Post-Apocalyptic Thoreau - the way he was meant to be.

Really, the idea of getting away and becoming more self-sufficient intersects with another of my long time passions. The Apocalypse. From the Tripod Trilogy by John Christopher through the Mad Max movies and then onto the Zombie uprising.

Self-sufficient. A strange concept to ponder in our current society where trades have been broken down into tasks via assembly line thinking. I doubt that I'll ever become completely so, not without vastly streamlining my life well beyond what I'm willing to sacrifice. One would have to embrace the primitive hunter-gather lifestyle and enschew all modern technology opting instead for whatever one could make with their own hands. To survive without needing to rely on the untrustworthy others.

This is the only path to true self-sufficiency. In the words of Thoreau “Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!” Cut down your affairs to the bare number possible to keep yourself alive. (Thoreau argues that you need to live a good life, be good for something – largely he seems to have some suggestions while leaving the reader to define exactly what that means.)

Food and shelter. Your life will be a constant search for these if you wish to live the simplest life possible with the fewest possessions. And, in the case of the apocalypse, this may be how many people are left to live. Either as hunter-gathers or as scavengers on the bones of society(I prefer the latter, but it is the more treacherous of the paths).

Bah on that noise. In this respect I don't want to simplify but rather to expand. I want to learn more about the world, to feed my curiosity(sadly I am easily distracted and quickly flit away to the next shiny object that drops in my path). I want to build myself a mountain of knowledge and save as much of the memory of humanity as possible. This is why I'm building my library. I am an introvert and a hermit, but I still want people around. People who can share the burden of learning and knowing.

Only an utter fool goes through life alone and turns away help from friendly hands. In many cases I have been this utter fool. I think I shall try to change this. I think that I will likely fail. I wonder if I could gather and set up my own self-sufficient community of Future Apocalyptic Survivors. Or does that sound like a cult? Or worse, the plot to The Village.

My Skills blog lists some of the areas of knowledge that might come in handy. My own pallet is largely useless and difficult to apply in the modern world. I'm left hoping that my experience in weaving chainmail will be a valuable asset after the collapse.

*if you wish to join kindly compose and mail an essay relating your applicable skills along with a recent headshot.

In 8^th grade we read the novel “The Girl Who Owned a City” (Objectivist Propoganda) about a plague that only left prepubescent children alive. That fired my imagination for years, until my voice changed and I began collecting my own odd assortment of body hair. Afterwards, I had to drop my admittedly silly plans of trekking to Alaska and fetching food with a BB gun. Oh well, other scenarios were always there to fill in the gap.

In recent years, I've settled on the idea of finding a parcel of land away from a population center. This is in part where the previous post comes into play. Find land, and produce food. Ok, I suppose that is easy enough, I live in America and we've a lot of space and if we get a proper apocalypse where the lion's share of our species ceases to be, well then more for me. Still, I should quite prefer to get a few years of practice in afore the end. A dress rehearsal before going on.

*I predict that the world will end soon after Sarah Palin is elected president in 2016. Soon after she'll somehow release the zombie plague while visiting a secret CDC facility. I like to imagine it will involve her tripping while trying to walk and chew gum at the same time. That leaves me with 4 years to work with. Better get cracking.

So my to do list: Find land. Build house. Gather knowledgeable companions to join me in my mad quest. If video games have taught me anything, I will meet them along the way and after a brief interaction we'll become fast friends and trusted allies. I'll need a healer, builder/mage, fighter and thief to round out my party proper. I'm working on my Mandolin skills so that I can fulfill the role of Bard.

To date I've not managed to accomplish any of these Herculean tasks. A few hurdles stand in my way.

Firstly there are the years of student loans that I need to pay off. I suppose I could follow in Thoreau's footsteps and find a wealthy benefactor to donate the land, but I am the suck at schmoozing. Though, I would love to see the business plan that sells that one. “So, you're going to collect a ragtag band of hippies, bikers, survivalists, farmers and doctors and build a settlement out in the boonies. What sort of profits are you expecting after you get started?”

