Just a thought on resource depletion, emergency preparations and economic resilience!

Most people who've heard of peak oil accept that it is a real phenomenon. Many people also realize that with rising world populations, increased consumption and the growing affluence of Asia that there will be a great many commodities from food, silver, distillates, catalysts, chemicals, rare earths and energy that will come into short term or permanent shortage at some time in our near future.

It is my belief that the GPC needs new ideas that will not only work towards the reality of resource depletion by advocating reduced consumption but at the same time creating policy that will strengthen Canada's resilience to the economic shocks caused by possible shortages. With this in mind I think that the GPC should adopt policy calling for the creation of regional strategic stockpiles that work with industry to make sure that primary materials required for the smooth operation of Canadian economic engine do not run out due to short term market shortages, or environmental emergencies.

I would also suggest that strategic reserves of grains, emergency supplies, and vital infrastructure components should be created so that in case of something like a massive blackout, ice storm, solar flare, hurricane etc. important infrastructure like the power grid or water treatment system can be restored in a timely manner without relying on foreign deliveries or waiting for the manufacture of damaged equipment. I'm sure there are already some government and utility provisions in place for such events but with the combination of resource depletion and the expectation of more volatile weather from climate change these programs surely need to be beefed up.

Now I admit there is no way to hoard our way to prosperity but having a strategic reserve for for energy is something most counties have. We do not! Canada always makes excuses for itself because it’s so big and cold, all the more reason to have a stockpile so no one ends up freezing in the dark, NO?

In today's just in time delivery system a strategic supply of food is only sane considering grocery stores and the distribution system only have a few days of anything in stock.

A strategic supply of rare earths for example will not keep us in business if the world runs out but would certainly keep industry running during a short term delivery interruption and would also be a great carrot to entice manufacturing companies to set up shop in Canada. Rare earths are especially important to those Green Techs we claim we wish to support like the manufacture of PV units and wind turbines.

Precursor chemicals for common and wide spread drugs like thyroxin, blood thiners or increased stockpiles of insulin might also be wise.

This is not an over night project but something that would take the better part of decade to build up to. Consultation with industry, economists, logistics people and the prioritization of which materials to stockpile would be a project unto itself but certainly energy and food should top of the list.

We are also in a time when currencies are going wild, the possibility sovereign defaults are being openly considered and it might just make sense to put part of our reserves into something that is real, growing in rarity and vital for our economic engine rather than more U.S. T bills.Recommend this Post

Food security: Ending the year on a downer

Unlike last year before the crash there’s been little talk about food shortages in 2009 but it's my belief that this will change by spring/early summer 2010.

There have been a series of crop failures world wide with China, Australia, and Argentina all suffering long term droughts which have severely damaged grain production. India not only had a poor monsoon season but also heavy winds and rain damaging crops in their other growing season. All these problems could cause food issues during any normal year but it would also appear that the USDA has been cooking the books on crop yields to keep prices in check; a great ploy when you know it’s only going to be a short term blip but in this case it could be the fraud before the famine.

This article from Marketsceptics.com shows that 2009 USDA corn and soy predictions (in most cases) not only went up from earlier in the year but are also above the 5 year average making it look like a bumper year, so what’s the problem? Well it seems that the USDA is ignoring its own data on counties that have been declared Natural disaster areas,(areas suffering 30% or higher crop damage). In fact the in the 30 days before the article was written a staggering 274 counties were added to the list. An additional 66 counties were added on Christmas Eve, I guess they figured people would be too busy to notice.

Some areas just barely qualify for the 30% damage criteria but other counties are virtualy destroyed, making the USDA predictions that much more suspect.

Despite all these declared emergencies there have been no modifications to the already overly optimistic crop estimates. Come next spring it will become obvious that these predictions were bogus when shortages in corn and soy will begin to hit the markets. There is also potential for shortages in wheat, rice, and other grains due to both the U.S. and foreign disasters driving food inflation through the roof. As we saw in 2008, food shortages will lead to higher prices, a rush to hoard, the banning of exports which lead to more local shortages and last but certainly not least civil unrest.

Read the whole article and judge for yourself if there are reasons to worry, but other people such as the National Inflation Association is also predicting food shortages and high prices plus I’ve been telling you that we’ve been one bad crop away from problems for several years.

This is just another wake up call for the move towards localization and food self sufficiency, get involved in a local food movement, a transition town group, Food Not Lawns; Something! Also don't forget that next years food shortages will inevitably turn into 2011’s retail seed shortage. I would suggest buying one the several garden kit packages being offered that give you a wide selection of seeds packaged for long term storage. Some of these companies offer both northern and southern garden kits giving you the varieties more suited for your climate. I think the best deals out there are these collections from Baker Creek Heirloom seeds
I wish these guys had an associate program I’d love to join.

These seeds can be stored and will maintain their viability for years to come giving you the opportunity to either save money now gardening or prepare for your future food security. Learn to save seeds from each years crop and the benefit will be perpetual. Don’t leave it until too late, one of the companies I’ve listed before and purchase some of my own survival seeds from a few years ago increased their sales volumes by several times and ran out of seed last season. Many people see this trend and are acting.


If you don’t know how to grow your own food I’d recommend this book on gardening small spaces and this one on Seed saving

Food shortages are inevitable as we move along the peak oil path but are not solely dependant on peak oil. We can and will face shortages in the near future and we need to adapt now because the end of cheap oil will only make them that much worse in the coming decade.Recommend this Post

A renewal in canning and stealth doomers

A recent Globe article high lighted the return of the canner, those intrepid folks who actually care enough about their food to do their own processing and preserving.

"The new breed of canner is driven by politics as much as practicality. A desire to eat locally and regain control over what goes into our food is fuelling a resurgence in farmers' markets and backyard kitchen gardens. Many see canning as a necessary step toward having year-round access to produce from their own region"

I admit that a portion of these people are simply foodies who wish to make their own distinct high quality food. Some of these folks are also recent converts to the local food movements like the 100 mile diet a useful and noble endeavour. Still others may be concerned about the health effects of eating genetically modified fruit and vegetables grown in China, sprayed with pesticides, adulterated with preservatives and sealed in a nice BPA lined can. Yummy!

What this article does not mention is that many of this new wave of canning enthusiasts are people preparing for the worst to happen. Peak oilers and their peak food brethren, those who fear a depression and unemployment and people who understand that a severe flu season could impair just in time food delivery systems all have sound reasons for taking food security into their own hands.

Now I understand this piece is from the food and wine section and I should not expect in depth journalism but would it be too much to ask that they at least throw the issue of food security a bone? Of course it's also quite possible that some of the people researched for the story simply lied about why they have started canning, these are people I call stealth doomers.

I know a number of these stealth doomers and if asked why? in a public environment will probably say "oh it's just a hobby", " I like to cook", "it tastes better". In reality they worry about the stigma that prepared or cautious people receive in our "live for the moment" society. The stories change drastically when you get them alone or in a small group of like minded people and you soon find out who has bags of rice under the bed, a solar oven or Berkeley water filter in the basement or even a gun in the attic, yet often their families and friends don't know about their preparations.

I remember a post from one lady saying she was afraid of having a guest stay over in her 2 bedroom apartment because if they oppened the guest closet they would find it filled with survival supplies. I'm not sure if it was fear of being mocked or fear of being robbed during an emergency.

Stealth doomers or not it's great news that people are canning again even if they are just making chutney. Just a year or two ago Bernardin Canada had proposed killing the Mason Jar line because canning was dying off and it was losing money for the company. Had this new wave of enthusiasts not arisen the jars would have been discontinued for sure and eventually the lids and seals may have ceased production.

Besides, chutney, salsa, relishes etc. are all good small batch preserves on which to hone your skills and when peak oil does begin to limit our variety of foods people will find that tasty condiments go a long way in limiting food monotony.

