Head for the Hills - The New Survivalists
by Mark Whittaker
Published Nov 18 2006

Head for the hills - the new survivalists
Pub. by The Weekend Australian Magazine

So what do you do when you're pretty sure that the end of the world as we know it is coming soon, but your girlfriend doesn't believe you? Sure, she might nod her head when you confront her with some of the gloomier facts, but then she shrugs and goes back to her pursuit of modern pleasures. She doesn't like it when you talk about it to other people, either. No one likes being told their hopes and dreams are about to turn to dust.

This is the problem confronting Adelaide aircraft engineer Steve McReady. Sick of trying to warn people who won't listen, he is bugging out. He has sold four of his seven investment properties, and has a fifth on the market. He's putting his collection of 10 classic Triumphs and BMWs up for sale. The girlfriend begged him to keep the BM convertible, but there won't be much use for it in the world he sees coming.

He has bought a property in New Zealand — which he says fares well in climate-change models — and once he gets his affairs in order he'll move there to learn about growing vegies and raising chooks. He wants to build a big shed to stock with all the important things that will become difficult to obtain, such as fencing wire and Band-Aids. But he worries that he's left it too late, and that the world might start getting ugly before he can learn how to make cheese and grow potatoes.

Chook

He would have been talking marriage with his girlfriend now if it weren't for all this. "She's a really nice person, great morals, but the lifestyle she aspires to is what most modern women want," McReady explains the first time we talk on the phone. "We're still going out and doing things together. We have talked about this issue but we really haven't resolved it. I'm relying on time. Maybe $2-a-litre petrol by Christmas or if the United States invades Iran ... Perhaps if she saw that what I'm talking about was true, she might change her attitude. But currently I can't see it happening."

When I meet McReady a few weeks later, they have split. He says he was unable to devote himself to her the way she needed. How could he when the calamity ahead colours his every waking thought? His whole future has spun off its steady track since he first picked up a document from a colleague's desk about the end of the oil age.

At 44, he had worked hard to be able to talk about early retirement. He was going to develop an industrial block, rent out two factory units and use another to tinker with his cars. But he's sold the block now because in a future without cheap oil to power the modern way of life — and therefore without cheap food, without cheap anything — he can't see much call for industrial blocks. He also can't see much use for aeroplanes, so he sold his half-share in one of those, too.

He's well aware that the economy is booming, unemployment is low, the sun is shining. Surely the system is working?

"This is what a peak looks like," he says. "That's where the economists and cornucopians get it wrong. They don't see that for every bright day there's going to be a grey day."

Sober and serious, McReady is part of a new wave of survivalists making plans for big trouble. Whereas once it was nuclear holocaust, big-government paranoia or religious rapture that motivated such people, now it is more likely to be climate change, energy shortages and economic collapse.

This story is not about whether what they think is true, but more about the social phenomena of what they're doing about it. Most never discuss their beliefs with friends and colleagues because they're frightened of ridicule. But they are getting ready for a world morphed into "Argentina on a very bad day" or plunged into a never-ending depression, or famine, or, worst-case scenario, Mad Max IV and the die-off of billions of people.

What is Peak Oil?

Peak oil is the theory that world oil production will one day peak and then begin a long and continuous fall. There will still be plenty of oil in the ground, but it will be in harder-to-reach places and come out slower. Just as the US peaked in 1970, Britain's North Sea peaked in 1999 and Australia peaked in 2000, so too will the world's total production peak at some point.

Because of the high oil use in agriculture, and because oil is used to transport every single item in your supermarket, and because almost all plastics are made from oil — every Barbie doll, every contact lens, every Band-Aid, every car tyre, every polyester shirt — the effects of a decline in oil would be far-reaching.

Extreme pessimists predict hyper inflation and collapse of the global financial system. Optimists say that the increased energy prices will drive alternative energy sources and the world will come in for a soft landing.

Of course, not everyone agrees with the idea of peak oil. Exxon-Mobil Australia chief executive Mark Nolan said in September that oil scares bubbled up every time there was a price rise. "The fact is that the world has an abundance of oil and there is little question scientifically that abundant energy resources exist,"

Mr Nolan said. "According to the US Geological Survey, the Earth currently has more than three trillion barrels of conventional recoverable oil resources. So far, we have produced one trillion of that."

A perusal of the US Geological Survey's opinions at shows that the US government body found there was a 5 per cent chance there might be 3.5 trillion barrels of oil. But it also said there was just as much chance that there were only 1.9 trillion barrels of conventional oil to be had.
http://energy.cr.usgs.gov/WEcont/chaps/ES.pdf

It said there are just 859 billion barrels of "proven" reserves, but that this figure will grow as more oil is discovered and more is extracted from existing fields through improved technology. In order for the 3.5 trillion barrels to come to fruition, the world has to discover 1.1 trillion more barrels — the equivalent of four Saudi Arabias — at a time when discoveries are in marked decline, and improved extraction has to find a further trillion barrels.

