JWR’s Introductory Note: At just over 20,000 words, this is perhaps the longest single-topic contributed article ever serialized in SurvivalBlog. I consider it an important piece to ponder. Please read all seven parts before sending your comments. I will post most of them in the Snippets column on October 29th.
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I want to start with a brief but sincere thank you to all the article writers I have learned from here at SurvivalBlog.com. Your efforts have made a difference for me and many others. I hope my contribution can have a similar benefit to others. Thank you.
Let me also begin with a warning. Some parts of this article will sound like heresy or foolishness to conventional preparedness wisdom. I am willing to risk being considered a fool if this article can help someone who read it, to someday save lives. This audience of the prepared and preparing are in the best position to have an oversized impact for good if they have the right knowledge to apply at the right time.
In the preparedness literature, much has been written about how every serious emergency will naturally bring out more of the worst in humanity when people become desperate or they feel that there are no consequences. We would be unwise to ignore the historical facts that support this assumption and not prepare for it. However, I will challenge how we should respond to the retreat of humanity during an emergency. I don’t accept that our approach to dealing with the unprepared around us needs to be 99% guns and bunkers and 1% butter diplomacy as the best way to protect ourselves and our families during a long-term societal collapse. I believe the moral and highest reward approach would be to wisely swing for the fences and aim for a ratio closer to 50% guns and bunkers and 50% butter diplomacy, so our ability to help others around us is just as strong as our ability to protect ourselves. I believe the following thought applies here, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men and women to do nothing.” If we prepare to only defend against evil and suffering during an emergency then that is likely the world we will live in.
I suggest that we try the long odds, like America’s founders and pick a fight with Goliath, because claiming the blessings of freedom and civilization is worth any sacrifice we can make. History teaches us that a committed few, very often have the power to lead their world into brighter or darker days depending on their aim. Let’s aim not just to survive but to thrive as free people in the aftermath of a serious emergency.
There will always be some wolves in every society who hate producing and only know how to take. These people must be resisted with cunning and force to protect civilization. The vast majority of people in an emergency will be the decent but unprepared. When this larger group of people become thirsty, hungry and desperate then they can only be held back with the threat or actual violence for a time, but if hunger and thirst could be greatly reduced they could be won as allies and even friends to help stop threats and rebuild. Who in their right mind would choose the risk of violent conflict as their first option to feed themselves and their families? That would be their last choice especially if they are given other options. This article is about how we might lead a swift effort to help feed decent but unprepared people and win them as assets instead of liabilities in an emergency situation. The approach I suggest is not without risks of its own, but if it is applied early, rapidly, with faith, wisdom, and knowledge, it is possible. The reward would be a serious barrier against a rising hell on earth, allowing a bit more of heaven to shining through in hard times.
This is not an article about the lowest risk preparedness Plan A options; a full rural relocation at an optimal site and with ideal resources. It is for those of us who for many reasons choose to make-do with preparing for emergencies in areas with moderate risks that will need to make the best of a bug-in situation in the event of most serious emergencies. This article is also not a fully detailed plan of how to feed the neighborhood if SHTF happens on our watch. The resources to accomplish such a task would require multiple books, lots and lots of practice, and Heavenly help to pull off. This article is just an outline to consider that should be modified to our skills and circumstances. It assumes we already have some valuable skills and we can work or network to access missing ones. It has research assignments and homework to successfully apply these plans. It is a skeleton with a few specific ideas and tactics on the bones. Please stick with me to the end and evaluate how these plans fit together as a whole and then decide how this might apply to you. Even if you wholly disagree with my strategy, I hope some of my tactics can help your family and friends to better survive in a serious emergency.
Types of Emergencies
I will preface by framing what type of emergencies I recommend my strategy and tactics for. For simplicity, I will call them type one and type two emergencies. I define a type one emergency (T1E) as an event that could be life-threatening but one where help from our fellow Americans will eventually come. This could be a large forest fire, hurricane, an earthquake, or any event where local groups, humanitarian organizations, state or federal help will come from non-impacted areas to offer aid. The survivors might stay and rebuild or move to a safer location but they have options in the US after a T1E.