In our house gardening, gleaning, freezing, canning and seed saving have all been part of this years food security effort and I tell everybody exactly why I'm doing it. Doomers should open up more and encourage others to do the same, that way there will be less people at your door begging for chutney should/when the hard times come.Recommend this Post

Top Doomer Accessories

I often see lists of things people like, best electronics or the best cars but what about us doomers? What are the best things we should own to be well prepared?

Now I'm not talking about having a weeks worth of food or 10 candles for an emergency because I expect you to already have the basics, rather I'm talking about more substantial items that would be of great advantages for either powering down or in an emergency. I know this is not necessarily the definitive list but more of way of arguing with myself and with you on how to best utilize my meagre resources and prioritize my doomer centric purchases.

Solar oven

I’ve actually have one of these and think it’s a great tool for cooking small breads, casseroles, roasts, even boiling and sterilizing water but as my current yard is not consistently sunny enough I don't get to use it except at the cottage. The Peak Oil Hausfrau says this is her favourite appliance and has a number of useful posts on oven use I'd recommend you read. There are several types of solar cookers made; some are simple reflectors, some have back up gas heating or are very portable, mine is the Global Sun Oven pictured here which ran about $320 with shipping, tax and dollar exchange. While slower than a real oven this useful toy is absolutely free to use and is also carbon guilt free. Depending on your location this might be only a three season product but fuel saved in one season will mean more available later.

Berkley water filter

Whether it’s for constant use, seasonal concerns about your ground water or even to drink roof runoff in an emergency the Berkley Water Filter family is the Cadillac of free standing home water systems. These systems range in size and flow allowing you to get a good match for your personal usage and your budget. For long term use I would suggest getting several sets of spare filter up front and then repurchases them each time you change them out. This will give you the most use in case supply disruptions should occur as some point

A Quality Grain mill






Wheat's long term storability and nutrition makes it a common find in most doomer's pantries but since most of us don’t want to pound it with a stick or grind it between two stones a good quality grain mill such as the heavy duty Diamant Grain Mill or the more modest but highly rated Country Living Grain Mill is a must. A Grain mill is a tool that could be used several times a week if not daily so it does not pay to cut corners and buy the cheapest thing you can find. Most mills have spare part kits available which you may or may not need but certainly buy a spare set of burrs(the part that actually grinds).

A Pressure Canner

Unless you have guaranteed access to fresh meat and/or a working freezer with a stable power source you control you will eventually need to preserve low acid items such as meat, fish, and veggies.
I swear my Grandmother use to do carrots and beans without pressure canner and no one died but what do I know? Government health agencies say high pressure canning is the only safe way to can low acid stuff, high acid things like jellies, tomatoes, chutneys etc do not need a pressure canner.

A Smoker

A smoker is an ideal way to preserve meat by making hams, sausage or even smoking fish but since many of the commercial smokers look to be propane or electric powered I think I’d be looking to make my own wood/charcoal fired smoker. Or perhaps you'd rather buy the Big Green Egg


A Still

Alcohol is now and always has been one of mans great escapes. With your own still not only can one make potable alcohol but you can also produce fuel for a modified engine, medicinal alcohol for sterilizing wounds and equipment, or for making tinctures, tonics, pain killers like Laudanum. A small still with a hopper or basket allows you to strip essential oils from herbs and plants for medicine, flavourings, or scents. Finally alcohol is a great preservative for such things as seasonal fruit or Admiral Nelson if you’ve got one laying about. There are many sites dedicated to building your own or you can purchase them here, or here.
check local laws I did not suggest that you do anything illegal


A treadle sewing machine

An old singer or its contemporary’s with all the parts and bobbins in tact are ideal for basic sewing and should be a no brainer addition to the doomers home. More recently the Janome made a model called the 712T(and probably others) which fit into the old singer treadle tables and had many of the more modern sewing machine features. Old treadles are a dime a dozen on the used market but because some people think they are collectible they may ask far too much for them, many also are incomplete. Some like my Grandmother's looked original but had suffered an electric conversion and some of the original pieces missing. Look carefully to assure you get both a structurally sound table and a working sewing machine. If you end up with a spare treadle and no sewing machine I've seen some great plans for a treadle powered hobby lathe.

A modest solar recharging system


While it would be great to be totally off the grid with enough power to live life exactly like we live now that is not financial viable for the majority of people. However a modest solar recharging system
consisting of enough solar cells to charge a laptop, cell phones or batteries for flashlights, lanterns small small appliances or toys can add a little safety and normalcy to a tough situation without breaking the bank

Water capture system

Every doomer needs a water system that not only fills rail barrels or a cistern for the garden but one that allows you divert water to tanks for indoor use during droughts. Roof run of is certainly fine for laundry and flushing and if you prefilter for sediment would be quite drinkable after passing through your Berkely water filter, or boiling it in the sun oven. Do both if your paranoid.

A rugged bike and trailer



Eventually getting around or shopping will no longer take place in a car and a durable bike for all members of your household is very important as is at least one trailer for hauling what ever it is you need to move from place to place. If age, health, mobility is an issue they make adult trikes with a good size cargo basket on them or get an electric assist bike

A real first aid kit

I'm not talking one of those crappy 3 band aids and a safety pin things the car emergency clubs give you as a premium but a real high end kit supplemented with a good assortment of painkillers, antihistamines, antidiarrheals, antibiotic creams, calamine etc as well as a complete backup set of any prescribed medicine you use that is regularly rotated to keep fresh. I’m not a first aid expert but a couple hundred dollars is minimum to get a relatively complete kit.

Now I can probably think of many other things I think doomer should own or could find useful but what do you think? And before someone starts on me about this, lets leave a discussion on guns and firepower to another day, ok?

.Recommend this Post

Being your own seed bank

I’ve been shouting at everyone for about 2 years to get off their asses and start gardening as a defence against poverty and food shortages brought on by peak oil and financial crisis. During this time I realized several things

1. A very small portion of the population gardens for food

2. A very small portion of the population know much about food or how it’s produced; an extreme example is here.

3. Of those who do garden many use hybrid seeds which do not breed true and should not or can not have their seeds harvested and saved from season to season. This makes you reliant on seed companies who essentially control the food supply.

4. If something happens and many people decide they want or need to garden for survival the available seed supply for local gardeners will be hopelessly insufficient to meet the publics demand. Such an event might require several years of gearing up by smaller seed companies and seed saving gardeners to meet demand for open pollinated seeds.

5. As rightly brought up in the comments, saving your own seed allows you to collect seeds from those particular plants that are best adapting or climatizing to your local climate and soil. Eventually, several plant generations later I will have a local plant regardless of where it originated or where I purchased the seed.

These revelations caused me to begin buying seeds, not just seeds I needed for a particular years gardening plans and not even the seeds of things I like to eat best but just seeds. The point of this is not some attempt to get the entire collection like an 8 year old with hockey cards. The point is to build up a personal seed bank that contains a good variety of different vegetables, herbs (medicinal and culinary) as well as oil and fibre plants just in case they were ever needed.

All the seeds I buy are open pollinated so I can save their seeds for future years and most are heritage crops which were selected for taste rather than durability in shipping like the tasteless shit we get from the grocery store most of the year.

My first purchase was a collection from AAOOB foods of 34 varieties of veggies, herbs and fruit in a 2 gallon plastic pail ready to freeze for long term storage, this kind of purchase is an easy, nearly anyone can do, food insurance policy. Even if you can’t freeze them they will still remain viable for several years in a cool dry environment, stick them on a shelf in the basement.