Peter Ward surveys the shriveled seedlings in his vegie patch after a hot wind has blown in from the desert, and he knows there's a long way to go. He didn't move out to the dry country east of the Adelaide Hills a decade ago to survive any sort of Armageddon.

He, his wife Sue and their children were going to produce boutique olive oil, but the day after ABC TV's Catalyst program ran a story about peak oil in November last year, Ward went out and bought a motorbike.

He researched it some more and decided that while oil was in no danger of running out soon, when production started to decline the flow-on effects through society would be massive, as the price of everything skyrocketed, interest rates rose calamitously and industrial farming faltered. There would be shortages.

The Wards knew life would be hard in their low-rainfall district. The ruined chimney of the original soldier settler on their 8ha block is testament to that. But they reasoned it would be harder in the suburbs - a decision complicated by Sue's encroaching multiple sclerosis.

They began stockpiling enough food to last up to six months. They've found it difficult figuring out how to manage the stockpile so that nothing goes off. And they're still remembering things they will need. Just the other day they realised they hadn't stored any toothbrushes.

Gardening took on a sudden urgency. "We've played with vegie gardening over the years. It sounds romantic and it never works ... The bugs eat the plants, you put seedlings in and there's a hot day and they all die. Or you get too much of something ... everybody groans when you bring another zucchini in. You've been eating them for three weeks solid. So knowing how to grow a good range of vegetables, growing them at the right time, and keeping them alive, is a pretty skilful thing.

"We feel that if we're three years away from the start of the difficult times, that three years is a very important time to practise. And particularly when you look at our vegie plot you'll see we need a lot of practice."

They have a paddock full of 10-year-old olive trees. They hope to use the olive oil to barter for other goods. They hope their neighbours, all on several thousand hectares of cropping land, will run a few dairy cows whose milk they can trade. They have some young fruit trees surviving in the septic run-off and Ward has built a shade shelter for his five precious avocado trees to protect them from the desert wind.

"I can't stress enough, once you decide there's a problem, you need to get cracking," he says in his refined South Australian accent. "We have time... but once things get tough, that's a bad time to be moving. The problems are likely to be both getting to the supermarket, and also getting produce to the supermarket, because most of the stuff in the supermarket has been shifted a jolly long way."

They have started trying to shop fortnightly, but found even that difficult. "It should be simple but it just isn't. This just-in-time mentality is so ingrained now. And it's all based on the availability of cheap oil transport."

Ward tries not to dwell on the more dire scenarios and what would happen if hungry hordes started to pour over the hill from Adelaide. He's thought about buying a gun for the rabbits, which might also be used for defence. "But I'm not skilled with it, I'd probably shoot myself rather than any intruder. And it's an unpleasant thing to think about."

Their son James, 24, who is building a petrol/pedal bicycle which he hopes will get 150km to the litre, is doing a PhD on groundwater hydrology. But when he finishes that, he plans to do a DipEd [Graduate Diploma in Education] and become a school teacher. He's not the only "peaknik" to take this career path.

Dr Shane Simonsen, 28, formerly a research scientist at the ANU working on plant defence mechanisms, has also packed it in for a DipEd. "I think we're heading for what is going to look like an economic depression, so I'm looking for a more stable form of employment," Simonsen says. "In the Great Depression, three out of four people kept their job. So you just have to pick the right kind of job."

He has bought a 1ha block with his parents in Queensland's Sunshine Coast hinterland. "We're going to put in an orchard and vegie patch and derive at least some of our food from that. Anything that requires transport and refrigeration is going to become a lot more expensive and less accessible. This is just a small buffer.

"I've had to have a hard look at what we're doing and realise that I would do it regardless of whether peak oil was happening or not. The survivalists who run off into a bolt-hole and wait for the end to come... you can't live like that. Even if solar or free energy or fusion comes along and everything keeps motoring along, I'd be perfectly happy with the way I've decided to go."

Dr Dan Kortschak, 35, has been published in Nature for his work on the genetics of coral evolution, but he has also dropped out of the glamour end of science to become a high school teacher. Living just 2km from the heart of Adelaide, in Maylands, he has three pushbikes for different jobs, including a recumbent trike with a large trailer for carting gardening equipment and building materials.

He now grows all his fruit and vegetables in his backyard, doesn't eat meat because of the transport costs, and survives each week on about $50 of groceries for him and his dog.

He lived in Nepal for a while, promoting permaculture (self-sustaining) farming. "I live luxuriously compared to people there. You look at an eco--footprint calculator and I'm still above what would be a sustainable level if everyone were to do it. Which is scary, because most people wouldn't want to live the way that I live."