A type two emergency (T2E) is one where no help is coming for a long time, if ever. By this I mean a long-term you’re on your own (YOYO) situation. These events could be surviving in a post-EMP world like in the novel One Second After, a complete financial collapse, or even the loss our computer-based communications network and with it banking, modern resupply, energy production, transportation, and more. I recently read a paper titled Grid Down: Death of a Nation written by fellow SurvivalBlog reader Jonathan Hollerman. It is free to access at www.griddownconsulting.com. It is a well-researched evaluation of our future if we lost our grid today without hardening and/or nationwide preparation. The author of this paper highlights three factors that would overlap and tear our civilization apart: starvation, desperation, and living without the rule of law (LWTROL). These are the core issues for a T2E. If people go hungry and thirsty for a few days with no end in sight, they become desperate and poor judgment and basic survival instincts erode our community’s morality. If this hunger and thirst is also felt by those who maintain our rule of law we will lose this too. We will be transported backwards in history to a low-tech, “might makes right” world. I have spent decades preparing physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually to create my humble personalized ark for my family and close friends to reduce the impact of a T2E.
Along this journey, I have often pondered and calculated what would it take to remove the local domino of starvation from this equation and prevent it from falling in my community and starting the SHTF chain reaction? With my resources, my prepared family members, friends, and church community we could at best help our whole community for 1-4 weeks at most before the buckets of rice would go empty. This could be a great calorie bridge for a T1E but not for a T2E. The bridge is too short to reach the necessary community-wide calorie surplus in the next local harvest and prevent starvation, desperation, and LWTROL.
I revisited this line of thinking again recently and I discovered a narrow pathway that certain small to medium-sized communities could travel with reasonable preparations to seriously blunt community-wide starvation. This discovery was the spark for this article. For those with the right natural resources, the first domino of starvation could be kept from falling and a community might be held together long enough to reach a sustainable calorie surplus again. One of my favorite thinkers, Thomas Sowell, often said, “There are no solutions, only trade-offs.” My ideas are not without risk or sacrifice but they do have a chance of success, a possible better set of trade-offs than what we have often seen throughout history after a T2E.
1 – Background Of This Chemical Engineering Prepper
Before I lay out my strategy and tactics, I will share what has influenced my thinking. What in my background has caused me to ponder impossible SHTF questions for years and what makes me think I could find better trade-offs that are worth sharing.
First, I believe that there are credible risks of a T2E happening in the next 50 years, my hopeful remaining lifetime, and some portion of yours. Most of these emergencies have a low probability of happen individually but there are many of them. When these risks are summed together there is a very significant chance that some T2E will happen in a modern life time. Here is a great article looking at this type of thinking: Prepper Statistics.
Our current civilization has a fragile technological foundation that requires significant energy inputs and large-scale cooperation to keep our way of life spinning. Our energy, technology, and knowledge allow our civilization in the US to produce in 1 year what would have taken our ancestors more than 100 years to produce. Now, think of the impact of losing the USA’s three power grids to multiple EMPs, a CME, a broad-scale cyber-attack or even our just the loss of our essential communications network. The wonderful force multipliers of our civilization could be swept away long enough for starvation, desperation, and LWTROL to take hold.
I knew my great-grandparents and grandparents who lived through the Great Depression. They were not wasteful, they grew big gardens, canned, and saved for the future. Some of my younger family members thought their behavior was old-fashioned, out of touch, and considered them to be mild hoarders. As the oldest grandchild, I never saw it that way, because of my time with them I always viewed our current era and prosperity in history as a special time, a time to be grateful for. I learned that hard times are a patterns in history that repeat, so we should be prepared for them. I believe that it is the responsibility of any thinking and caring person to seriously face the likely dangers of their day with thoughtful actions.
