I grew up on a supposed, self sustaining farm and all I remember was that it was a lot of work and we worked sun up to when we finished. We planted lots of vegetables, picked a lot of berries and fruits that my late mother would can and freeze all summer long and into the early fall. We lived in a very cold climate place so summers where short and the winters were long. We raised chickens, beef cattle and pigs for food. And we were dirt poor as well, despite having all the food we wanted. And just to add more salt to the wounds, in late summer, we would head for the woods to cut twelve to fifteen cords of wood to keep the farm house warm during the cold months. We had a wood fired kitchen range, a parlor stove in the family room, and an add on wood furnace in the basement, and the upstairs was still cold enough in the dead of winter to have hoar frost on the hardwood floors when we got up in the mornings. This was all in the late 1960's and early 1970' before I left for basic training in 1974.
Our rule, because the nearest actual grocery store was fifteen mile away, was if we didn't grow it or shoot it, we did without. This is very close to the scenario you outlined above for actual homesteading without internet and cell phones. You are right. Very few people have lived like that in recent memory and very few would be able to manage that now. If the electrical grid around the world were to collapse now, there would be a lot of dead people because they would kill each other over what they could scrounge until it was all gone. Then some of them would resort to cannibalism. Eventually, the survivors would figure out how to create small tribes of like minded people and start growing and hunting again. The bottom line is by the time that starts happening. millions of humans will have died off. That is the reality of a total grid collapse. If the world were to revert back to a pre-industrial civilization, a lot of humans will die in the process.
Given the thousands that are dying in the wars right now, that might not be a bad thing.
Maybe if more people understood or lived through this, they would understand. They take it all for granted and can't wrap their heads around the facts.
I have been trying to understand why so many people's thinking goes immediately to "loss of electricity". That is not something which is going to happen in general collapse.
Is this due to a misgeneralization from the short-term loss of electricity during short-term natural disasters or wars? Probably. It's a misgeneralization. Puerto Rico's grid never really got repaired after Hurricane Maria, but electricity came back on a "I'm importing solar panels and batteries to supply my own small community" basis. Electricity is very valuable and so societies go *out of their way* to get it.
We're losing the organizational capacity to do megaprojects or to maintain megaprojects, which is why I don't like the situation with California being supplied by a very very long aqueduct from Colorado. But a more fragmented, medieval-Europe style political situation with lots of tiny microcountries... is still quite capable of getting electricity.
There were some historic economic weirdnesses about electricity due to difficulty storing it. This tech barrier has been passed. It was also historically easiest to generate at large centralized sites. Not any more. The solar industry is technologically complex, but (despite some inaccurate sensationalist headlines recently) there is no single point of failure.
Thank you for this. I would just take this a bit further and note that this homesteading scenario only describes the first (and maybe in rare instances, the second?) generation of survivors. As already noted, this homesteading scenario requires a civilization capable of providing, at a minimum, tools needed for chopping wood, planting seeds, mending wounds, creating clothes, etc.. We would also need a sustainable source of firewood, which is not going to be easy to do when fires are raging and no one to put them out, and destroying the very resources needed for homesteading. I think people will quickly be forced to go even further back in our history, and adapting a hunter/gatherer behavior and lifestyle is more likely. This too will be an extraordinary challenge for most modern humans who lack all of the skillsets necessary to stay alive in such a scenario. Keep in mind also that the homesteading you described occurred during a stable climate, which we no longer have. The modern, fast-changing climate puts even more pressure on all the plant and animal life on earth - the natural resources that humans need to survive. Where will the large herds of herbivores (or fish) be to sustain human populations at levels to survive regional natural hazards driven more frequent and more severe by climate change? Can populations grow crops when floods and droughts are even more common and severe? Will there be some kind of civilization and support system to move food, tools, and other resources where they are needed? At least the homesteaders had that, even if most of the time they couldn't afford it.
Yes, it's worth pointing out that there is no real preparing for collapse. I doubt anyone can imagine what it will be like.
"Also, it’s worth pointing out that maybe we wouldn’t have to give all of this up if we could figure out a way to live together, sustainably, with a moderate amount of technology so we don’t have to live like the original homesteaders."
