. Plates you throw away? How gullible do we look?
 
#150 ·
Quote:

Originally Posted by wombatclay View Post
Yeah yeah great-gran... pull the other one, it's got bells on. Come on. Plates you throw away? How gullible do we look?

...Remember toilet paper? No, it's true, we used to wipe our butts with paper that was specially made for that purpose!
 
#151 ·
Wow, I made it to the end of the thread!

Well, I've read Kunstler's books, and I 43rd the plug for Sharon Astyk!

I don't know if other cultures have had easier lives, but some have had longer, healthier lives and seemed happy to those who first documented their existance for us. The Okinawans and Hunzan peoples both saw many many old people in their societies live to 100 or beyond, with eyesight, teeth, etc intact and perfect!

The truth is, whether it was hard for others or not, it will be hard for us. We are reading the Little House on the Prairie books right now, and much of their normal day-to-day lives is like reading about aliens. And we are on the verge, or over the verge, or losing lots of practical skills and information for a low-tech lifestyle. Think: how to make soap, train a horse, make clothes and shoes, cook over an open fire.

I am discouraged when I look around. I don't think PO is on the normal person's radar. And most that know a little about it can't or don't think much about it. When I mentioned getting a wood cookstove to a friend the other day, she made a comment about going back to the dark ages. I gently reminded her that dark ages meant cooking inside over an open fire, and that the cast iron wood cookstove is actually like going back 100 years.

The best thing Kustler and other writers have done for me is give a historical perspective on what is going on. Other societies and civilizations have collapsed. I think ours will in my lifetime. And I think we are less prepared than the Cubans and the Russians (two recent examples). Dimitri Orlov has written comparisons between the situation in Russia in the 90s and the situation we are facing. Here is one of his essays:

http://www.energybulletin.net/23259.html

As you each prepare for the future in your own ways, I would encourage you to consider this tenant of permaculture: Any important system should be supported multiple ways.

Take water: Water is the basis of life and your household. Make sure you will have some no matter what. And then plan a backup. And then plan another backup. We hope to move to our little property and build a farm just as soon as we sell our house, and our plan is to have a hand-pump on our well (maybe along with another system), a rainwater catchment system that is gravity fed, possibly a pond, possibly a greywater system, and garden designed to soak in the maximum amount of rainfall when we do get rain.

We just recently got chickens - 12 - and I was seeking solace in that fact a month ago when NRP kept reporting food crisis all over the world. The next day, 10 chickens were killed by dogs. Note to self: if protein is important, do not rely on one source. We are getting one egg per day now.

I think PO boils down to this mistake that we as a society made. We put all our eggs in the cheap oil basket (after Carter tried very hard to steer us in a better direction in the 1970s), and the dogs are at the gate.

The chicken situation not only illuminates our lack of backup, but our lack of know-how with a simple thing like keeping laying hens. Our problem was faulty coop design. The dog got on top and fell through the screened roof in one area that was held by staples. Do almost any of us know how to design a dog-, raccoon-, fox-proof chicken coop?

Another book I recommend is American Theocracy by Kevin Phillips. Scary when all parties from different camps are saying the same thing.

And finally, I have Seymour's book and Carla Emory's "Encyclopedia of Country Living," and I recommend the latter if you have to pick one.
 
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