[traz]

I have to admit I'm a bit of a doomer in my thinking; I believe chaos and panic will reign if the price of oil pushes the price of everything else exponentially skywards, panic buying happens and food gets scarce. I believe that those of us who survive this period will be forced to go back to pre-technology times to get things done, eg horse and carts (OMG that looks so stupid when I type it out, but anyway that's what I think...), or basic backyard power generation for those who know a bit about electronics and have enough spare parts to see them through - oh God, who knows how long - let's say *at least* 50 years. Enough years to at least see your children survive through it all anyway. (My twin boys are one year old)

Like most of us here I have taken on the survivalist way of thinking - plan for the worst, hope for the best.

But where the hell does one start? I'm thinking particularly in the long term. Where and how did you begin your planning? Did you totally learn up on one thing at a time (and built or bought the equipment you needed) and then moved on to the next thing? Did you work to a plan that you wrote out, ie a list that you ticked off etc?

My head is spinning to the point that I have reached a point of total disorganisation and inertia. There is so much to do! It's also hard when no-one around you believes things as much as you do. My husband does not have the same survivalist attitude that I do, he has more faith than I do that things will work out okay. And, obviously, any financial outlays I make for preparations will have to be run by him.

[GreenTree]

I asked the same question a while back and decided that I would start with simple things that don't cost a lot of money to do and that benefit me and my family both now and in the future.


Gardening is a good example . I have learned how to garden, make compost, can vegetables, etc. I see glass canning jars and supplies like that as a good investment right now. I have also been working on my sewing skills since most people in our generation haven't got a clue how to sew.


Anyway, that is where I have started. It saves me a lot of money and teaches me some self-reliant skills.

[Laurasia]

A good way to start (since you are a doomer, as am I - though I think we should call ourselves realists!) is to think, okay, a disaster will strike tomorrow - choose your flavour of the month, hurricane, earthquake, total blackout of electricity, you name it. Now ask yourself what you would need to get through this short-term disaster. You'd need to have a reserve of food, water & shelter, medicine, etc. Enough for your family for, say, 72 hours. Start working on THAT scenario. Then let the disaster scenario ripple out a bit into the future, say three months of disaster. Plan what things you will need to do, have, & know for you and your family to survive. Look out further & further into the future and try to envision what might arise, and act on it.

In this way, you will build on what you have previously accomplished, and ANY little bit of preparation is a good thing! Study the threads in the preparation forum (forgotten its full name) here - there are loads of things to read about. But above all, break up the MASS of data into manageable pieces so as not to lose your marbles!

Hope this helps a bit.

Regards,

L.

[SILENTTODD]

Get a good road bicycle without the fancy clips or shoes (under $600, even under $300 if you have to). Helps you to do a lot of thinking on a long ride about what‘s important in your life. Going as fast, or as slow as you want. Will also come in handy when you want to cut down on the number of trips you take in your car or truck (or if your like me commute to work on!).

Read as much as your can of the writings of Henry Thoreau.
He lived way before the oil age(died at the start of the American Civil War), and has a lot to say about living with the least, and still be happy!

[elocs]

Yes, the best initial advice is to prepare for your regular disaster by having food, water, and supplies for 72 hours, then 14 days, then keep going. Think, if there was no power, how would you prepare your food or keep warm. Work to become self sufficient, pretending you are preparing to live in the middle of nowhere no matter where you live now. The terrible post PO to whatever degree is not going to happen overnight, so don't try and do everything at once. Just step by step and it should not be a big financial burden.

Be comforted with the fact that the absolute best prepared the end of the world doomer is going to forget something, maybe something important. The ultimate doomer has to prepare for everything going to hell forever and how to protect everything they have forever. That's a lot for anybody's plate, so just do the best you can and keep reading here. Find and learn where your preparation niche is and also learn to separate the wheat from the chaff and b.s. Determine your level of humanity and how much of it are you prepared to abandon if it comes to it. Will you be willing to help others or will it be an everybody for themselves attitude. You get to decide what is important to you and your family.

Good luck and don't get discouraged.

[grillzilla]

Personally, I have been using Laurasia's method. Living in earthquake country provided a non-PO reason for immediate disaster preparedness. Work towards immediate disaster preparedness first...heck, you should anyway PO or not

One thing that I do to keep me working towards full preparedness is to fix the "big Event" about 3 weeks away in my head. A month is too long and I won't do anything, but three weeks keeps me primed to do something once a week or so to increase my readiness.

So for instance, last week I upgraded my bug-out-bag and added a couple items.

On the cost issue, sometimes you can work the cost of things into a part of yourlifestyle or other hobbies. I backpack and camp, so working suvival gear into my yearly budget is not hard, it's dual purpose.

other things, like big ticket items (household appliances) have to be penciled out carefully but often you can make a case for energy efficiency, especially if your appliances are at the end of their reliable life.