There is no sustainable way of living that uses any amount of technology. I'd sure like to be wrong on that but I've spent years trying to figure out if there is a way. I'm still looking. However, if there is a way, you can guarantee that most people would not want to live like that and would resist with everything they had. For a while.
By the way, that picture of early homesteaders is not even sustainable. They will have used some kind of technology, usually stuff that uses fashioned metal in some way. That all needs replacing over time.
From the pieces I've seen, it seems like she is not considering downgrading modernity but moving people out of poverty and to different locations. If that's right, this doesn't seem like something worth reading. "The Old Way" by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas seems like a better guide to what's coming for future generations.
What I'm dismissing is the notion that modern society can continue in some form. Moving people out of poverty or just to different locations is an attempt to keep modernity going. If she is acknowledging that modernity can't continue and is proposing a way down to sustainable groups then it would be worth reading. Is that what she is saying?
Mike it's best if you read the book. But the fact is "modernity" can keep going ie communities that enjoy arts, education, electricty, medical care, etc.
Just in a different way to the insanity it's become.
Basically Vince proposes "sanctuary cities" in the sub arctic to protect the earth's population from the coming unlivable heat.
Here's an example of her well thought out thesis:
“there’s plenty of room. If we allow 20 square meters of space per person—around double the minimum habitable size for a house allowed under the International Residential Code—11 billion people would need 220,000 square kilometers of land to live on."
Please let me know if you have a better alternative. But first, maybe checkout the book.
In a rapid total collapse of the systems we depend upon for sustaining life, most people would not survive. We shouldn't expect to be able to reinvent the wheel and devise clever work arounds to somehow completely overcome the hurdles and thrive miraculously.
The tragic aftermath of hurricane Helene in the South is a sobering reminder.
After sudden devastation, survivors are faced with catastrophic loss and immediate danger of more. The damage, while extensive, is a microcosm of what is total collapse could entail. Most survivors will be able to access safe places to be removed from immediate danger.
But especially those who found themselves trapped by 400 roads being washed out in NC, the reality of isolation without power, water or food is a grim situation. If your house survived the flooding and you had a stash of food and water and a generator with fuel you would have a short term boost to survive until you could be rescued. But that's probably the best you could expect.
I concluded long ago that it's not possible to retool society under duress of a catastrophic event. We are focused on short term patches that will carry us through common events like flooding, droughts, snow storms, power outages, etc. We are probably able, as a consequence, to limp along for a few months without the grid. But longer than that, forget it.
Unless our whole society suddenly becomes focused on hardening our brittle places, life will continue to become more and more precarious, even in places where we assume are removed from obvious natural disasters.
Are there scalable long term solutions for survival? I don't think so. I think the best we can do is to plan for ways to mitigate against the things we might have a chance of evading in short term. That includes locating somewhere where the exposure to natural disasters is less likely.
It's not plausible or rational to try to retool your entire existence and ignore the underlying dependency we have on modern technology, supply chains, and infrastructure. If those go, we're all cooked.
The world has about 11 billion acres of agricultural land, which works out to 1.4 acres per person. A typical 19th century homestead was 160 acres. It takes about 500 acres to support a hunter-gatherer. The true horror of these homesteading fantasies is that they rest on the unspoken starting assumption that >99% of humankind will have to be exterminated to make enough room for homesteaders to be self-sufficient using the old low-tech agricultural methods. The idea that many people are fantasizing about these scenarios gives me the creeps.
The stats in the post are accurate - I just have trouble wrapping my mind around numbers in the billions. Whereas thinking about each person only getting 1.4 measly acres is easier to conceptualize. It puts an exclamation point on just how little margin for error 8 billion people have on this one small planet. Without the complex interlocking technologies we've developed to make efficient use of limited space, we're pretty much all dead.
The other day I was listening to a podcast about the Endangered Species Act and they played a clip of Jeff Bridges, who owns a 900 acre ranch in Montana, preaching about how important it is for us to increase the grizzly bear population. There's not room for a grizzly bear on my 1.4 acres.
Hmm I don't want to be rude but I wonder if Americans are more prone to see things more in terms of self-survival solutions. "Every family for itself"
Perhaps influenced by the national story myth of brave homesteaders - which Jessica analyses brilliantly.
