Practical Question and Answer series
For more questions and answers see the
Q&A Index.
2) How do I get access to hard-to-find objects, materials
and ingredients? (i.e., saffron, oranges, pipe-tobacco, light
bulbs, batteries, electronic parts, solar panel parts, ammunition
for guns. Basically, anything that still requires industrial techniques.)
I'm going to answer this question in two parts. Firstly, since
there is definitely too much instructional material required cover
each item individually, but I'll look the items in terms of several
categories. And then secondly I'll suggest a number of strategies
that you can adopt for dealing with those possible shortages.
So let me break down some items into different categories.
Your first three examples, saffron, oranges and tobacco,
I'll put into the first broad category of organic "items" because they are biological
and can be grown without any industrial infrastructure or technology.
That in and of itself isn't an issue, of course, the problem comes
when you live in a bioregion where those specific things
can't be grown.
So we can break that category down further in local organic items, and nonlocal
organic items, and you'll have a different strategy for
dealing with shortages of each. What falls into each list for
you depends on where you live. (So if you live in a northern temperate
climate, saffron and oranges would be nonlocal organic, but tobacco
would be local organic.)
Most of the rest of your examples fall into a second broad category
I'll call industrial items.
Items in this category require industrial techniques to manufacture,
they all require a lot of cheap energy to produce, and they're
all unsustainable by definition because they use up finite resources
or cause long term damage to the planet's ability to support life
in the process of their manufacture.
We can break the industrial category into two subcategories as
well. The first I'll call industrial
durables: items produced industrially that will last a
long time. For example, LED lights will supposedly last for something
like one hundred thousand hours of use. So if you used an LED
light for three hours each day, 365 days a year, it would last
91 years. That's pretty durable. Solar panels and some other electric
parts can last for a long time as well. In contrast, industrial
consumables are industrial produced but get used up or
worn out quickly. Batteries are a good example, because even if
you treat them well and recharge them, most batteries will still
last only a few years. Ammunition is in an industrial consumable,
and so are incandescent light bulbs, pharmaceuticals, disposable
coffee cups, and most objects people in the industrialized world
use in their day-to-day lives.
I should also note that these categories of items aren't completely
distinct. Rather, they can be overlapping. A can of tomatoes like
you would find in the grocery store falls partly into the category
of organic, but it is also an industrial consumable because it
is produced and distributed by an industrial system.
Now we come to the strategies for dealing with shortages of these
items. You've probably heard the old saying. "Use it up, wear
it out, make it do or do without," which was popular during the
Depression and Second World War. I think that's part of the answer.
As an extension of that I see four general strategies for
dealing with these shortages: stocking-up
and conserving, substitution
and localization, improvisation,
and restructuring.
Stocking up and conservation
as a strategy is an extension of the "use it up, wear it out"
part of that saying. This approach is the strategy of choice for
the industrial items, especially industrial consumables like batteries,
pharmaceuticals, and so on. This strategy is only temporary, since
eventually you'll run out of whatever it is that you've stocked
up on. So the main intent is to smooth the transition from an
industrial to a non-industrial way of living, to give you and
your community breathing room while you figure out how to implement
the other strategies.
You can extend the effective length of this strategy by conserving
and taking good care of whatever you've stocked up on. Make a
list of the things you need and determine what kind of storage
conditions and care they require. If you are stocking up
on pharmaceuticals, remember that many pharmaceuticals have a
specific shelf life (after which they may become increasingly
ineffective) and appropriate temperatures and conditions
for storage. If you need batteries for something (like a hearing
aid), figure out what methods of recharging (like charging devices
and charging interval) will prolong the lifetimes of the batteries
you need. And for whatever you are stocking up on, try to figure
out how you can use less of it, or use it more efficiently, so
your supply will last longer or so that you require a smaller
(and less expensive) supply in the first place.
Now is the time to start stocking up. Right now. As oil and natural
gas become more expensive and less available, so will almost everything
else. However, I'm definitely
not suggesting that you run off and order a thousand cases of
surplus army rations. Rather, start to stock up simply by modifying
the way that you usually get things. If you can, buy extras
of the things that you usually use each time you get them, so
that over time you have an increasingly larger buffer against
shortages. That way you'll have more of what you usually use rather
than stockpiles of something that is strange to you (like army
rations) and that you may be less inclined to use. Try buying
things in bulk and when they are on sale. In the long term
this is less also expensive (assuming you store and use things
properly to avoid wastage). Keep track of when you got items and
rotate through your stock, using the oldest first so that nothing
becomes expired.
Set a target for how much of things you want to stock up on --
say, a year's supply of canned goods -- and then work out how
long it will take you to buy that much bit by bit, and where to
store things. A good book to help you do this is Peggy Layton's
Emergency
Food Storage & Survival Handbook. It covers methods of
storing food and discusses how much food you actually need to
store.
The disadvantage of the stocking up strategy is that it requires
both storage space and money upfront. If you live in a small urban
apartment it can be tough to find a place to keep ten 20 kg sacks of
grain and dried beans. And it's tough to buy a case of canned
tomatoes if you only have enough money available to buy one can
-- or no cans. I have no easy solution for those problems, but
they can both be addressed to some extent by using creativity
and community. Even a small apartment probably has some nooks
and crannies, or spaces under beds, where stocks can be creatively
stored. If you have a shortage of cash, you might try teaming
up with other people in your neighbourhood to create a "buying
club" that can pool funds, buy in bulk and then divide up the
food amongst the group at a lower cost per person.
As a final note on this strategy, I want to make a distinction
between "stocking up" and hoarding. Stocking up is planning ahead
and preparing to meet the needs of your community. Hoarding is
keeping limited supplies to yourself when you have an abundance
and other people are in great need. No one can predict exactly
how things will play out during collapse, but I think that in
the long term the community and goodwill you can build by sharing
supplies is much more valuable and constructive than a temporary,
secretive hoard of supplies.