Yeah. Better do this myself. Come on lotto!

Assuming I do manage to scrape up a place to homestead, I've often wondered how to go about it. And where. I've had long discussions on the subjects, as well as debating myself. Locally I'm fond of Traverse City, mostly due to a partiality to the landscape. Climate is iffy and soil is sandy. Move on.

Really, there are going to be positives and negatives to just about any local I can dream up. The north east has a cold climate and poor growing season. North west has a superior climate but is prone to earthquakes and volcanic activity. Fuck the South(east) – More eloquently, the climate is far too hot for my preference, and the last decades have been dry, not to mention the bevy of overly religious folk. Religious folk are scary enough in quiet times, I fear that the end of the world will send them over the edge. The southwest is hot, dry, and hot and dry.

I of course have my preference after weighing the options. No I won't tell you. I will however move onto the last part of this muddled tirade.

Housing. As I don't plan to wander, I will need some permanent housing. Something sturdy that works with the land. Many ideas have come and gone.

For a while, I had a passing fancy for Microhomes. For those who aren't enlightened, they're a spin off of the Thoreau inspired Movement for Simple Living. Thoreau himselflived in a Microhouse. Generally to be considered a microhouse the domicile needs to be around 100 to 750 square feet. That's right, many of these places are the size of a studio apartment. Some are as small as my dorm room. Still, that should be enough space for one or two people – so long as they Simplify and slough off their unnecessary baggage.

A microhouse would be perfect. I am a hermit and need but little space and could easily get by with a mere couple hundred square feet. Mostly. Even without the imminent Palinocalpyse. I want a home that will be warm in the winter and cool in the summer. All with the least resources possible. To be honest, I've been fascinated by the concept of the underground home since I was a kid. Back then we lived near an underground home and it was an exciting landmark that we would point out on the daily commute. I don't recall that seeing the place ever got old, it was so damned exotic.

Then I found Earthships. They are a range of earth sheltered homes that were constructed of walls of earth filled tires. The creator, a raging hippie, claims to have designed for sustainability. He's been working on the project for 30 or 40 years now, learning and advancing through trial and error. Heated with passive solar, they collect rainfall for water and are outfitted with sources to manufacture renewable energy(solar panels and wind turbines). He claims that even in the harshest Taos winters that residents don't need to spend a dime on heating the home. Same goes for cooling in the summers.

*Pardon if I'm a mite obsessed with the idea, but we just had a heatwave where the temps topped 105. There have been many days this summer where I've wished my apartment was really one of these structures.

The south face of the house is a wall of windows that forms a greenhouse. The roof collects water and stores it in cisterns. These two features are combined to make a natural water treatment system as well as food production area. Fresh water > Shower > Planters(to filter) > Toilet > Outdoor Planters > Septic tank and field.

Fresh food 365 days a year from the greenhouse. Resistant to fires, tornadoes and earthquakes. These are the claims that the hippie architect makes, and I want to believe them. The houses were designed to allow the inhabitants to live their lives off the grid. The possibilities tickle both the inner hermit and survivalist.

I want to try it out.

More reflections from Walden Pond.

How I envy the man. In some ways at least. He was able to extract himself from the clutter and hone his attention on the aspects of living that he found to be the most important. HDT was a philosopher, so he thought about the nature of living a good life. This is what philosophers seem to do. Though he put aside his thoughts and words and went out an acted.

This is the hard part for me personally.

Henry David Thoreau called his approach “living the simple life.” As he forswore everything that he didn't actually need to survive. There were no luxuries. Instead of tea/coffee/wine he drank the cool clean water from Walden Pond. He labored on his own, where his fancies took him. Taking only the bare minimum of what he NEEDED in order to survive and devoting the rest of his life to enjoyment of the natural world.