For example, one of the things that struck me about the TV show, LOST, was how the survivors wandered around the beach on their own. The story is driven by the forming of random relationships.
A European script would have had leaders gathering everyone together on the beach, assessing tyhings as a group ...
The only solution is community based.
Otherwise, yes you are looking at "The true horror of these homesteading fantasies is that they rest on the unspoken starting assumption that >99% of humankind will have to be exterminated"
I think we're basically agreeing. There's a pernicious TV show called "Yellowstone" that invites Americans to masturbate to the pornographic myth of the rugged self-made man. From one viewpoint, Yellowstone's patriarch - played by Kevin Costner - is defending the honor of his family ranch against encroaching corporate developers. From another viewpoint, Costner's character is a sneering entitled NIMBY who governs his inherited 750,000 acre private fiefdom like a feudal warlord.
I of course hold the latter view. No man is an island - especially not men who inherited their wealth. The world is now way too overpopulated for the luxury of masturbating about rugged individualist survival fantasies. It just obscures the fact that the actual choice ahead of us is community or death.
I'm going to be blunt: the world population is going to drop, a lot, because it has overshot ecologically. There's no actual choice about this. We can do this the nice and highly effective way, with birth control and empowering women -- we can still do this. Or it'll happen the nasty way with starvation, disease, and warfare -- this is arguably already happening in some places.
Natalists are evil. As an apex predator, humans have to control our own population if we want to have any hope of maintaining the ecology which supports us (something we're doing very badly at). Most apex predators do this by being extremely territorial. Humans have the option of artificial birth control, which gives us the nice way out. Unfortunately, some humans (natalists) are actively fighting against that.
So take that as an initial assumption. Homesteading is still ridiculous fantasy for other reasons (some of which Jessica laid out and some of which I laid out in another comment). But we're all going to have to get over getting the creeps over mass drop in population, because it is going to happen period whether we like it or not, it's just a question of whether we do it the sensible way or the stupid violent way.
When I bought my land in 1984, ten acres enough was sort of my bible, along with the good life by the Nearings. I built earth sheltered by using some, but not all by any means, of Oehler's $50 and up underground house book. No electricity, built by hand, although I did have a chainsaw. Logs, stones, and a local mill...Didn't need a/c, well was a sandpoint driven in the kitchen. Outhouse matter was covered by sawdust, so no flies and there is a cover on the back of the outhouse and compost pile nearby to shovel into for humanure. Rarely if ever went to town. Outhouse, handpump, james washer. Gardens, fruit trees planted. Rarely ate meat, unless it was freshly killed. Didn't raise animals. Did buy 25 pounds of rice, beans, etc to keep in a small area off the kitchen which was buried in earth. Yep. I'm glad we did what we did, how we did. We do have solar electricity now, but miinimal. We do have 12 volt freezer, and the new battery technology lasts so long now. 6-8000 cycles. That's 20 years or so. Hey, at 75 I'm not too worried about it. However, not a fan of wars and war like peoples. Remember, homesteaders back in the day got their land which was stoled from indigenous peoples who already were prepared for the most part.
Sometimes I fantasize about the homesteading life. I have a few hobbies that are romanticized in the homesteading world - gardening, fermentation, canning. I can sew. I'm good at making do. But I recently read a substack linking the homesteading movement post Vietnam in the US to white supremacy and it really opened my eyes. I think of it differently now - that homesteading as a sustainable option for future collapse would require a lot of people to die, just like manifest destiny (which I was taught in school in the early 90s btw) required the ethnic cleansing of indigenous populations in America. And I'm not sure I want to participate in a system like that. I highly suggest The Poor Proles Almanac on substack if you have an interest in homesteading and permaculture.
Brilliant. I grew up on a working farm, and by the time I was 12, I was determined to get away the minute I could. It wasn't because I hated it; it was because the work- on top of going to school and actually attempting to learn things- was just so backbreakingly hard. Later in life, I spent 10 years cooking in top kitchens and did well at it because the physical demands and stress were so much less than farm work. A significant percentage of these prepper idiots nowadays will end up whacking themselves and their families with self-administered cases of botulism from improper canning techniques or trying to build a wall that eventually collapses on them.