Since then, I’ve found this company which offers what looks to be a better deal with more varieties, the only issue is they don’t break down the kits so you know what varieties of seeds you are getting ahead of time, still 60 varieties from 25 vegetable types all open pollinated for $90 US is a damn good deal as is the 275 varieties from 30 vegetable types for $375. Even better these kits have southern and northern variations to ensure you get plants suitable for your climate. A kit like this would make you a micro seed bank able to freeze for long terms storage for your personal use or to disperse to others in case of need.


I’ve also purchased individual seeds packages of heritage crops with the intention of using my limited garden space and growing out a selection of them each year in rotation to increase the amount of seed I’m storing. For example this year I will plant Ardwyna paste tomatoes, a bean variety called Orca, Bronze Amaranth, Kamut, Potimarron squash and hulless barley called Faust.

In each case I’ll only plant a few grams or maybe an ounce of each species but by only planting 1 variety of each species to avoid crosspollination and using proper seed saving techniques I can probably increase my hoard of seed in these varieties by 15-50 fold, an ounce become pounds, a gram an ounce, and I’ll still be able to eat from these plants crops. Each year I will rotate to different varieties in order to increase them as well and to replace and refresh the vitality of seeds that have been frozen for too many years.

At some point I’ll be able to share my seeds with other gardeners or if I get a bigger plot of land perhaps I can even start my own online seed store. In either case I’m increasing the supply of seeds for myself and others and just as important, I’m preserving the genetics of heritage crops that are being squeezed out by often sterile or genetically unstable hybrids. Do you honestly think that in a time of food crisis that large seed companies like Monsanto won’t screw us over by buying and killing heritage seed companies so that you will be forced to buy new sterile seed from them each and every year at a new and inflated price?

Provided you are not surrounded by other gardeners who will pollute your genetics everyone should try seed saving. If you do have fellow gardeners too close perhaps you can agree to sow the same types of plant, or offer to grow beans for both of you while they grow tomatoes for both of you. This would allow you to garden yet maintain the isolation of species required to breed your seed true.

A network of people working together locally could maintain and increase a wide variety of seeds and trade back and forth. They could also support local community gardens with seeds or make seed packages for distribution to people frequenting food banks. A return to local food is probably in our future but it’s not going to happen without some help from individuals taking part in saving and increasing the quantity of open pollinated seeds. If you don't garden consider doing so. If you do garden make it count!


While far from complete or adequate (I’m currently light on root crops and medicinals) the green Assassin Seed Bank currently contains

Bronze Amaranth

Barley - Faust

Beans- all dry bean or multi use varieties.
Orca
Candy
Mitla Black Tepary
Nez Perce
Jacob’s Cattle
True red cranberry
Good Mother Stallard

Corn-
Blue Jade
Strawberry Popcorn
Stowell’s Evergreen

Carrots- I forget

Cucumber – Bushy

Flax – a fibre variety

Kamut- Polish Wheat

Opium poppies- you never know if modern medicine will survive the coming chaos, pain abatement or euthanasia may be up to you. Seeds are so good in baking, if you don’t need to pass random drug tests.

Parsnip - Harris Model

Squash-
Potimarron
Long Island Cheese

Sugar beets – I even have the instructions to make molasses and sugar from them.

Sunberry- I have no clue what a sunberry is but figured I’d give it a try

Tomato -
Ardwyna paste

Tomatillos-

Wheat – Hard White Spring


I've purchased most of my seeds from Salt Springs Seeds, Seed Savers Exchange or Richter’s Herbs

Related posts
What your neighborhood needs is a seed library

.Recommend this Post

Embracing the Doom pt 3: Urban Adaptors and food

Spring has sprung
De grass is riz
I wonder where dem doomers is?

Spring or not, no grass will be rising in this part of Ontario for another week or more so this doomer is sitting in the basement sorting seeds, checking the calendar for planting dates and filling planting trays with starting mix in preparation for the season ahead. It’s now only 7 weeks until last frost which allowed me to plant the first of my tomatoes “Ardwyna Paste” under grow lights, joining the strawberries whose vague instructions of “plant in early spring” enticed me to start them right away. I have no doubt I planted them too early but I’m sure we can live with a few strawberry pots on the coffee table for a few weeks if needs be. My cabbage, onions and a couple of test Tomatillos are already sprouting and due to my usual planting exuberance I’ll probably have enough surplus plants to sell at this springs garage sale or give away to friends as an encouragement to start their own gardens.

As an urban adaptor with limited space it’s a daunting task trying to figure out how one will strive for any reasonable level of food security but there are options, some are quite reasonable, some require actual work and others many be a little to extreme for the more squeamish doomer (and no I’m not talking cannibalism …….. yet!)

Any discussion on food security should start the same way every energy security discussion should, simply cut back! Unless you are uncommonly active, thin and modest in your caloric intake most people could easily drop 100-400 calories or perhaps even more from their diet per day, freeing up supply for others and cutting the costs and work required to feed yourself. On average we eat too much; we eat out of boredom, for entertainment, and for simple gluttony so this is the most logical place to start the conversation.

Likewise we must take a serious look at what we eat and how we use it. The production of meat is up to 7 times less efficient than eating the grain yourself. Eating meat negatively impacts the number of people our agricultural system can support, our health, the availability and quality of our water resources and increases green house gases. In a time of hardship whole grain, bean, lentil, and tofu based meals can provide adequate protein, improve your health, save you money, all with the side benefit of treading lighter on the earth.

You should also remove the empty calories that add cost but no utility to your diet such as refined sugars, alcohol, etc and then calculate what you really need to survive. If you have the means to purchase or produce these things when times get tough great, but having a target of real needs instead of wants as a baseline is an important step in planning your food security. And before someone who knows me starts sniping and calling me a hypocrite, I admit to being an over exuberant consumer of meat and beer but I also know a time will probably come when I won’t be able to do so.

Finally we must look at our level of personal food waste and ways to reduce it, especially considering studies in the U.S place waste as high as 30%. That’s a lot of food grown, shipped, bought, and tossed out. It’s also a perfect example of low hanging fruit, an easy and free way reducing your total consumption.

Do you refuse to eat leftovers? Or maybe only use them once rather than until they run out?
Do you cut around a blemish on a fruit or veggie, or do you toss the whole thing?
Do you make stock from a turkey or chicken carcass?
When you eat out do you use the doggy bag?
Do you habitually buy lettuce every time you shop because you know you should eat more salad but end up tossing one out every weak because you could not be bothered making one?
Have you ever bought an entire container of something with an expiry date only to use a single dollop in one recipe knowing full well you have no use for the rest of the product.

We all do irrational wasteful things that endanger our food security and blow a shit load of money. I’m not saying you should not buy that container of sour cream but perhaps you should plan a menu allowing you to have leak and potato soup, perogies/tacos, baked potatoes or a homemade veggie dip all within a two weak period making use of the entire container. Don’t buy the damn lettuce unless you are committed to 2-3 salads in 4 days and eat those leftovers or convert them into new dishes like sheppard’s pie, soup, or bubble and squeak. Bake or make sauces with overripe fruit. Plan and shop to a menu and stick to it.

I’m convinced that if most people looked at the questions of how much do I need? What should I eat? And how can I fully utilize what I do have? They would only need 50-60% of their current food supply, How much effort put into gardening or stalking a deer could you save by cutting consumption by 40%? How much money would a 40% reduction save you?


Food strategies

Once you know how much food you really need you can then decide on the appropriate strategies to acquire it. All food strategies can be broken down into 3 categories, purchasing food, growing food or scrounging food.

With today’s access to a wide variety of cheap and easy foods from around the world few people even farmers make any attempt to be food independent. As adapters we will try to produce as much of our own food as possible but true independence is simply not possible. One person cannot expect to be a gardener, a herder, a butcher, a miller, an apiarist or a blessed cheese maker all in their backyard plot. Specialization and barter between many urban farmers can eliminate some of these deficiencies but there will always be some things that can’t be done on the small, local, and urban scale. This means we will always be dependent on vendors, be they grocery stores, co-ops or farmers markets to supply those things we cannot produce ourselves.