As "an ageing nerd" David Clarke has gone for a technical fix to survive any future crisis. The holder of two software patents, he is continually at pains to point out what a geek he is. He had heard theories about a looming oil crisis, but always dismissed them as the ravings of a lunatic fringe.

Late last year, however, he was chatting with a friend in the power industry, John Roles, who was unusually glum. Roles told him about his research into the future of oil, painting a picture of $5-a-litre petrol and an almost certain depression.

Clarke had just had a baby son, Nicholas, and so decided to treat the boy like a major business project by doing a "threat analysis". After weeks of research, he concluded that the quantifiable threats were the collapse of fisheries, global warming, an agricultural decline and a decrease in oil supplies.

He couldn't believe how gloomy he was being. He knew he must have made mistakes in reasoning so he went back over it, but could find no assumptions that were not conservative. And he certainly hadn't written a worst-case scenario. He refuses to let himself go there.

The best analogy he could think of was Russia after the fall of communism - more a severe disruption than a collapse of society. He started searching for a way to feed his family. He planted fruit trees in his suburban Melbourne yard, but he wanted a techno fix.

By May, he had developed an "aquaponics" system that used the waste water from a fish breeding tank to feed hydroponically grown vegetables. There was nothing groundbreaking in the broad system, but he had devised a way to minimise evaporation and use only a $70 solar panel from Dick Smith to power it. The only input needed was his kitchen scraps.

The system, which he is scaling up to 2000 litres, will supply, he says, 4kg of silver perch — full of omega 3 oils for his son's brain development — and 12kg of vegetables per month. "Not enough to live on, but a good first step... I am an optimist. I believe that I have at least 10 years to prepare. I also believe that here in Australia we will be insulated from the really tough times... Will I let my concerns completely change my life? No. But I will spend money that might otherwise have gone into expensive dinners and a new home theatre."

This new survival movement has two distinct philosophies: 1. those who think that by building strong communities around sustainable lifestyles... modern society will pull through relatively unscathed, if a little slowed down; 2. and the "Mad Maxers", or dystopians. [“dystopians” emphasize the negative consequences of the internet, TV and other modern means of communication]

John Cotis, 27, is a student of the history and philosophy of science at Melbourne University. He's also a Mad Maxer, but says there's no point preparing for the apocalypse. He cites Jared Diamond's Collapse, which has a case study on the fall of the Anasazi native American civilisation, in the southwest of what is now the US. It, too, had outlying areas where people had little gardens.

Archaeologists found their bones cooked and chewed. "If you live in a complex society there's no getting out of it. So it's pointless to build your permaculture garden or raise your chooks. It's about trying to save the whole boat. So my preparation is basically writing to politicians, going to industry lectures, and networking with anyone I know to get the word out."

He paints a picture of a pre-industrial world where your snotty-nosed kids are illiterate, your wife dies in childbirth, and insects eat your food. "It's not feasible to survive individually... I sound like a raving madman, right? What's scary is that you become used to the idea. I still have faith in humanity. We went through the Dark Ages, but the knowledge got stored in monasteries and we came out better."

Simon Beer expected a very dark age. The physicist and astronomer won a University Medal at Sydney's Macquarie University in 1999 after discovering one new nebula (where a star is forming out of a vast cloud of gas) and confirming the existence of another only previously speculated about.

He turned down a PhD scholarship because it seemed like there just wasn't much point in astronomy. He went into computers and by 2001 his programming business was coming along nicely. He lived in a pad overlooking Sydney Harbour. Not bad for a kid who grew up poor in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney.

But the day after the September 11 terrorist attacks, he went to the opera and, at a nearby cafe, he was watching the TV news continually showing planes crashing into buildings and he couldn't help looking out the window to make sure the Opera House was still standing.

He wondered how he'd fare if things started to fall apart. "I wasn't pleased with my position. I had no savings. My health was good, but other than that I was completely dependent on the system, and becoming more so."

He felt an overriding urge to flee to the wilderness, but life went on as normal. Then he read a book called The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight by Thom Hartmann, detailing potential disasters awaiting planet Earth, such as oil depletion, water shortages and overpopulation.

"I took it very seriously. More seriously than I'd recommend for other people, because I wasn't prepared for the changes." In 2002, Beer left his middle-class life and moved back to his mum's house in the Blue Mountains to prepare for the looming crises.

He was certain that a food garden was not the way to go. If four million people didn't have gardens, he'd need a gun to defend his. He decided to learn primitive technologies so he could simply disappear into the vast mountain wilderness until the hordes had starved themselves out.