Technology doesn't go backwards. I'm not saying individual technologies don't get lost. But it doeesn't go backwards. We will not revert to a pre-industrial civilization. That's a fantasy.
The fall of Rome and the collapse of the Roman empire led to the medieval era in Europe. They lost a lot of the large megaprojects (like aqueducts) and some very valuable special techniques (like Roman concrete), but the medieval tech was not the pre-Roman-imperial tech. It was new tech.
Another example: the collapse of the major oasis civilizations in Central Asia due to repeated invasions by herding cultures (they were dependent on very, very long irrigaton aqueducts which kept being damaged by the invasions, among other things). Even after the cities shrank massively and the area was largely occupied by herders, the tech didn't go backwards to the state before. The knowledge didn't disappear, and any tech which was useful kept being used, and new tech got developed.
I get very irritated by primitivist fantasizing. I understand the urge to look to the pre-industrial world for what a post-collapse civilization would look like, but it's simply *wrong*. A post-collapse civilization will be filled with technology which didn't exist in the 19th century. That's just how it *works*. Once a technology is known, it doesn't magically become unknown. It may be abandoned for economic reasons (like Roman concrete, expensive and not necessary for the smaller polities) or organizational reasons (like Roman aqueducts, very expensive and hard to maintain without a huge government), but it doesn't get abandoned just because.
If a tech is useful to the new smaller city-states, and they have the organizational capacity to make it happen, *they keep the tech and probably develop new tech*.
A lot of our modern tech really is just about knowing how to do it. Everything involving electricity? The key is Maxwell's Equations, which are just, y'know, equations in a book. The *ancient Romans* had the raw materials and manufacturing capacity to make copper wire and batteries and electric motors. What they were missing was the *know-how*. Electricity is so valuable that we *are not going to lose the know-how*.
I am quite certain that a "post-collapse" society will feature electricity everywhere. And motors. And batteries. Maybe certain current battery formulas will prove too difficult to produce given supply chain issues, but there are so many different types, some sort will get produced. I suspect we will even have solar panels. Yes, maybe not the exact same models we're using now, but some sort. They're *too valuable* to abandon, and they can be supported at a lower level of organizational complexity than the giant aqueducts, and they're much less prone to single-point failure (an aqueduct has to work across its *entire* length to work at all, making it brittle). They have a pretty complicated supply chain but the value is very high and a lot of effort will be put into keeping them going.
We'll probably also have computer chips, though we might go back to slower, simpler chip designs, because a lot of the really valuable stuff they're used for really could be done with chips of the 1980s -- if the economics demand some chips but the supply chain becomes a lot more expensive, they will start being focused on the genuinely high-value areas and will be optimized for cost of production under a supply-chain-constrained environment.
What fails during collapse is supply chains and trade. During the Roman empire, everyone in Palestine was building their houses using German wood. This stopped. Everyone in Rome was eating Egyptian grain. This stopped. Supply chains for high-value, low-volume materials (spices then... computer chips now?) could be maintained. Bulk-shipping low-value materials long distances became intractable.
Technology doesn't stop, because it's largely a matter of knowledge, not a matter of supply chains. Any technology which doesn't hit supply chain limits will stay in use.
Humans could get completely wiped out -- that is a baseline scenario, but there's no point in planning for it, because you won't be there and neither will anyone you know.
If that doesn't happen: The future, after the mass population drops, will not look like the past. It will look *different*. Look at cases of local collapse. Skip looking at the large, organized polity (which occupies most of the history books) and instead compare the situation *before* the large organized polity to the situation *after* it. They're typically both a bunch of small, feuding groups with an inability to do megaprojects, but *the tech is completely different*.
Some homesteading could be better than none. Just to soften a potential collapse? Some prepping, not for longtime survival, but just to make it easier some weeks? I have a minimal homestead with larger farms nearby. All farms will wear out over some decades, but its perhaps better than nothing? The farms have cows and sheep. They can make food without heavy machinery.