The secret is to optimize those purchases you are required make by shopping in bulk. Now it’s understandable that most people cannot afford to buy a skid of flour even if they did have somewhere to store it but there are other ways to buy large quantities. You might find that club stores work for you despite the problems of membership fees, rarely being walkable or not always having the best prices on some items. Other alternatives include bulk food stores or even better food cooperatives that have local ownership, help form community bonds and can have access to local producers who don’t want to deal with the hassle of individual sales. If you do garden or have a useful craft you might find your co-op an ideal place to sell or trade your surplus. I think co-ops are the way to go and I would encourage anyone to join one or investigate forming a group to create one. Sadly this is not a business model that has gained much ground in Canada.

Eventually things we’ve grown accustomed to like imported off season fruits and veg may no longer be available, we must again learn to eat seasonally and preserve our local bounty just like our grandparents did.

Gardening/urban agricultural

Provided you have access to land the best way to gain food security is to grow it yourself. You may not have a lot of space, you may not have good soil but short of having 100% shade nearly every property should be able to produce at least some food. Square food gardening shows you how to get a considerable amount of produce from a limited area and even if you don’t have great soil you can always build raised beds or use container gardening. Having no gardening skills is no excuse, the ability to grow food is a basic skill that let humans form communities and civilization as we know it (not necessarily a good thing). Surely such a basic skill mastered by Neolithic man is not beyond your skills, but start now it does take time.

Starting now also gives you time to improve the fertility of your soil by adding organic matter, improving the drainage, Ph and level of helpful micro organisms. All around us there are sources of organic matter that can improve your soil, do your own composting, collect sea weed by the sea, grass clippings from your neighbors who don’t spray, leaves from a park, or ask for the coffee grounds from your neighborhood coffee shop, it’s all good. Many municipalities even have events where you can get cheap or free rain barrels, composters or compost. Soil is only poor and unproductive because you let it stay that way.

If you really don’t have enough space to garden you should look into joining a community garden program. While some areas like mine are severely limited in space (70 plots for over 70,000 population), added demand and/or advocating to businesses, towns, utilities and school boards to provide land for more community gardens should eventually create more gardening spaces. Demand municipalities support community gardens. If you can find someone who is speculating on vacant land for the long term you might even negotiate cheap leases on properties large enough to support a profit generating market garden, creating food and employment.

In your daily lives look for opportunities, perhaps a local business could be convinced to give up its lawn so employees could garden at lunch and after work and you as adviser/manager would get a portion of the garden as your own. Sell it to them as a way to help their employees save money and become healthier, a way to show they are a good corporate citizens, and a way to save money on a lawn service. The same offer could be made to use a portion of a school yard supplying both you and the cafeteria with real food all while teaching students a real skill they can use.

A sick or elderly neighbor may let you garden their yard simply to get some free produce and a little company, before too long you’ll probably find them puttering along behind your doing something they did not think they were still able to do.

I just noticed a mistake above, even if you do have 100% shade in your yard you could bring in wood shavings, logs, straw or some other appropriate medium and plant mushrooms or morels. No yard need be barren of edible life.

Somewhere between gardening and purchasing is the CSA , Community Sustained Agriculture. In a CSA you buy a share of farm’s crop for the year and each week during the growing season you receive a basket of what ever is in season. Some CSA’s require their members do labour especially at planting and picking time, others like the one we belong to does not.

All CSAs are not equal however, some are organic some aren't, I said before some may ask for your labor, most won't. Unless you eat anything it may take you some time to find a CSA that grows a selection of vegetables that suites your tastes. Our current farm did not originally meet our needs and after a summer of drowning in honeydews but no beans to speak of we dropped out for a couple of years. With better planning, experience, and more understanding of what their customers wanted we have returned to the same CSA finding a much more balanced food basket.


Guerrilla gardening is also an option, simply pick plant types that require minimum care and plant them on vacant land and hydro corridors and see what happens. You might lose it all to animals, lack of care or vandals but you might also end up with a field of squash or patch of amaranth ready to harvest come fall. If you back onto a hydro cut simply put up temporary snow fence and extend your yard past your lot line. You might get told to remove it immediately or be left alone for years to garden on free land, either way begging forgiveness is easier than asking permission.

In the same vein as begging forgiveness rather than asking permission, most municipalities will ask you to comply with bylaws before they fine you or start legal proceedings, with this in mind don’t be scared to put a ½ dozen hens or a rabbit hutch in your back yard, hell if you have a good sized yard try some miniature goats. Be mindful to raise them in extra clean conditions so smell won't bother the neighbors and so no one gets the Humane Society involved. Some municipalities in the U.S. are rescinding old rules about small livestock so push the limits and get like minded people to lobby for such changes. In Canada you can join CLUCK, Canadian Liberated Urban Chicken Club, a group that is involved in education and legal challenges to anti chicken laws.

Scrounging

There's lots of food around around if you just look for it, be it dandelions found on unsprayed vacant lots or fiddle heads and morels in the forest, you just have to put the effort in to find it. In the local green belt near my home I know I can find choke cherries for wine or jelly, crab apples for canning or jelly, sumac for fake lemonade, and morels and that’s without having any expert knowledge or having spend any amount of time actually looking. There is always something edible around if you look hard enough which brings us to the “I’m not that desperate yet” behavior of the Freegan.

The Freegan is someone who salvages edible food from the garbage. “Freegan” was originally used as a label for anti consumerism activists outraged at the 25-30% level of western food waste. These activists began to eat salvaged food from dumpsters to lower their ecological footprint and their participation in the normal consumer model. If you look around there are web sites, meet up groups and probably facebook pages dedicated to Freegan activates. While some people do this as political statement are also many people with more basic motivations like starvation who have been forced to eat this way, certainly a sad commentary on our society.

While I don’t suggest you go out and root in the garbage behind the Lowblaws or the Piggly Wiggly tonight (unless you are really desperate), there should be some procedure to intercept and utilize this food before it gets dumped like this. High quality produce or stuff set to expire the next day should be sent to shelters or food banks for immediate consumption, lower quality produce should be shipped to local farmers for animal feed and the real rotten stuff sent to composting facilities rather than the dump. Fear of litigation is scaring some retailers from donating food, even for livestock. You might however convince them its for your composter or worm farm.


We should all lobby companies to be compassionate rather than wasteful with damaged foods and we should lobby that governments alter any laws that make being responsible hard for companies.

The final scrounging pointer is to look for a gleening program. I was quite surprised to find that the York Region Food Network runs a gleening program where you can register and get notifications throughout the growing season as various participating farmers allow people to wander their fields and harvest produce that is either surplus, not of salable quality or simply was missed by mechanical harvesters. This program allows the salvage of tonnes of food for those willing to work and with no veggies left to rot in the field the quantity of harmful insects, fungus and disease in the soil for the next year’s crop is reduced. While you may end up with far too much of one item to use in a timely manner you gain the opportunity take up canning on the cheap, stock a root cellar or share with others.

Damn these posts are getting long

Associated posts

Embracing the Doom: What kind of doomer am I?

Embracing the doom pt 2: How doomy How soon?

Top doomer accessories

Renewal in Canning and Stealth Doomers

Being your own Seed Bank
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Embracing the Doom: What kind of doomer am I?

Well according to last week’s Star article I am officially a doomer simply because I accept the possibility that the last 50 years of greed, excess and prosperity may come to an end , the result of peak oil. I'm totally comfortable with this label.