He acquired a large library of books and started teaching himself crafts such as rope-making and plant identification. There was too much to learn, though: building shelters, tracking, hunting, trapping, skinning, making clothes and tools. He was certain that time was running out. He had a bag packed with cordage and knives, ready to walk out the door, but he knew that if the stuff hit the fan tomorrow he would die.

Clearly, the modern essentials of a big mortgage and a big car were going to pass him by. He didn't see himself as some hippy alternative lifestyler. He had normal friends, but unfortunately none of them believed him when he tried to tell them where the world was headed. He started feeling like a loser - isolated and lonely.

"And I think I underestimated the effect that would have," he explains. What happened was that the over-stimulation of his adrenal system caused by the stress led to a muscular illness, fibromyalgia, which robbed him of his chance to get out there and practise the skills he needed.

"I've come to the conclusion that most people have a psychological block. Their mind prevents them from seeing something they can't deal with. In a lot of ways that's a good thing. I didn't have that. I was thinking: 'This is real, I have to face it now, and I have to face it on my own.'"

Psychologist Kathy McMahon has cut a niche for herself ministering to people like Beer, wandering the internet in various stages of foreboding about the end of the world. She was a couples counsellor and sex therapist in western Massachusetts before she reinvented herself under the nom de keyboard Peakoilshrink.

She'd been through it all herself, the shock upon first learning about this coming oil crisis, followed by trying to disprove it, then various stages of despair and furious activity as she learned how to dry fruit and farm chickens (she has 28).

She also felt the rejection of friends telling her to take a chill pill as they went off and refinanced their houses to take a cruise and as the Dow rose inexorably. She also knew that if she fronted up to one of her psychologist colleagues, they would disregard her fears as irrational and start looking for other problems. The first thing they'd ask would be something like "How is your relationship with your husband?" or "How did you get along with your mother?"

"People in the peak oil community are dealing with a mass delusion [in the wider community]: that there is no problem with fossil fuels; that we're just going to find a solution and there just isn't anything to be concerned about.

When they get those messages over and over and the public assumes that if they're not covered in the popular press then they aren't real, it creates a dramatic emotional impact for those with that distinct minority view.

I would argue that the symptoms people in the peak oil community are experiencing — what we in the psychological community would label as paranoia, anxiety, or obsessive compulsive disorder — are actually a vigilant adaptation to what's happening around them.

I'm trying to educate psychologists to start to frame it as a legitimate fear. Because by saying it's a personal problem, the psychiatrist is doing exactly what the person's family and friends have been doing and the patient will end up more isolated and more fearful."

ONE 33-year-old scientist from Wollongong in NSW contacts me by email and agrees to talk. "One thing I'll have to explain first, though... I won't be giving you my real name. Part of the problem with this whole peak oil issue is some people are going to prepare while the majority of the population won't.

When the oil crisis comes, and it is inevitable that it's going to happen at some stage, the people who have prepared will be targeted by those who haven't. I have a very young family and part of the reason I am getting ready for an oil crisis is to protect them. The last thing I want to do is jeopardise their personal security by advertising to everyone that I have stuff to help during 'The Long Emergency'."

When I phone him he explains that, being a scientist, he'd like to go public and start campaigning about peak oil, but again he won't because he says it will make him a target. "I'm a bit of a Jekyll and Hyde at the moment. Where I work, nobody knows about the sort of things I'm doing or thinking or involved with.

You start talking about these sort of things to your colleagues and they think you're nuts. It's just looking after yourself and looking after your family. It might be considered wacky and a bit hippy... but to me, to prepare for this is just common sense."

The first thing he did was get depressed as he mulled over the diabolical possibilities, but as soon as he got over that, he rang his dad, who'd grown up out west of the Great Divide with no power, no tap water. He didn't tell him why he was asking about the old days... not at first.

His father told him how they only had fruit and veg in season and so they preserved things. They were too poor to buy powdered milk, which most people used back then. So they bought a cow which they ran on land rented from the railways. They made their own cheese. Everyone had chickens.

He also grilled his father-in-law, who taught him how to harvest honey and a bit about vegie gardening. "He came from a little bush town where the only thing they bought was some of their clothes. Everything else, including food and tools, were made in the village. Try doing that these days with our extremely limited knowledge."

His instinct told him to head into the bush and hole up somewhere totally isolated. "But humans can't live like that. You'd get sick, you'd go mad. We need communities." So he started cultivating neighbours. Saying hello to them. Talking to them when he was in his suburban yard.

He installed 10,000 litres of rainwater tanks. He got bees even though he hates bees. Aside from the honey, he'll use the wax to seal in the cheese he's learning to make. "You can store it for years." He's got six chooks on order and he's started a vegie patch.