As a nation we have not used our great prosperity to build up a long-term safety net of essentials to buffer us from a nationwide T2E. For example, a 3-month supply of basic foods packaged in long-term storage containers would currently cost about $400/person. As of 2023, there were 335 million Americans. If the federal government split the cost with the citizens, it would be a one-time cost of 67 billion of our tax dollars to add this level of resilience to our nation. We waste many multiples of this each year and have nothing to show for it except for a wealthier political and connected class. The loss of our ability to produce great abundance, just in time for the next few shopping trips, is the peril of our day. There are several types of T2Es that could turn our abundance into a famine quickly:
Second, I am a chemical engineer by training, so I love to solve problems. I am likely addicted to problem-solving, which works fine as long as I don’t try and solve my wife’s problems without an invite first. The conceivable loss of civilization from mass starvation is a pretty big problem and I have been working to minimize the impacts of this possibility for my family and friends for years. In my work over the years, I have been part of teams that have solved tough problems in the oil and gas industry. Carefully analyzing these problems and gaining deep knowledge on a topic have been our keys to having big wins. I have applied these same methods to T2Es so I can be ready to solve problems if the SHTF happens on our watch.
There is also one other aspect of chemical engineering that I think is helpful for facing these types of challenges. I was trained and have practiced understanding production processes from the individual pieces and expanding out to how all the pieces work together to make the process work. This is very helpful for scaling up production efficiently and operating complex processes. I believe this background can also be applied to building large-scale emergency calorie -enerating processes to reach a calorie surplus after a T2E.
Third, I am a hopeless optimist riddled with tenacity. I have an abundance mindset that believes that growing the resource pie helps more people than fighting about how to divide up the pie. Accessing more resources is mainly limited by our knowledge of how to produce more or better resources in new ways and is not limited by the physical atoms and compounds that surround us. We are still very ignorant of all the resources we can produce, so growth is only limited by our ability and humility to learn.
When I find tough but valuable problems I keep them in my mind, and in notebooks and spreadsheets, for years because I believe important problems deserve better trade-offs. History is full of statements like this one from Lord Kelvin: “X-rays will prove to be a hoax.” Or this one from Napoleon Bonaparte: “How, sir, would you make a ship sail against the wind and currents by lighting a bonfire under her deck? I pray you, excuse me, I have not the time to listen to such nonsense”, when he was told of Robert Fulton’s steamboat in the 1800s.
The impossible is impossible until it isn’t. Sci-fi novelist Arthur C. Clarke outlined the Law of Revolutionary Ideas to describe this pattern. “Every revolutionary idea — in science, politics, art, or whatever — seems to evoke three stages of reaction. They may be summed up by the phrases:
(1) ‘It’s completely impossible — don’t waste my time’;
(2) ‘It’s possible, but it’s not worth doing’;
(3) ‘I said it was a good idea all along.’ “
I believe that most problems can be significantly improved, even the tough SHTF ones. One T2E often on my mind is losing our power grid due to a statistically more likely large solar CME, being hit by multiple high altitude EMPs, or a successful cyber-attack on our power grids. Dr. Peter Vincent Pry gave a report to Congress in 2015 about this type of scenario and his team’s research found that the long-term loss of our power grids “could kill up to 9 of 10 Americans through starvation, disease, and societal collapse.” The optimist in me asks: why do we have to lose 90% of the population? Can’t we do better? Could the consequences be reduced to 70% or even less than 50% loss of life if we find better trade-offs before the crisis?
Fourth, in my preparedness thinking I have always tried to strike a balance between how to survive an emergency and how to rebuild and thrive after the emergency with short-term and long-term planning. I don’t want to survive just to survive. I want help my family, friends, and neighbors to rebuild an abundant life in the aftermath of a disaster. To help spark long-term emergency thinking, books like The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Civilization in the Aftermath of a Cataclysm by Lewis Dartnell or How to Invent Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler by Ryan North are amazing. Both are really history of technology books with a focus on preparedness applications. They have great information and I would recommend them as part of a well-rounded preparedness library.
(To be continued tomorrow, in Part 2.)
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