Then, he came to the conclusion, all those things that a man doesn't need can be happily 86ed as they only hold him down and bring poverty and unhappiness. In fact at one point he considered spending his nights in a tool-chest by the railroad to avoid the burdens of rent and property. His thoughts cleave to the enlightened path of the Buddha that wanting more than you need to live is the ultimate cause of unhappiness in the world.

Tea, meat, fine clothing and all the other fripperies should be laid at the wayside.

But I like tea and fresh meat. Then there are the modern joys of video games. Who could live without the internet in these modern days? Owning a car is fantastic, how else does one get to Chicago in three hours? Well I suppose that there is the train. Not by walking Henry, not by walking. But one has to labor at unpleasant things in order to acquire and maintain these luxuries. And really luxuries they are.

The problem is that the world has changed dramatically in our post-industrial society. Where HDT's world involved a proto-industrial economy where 80% of the population was still working in an agrarian based economy. We've forgotten the skills of old and have laid down the tools of the trades. Who knows how to weave cloth anymore? We survive on trading haircuts and hand-jobs while less than 5% of the population is invested in growing our food.

I suppose I should focus on the problem of getting my own food(and water) first and clear up the rest later. The chemical foundations which power our bodies are the single universal need amongst humanity. We all need a daily intake of food and water or else we'll die. There are places on this earth where a human can survive without clothing, shelter or fire to provide warmth. But let even the craziest airatarian go without some proper nosh for very long and you'll be planting another corpse.

I've devoted a fair sized section of the Post-apocalyptic survival section of my library to the questions of food production and homesteading in general. Most of the books are encyclopedia types of volumes that cover a broad spectrum of topics that are linked to raising crops and cattle. Very few go into much detail. I suppose I need to track down better volumes, but this will require more study on my part as I discern what I might actually need to branch into.

*A note about the library, the intent was to build a base of knowledge that would be useful for a community that is attempting to rebuild. I have focused largely on skill subjects with the aforementioned food production as well as some traditional crafts such as pottery and metal work that seem to be the basis of most civilizations. Not to mention the books on mathematics. I suppose that one could consider this a capsule. I really should find some material about teaching people to read. How does one acquire that skill without another to guide them? So far acquisitions have been driven by subjects that I was interested in at the moment.

Very few people grow their own food in this day in age. Even those who garden as a hobby aren't self-sufficient. It is faster, cheaper and easier to pick of a can of Spaghetti-Os at the local big box than it is to plant even a small garden. A meal costs a dollar, though the meal is of questionable nutritional value and loaded with chemicals which may just be killing us.

I know, as I just consumed a can of Chef Boyardee's ravioli. A fondly remembered staple of my childhood that, much like Kraft Mac and Cheese. All of these canned an boxed conveniences have some delightful qualities that quite resemble real food, and maybe at one point they started as such. There are few times when I ingest said fare that I actually feel glad that I ate it.

In the process of processing food, much of the actual flavor is stripped away through the rather harsh treatment of high temperature cooking(to kill parasites). The companies are forced to add a bath of chemicals that interact with our sense in order to reintroduce those flavors. Really, why does every can of ravioli taste and smell exactly the same? They are constructed to be so. Corporations have food production down to a science.

For those who own the land, Even small scale Gardens are labor intensive. For those who don't own land? Well gardening is out of reach for most of us. In Medieval England an average of 30 or 40 acres were required to feed a family and their livestock. Keep in mind that not all soils or climates are equal to the task of keeping a farmer alive. Will I be able to grow the various foods that I enjoy? Bread alone requires flour, sugar, yeast and water. Various flours can be substituted here, but wheat seems to be the most common and has been since it's discovery some 8000 years ago. Sugar is the same. Water is usually easy enough to find. I'm pretty sure that wild yeasts can be gathered.