However unlike classic peak oil doomers I also believe that debt, monetary and fiscal mismanagement, environmental degradation, global warming, and even unsustainable population growth are all issues that alone on in concert will lay a world of pain on our species and/or our planet in the coming years. I don’t even need to be right about all of these issues because each one alone could sow the seeds of despair.

So I if I’m a doomer what should I do about it?
What are my options?
My priorities?
What kind of doomer am I?

I think the last question may be the most important in deciding how people will deal with the issue of our impending doom, so let’s look at the kinds of doomers, their sub groups, those confused with doomers, and the various strengths and weaknesses of particular survival strategies.

Survivalism

Despite the stereotypes portrayed in many articles the vast majority of doomers I know are not survivalists.

Survivalists have been a noticeable and growing subculture since the height of the cold war and have not suddenly sprung up just because of peak oil. While part of the movement was based on nuclear survial others rose from people’s fear of a societal collapse due to monetary issues like devaluation, inflation and the destruction of stable hard currencies that were replaced with Fiat currencies. Earlier preparedness advocates were often divided between retreaters, those who would opt out of normal society and become remote homesteaders or hermits (that crazy guy on the hill) and those who were more militant, who talked at length about self defence and purchased significant firepower; these were relegated to the survivalist category.

While some cold war survivalists turned away as the threat of nuclear Armageddon abated the hard core simply adapted to other threats like Y2K, terrorism, natural disasters, pandemic, the rise of domestic fascism, the old standby of financial collapse or more wacky reasons like the end of the Aztec calender, magnetic pole reversal, dark planets or stars swinging through the solar system or the weird acid trip Armageddon of Revelations.

The common Survivalist

Survivalists are not just people who are prepared but people who also expect societal collapse, lawlessness, banditry and feel the need to defend themselves and every damn combat ration they managed to hoard. Many survivalists also have their own social agenda be it racial, religious, anti government/anarchist/radical libertarian, anti urban and some even supporting class warfare.

Not all survivalists are doomers and few doomers (IMO) are survivalists.

The classic Survivalists take preparations seriously and often form communities of like minded people giving them strength of purpose and manpower but the advantages of this set are often offset by their very agendas. Today is an age of information and if they think their compound, stash of weaponry and often intolerant social ideals have not been flagged by law enforcement, municipalities and their neighbours they are naïve. While their claims of defensive preparations may be legitimate they may find their failure to integrate, share and aid the communities they choose to bunker up in make them a perceived threat. The survivalist’s own agenda and beliefs may create the very confrontations they expect.

Much of the survivalist literature I’ve seen seems to believe that a finite crisis will pass allowing the survivalists a “coming out “ where they will be higher up the pecking order than before the crisis. Storing food rather than being prepared to grow their own seems prevalent which can also add to the perception that they may become predators rather than neighbours. Hoarding is all fine and good for a short emergency but the ability to grow food for future seasons is paramount for Kunstler’s Long Emergency

The Retreater

The retreater like the survivalist takes preparations very seriously but is more likely to live the life rather than just plan for it. These people will move into a remote area alone or in larger groups in a belief that a low profile avoidance strategy is a better bet than the “Let them try to take my MREs“, gun toting bravado of the survivalist. Retreaters do not have to be pacifists any more than all survivalist are looking for a fight it is simply a variation in optimizing ones chances of survival.

Retreaters are more likely to live full time in their retreats and try to become totally self sufficient. This drive to be away from society pushes them to the fringes, away from good land, medical services, and even neighbours. The choice of being cloistered like a hermit on marginal land poorly suited for agriculture begs the question “is this a life worth living”. To simply live and survive may not be enough for many people and the lack of community and social interaction may weigh heavily on those opting to retreat from society.

Both the survivalist and retreater share the worse case scenario of how the future will unwind believing there is no point staying part of society and trying to save it for everybody. This seems an overly pessimistic and selfish vision and I cannot consider myself either of these despite the label of doomer I proudly wear.


Homesteader: back to the land

Like the retreater the homesteader moves back to the land and tries to achieve some level of self sufficiency. A homesteader may still be on the grid but in most cases will also be preparing their property and lifestyle for a time when private or government utilities and services may be lost or become unreliable. Unlike the retreater the homesteader is not limited to live on the fringe of society, rather their limitations on location are based more on affordability and their personal land preferences than a need to hide.

Homesteaders will not shy away from contact and the wise ones will dive in with both feet in an attempt to forge lasting bonds and friendships with the established community. It is nearly impossible for any person to become proficient in all the skills needed to be self sufficient. Not only would it be difficult to learn all the skills it would be inefficient in both time management and the cost to acquire the specialty tools required. Horse ownership gives us a perfect example, while the average person can learn to care for and groom a horse, and perhaps even give it rudimentary training the average person is not going to have the tools, training or experience to be their own vet or farrier. A homesteader would need a great many skills to become totally self sufficient including farming, animal husbandry, building skills, cooking, baking, hunting, canning, bee keeping, cheese making, brewing, nursing, midwifery, sewing, weaving, spinning, knitting, shearing, yada, yada, and will most definitely never be totally self sufficient. Society and technology even at the level of 1600s cannot be individually sustained, community is a must and something that will cause most retreaters and survivalists to fail.

Homesteading like the other models can be single family, extended family or a cooperative venture like the Eco village.

As a doomer I see the homesteading model as preferable survival strategy. Anyone who can both feed his family and have surplus to trade for more specialized services and products will be as close to self sufficient as practical and depending on the level of surplus may actually be considered affluent. I also believe I have a wide enough skill base to at least make a go of it.



Adaptors: Adapting in place

Most people because of their current employment, family ties, lack of the capital needed to start over, the shear lack of the skills required, ignorance of the issue or just because the have no desire to live in an rural setting will be forced to adapt in place and make the best of what they have; they just don’t know it yet and are in for one hell of surprise.

Unlike the masses who will have this decision made for them by circumstance, some doomers actively decide to remain and adapt to the coming changes where they are. These are the people who are already modifying their houses with small wind mills, solar panels, solar hot water and high levels of insulation so that their homes can remain comfortable in a low carbon economy. Adaptors vary in their preparedness plans but often do things like replace their lawns with veggies, hide rabbit farms in their garages, join community gardens and advocate for more gardens, lobby for zoning changes to promote urban agriculture, join CSAs, form food co-ops or buying clubs, buy local food, learn to can and cook from scratch, take up home crafting like knitting, weaving, spinning, sewing.

Like the other varieties of doomers Adaptors probably still store extra quantities of food, water, medicines, seeds and barter goods it’s just they don’t plan on moving. Some may even own a gun despite their lack of bunkers and camouflage macho wear. Adapters may also be reorganizing their homes so they can become multi generational homes or welcome friends or strays to lower living costs.

An adaptor may not have the means to BUY into adaptation but rather be a King of the thrift store or Queen of the garage sale going out of their way to duplicate the thrift and creativity that served people so well in the Great Depression.

Of all the options adapting in place is the one that will be the norm because most people will have no choice. Cities hold the majority of jobs, the majority of homes, and the majority of government services and despite an eventual need for additional agricultural labour to offset some of the energy inputs, people are not going to flee the cities unless everything falls apart and the survivalists were right.

The adaptors and homesteaders both believe change is coming but believe that we can survive, thrive and have purposeful lives even in a post or low carbon environment. I have to have to accept this belief and work towards it as the best option I can provide for my children. While I may be wrong I will not give into chaos and anarchy willingly.

Decision making

People have to decide several things

Are the fears of doomers regarding peak oil without merit? (no!)

Can you say without out a doubt that you believe bad things never happen and that oil depletion can be managed without a severe impact to your lifestyle? (no!)