When he eventually told his dad about his fears over peak oil it didn't take the old man long to come to the same conclusion... that the world was stuffed. But rather than come on board and start preparing, his dad did nothing. "He thought it's going to be so bad there's nothing anybody can do about it, and so why bother."

American Andi Hazelwood and her Australian husband, Dean, met and married in a whirlwind trans-Pacific internet relationship in 1997. They were living in Atlanta, Georgia, in early 2004 — she was producing radio ads, he was an internet development manager — when they heard about peak oil.

"Literally that day, and once we realised there was no argument for this not happening, we started realising we needed a plan. It was either Australia or America and the options in America weren't as good."

They moved to the Burnett region of southern Queensland because they could afford a block* there without going into debt and because Dean had family in the state. "When we told people we were going to quit our jobs, move to the bush and grow vegies, they're just like, 'What? Why in the world would you do that?'

People think we're crackpots and people ask 'What are you going to do if there is some magic solution and there's no problem?' And our answer is we've built our own house on a piece of property bought and paid for, we're growing our own food and only having to work part time. What's the problem?"

*[In Australia, one of the large lots into which public land, when opened to settlers, is divided by the government surveyors.]

Dean & Andi Hazelwood

They arrived in November 2005 and have set about building a strawbale house, planting a garden, buying solar panels and a composting toilet. Hazelwood has also set up a group, Relocalisation Works in the Burnett Inland, one of many such groups popping up worldwide, with the ambition of weaning the district off oil.

A big ask in an area with a lot of distance between everywhere, but the most basic step would be to get local producers to sell locally rather than trucking to Brisbane and having the goods trucked back by a supermarket chain.

When I tell her how some of the "peakniks" I'd spoken to didn't want to be named for fear of becoming magnets to the unprepared when things went wrong, she didn't seem overly concerned. "My thought is that if you're actually making the effort to make things better for the community as a whole instead of just yourselves, then it's foolish for people to try to target you... we're relying on the goodness of people."

While researching this story, I spoke to 18 people who were changing their lives in preparation for big trouble up ahead. Not one of them sounded like a nut job... not to me, anyway. Five of them were scientists, three were engineers and five were in IT.

They weren't treechangers [homesteaders] or seachangers [social dropouts that hangout around coastal villages], although sometimes they might have portrayed themselves as such so as not to look like loons. I sure hope they're wrong, but in the months that this story was in gestation, I bought two chooks and planted some fruit trees. Hey, it can't hurt.

Reprinted with the permission of News Limited. Photo by Andi Hazelwood

http://www.energybulletin.net/node/22852

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Editorial Notes ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
This article is also available at the Relocalisation Works in the Burnett Inland site. Thanks Andi for seeking permission to post it, and the Weekend Australian for granting it. -AF

Content on this site is subject to our fair use notice.

Duck and Cover: It’s the New Survivalism
By ALEX WILLIAMS
Published: April 6, 2008

THE traditional face of survivalism is that of a shaggy loner in camouflage, holed up in a cabin in the wilderness and surrounded by cases of canned goods and ammunition.

***

“Your safe haven must be self-sufficient and capable of growing some kind of food,” Mr. Biggs writes. “It should be well-stocked with seed, fertilizer, canned food, wine, medicine, clothes, etc. Think Swiss Family Robinson. Even in America and Europe there could be moments of riot and rebellion when law and order temporarily completely breaks down.”

Survivalism, it seems, is not just for survivalists anymore.

Faced with a confluence of diverse threats — a tanking economy, a housing crisis, looming environmental disasters, and a sharp spike in oil prices — people who do not consider themselves extremists are starting to discuss doomsday measures once associated with the social fringes.

They stockpile or grow food in case of a supply breakdown, or buy precious metals in case of economic collapse. Some try to take their houses off the electricity grid, or plan safe houses far away.

The point is not to drop out of society, but to be prepared in case the future turns out like something out of “An Inconvenient Truth,” if not “Mad Max.”

“I’m not a gun-nut, camo-wearing skinhead. I don’t even hunt or fish,” said Bill Marcom, 53, a construction executive in Dallas.

Still, motivated by a belief that the credit crunch and a bursting housing bubble might spark widespread economic chaos — “the Greater Depression,” as he put it — Mr. Marcom began to take measures to prepare for the unknown over the last few years: buying old silver coins to use as currency; buying G.P.S. units, a satellite telephone and a hydroponic kit; and building a simple cabin in a remote West Texas desert.

“If all these planets line up and things do get really bad,” Mr. Marcom said, “those who have not prepared will be trapped in the city with thousands of other people needing food and propane and everything else.”

Interest in survivalism — in either its traditional hard-core version or a middle-class “lite” variation — functions as a leading economic indicator of social anxiety, preparedness experts said: It spikes at times of peril real (the post-Sept. 11 period) or imagined (the chaos that was supposed to follow the so-called Y2K computer bug in 2000).