Anothere for instance: It was time for me to get a new car anyway, so I bought a very efficient one. I spent no more money on the hybrid than I was going to spend anyway. So the cost difference is not a factor. Within the liftime of the new vehical I think it is pretty likely there will be times when gasoline is hard to get.

[kevincarter]

A very important thing to think about are your kids, how will you raise them? Will they be in a regular school? Will they have the regular skills and limits that civilization offers to our children and that are totally useless in an off grid environment? I think they are the best way to prepare, teaching them from scratch all those things: how to grow food, how to preserve it, how to keep warm, how to hunt, how to take care of a gun, how to build, how to recycle and re use, how to be self sufficient… everything you can think of, and it’d be fun too for you and for them.

The rest you know it, good land with water and a forest nearby.

[Wednesday]

Get your emergency plans in place first. If you're on a tight budget, start with a 72 hour plan. Once that's in place, think about supplies for a month. I wouldnt depend on a stockpile for longer than 6 months, so I dont see the point in building one bigger than that. I chose 6 months based on grocery lists from pioneers crossing the Rocky Mountains in covered wagons. They carried no more than 6 months worth of supplies with the expectation that they would be able to restock at waypoints. If you cant resupply in 6 months, you're dead anyway, basically.

Once you feel like you will be able to cope with supply disruptions for short periods of time, it's time to look at long term preps. I chose to focus on the garden. I made this decision based on coping mechanisms of residents of London during the Blitz. Every house had a Victory garden to supplement government rations. Don't count on rations this time around, make your garden twice as big.

Once you feel pretty secure about feeding yourself, the tough questions start. How many vehicles can you really expect to maintain and for how long? How about weapons? The questions just get harder after this point.

[Doly]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Wednesday', '
')Once you feel pretty secure about feeding yourself, the tough questions start. How many vehicles can you really expect to maintain and for how long? How about weapons? The questions just get harder after this point.

[kevincarter]

Don’t forget about water. You can survive way more without shelter or food than without water. And remember that you only need a single contaminated drop to make you sick, imagine trying to make big life or death decisions with an enormous diarrhoea on you…

Life starts at water, even in the city. One tiny bottle of yodine can save you lots of trouble.

And IMO the most important is learning how to do things, getting the skills, if you know how to start a garden, how to build a structure, how to depurate water and so on then it gets to a point that its all in your brain, so if you’ve got to run you can run because you take your brain with you, and that’s all you need.

[Wednesday]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Doly', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Wednesday', '
')Once you feel pretty secure about feeding yourself, the tough questions start. How many vehicles can you really expect to maintain and for how long? How about weapons? The questions just get harder after this point.

[elocs]

Could someone more knowledgable than myself address the queston of "owning" a house or land? I can remember reading that people do not actually "own" their house or property in the sense that you own your shirt or shotgun.
The government gives you a title or deed which allows you to sell, give, or bequeath your house or land to somebody else. If this is true, then as long as there is a government it still applies. Lots of people in the Great Depression owned their homes or farms, but lost them when they either could not pay their mortgage or their taxes. So is it true that we never truly "own" real estate?

If the government collapses into whatever, then that is a different matter. The question probably would be can you keep or hold on to your house or land? If that was the case, then there is strength in numbers. I think human survival has always been more successful in cooperative groups than lone individuals or families. There were societies where the worst punishment for a member was not execution, but banishment, where death was nearly certain.

I think depending upon where you live that hunting will be problematic. In this country there were Indian tribes that were nomadic and followed the buffalo herds to survive.
Their numbers were in balance with the game they sought, so there was no danger of killing it all off. They seemed to have more of a respect for nature and the land and lived in harmony with it. Perhaps this is a quaint, romantic notion of the "noble savage", but overall it seems to have been true.

Today in the U.S. our population is 2-3 times or more than what it once was when people hunted for the food they did not grow or raise. Today, my county has 100,000 people which is double what it was a hundred years ago. For many, a respect for nature and the land is imposed by government regulation such as hunting seasons. There are many hunters where I live. If and when hunting becomes a matter of survival and regulations are disregarded, how long does it take for every rabbit, squirrel or deer to be wiped out where I live given the huge numbers who would now be hunting to survive compared to the numbers in the 1800s? Not too long I would bet. I am not married to this theory, so feel free to refute it.

So much does depend upon what level of doomerosity you anticipate or hope for (I would guess there are those who are hoping for opposite ends of that spectrum). In the 1950s and 60s it was surviving a nuclear war. Today it is Peak Oil. There are so many things and elements that are out of your control, such as if there is a flu pandemic, that you can only do what you can do. But much concerning the worst scenerio of PO is pretty much like life has been for humans for thousands of years before this modern era where we worked and struggled to simply survive. So there is nothing new under the sun.