If you can say at this point you are not a doomer go back to reading your people magazine and drinking your Staryucks coffee. (oh look, Brad is having Angelina Jolie cloned so she can pump out more babies faster, but rumours have it Aniston stole the zygote with the intention of raising it to hunt down the real Jolie. Wow fascinating)

If you can see the threat, what can you do about it? (Prepare?, ignore?, suicide?)

If you do want to prepare which survival strategy outlined above suites your means, yours skills, your willingness to uproot and your view of how bad it can get?

In my case this has been a long evolved decision process. I’ve always wanted to live the homesteading life even before I knew of any sound reasons to want it, yet I do not have the means to leave my job in the city and give it a go. My job currently ties me to a desk 60k from where I live and I cannot support two separate properties. I’ve found no kindred spirits to share a property with and my employer despite selling telecommunications does not believe in telecommuting for its union employees, sucks to be me!

So while I would prefer the homesteader’s route and have tried to learn some of the relevant skills, I will be forced to become an adaptor and can only hope that some opportunity will come along allowing me to change course before it’s too late. I also believe that at some point there will be increased pressure for people to return to the land in order to off set expensive energy inputs with manual labour. When this time arrives I want to own my own land and treat people fairly rather than becoming someone else’s serf or share cropper

What kind of doomer are you?

Related Posts

Embracing the Doom Pt2 How Doomy how Soon?

Embracing the Doom Pt 3: Urban Adaptors and Food

Being your own seed bank

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Doomers Amongst Us!

An article in the Star today takes a look at doomers and their preparations for what they believe will be a crisis as oil depletes and the modern high carbon society collapses. The story covers a self sufficient farmer/homesteader type , the Bug-Out and start over type and the optimistic urban survivalist who opts the Adapt in Place scenario. (Personally I prefer the first option but will likely be forced by necessity to follow the last.)

As I read the article I can imagine the eyes of my friends and family rolling they way I do when I bring up such subjects, and then I start to panic thinking "Shit, these people seem better prepared than I am." I can't help but laugh when I see the "ideal" provisions list for a family of 5 with pet. I'm truly sceptical that any family needs 34 cans of anchovies or would want to live after 114 of Spam but we know the Star published this abridged version of the attached provisions list making sure there were just enough items on it to heap scorn on these "poor deluded" survivalist types. Can't take them too seriously can we?

I want to know where was the doomer like me? Someone concerned about growing local food and the conservation of open pollinated seed, strategies that will create personal food security and alleviate the need to store outrageous amounts of food.

Where was the reference to Cuba and the movement to low carbon urban farming and food self sufficiency? A reduction in fuel does not need to bring starvation and panic but it will if we do not prepared for it.

I think the doomers they covered were far too weighted towards the "screw you I'm saving my own ass" camp and ignored the good work and advocacy by people looking to Power Down society and adapt. It seems that making the doomers survivalists types rather than seers and mentors for the masses was a better way at marginalizing people who would question the status quo.

It was unfair to imply that most doomers are simply survivalists looking for the next perceived crisis, especially considering the connotation that the survivalist label has generated in the U.S.
At least they did not ask these people how many guns they owned!

What concerned me most about the article was the ignorance of commenter's who cling to claims that oil is not depleting, that Alaska, Alberta, Unknownia all still have massive reserves that will keep us wallowing in our exuberant lifestyles for another century. Beside these cornucopians we have the usual techno fix types who think that wind mills and solar will somehow replace a dense, easily transported liquid hydrocarbon for cars, fertilizer, pesticide, or as used in a gazillion chemical compounds including many medicines.

Did they all miss the report I posted about last week questioning the sustainability of most new "Saviour" techs which are commonly touted as our future.

When it comes down to it unless people are hoarding guns so they can steal their neighbours food, fuel, wife, land etc, why ridicule them? As long as they are not working on an online longpork cookbook why sneer at them. Each prepared person is one less the government will be able to fail, one less that will initially compete for resources as they decline, and one more likely to have the skills rest of us will need to learn. We've all heard the the boy scouts motto, about 7 fat years followed by 7 lean years, the stories of hardship from your depression era family, yet suddenly it's insane to be prepared "just in case". Are we too affluent to worry about mere food?


Also don't forget that the financial Doomers like Marc Faber and Peter Schiff are now becoming celebrities in financial circles for being all to correct. While chicken little was just a stupid bird it was those around Cassandra who could not see the truth.

Associated article

Embracing the doom: What kind of doomer are you?

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Saving the world one bread at a time!

The way I see things the western world is about to get bitch slapped by reality as an economic and possible fiscal crisis could destroy our banks, money and financial infrastructure. On top of this issue we have global warming, peak oil, and the specter of expanding famine zones spreading around the world all ready to bend us over the bottom bunk like in some sick prison movie.

Now there are things we can do to meet these issues and I do what I can for the environment by trying to curb my consumption of energy, stick to the 100 mile diet when we can, trying and failing in my pitiful attempt to grow a reasonable amount of food from my tiny yard, as well as my activism, blogging and GPC involvement. I am unconvinced however that we will reach a solution that will allow most or any of us to maintain the lifestyle or level of civilization we have grown accustom to in the long term and I’m trapped somewhere in-between going Amish or survivalist. I like basic black clothes and the idea of a simple agrarian life but wool jackets, full beards and a lack of beer just don’t do it for me. On the other side gun toting fundamentalist Christians with no necks and brush cuts scare the fucking shit out of me, mmmm choices?

In the mean time I am trying to learn basic skills that might prove useful in a post carbon future. Gardening has been a bust this year do to a combination of bad weather, very limited space and a herd of slugs and snails that decimated the beans, potatoes and cabbage. Over the years we’ve done some preserves and canning but we are certainly not experts. We expect to be drying whacks of tomatoes, some herbs and if we are lucky we might even get some homemade raisins. I don’t see a lot of reason to learn the proper techniques to freeze things when our power grid could collapse in a couple years when oil/gas prices drives people to space heaters.

As a frugal college student who could not always find what he wanted to wear at the vintage stores like Courage My Love in Kensington Market, or the occasional find at such stores as the South Pacific on Maitland I even taught myself to make shirts. Of course I would need a treadle machine in a post carbon future but did you know you can still buy one?

Apparently a manufacturer did a couple of short runs of an existing electric machine modified to mount to vintage treadles, finding a working treadle does not seem to be much of challenge you can find them on ebay or Kijiji daily.



One place where I have made progress in self sufficiency is in the kitchen where I’ve made great progress in the last year progressing from the occasional misshapen loaves of homemade bread to nice ones like this that the family actually wants me to make. Now rationalizing making my own bread had to include time, taste, cost and assumptions that I can do it using less carbon than a commercial bakery. The time is simple, I do it early weekend mornings while listening to financial web casts. Hell I’m up anyway because the kids don’t sleep and it’s too early to cut grass or go to the farmers market.
It is nice tasting bread and as long as we avoid the real discount breads it’s not only cheaper but I know the ingredients. The only real issue I can’t verify is how much energy my bread, cooked 2 loafs at a time consumes compared to a commercial bakery, per loaf it’s probably more at least until transportation is added. I also cannot know for sure that in a post carbon situation I will have access to the natural gas I will need to cook. So what to do?

Well after a surge in hits and advertising revenue on my financial blog I finally got windfall in the form of my first cheque from Google Adsense and after getting through the spring without going on strike I decided to blow my meager new earnings (plus some extra $) on a SUN OVEN


Now I was somewhat skeptical it would work as well as stated but I was willing to give it a shot as an emergency or camping oven. My first experiment fared poorly because I did not realize the full extent of my yards afternoon shading, the oven works great if I want to cook from 6:00 to 8:00 rather when the family wants to eat. My second attempt, tried and documented at the cottage and was a success, the only exception was I did not know how big a loaf I could put in the pot and it ended up a little on the small side.