At times, a degree of paranoia is officially sanctioned. In the 1950s, civil defense authorities encouraged people to build personal bomb shelters because of the nuclear threat. In 2003, the Department of Homeland Security encouraged Americans to stock up on plastic sheeting and duct tape to seal windows in case of biological or chemical attacks.

Now, however, the government, while still conducting business under a yellow terrorism alert, is no longer taking a lead role in encouraging preparedness. For some, this leaves a vacuum of reassurance, and plenty to worry about.

Esteemed economists debate whether the credit crisis could result in a complete meltdown of the financial system. A former vice president of the United States informs us that global warming could result in mass flooding, disease and starvation, perhaps even a new Ice Age.

“You just can’t help wonder if there’s a train wreck coming,” said David Anderson, 50, a database administrator in Colorado Springs who said he was moved by economic uncertainties and high energy prices, among other factors, to stockpile months’ worth of canned goods in his basement for his wife, his two young children and himself.

Popular culture also provides reinforcement, in books like “The Road,” Cormac McCarthy’s novel about a father and son journeying through a post-apocalyptic wasteland, and films like “I Am Legend,” which stars Will Smith as a survivor of a man-made virus wandering the barren streets of New York.

Middle-class survivalists can also browse among a growing number of how-to books with titles like “Dare to Prepare!” a self-published work by Holly Drennan Deyo, or “When All Hell Breaks Loose” by Cody Lundin (Gibbs Smith, 2007), which instructs readers how to dispose of bodies and dine on rats and dogs in the event of disaster.

Preparedness activity is difficult to track statistically, since people who take measures are usually highly circumspect by nature, said Jim Rawles, the editor of www.survivalblog.com, a preparedness Web site.

Nevertheless, interest in the survivalist movement “is experiencing its largest growth since the late 1970s,” Mr. Rawles said in an e-mail, adding that traffic at his blog has more than doubled in the past 11 months, with more than 67,000 unique visitors per week. And its base is growing.

“Our core readership is still solidly conservative,” he said. “But in recent months I’ve noticed an increasing number of stridently green and left-of-center readers.”

One left-of-center environmentalist who is taking action is Alex Steffen, the executive editor of www.worldchanging.com, a Web site devoted to sustainability. With only slight irony, Mr. Steffen, 40, said he and his girlfriend could serve as “poster children for the well-adjusted, urban liberal survivalist,” given that they keep a six-week cache of food and supplies in his basement in Seattle (although they polished off their bottle of doomsday whiskey at a party).

He said the chaos following Hurricane Katrina served as a wake-up call for him and others that the government might not be able to protect them in an emergency or environmental crisis.

“The ‘where do we land when climate change gets crazy?’ question seems to be an increasingly common one,” said Mr. Steffen in an e-mail message, adding that such questions have “really gone mainstream.”

Many of the new, nontraditional preparedness converts are “Peakniks,” Mr. Rawles said, referring to adherents of the “Peak Oil” theory. This concept holds that the world will soon, or has already, reached a peak in oil production, and that coming supply shortages might threaten society.

While the theory is still disputed by many industry analysts and executives, it has inched toward the mainstream in the last two years, as oil prices have nearly doubled, surpassing $100 a barrel. The topic, which was the subject of a United States Department of Energy report in 2005, has attracted attention in publications like The New York Times Magazine and The Wall Street Journal, and was a primary focus of “Megadisasters: Oil Apocalypse,” a recent History Channel special.

Another book, “The Long Emergency” (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2005), by James Howard Kunstler, an author and journalist who writes about economic and environmental issues, argues that American suburbs and cities may soon lay desolate as people, starved of oil, are forced back to the land to adopt a hardscrabble, 19th-century-style agrarian life.

Such fears caused Joyce Jimerson of Bellingham, Wash., a coordinator for a recycling-composting program affiliated with Washington State University, to make her yard an “edible garden,” with fruit trees and vegetables, in case supplies are threatened by oil shortages, climate change or economic collapse. “It’s all the same ball of wax, as far as I’m concerned,” she said.

Scott Troyer, an energy consultant in Sunnyvale, Calif., said he was spurred by discussions of peak oil — “it’s not a theory,” he said — and other energy concerns to remake his suburban house in anticipation of a petroleum-starved future. Mr. Troyer, 57, installed a photovoltaic electricity system, a pellet stove and a “cool roof” to reflect the sun’s rays, among other measures.

Mr. Troyer remains cautiously optimistic that Americans can wean themselves from oil through smart engineering and careful planning. But, he said, “the doomsday scenarios will happen if people don’t prepare.”