I grew up on a supposed, self sustaining farm and all I remember was that it was a lot of work and we worked sun up to when we finished. We planted lots of vegetables, picked a lot of berries and fruits that my late mother would can and freeze all summer long and into the early fall. We lived in a very cold climate place so summers where short and the winters were long. We raised chickens, beef cattle and pigs for food. And we were dirt poor as well, despite having all the food we wanted. And just to add more salt to the wounds, in late summer, we would head for the woods to cut twelve to fifteen cords of wood to keep the farm house warm during the cold months. We had a wood fired kitchen range, a parlor stove in the family room, and an add on wood furnace in the basement, and the upstairs was still cold enough in the dead of winter to have hoar frost on the hardwood floors when we got up in the mornings. This was all in the late 1960's and early 1970' before I left for basic training in 1974.
Our rule, because the nearest actual grocery store was fifteen mile away, was if we didn't grow it or shoot it, we did without. This is very close to the scenario you outlined above for actual homesteading without internet and cell phones. You are right. Very few people have lived like that in recent memory and very few would be able to manage that now. If the electrical grid around the world were to collapse now, there would be a lot of dead people because they would kill each other over what they could scrounge until it was all gone. Then some of them would resort to cannibalism. Eventually, the survivors would figure out how to create small tribes of like minded people and start growing and hunting again. The bottom line is by the time that starts happening. millions of humans will have died off. That is the reality of a total grid collapse. If the world were to revert back to a pre-industrial civilization, a lot of humans will die in the process.
Given the thousands that are dying in the wars right now, that might not be a bad thing.
Maybe if more people understood or lived through this, they would understand. They take it all for granted and can't wrap their heads around the facts.
I have been trying to understand why so many people's thinking goes immediately to "loss of electricity". That is not something which is going to happen in general collapse.
Is this due to a misgeneralization from the short-term loss of electricity during short-term natural disasters or wars? Probably. It's a misgeneralization. Puerto Rico's grid never really got repaired after Hurricane Maria, but electricity came back on a "I'm importing solar panels and batteries to supply my own small community" basis. Electricity is very valuable and so societies go *out of their way* to get it.
We're losing the organizational capacity to do megaprojects or to maintain megaprojects, which is why I don't like the situation with California being supplied by a very very long aqueduct from Colorado. But a more fragmented, medieval-Europe style political situation with lots of tiny microcountries... is still quite capable of getting electricity.
There were some historic economic weirdnesses about electricity due to difficulty storing it. This tech barrier has been passed. It was also historically easiest to generate at large centralized sites. Not any more. The solar industry is technologically complex, but (despite some inaccurate sensationalist headlines recently) there is no single point of failure.
Thank you for this. I would just take this a bit further and note that this homesteading scenario only describes the first (and maybe in rare instances, the second?) generation of survivors. As already noted, this homesteading scenario requires a civilization capable of providing, at a minimum, tools needed for chopping wood, planting seeds, mending wounds, creating clothes, etc.. We would also need a sustainable source of firewood, which is not going to be easy to do when fires are raging and no one to put them out, and destroying the very resources needed for homesteading. I think people will quickly be forced to go even further back in our history, and adapting a hunter/gatherer behavior and lifestyle is more likely. This too will be an extraordinary challenge for most modern humans who lack all of the skillsets necessary to stay alive in such a scenario. Keep in mind also that the homesteading you described occurred during a stable climate, which we no longer have. The modern, fast-changing climate puts even more pressure on all the plant and animal life on earth - the natural resources that humans need to survive. Where will the large herds of herbivores (or fish) be to sustain human populations at levels to survive regional natural hazards driven more frequent and more severe by climate change? Can populations grow crops when floods and droughts are even more common and severe? Will there be some kind of civilization and support system to move food, tools, and other resources where they are needed? At least the homesteaders had that, even if most of the time they couldn't afford it.
Yes, it's worth pointing out that there is no real preparing for collapse. I doubt anyone can imagine what it will be like.
"Also, it’s worth pointing out that maybe we wouldn’t have to give all of this up if we could figure out a way to live together, sustainably, with a moderate amount of technology so we don’t have to live like the original homesteaders."
There is no sustainable way of living that uses any amount of technology. I'd sure like to be wrong on that but I've spent years trying to figure out if there is a way. I'm still looking. However, if there is a way, you can guarantee that most people would not want to live like that and would resist with everything they had. For a while.