What about potatoes and the like? They'll grow in some of the worst soils and climates, and you can use barrels and tire-stacks to force them to grow vertically. They did well enough for the Incas and the Irish(at least until the potato famine). And there are a thousand varieties that have been developed to address various nutritional needs. They come in all shapes and colors and sized. Sadly we really only rely a half-dozen commercial varieties (which is the case for most of our food production).

Technology has improved in the last 1000 years, for better and worse. More importantly, the science behind agriculture has improved. There is a better understanding of soil chemistry as it applies to foods and the need for crop rotation and the best methods for fertilization. As a result we grow more food than we need and are able to devote tons and tons of it to making fuels and sugary drinks.

Last spring/summer my roommate and I attempted an experiment in indoor planter gardening. We filled several 5 gallon buckets with potting soil and placed them in behind our large south-facing window. The experience was delightful, but came to little. I think that we got a total of 5 grape tomatoes, no string beans, a half dozen peppers that grew smaller and smaller(the pepper plant lasted into December) and a fair sized collection of herbs. Of these plantings, only the basil is still with us. Some of the failure is due to inexperience on the part of the farmers(over-watered), while the rest stems from a poor situation of not enough room or direct sunlight.

I guess how we do things as a society is fine, when the system works. But sooner or later it will break and a whole lot of people will go hungry. And it will break. Great. We're efficient! Yay. The next problem is our increasing reliance on mono-culture crops. Basically most of our food plants are clones and many of our animals have had variation inbred out of the stocks. We've done this to increase productivity of our food stuffs and it has worked quite well in that respect, our yields have increased drastically over the last century. Even if it has some problems (tomatoes, I am told, used to be delicious, now they taste like Styrofoam).

The largest looming pitfall(what it does the the environment aside) for our mono-culture is the advent of a disease. According to the experts, when a disease appears that is deadly to a culitvar, it is uniformly deadly and can cause vast crop failures. True, we breed new crops to resist known diseases, but this takes time and doesn't help the present. Take for an example the fungus that is once again destroying banana plantations in Central and South America.

On a personal level, one can resume cultivating heirloom plants. Those ancient breeds of yesteryear that have been husbanded by dedicated hands. Yields will drop even as flavor, nutrition and security increase. Many of our crops have been bred with yield and endurance(for purposes of shipping) in mind. As well as uniform appearance.

That's all good for plants. What about animals? Many of the same issues seem to be applicable I'm afraid. Hogs have been engineered to bulk up in weeks where it took months. They are fed the same diet and loaded with antibiotics and hormones and driven faster than was ever intended. They live out their entire lives in smelly stalls, until the time for slaughter arrives. Industrial livestock operations seem to be rather mechanical and ugly. The living animal that is sacrificed for nourishment is treated like a product.

I say this from a standpoint of a man who has only intentional slain one mammal (numerous fish have died by my hands – despite the fact I don't like fish personally. The rest of my family is a different story.) in his life. And the life of that lone animal was wasted. I still feel shame over this. Wasting food is in my mind one of the few actual sins a human can commit. I've also not got much hands on experience in raising livestock, so I cannot be sure how widespread these practices are.

But I am not against eating meat, I quite enjoy it. I'm not against raising animals, or hunting them for food. This is just an area of expertise which I plan to personally avoid where possible. I think I should prefer to create goods and earn my meat through trade than to harvest it with my own hands. Honesty, the sight of blood and internal organs have affected me negatively in the past. I'm soft.

Sometimes I even feel a brief pang of sadness when I contemplate the sudden and wasted end of roadkill. These creatures have not died for any good cause, to feed another organism. This seems a vast waste. But nature does not waste. The carcass will be made use of.

All right, to the final point. I feel that it is important for people to take control of their own food production. At least to supplement what they buy from stores. We can never go back to what was, not while keeping what we have. There is little point in returning to the past anyhow and only fools and Conservatives gaze at the past with rose covered glasses.

Still, with the present, it appears that we're building up for some big trouble and I want to get ahead of it.

Welcome to the apocalypse. To be continued.