Some middle-class preparedness converts, like Val Vontourne, a musician and paralegal in Olympia, Wash., recoil at the term “survivalist,” even as they stock their homes with food, gasoline and water.

“I think of survivalists as being an extreme case of preparedness,” said Ms. Vontourne, 44, “people who stockpile guns and weapons, anticipating extreme aggression. Whereas what I’m doing, I think of as something responsible people do.

“I now think of storing extra food, water, medicine and gasoline in the same way I think of buying health insurance and putting money in my 401k,” she said. “It just makes sense.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/06/fashion/06survival.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2008/04/survivalism-is-the-new-black.php

Surviving in the Tough Times Ahead
by Emily Spence, January 15, 2009

Ian Sample's "Billions face food shortages, study warns" [1], based on findings by researchers at Washington and Stanford Universities, points out some of the progressively difficult conditions that will likely lead to widespread starvation in times ahead. Its conclusions fit well with ones posed in Paul Chefurka's "World Energy and Population Trends to 2100" and "Peak Oil, Carrying Capacity and Overshoot: Population, the Elephant in the Room" [2].

Such reports, certainly, are cause for alarm and dismay. This is because, with increasing credibility, they warn that humankind is quickly approaching critical choices in terms of whether we, collectively, want to undertake the necessary modification to shape the world to reasonably serve life in the future or plan to bequeath a hell onto the generations of people and other life forms that come after ours.

Obviously, ethically prone people--ones strongly oriented towards cooperation, support of justice and altruism, as well as ones at the opposite end of the spectrum--extremely self-centered, greedy, ruthless brutes, can make out in good times, the moments of abundance and plenty.

However, the lean periods, ones in which there is competition over dwindling resources (i.e., contention over a finite supply of food, territory, water, oil, etc.), all but guarantee that the individuals and groups with the most power will prevail over their weaker counterparts and there are only two main routes to escape the pending conflict.

One path is for groups to hide (like Anna Frank's family) and hope not to be found or, alternately, they can flee adversity (regardless of the form that it has, such as religious persecution or lack of jobs) into a new location and hope to not be deported. In other words, they can try to stay alive by concealment in the difficult region assuming that sufficient provisions are available to support them there or reside in some other place with circumstances more auspicious to maintaining an enduring, less guarded existence.

Primarily, it seems that two types of assemblages will prevail in the times of paucity that loom ahead. One will include persons, such as members of farming cooperatives, who are pretty much self-reliant while in natural environments containing most of the indispensable materials needed to foster their long term furtherance.

The other kind will consist of nearly all persons in the ultra-wealthy class in that they possess enough money and command to get whatever is wanted when wanted even if only on the black market or through legal and illegal forms of theft, such as occurs through some eminent domain rulings, certain Machiavellian Wall Street behaviors, usury related loan practices and other deals for which the gain often winds up in offshore bank accounts.

Meanwhile, the countermoves against the pilfering that occurs with eminent domain procedures (i.e., for water or land rights) or in outright wars--especially in regions that have ample supplies of uranium, gas, oil, agriculturally rich soil, gems and other coveted resources--will probably take place with greater frequency and fervor in the years ahead.

Invaded populations have learned that they can successfully fight back. Recent evidence in the Middle East makes this fact a reasonably correct supposition to entertain.

Similarly, there will likely exist increasing attempts by authorities to control distressed populations in resource depleted lands, as well as in ones rich in material abundance into which the desperate masses could try to flee in huge numbers, which would obviously inundate the reserves at the latter sites if they were allowed to come in full measure.

(The population is expected to hover somewhere around ten billion in less than fifty years from now. At the same time, the most highly populated areas, in many instances, are the ones most at risk for crop failures, severe water scarcity and other shortfalls.)

In tandem, it seem reasonable to assume that prospective immigrants and the inhabitants already settled in such favorable locales could both be tightly controlled by military force to prevent riots and other major social disruptions from taking place due to the enormous disparities in assets held by the haves and the have-nots. As such, the rules concerning allocation of needed supplies and the conditions under which they are apportioned would probably be tightly proscribed.

In fact, rationing nearly always takes place when pervasive shortages prevail, i.e., during and immediately following W. W. II and, to a lesser extent, the Great Depression. All the same, some people in most societies always seem to get shorted, anyway, such that they have resort to garbage dump hunts, mud cookies, soup kitchens and tent parks with Hooverville-like conditions as a last bulwark against death.

Additionally, both the individuals with might, military based or otherwise, to back their claims to greatest goods access and persons tucked away in safe, resource abounding enclaves (i.e., the self-sufficient few who happen to be in out of the way spots) will, in all likelihood, make out just fine no matter what.

Their needs will be met even when others in their countries face glaring deprivation. For the most part, this sort of result has always been the case throughout history in the sense that whomever has adequate necessary stores, regardless of the ways that they are garnered, generally does well regardless of the prevailing surrounding conditions.