By the way, that picture of early homesteaders is not even sustainable. They will have used some kind of technology, usually stuff that uses fashioned metal in some way. That all needs replacing over time.
It's true, and 8 billion people can't live like the homesteaders did. The forests would be gone in a few years, even faster than now.
Check "Nomad Century" Gaia Vince
From the pieces I've seen, it seems like she is not considering downgrading modernity but moving people out of poverty and to different locations. If that's right, this doesn't seem like something worth reading. "The Old Way" by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas seems like a better guide to what's coming for future generations.
With respect, Mike, you'd need to read it before dismissing its arguments.
What I'm dismissing is the notion that modern society can continue in some form. Moving people out of poverty or just to different locations is an attempt to keep modernity going. If she is acknowledging that modernity can't continue and is proposing a way down to sustainable groups then it would be worth reading. Is that what she is saying?
Mike it's best if you read the book. But the fact is "modernity" can keep going ie communities that enjoy arts, education, electricty, medical care, etc.
Just in a different way to the insanity it's become.
Basically Vince proposes "sanctuary cities" in the sub arctic to protect the earth's population from the coming unlivable heat.
Here's an example of her well thought out thesis:
“there’s plenty of room. If we allow 20 square meters of space per person—around double the minimum habitable size for a house allowed under the International Residential Code—11 billion people would need 220,000 square kilometers of land to live on."
Please let me know if you have a better alternative. But first, maybe checkout the book.
In a rapid total collapse of the systems we depend upon for sustaining life, most people would not survive. We shouldn't expect to be able to reinvent the wheel and devise clever work arounds to somehow completely overcome the hurdles and thrive miraculously.
The tragic aftermath of hurricane Helene in the South is a sobering reminder.
After sudden devastation, survivors are faced with catastrophic loss and immediate danger of more. The damage, while extensive, is a microcosm of what is total collapse could entail. Most survivors will be able to access safe places to be removed from immediate danger.
But especially those who found themselves trapped by 400 roads being washed out in NC, the reality of isolation without power, water or food is a grim situation. If your house survived the flooding and you had a stash of food and water and a generator with fuel you would have a short term boost to survive until you could be rescued. But that's probably the best you could expect.
I concluded long ago that it's not possible to retool society under duress of a catastrophic event. We are focused on short term patches that will carry us through common events like flooding, droughts, snow storms, power outages, etc. We are probably able, as a consequence, to limp along for a few months without the grid. But longer than that, forget it.
Unless our whole society suddenly becomes focused on hardening our brittle places, life will continue to become more and more precarious, even in places where we assume are removed from obvious natural disasters.
Are there scalable long term solutions for survival? I don't think so. I think the best we can do is to plan for ways to mitigate against the things we might have a chance of evading in short term. That includes locating somewhere where the exposure to natural disasters is less likely.
It's not plausible or rational to try to retool your entire existence and ignore the underlying dependency we have on modern technology, supply chains, and infrastructure. If those go, we're all cooked.
The only "scalable long term solutions for survival" I've come across are the Sanctuary Cities outlined in "Nomad Century" Gaia Vince
The world has about 11 billion acres of agricultural land, which works out to 1.4 acres per person. A typical 19th century homestead was 160 acres. It takes about 500 acres to support a hunter-gatherer. The true horror of these homesteading fantasies is that they rest on the unspoken starting assumption that >99% of humankind will have to be exterminated to make enough room for homesteaders to be self-sufficient using the old low-tech agricultural methods. The idea that many people are fantasizing about these scenarios gives me the creeps.
That was definitely in the background of this but it warrants more discussion. If you've got a link, I'll dig more into this problem and add to it.
The stats in the post are accurate - I just have trouble wrapping my mind around numbers in the billions. Whereas thinking about each person only getting 1.4 measly acres is easier to conceptualize. It puts an exclamation point on just how little margin for error 8 billion people have on this one small planet. Without the complex interlocking technologies we've developed to make efficient use of limited space, we're pretty much all dead.
The other day I was listening to a podcast about the Endangered Species Act and they played a clip of Jeff Bridges, who owns a 900 acre ranch in Montana, preaching about how important it is for us to increase the grizzly bear population. There's not room for a grizzly bear on my 1.4 acres.