The lump of dough in a new but old fashioned granite pot (speckled black enamel on steel) This was a simple white bread recipe I could do off the top of my head without a recipe book.


The Sun Oven in all it’s reflective glory, you point the oven at the sun and adjust occasionally in an attempt to keep the sun focused inward. The simple method is try to keep the shadows even on all sides, I found myself adjusting it every 15 minutes or so. You need sun glasses or you’ll go blind near this thing.



A close-up of the thermostat proving you can get the oven up to a useful working temperature. Eventually about mid cook I did touch 400 degrees.



Dough in the oven and starting to steam up


1 hour or so in, turning golden and surface cracking


The finished product waiting to be served with BBQ and fresh corn.


Now I fully understand that weather conditions, shade, heat up time etc do not make this practical for every person but for the dedicated homesteader or environmentalist, the cottager in area where the power is suspect, the Amish or the survivalist, this is a low tech, zero emissions way to cook bread, stews, soups, casseroles etc. Frequent users claim that burning is not much of an issue and if you walk away from it pointed at where the sun will be later you can come back to a fully cooked mean hours later, and even if you are late the less direct unfocused sun and insulated box will keep your dish warm for quite some time. After trying this I went looking for and found a do it yourself plan that puts the oven on a solar powered turntable that tracks the sun, neat!

While I would recommend the Sun Oven as a quite a useful contraption, for non portable use or a large family I might suggest people attempt to build a larger one that has bigger reflectors, a more stable tilting mechanism (the worst flaw of the Sun Oven) and perhaps the turntable I mentioned. I would also consider any charity project delivering Sun Ovens or some other variant of a solar oven to be a good, long term solution to fuel costs, carbon emissions and deforestation in the 3rd world.

I now know I can make cheaper, better bread with a lower carbon footprint than a commercial bakery. Now I must find a source of locally grown, organic hard wheat and a quality hand mill.Recommend this Post

Collapse of civilization, crisis and opportunity

This article from the UK Guardian shows that while the fear of civilization collapsing is growing, the survivalist movement is maturing beyond it's U.S. stereotypical militia image to a more international mainstream viewpoint including an opportunity to make future communities better.

Natural born survivors
Rising oil prices, global food shortages and the economic crisis are proof for many survivalists that society is on the brink of meltdown. But are their predictions all gloom and doom - or a chance to create new communities?

Harriet Green reports

For three years, my husband has talked about taking to the hills. About buying a smallholding on Exmoor where, with our four-year-old daughter, we can safely survive the coming storm - famine, pestilence and a total breakdown of society. I would wait for his lectures to finish, then return to my own interests. I had no time for the end of civilisation. As an editor on a glossy magazine until a few months ago, I was too busy. There was always a new Anya Hindmarch bag to buy, or a George Clooney premiere to attend.

But recently, I've wavered. Much of what he has been predicting has come true: global economic meltdown, looming environmental disaster, a sharp rise in oil and food prices that has already led to the rationing of rice in the US, and riots in dozens of countries worldwide.

This week, the details got scarier. The UN warned of a global food crisis, like a "silent tsunami", while Opec predicts that oil, which broke through $100 (£50) a barrel for the first time a few weeks ago, may soon top $200.

In the course of an idle conversation at work last week, a colleague casually revealed that he keeps a supply of tinned food in his bedroom "just in case". He has done this, apparently, ever since the July 7 bombings in 2005 and the fear of global pandemics such as Sars and bird flu.

And he's not alone. On the internet, you'll find numerous would-be survivalists discussing strategies: where to find a hideout in the UK, what goods to stock up on, and the merits of carrying a 48-hour survival kit. Some are even wondering how to get round the UK's relatively strict laws on the possession of weapons.

If not stockpiling food, many others are growing their own, with Jamie Oliver urging us to turn our gardens over to food production: sales of vegetable seeds are up 60% on last spring. Others still are moving towards taking their homes "off-grid", with rainwater harvesting and solar electricity, and withdrawing their money from pensions to invest in precious metals and other time-honoured securities.

I've started to worry. Is my family prepared for the worst? I'm reasonably nimble at the computer keyboard, and a whiz with the hairdryer, but otherwise pretty useless. I've barely made or mended anything in my life. Thankfully my husband is three years ahead of me, and - with help from the many self-sufficiency manuals he's collected - has evolved (or regressed) into a creature from the past: he's got an allotment, has turned our garden into some kind of nursery for innumerable apple trees grown from pips (farewell, ornamental rose) and recently started knitting. He even has plans for a composting loo, in the event that water supplies fail.

This kind of survivalism is not entirely new. In the 70s, with the threat of nuclear war in the air, government leaflets suggested we stock up on food and drink to last 14 days, and advised how to build our own fallout rooms. Some of my cousins left the UK for a nuke-free life in Australia.

Then there was the oil crisis, with associated blackouts and abbreviated working weeks. In 1975, the BBC reflected the forced move towards self-sufficiency and survivalism in two landmarks series: on a lighter note, Tom and Barbara dug up their back garden in the Good Life while, more apocalyptically, the drama series Survivors imagined that 90% of the world's population had been wiped out by a deadly bacterium in just a few days. The series followed a few disparate survivors as they struggled to form ad-hoc communities, relearning ancient skills in order to survive. The BBC recently announced that it is remaking Survivors to air this autumn. I can't help thinking it's horribly timely.

Survivalists have always seemed quintessentially American; scary, bear-like loners in commando jackets, loaded with ammunition. Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma bomber, was a survivalist, as were many of the scary characters in Michael Moore's anti-gun film, Bowling for Columbine, including one, with bulging eyes, who kept a loaded firearm under his pillow. But today survivalists include the likes of Barton M Biggs, former chief global strategist at Morgan Stanley, who warns in his new book, Wealth War and Wisdom, that we should accept the possibility of a breakdown of the civilised infrastructure.

"Your safe haven must be self-sufficient," he advises, "and capable of growing some kind of food, 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."

Aside from climate change, what underpins all this gloom is a belief that we have nearly reached, or already passed, peak oil - the point at which global demand for oil permanently outstrips dwindling supplies, causing prices to shoot up. And not just the price of oil, but the price of virtually everything else too, because our lives depend on ever-increasing amounts of cheap energy and synthetic petroleum byproducts.

Dr Vernon Coleman is a writer and broadcaster who has placed full-page advertisements in national newspapers to promote his new book, Oil Apocalypse. "This isn't a script for a horror movie," the terrifying text declares. "The lorry that collects your rubbish won't be running. Streetlights won't burn. Hospitals will have to close . . . There won't be any more television programmes. You won't be able to charge your mobile telephone. Within a generation, five out of six people on the planet will be dead. I'll repeat, five out of six people on the planet will be dead."

Blimey. How long have we got? Well, at the annual conference of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil in Cork last year, the former US energy secretary, Dr James Schlesinger, said that oil industry executives privately conceded that the world faces an "imminent" oil production peak. And last week it emerged that output in Russia - the world's second-biggest supplier after Saudi Arabia - has peaked already. The Saudis may have peaked, too, but they don't allow outsiders to audit them, so we won't know until it is too late. Brazil announced recently a massive new oilfield, but within a week its own government had urged caution, warning that the claims were premature.

"We've got to start preparing now," says Coleman. "The Saudis historically have always increased oil when there is a need, or if the Americans ask them to. This time they haven't done so. Suddenly they have stopped increasing. All the evidence is there: we've reached peak oil."

Like many others, Coleman suggests that the recent move towards biofuels would not have happened unless conventional oil supplies had become scarce - and that it has been a disaster. "How stupid can you be? If you use land to grow crops that enable Americans to drive 4x4s, of course you're going to reduce the amount of food that people can eat."

