The August 9, 2009, Washington Post article “Apocalypse Later? I’m Going Local Now,” by Doug Fine struck a nerve with me. For six or nine months now, probably as long as I have been unemployed, the stock market crashed, health costs escalated, and my savings dwindled, I have been thinking that I need to work on my survival skills including learning how to hunt for my own meat and raise my own vegetables.
These are just a couple skills out of many that one might need should we see a total breakdown of life as we now it. Doug Fine addresses these issues quite well. He lives on a ranch in New Mexico, and along with like-minded neighbors, is trying to attain a lifestyle in which he is self-sufficient as possible. In his own words, “I’m examining my place in a hypothetical post-oil, post-consumer society 40 years in the future.”
This includes using solar power, getting milk from goats, growing his own produce (irrigated w/o electricity) or buying in locally, raising chickens for eggs, etc. Doug talks of a society in which one barters for goods and services and ponders providing security for his family in the case of a breakdown of civil society. His three year experiment in self-sufficiency has lead him to believe that “the only way I can become truly independent (a word I like even better is “indigenous”) is through incremental steps based in a local economy.”
I have some good friends in Vermont from whom Doug Fine and those of us who have similar concerns about the eventual collapse of systems and supply chains could learn a lesson. They have grown their own vegetables, hunted for meat, raised cows, chickens, goats, etc, to provide for food throughout the year. They heat their home with a wood stove and have no AC’s. They barter services such as vehicle and farm equipment repair and meat butchering and packaging for other services and goods.
They really have a head start on preparing for chaos and surviving on the “local” grid.