Hmm I don't want to be rude but I wonder if Americans are more prone to see things more in terms of self-survival solutions. "Every family for itself"
Perhaps influenced by the national story myth of brave homesteaders - which Jessica analyses brilliantly.
For example, one of the things that struck me about the TV show, LOST, was how the survivors wandered around the beach on their own. The story is driven by the forming of random relationships.
A European script would have had leaders gathering everyone together on the beach, assessing tyhings as a group ...
The only solution is community based.
Otherwise, yes you are looking at "The true horror of these homesteading fantasies is that they rest on the unspoken starting assumption that >99% of humankind will have to be exterminated"
jes sayin
I think we're basically agreeing. There's a pernicious TV show called "Yellowstone" that invites Americans to masturbate to the pornographic myth of the rugged self-made man. From one viewpoint, Yellowstone's patriarch - played by Kevin Costner - is defending the honor of his family ranch against encroaching corporate developers. From another viewpoint, Costner's character is a sneering entitled NIMBY who governs his inherited 750,000 acre private fiefdom like a feudal warlord.
I of course hold the latter view. No man is an island - especially not men who inherited their wealth. The world is now way too overpopulated for the luxury of masturbating about rugged individualist survival fantasies. It just obscures the fact that the actual choice ahead of us is community or death.
I was going to comment something of this sort but you said it so well.
I'm going to be blunt: the world population is going to drop, a lot, because it has overshot ecologically. There's no actual choice about this. We can do this the nice and highly effective way, with birth control and empowering women -- we can still do this. Or it'll happen the nasty way with starvation, disease, and warfare -- this is arguably already happening in some places.
Natalists are evil. As an apex predator, humans have to control our own population if we want to have any hope of maintaining the ecology which supports us (something we're doing very badly at). Most apex predators do this by being extremely territorial. Humans have the option of artificial birth control, which gives us the nice way out. Unfortunately, some humans (natalists) are actively fighting against that.
So take that as an initial assumption. Homesteading is still ridiculous fantasy for other reasons (some of which Jessica laid out and some of which I laid out in another comment). But we're all going to have to get over getting the creeps over mass drop in population, because it is going to happen period whether we like it or not, it's just a question of whether we do it the sensible way or the stupid violent way.
When I bought my land in 1984, ten acres enough was sort of my bible, along with the good life by the Nearings. I built earth sheltered by using some, but not all by any means, of Oehler's $50 and up underground house book. No electricity, built by hand, although I did have a chainsaw. Logs, stones, and a local mill...Didn't need a/c, well was a sandpoint driven in the kitchen. Outhouse matter was covered by sawdust, so no flies and there is a cover on the back of the outhouse and compost pile nearby to shovel into for humanure. Rarely if ever went to town. Outhouse, handpump, james washer. Gardens, fruit trees planted. Rarely ate meat, unless it was freshly killed. Didn't raise animals. Did buy 25 pounds of rice, beans, etc to keep in a small area off the kitchen which was buried in earth. Yep. I'm glad we did what we did, how we did. We do have solar electricity now, but miinimal. We do have 12 volt freezer, and the new battery technology lasts so long now. 6-8000 cycles. That's 20 years or so. Hey, at 75 I'm not too worried about it. However, not a fan of wars and war like peoples. Remember, homesteaders back in the day got their land which was stoled from indigenous peoples who already were prepared for the most part.
We are all spoiled.
Sometimes I fantasize about the homesteading life. I have a few hobbies that are romanticized in the homesteading world - gardening, fermentation, canning. I can sew. I'm good at making do. But I recently read a substack linking the homesteading movement post Vietnam in the US to white supremacy and it really opened my eyes. I think of it differently now - that homesteading as a sustainable option for future collapse would require a lot of people to die, just like manifest destiny (which I was taught in school in the early 90s btw) required the ethnic cleansing of indigenous populations in America. And I'm not sure I want to participate in a system like that. I highly suggest The Poor Proles Almanac on substack if you have an interest in homesteading and permaculture.