At the same time, it somewhat exemplifies the way that evolution, itself, has always operated in the sense that survivors, during periods of privation, are those with the greatest advantages when compared to less fortunate peers. Therefore, people will have to be increasingly resourceful to endure in the worsening hard times on the way.

As David Smalley said, "Survival of the fittest is the ageless law of nature. The fittest are those endowed with the qualifications for adaptation, the ability to accept the inevitable and conform to the unavoidable, to harmonize with existing and changing conditions."

Moreover, it is unambiguously clear that humankind cannot go on as is with always an ever greater population, ever ramped up resource ravage to maximize utmost personal profit, ever more severe climate change difficulties and so on.

The combined damage of these processes will not stand and, so, a large number of people will either have to accept drastically altered lifestyles and assorted types of curtailment (i.e., pertaining to family size, consumer activities, travel and energy consumption to name a few) or many of them will face the most tragic sorts of failure on a scale barely imaginable.

In spite of many of our government and business leaders seemingly understanding that deep changes are necessary to be carried out, they are not willing to avert even half of the funds used for current war activities, amounting to trillions of dollars lavishly spent each decade, towards support of a sufficient supply of energy generated from benign sources like wind, solar and geothermal activities delivered with opportune timeliness.

In other words, global warming will possibly not be adequately addressed fast enough to offset some truly terrible effects like a significantly raised ocean level and crippling heat waves. Most of all, they will not be prone to limit ecologically unsound economic activities, nor publicly push for the deep cuts associated with energy conservation that are desperately needed.

In a similar vein, it does not seem likely that food and other material aid will ever be tied to birth control education and provision. On account of this contribution lacking, each generation of recipients saved from untimely demise will produce many more additional people so that the overpopulation problem in localities that, from an environmental standpoint, cannot support them with which to begin will only become more exacerbated over time, especially so in light of imminent sweeping scarcities.

At the same time, one can assume that, with major food deficits on the way, the majority of the produce derived from huge factory farms owned by multinational corporations will go to the highest bidders on the global markets.

Simultaneously, there could exist problems with transporting sufficient supplies of it into urban areas or far off regions due to lessening availability of oil needed for the shipments. This occurrence, in turn, could intensify the overt and covert resource struggles currently taking place in areas of the world possessing fossil fuels.

All of these factors in consideration, one has to, first, ask himself whether he is doing everything that can be envisioned to ensure his own and his family's continued existence for a long duration. In other words, is he setting up circumstances that can be fairly certain to promote survival in the rough times ahead?

Secondarily, is he undertaking all that he can to try to soften the blow for others? In short, is he maximizing their chances to carry on during the increasingly hard times? Indeed, they could become so precarious that the present number of people, approximately 35,000, dead each day from malnourishment, actually, seems a modest quantity.

Furthermore, anyone who entertains the illusion that we can "save" all life everywhere or, at last moment, humanity will turn everything around relative to dire global warming impacts, overpopulation, equitable sharing of income and requisite resources, protection against environmentally devastating opportunism, etc., needs simply to look at the overall history of our species thus far on the planet.

As an alternative, he can, instead, consider events pertaining to the final settlement at Easter Island, deer on St. Matthew's island, our world wars, our current battles in the Middle East and Africa, the ongoing shaky state of the world's financial markets; the staggeringly high extinction rates for other species, such that almost one third have vanished from 1970 to 2005, which correlates with human commercial advancement and the swift rise in our population; the quickening pace of deforestation and accompanying large-scale desertification, the accelerating methane release from permafrost and other formerly sequestering sites, the rapidly transpiring deglacialization across the entire globe with its impending impact on delta zones and rivers, the spreading ocean dead zones or any number of other deeply ruinous occurrences in progress to envision the difference between reasonable and outlandish expectations relative to events that will take place in the future.

In the end, individuals and groups will have to energetically and conscientiously look out for their own best interests. However, this does not mean that they will need to hoard or should forego cooperating with others.

Indeed, they can enhance the chance for surviving and surviving well if they plan and work together to build the community bonds that foster mutual aid and uplift. As the Dali Lama suggests, "If any individual is compassionate and altruistic, wherever that person moves, he or she will immediately make friends. And when that person faces tragedy, there will be plenty of people who will come to help."

[1] Billions face food shortages, study warns ...
[2] http://www.paulchefurka.ca/WEAP/WEAP.html and "Peak Oil, Carrying Capacity and Overshoot: Population, the Elephant in the Room

Emily Spence is a progressive living in Massachusetts. She has spent many years involved with assorted types of human rights, environmental and social service efforts.

Other articles: http://www.opednews.com/author/author9056.html