Substitution and localization: You can't stock up on everything,
and even what you do stock up on will eventually run out. Substitution
and localization are crucial for dealing with that. Many of the
items above have a rough equivalent that you can substitute and
obtain locally and on a sustainable basis.
The organic category of items is best addressed by this strategy.
If you are living in a colder part of north america and can't
grow saffron and coriander, there are plenty of plants that you
can grow or gather for flavouring, including herbs and "spicy"
flavours like hot peppers. For drinks like coffee there are a
variety of rough substitutes that you can make yourself; roasted
chicory has been a very popular coffee substitute historically.
In some cases, substitution is pretty easy. You can stop using
disposable coffee cups and use a mug (assuming you don't already).
In other cases, like substituting a slingshot or a bow and
arrow for a gun, you will require more skill and practice.
Generally substitution is something that happens on a case-by-case
basis. Yesterday's practical answer about toothpaste, soap, and
razors is an example of that.
So look at the things you consume daily and try to figure out
what you can substitute an alternative for, and what skills and
tools you would need to do that. I'll talk a lot more about those
things in planning and preparation writings I'm working on now.
Improvisation is the "make it do" part of the strategy.
It's a strategy best suited to the category of items I called
industrial durables like LEDs, electric motors or generators,
or simple machines. You may want to repair them, extend their
useful lifespan, or modify them to perform tasks they weren't
originally designed for. Or you may want to use industrially produced
scrap to create new tools or useful devices (like making gardening
tools out of automotive springs, or hand-cranked generators out
of windshield wiper motors).
This strategy is all about knowledge, skill, and creativity.
And again, the scope is so large that I can't get into too much
detail in this answer (which is already quite long) but there
is more to come.
Technical knowledge and experience are helpful for this strategy,
but so are fresh eyes and flexible minds.
You'll want to have a good reference library on a variety of topics
to help you with improvisation. Two categories of useful knowledge
you might want to include are blacksmithing and electronics.
Blacksmithing requires
a lot of energy, either in terms of wood, charcoal or coal. That
means either cutting wood for that purpose when forests should
be expanding, or using some of the few remaining stockpiles of
coal — although you could build a forge that runs on biodigested
methane, with some planning and innovation. Additionally, forges
generally produce some air pollution.
However, I've included this section anyway, partly
because I don't believe that the people reading this are
likely to cut down forests for forges, and because I think that
people can integrate the information into an intelligent way of
dealing with collapse and building sustainable communities. A
knowledge of blacksmithing can help to make basic gardening tools
which, although not essential, make things easier and hopefully
mean that people will use fewer calories on work that is harder
than it needs to be. Using less calories means requiring less
food, which means you would need to cultivate less land.
One of my favourite books on blacksmithing is
Alex Weygers' The
Complete Modern Blacksmith,
which is a compilation of his three earlier books on the subject.
Weygers is a consummate improviser, and the book is essentially
about how to build your own shop out of any materials you can
scrounge, and then how to build your own blacksmithing tools out
of available metal taken from car springs and bodies, and so on.
It's great, well illustrated, and very appropriate for application
in a collapse context. In that same vein, check out Basic Blacksmithing:
An Introduction to Toolmaking With Locally Available Materials,
by David Harries and Bernhard Heer. For very comprehensive books
on blacksmithing see The Art of Blacksmithing by Alex W. Bealer (with over 500
illustrations), or New
Edge of the Anvil: A Resource Book for the Blacksmith by Jack Andrews.
There are also
many good books for learning about electronics. Getting
Started in Electronics by
Forrest M. Mims is cheap and published by (and available at) Radio
Shack. It's illustrated with 127 pages and it's great for the
newcomer to electronics. It will teach you the basics, and one
skilled off-the-grid electronic tinkerer told me that the only
electronics resource he recommends is this book, and some
time and ingenuity to think through the challenge at hand. Mims
has written about 60 books, including short references like his
Circuit Scrapbook and Engineer's Notebook,
which may help you find a specific circuit if you need one. If
you want a really comprehensive book on electronics which is still
accessible to people with basic electronics knowledge, check out
Paul Horowitz and Winfield Hill's thousand page tome The Art of Electronics.
Restructuring is the "do
without" part of the strategy. Eventually everything you stocked
up will run out, and if you can't substitute it, produce it locally,
or improvise it, you may be out of luck.
Restructuring is about looking beyond the immediate shortage to
restructure your community and lifestyle so that you no longer
require the items you don't have, or at least so that you can
cope without them. It's about addressing the very root cause of
the problem in the long term. But by learning from the example
indigenous peoples who lived well and sustainably for thousands
of years, and by shaking off and deconstructing the dysfunctions
of civilization, we can eventually make our communities thrive
with the land. Restructuring is the most long-term, and in many
ways the most difficult, of all the strategies. And it's something
that we will have to figure out for ourselves, together, as we
go.
Learning how to restructure communities is one of the deepest
underlying goals of the In the Wake Project, so it is hard to
pick out just a few suggested references. But if you read the
suggested readings and
other great, current analytical sites like Anthropik and
Ran Prieur you'll be heading in the right direction.
In conclusion, I encourage you to take some time to think about
the items you use in your every day life, especially if some of
them are medicines or devices that help you deal with disabilities.
Get together with people in your community to talk about it. What
kind of items do you need, what would you expect shortages of
in the case of serious economic and industrial disruption, and
what strategies can you implement to deal with those shortages?
I'd love to hear what you come up with.
This all leads into more issues of planning and preparation, which
some of my upcoming writings will deal with in much greater detail.
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