After a long period of steadily increasing globalisation, Coleman foresees a future in which everything will shrink back to the local. "You must prepare yourself for a different world. A world in which the rich ride horses, the middle classes use bicycles and the poor walk. If you are planning for the long-term - and in this scenario, five years is long-term - don't buy a house that relies on you having petrol for your car. You want a house in a town with a small garden where you can grow vegetables, and you want to be relatively close to railways, hospitals, shops, and libraries. The government shutting down local post offices is an enormously stupid thing to do." Coleman believes that many big companies will collapse, taking their pension plans with them, and governments will not be able to step in. He's switched his own investments to gold and silver.

Another prominent survivalist is Paul Thompson, a graphic designer living in Reading who also happens to be a modern-day prophet of doom. His website, Wolf at the Door, offers a brilliantly argued lecture on peak oil for the beginner and attracts vast numbers of visitors. In person, however, Thompson is low key. "I'm still pretty cautious. People find the idea that society might fall apart nonsense. I wouldn't bring it up in front of just anyone."

On his website, he takes reasonable account of conflicting arguments about how peak oil and climate change will play out, but overall he remains gloomy. "I'm 50 this year. I've had a good run," he says. "I want to enjoy the next five or 10 years." With that in mind, he's leaving Britain for the Czech Republic, where he will teach English and put into practice the self-sufficiency theory he's absorbed from books.

"I'm pretty depressed about Britain. I think we won't cope well. We are overpopulated, we have poor transport links. In the Czech Republic they still have trams. Eastern Europe is better prepared. They were kept back for so many years, they haven't become so urbanised. It'll be easier to slip back to a more rural lifestyle. We've got to get back to little villages and towns, growing our own food, putting in place micro-generation. You won't be able to rely on the centralised state any more.

"I've got no house, no immediate family. I have tried to make things more flexible in the past few years. I've taken money out of stocks and shares, stopped paying into a personal pension, and put all my money into bank accounts where it's accessible tomorrow if I need it. I've got total flexibility."

Has he put together any kind of emergency kit? "It's probably a good idea, but the problem is you don't know what you need. You can have petrol in your garage, food, candles and water. But you don't know for sure what you're going to be facing."

One of the most gloomy websites that you will ever read is Lifeaftertheoilcrash.org. Set up by an American, Matthew Savinar, it presents the bleakest possible outlook. A lawyer by background, Savinar litters his website with ads for freeze-dried food. There's even a picture of Savinar himself, crouching beside boxes of the stuff in his kitchen. But when asked if the Guardian could reproduce that photo, Savinar declined: "I don't need the marauding hordes descending on me here as my supplies are quite limited."

It is presumably this fear that recently led a British member of the international survivalist community to ask for advice on Survivalblog.com (which attracts 82,000 visitors a week). Noting that the British government has banned samurai swords, he wondered what other weapons might be kept handy. American correspondents replied that he should get out of England soon, while the US and New Zealand were still letting in foreigners.

Having no samurai swords at our house, we have little chance of fighting off the hungry masses when they tear lettuces from our window boxes and scale the fence of our allotment. And the truth is that probably few places in Britain are much safer - not even in the most remote parts of the countryside. Which is why we have put our hopes in a saner band of survivalists, who believe the answer is to work together.

The "transition town" movement was started by an Englishman, Rob Hopkins, after a stint working as a teacher in Kinsale, Ireland. After learning about peak oil, Hopkins and his traumatised students spent several months trying to imagine what Kinsale would be like without oil, some years in the future - then worked backwards to create an "energy descent" plan that, on completion, was unanimously endorsed by the local authorities.

Returning to the UK, Hopkins started something similar in Totnes, Devon, which became the first official transition town. There are now more than 35 of these grassroots initiatives up and running, not only in towns but also cities, villages and entire islands - and more than 500 communities, worldwide, are taking steps to join the Transition Network. Even Ambridge, on The Archers, is weighing it up.

Hopkins recently published a manual, The Transition Handbook, a startlingly cheerful book that gives some idea as to how transition initiatives work - from the very early stages, in which groups raise awareness through film screenings and talks, to the later development of local food networks and even the launch of local currencies.

The movement uses 12 steps, rather like Alcoholics Anonymous, to wean us off our dangerous addiction to oil. This includes honouring elders, Hopkins says. "They have the knowledge of how things were done in the past" - when our lives depended so much less on the black stuff. "We have been doing work with people who remember the 30s and 40s, people who say it would have been insane to eat apples from New Zealand. Back then, all the food came from near the town, but we don't have that resilience any more. In the lorry strike of 2001, we had only three days' worth of food in Totnes."

The key to effecting a smooth transition is rebuilding resilience and self-sufficiency at every scale - from the household to the wider community - all at once. To Hopkins and others, Cuba offers a great example of effective community-based survivalism at the national level. Many transition towns have been launched with screenings of The Power of Community, a short documentary showing what happened to Cuba after the breakdown of the Soviet Union led to oil supplies drying up, and the US embargo stopped many other crucial imports.

Faced with potential starvation or capitulation to the US, the Cubans gradually turned from heavy reliance on carbon-intensive agriculture: all kinds of urban spaces were cultivated, from window boxes to wasteland, and oxen were put back into use as there was no fuel to run tractors. The transition took several years, and for a while Cubans had to forgo the equivalent of a meal a day, but eventually even people in cities were producing half their annual fruit and vegetable needs.

It's films like this that explain why Hopkins remains fundamentally upbeat, and rejects the gloomiest prognoses. "If we didn't do anything," he agrees, "there are all sorts of grim scenarios. But I like to think of those as like Dickens' Ghost of Christmas Future - just one possible scenario."

Thus, when the price of oil rises, Hopkins cheers. "It's like a racehorse owner cheering his horse. The things I want to see happen only happen in times of high oil prices. In the 70s, there was the most incredible flowering of creativity. Solar power, permaculture - they all started in the 70s. Then cheap oil came back, and everything went out of the window. High oil prices will stimulate creativity all over again: the knock-on of rising food prices will make it more cost-effective to grow food here; the higher cost of petrol in your car will make you ask if it's worth making the journey." The bonus is that, as we burn fewer fossil fuels, emissions will be reduced and climate change might be slowed.

Peak oil can, Hopkins accepts, confirm the widespread belief that people are inherently selfish. But the "head for the hills" response, he says, is more typically North American than British. "I wrote a piece on my website, transitionculture.org, called 'Why the survivalists have got it wrong'. That elicited more comments than any previous post. Some came from survivalist websites, and included such gems as 'Which is better, a gun or a club? The answer: You can use a gun as a club but you can't use a club as a gun.'"

Hopkins does possess survival skills, and he thinks they're important. "Bushcraft training is very useful. It's very empowering, learning to eat the things that are around you." But there are other things we need to learn too. Indeed, a key part of the transition-town process is what he calls the "great reskilling". "We no longer have many of the basic skills our grandparents took for granted. One of the most useful things a transition initiative can do is to make training widely available in a range of these skills."

What skills does he have in mind? Bicycle maintenance? Home energy efficiency? Basic food growing? "You need to look at the skills people used to have that might still be appropriate, as well as looking at the skills people have now. Speaking to older people in the area around Totnes, it turns out that, for example, they all knew how to darn their socks. I know very few people my age who know how to do that, and it is a skill that, once we get beyond the throwaway society, we may well need again. Hence the sock-darning workshop we are running."

Sock darning, eh? It's not as glamorous as those George Clooney screenings, and it lacks the superficial appeal of a hoard of rice, or gold coins. But I'm pretty sure my husband hasn't tried it yet, and in the spirit of amiably competitive self-sufficiency that I'm confident will soon become mainstream, I have decided that sock-darning may well be the survival skill for me.

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