Brilliant. I grew up on a working farm, and by the time I was 12, I was determined to get away the minute I could. It wasn't because I hated it; it was because the work- on top of going to school and actually attempting to learn things- was just so backbreakingly hard. Later in life, I spent 10 years cooking in top kitchens and did well at it because the physical demands and stress were so much less than farm work. A significant percentage of these prepper idiots nowadays will end up whacking themselves and their families with self-administered cases of botulism from improper canning techniques or trying to build a wall that eventually collapses on them.
Technology doesn't go backwards. I'm not saying individual technologies don't get lost. But it doeesn't go backwards. We will not revert to a pre-industrial civilization. That's a fantasy.
The fall of Rome and the collapse of the Roman empire led to the medieval era in Europe. They lost a lot of the large megaprojects (like aqueducts) and some very valuable special techniques (like Roman concrete), but the medieval tech was not the pre-Roman-imperial tech. It was new tech.
Another example: the collapse of the major oasis civilizations in Central Asia due to repeated invasions by herding cultures (they were dependent on very, very long irrigaton aqueducts which kept being damaged by the invasions, among other things). Even after the cities shrank massively and the area was largely occupied by herders, the tech didn't go backwards to the state before. The knowledge didn't disappear, and any tech which was useful kept being used, and new tech got developed.
I get very irritated by primitivist fantasizing. I understand the urge to look to the pre-industrial world for what a post-collapse civilization would look like, but it's simply *wrong*. A post-collapse civilization will be filled with technology which didn't exist in the 19th century. That's just how it *works*. Once a technology is known, it doesn't magically become unknown. It may be abandoned for economic reasons (like Roman concrete, expensive and not necessary for the smaller polities) or organizational reasons (like Roman aqueducts, very expensive and hard to maintain without a huge government), but it doesn't get abandoned just because.
If a tech is useful to the new smaller city-states, and they have the organizational capacity to make it happen, *they keep the tech and probably develop new tech*.
A lot of our modern tech really is just about knowing how to do it. Everything involving electricity? The key is Maxwell's Equations, which are just, y'know, equations in a book. The *ancient Romans* had the raw materials and manufacturing capacity to make copper wire and batteries and electric motors. What they were missing was the *know-how*. Electricity is so valuable that we *are not going to lose the know-how*.
I am quite certain that a "post-collapse" society will feature electricity everywhere. And motors. And batteries. Maybe certain current battery formulas will prove too difficult to produce given supply chain issues, but there are so many different types, some sort will get produced. I suspect we will even have solar panels. Yes, maybe not the exact same models we're using now, but some sort. They're *too valuable* to abandon, and they can be supported at a lower level of organizational complexity than the giant aqueducts, and they're much less prone to single-point failure (an aqueduct has to work across its *entire* length to work at all, making it brittle). They have a pretty complicated supply chain but the value is very high and a lot of effort will be put into keeping them going.
We'll probably also have computer chips, though we might go back to slower, simpler chip designs, because a lot of the really valuable stuff they're used for really could be done with chips of the 1980s -- if the economics demand some chips but the supply chain becomes a lot more expensive, they will start being focused on the genuinely high-value areas and will be optimized for cost of production under a supply-chain-constrained environment.
What fails during collapse is supply chains and trade. During the Roman empire, everyone in Palestine was building their houses using German wood. This stopped. Everyone in Rome was eating Egyptian grain. This stopped. Supply chains for high-value, low-volume materials (spices then... computer chips now?) could be maintained. Bulk-shipping low-value materials long distances became intractable.
Technology doesn't stop, because it's largely a matter of knowledge, not a matter of supply chains. Any technology which doesn't hit supply chain limits will stay in use.
Humans could get completely wiped out -- that is a baseline scenario, but there's no point in planning for it, because you won't be there and neither will anyone you know.
If that doesn't happen: The future, after the mass population drops, will not look like the past. It will look *different*. Look at cases of local collapse. Skip looking at the large, organized polity (which occupies most of the history books) and instead compare the situation *before* the large organized polity to the situation *after* it. They're typically both a bunch of small, feuding groups with an inability to do megaprojects, but *the tech is completely different*.
Some homesteading could be better than none. Just to soften a potential collapse? Some prepping, not for longtime survival, but just to make it easier some weeks? I have a minimal homestead with larger farms nearby. All farms will wear out over some decades, but its perhaps better than nothing? The farms have cows and sheep. They can make food without heavy machinery.