[elocs]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Wednesday', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Doly', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Wednesday', '
')Once you feel pretty secure about feeding yourself, the tough questions start. How many vehicles can you really expect to maintain and for how long? How about weapons? The questions just get harder after this point.

[RacerJace]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Doly', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Wednesday', '
')Once you feel pretty secure about feeding yourself, the tough questions start. How many vehicles can you really expect to maintain and for how long? How about weapons? The questions just get harder after this point.

[kjmclark]

Traz,

I think you need to go for a walk.

The first step in anything, particularly difficult situations, is to avoid panicking. You're probably much better prepared than you think and you need to stay calm and avoid feeling overwhelmed. You can start worrying about next steps when you're past the first step.

When you get back from your walk, make a list. Doesn't matter what order things are in, just make yourself a list of things you want to do. It's better if you write the list by hand. Then hand write another copy of the list and put it somewhere where you can't possibly lose it. There is no better, or simpler, organization tool than a good paper list.

With two one year-old boys, I recommend you plan to take a walk every day. There is no better way to calm down than a good walk. Besides, the people who get through real problems are often those who can just keep walking through it all. As they say, the longest journey starts with a single step.

These are my wife's simple rules for dealing with things, and she's quite effective. Our two kids (6 & are happy, healthy, and fairly comfortable with the idea of going "back to pioneer times." I really don't think it will be that bad, but they think the whole idea is kind of cool, and they have a better idea of what that lifestyle involves than most adults. You and your kids will be fine.

[clueless]

It is important to remember there are things we can control and things we can't.

In this country our lives are complicated largely because we complicate them ourselves. The simplest advice is usually the best advice, uncomplicate your life as much as possible and the things you have no control over probably will seem less daunting.

People who lived <100 years ago faced hardship on a daily basis, how did they deal with it ? I know many people hate it when people like me say things like this, but history shows mankind (until recent history) trusted in God for provision. Many will not like it, but ALL ancient cultures either worshipped the God in the Bible or invented other God's to worship, the pat answer from most people on this board will be " We don't fall for that God crap"...I like the point Matt Savinar brought up about how stupid our modern culture is to base our entire existence on a finite resource -This is where human ingenuity has taken us, had we lived according to the way the Bible tells us to live we would not be in this mess.

Obvioulsy there are good things also, modern Health Care and agriculture has increased the population, but the bulk of our vital resources are wasted on junk. I personally am not going to place my trust in worldy institutions, Jim Kunstler, Richard Heingberg, George Bush or anyone else. And the Bible alos lays out a realistic scenario of the beginning of the world and the end of the world with amazingly similiar descriptions of the end that are very similiar to oil depletion.

Traz - Do all the things that simplify your life, but please don't rule out at least investigating what the Bible says about these things. Read Revelation 6 &18, and see what you think...

[elocs]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('clueless', 'I')t is important to remember there are things we can control and things we can't.

In this country our lives are complicated largely because we complicate them ourselves. The simplest advice is usually the best advice, uncomplicate your life as much as possible and the things you have no control over probably will seem less daunting.

People who lived <100 years ago faced hardship on a daily basis, how did they deal with it ? I know many people hate it when people like me say things like this, but history shows mankind (until recent history) trusted in God for provision. Many will not like it, but ALL ancient cultures either worshipped the God in the Bible or invented other God's to worship, the pat answer from most people on this board will be " We don't fall for that God crap"...I like the point Matt Savinar brought up about how stupid our modern culture is to base our entire existence on a finite resource -This is where human ingenuity has taken us, had we lived according to the way the Bible tells us to live we would not be in this mess.

Obvioulsy there are good things also, modern Health Care and agriculture has increased the population, but the bulk of our vital resources are wasted on junk. I personally am not going to place my trust in worldy institutions, Jim Kunstler, Richard Heingberg, George Bush or anyone else. And the Bible alos lays out a realistic scenario of the beginning of the world and the end of the world with amazingly similiar descriptions of the end that are very similiar to oil depletion.

Traz - Do all the things that simplify your life, but please don't rule out at least investigating what the Bible says about these things. Read Revelation 6 &18, and see what you think...

[clueless]

That is the most humorous things about the "progressive" way of thinking...Say what you want, but only as long as I agree with it !

[rwwff]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('clueless', 'T')hat is the most humorous things about the "progressive" way of thinking...Say what you want, but only as long as I agree with it !

[clueless]

As my old man always taught me...

Trust God AND keep your hand to the plowshare.

no worries about ELOCS and the folks who "ignore". If all their hope lies only in this world and their "income generating capability", then those are the most pitifull of creatures.