by ReverseEngineer » Thu 18 Dec 2008, 03:40:05
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('mos6507', '
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The idea that an attitude adjustment alone will help us get through this is ludicrous. Unless that adjustment includes people intentionally not having kids, no amount of community-building will prevent death and destruction. The best you can hope for is to be one of the survivors.
I certainly never made the claim that an attitude adjustment would solve the problem of overshoot, and frankly since limiting global reproductive ability is a logistical nightmare, one has to figure that the traditional forms of population control, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse will do their job here. War, Pestilence, Famine and Death are more than adequate population control mechanisms, they ALWAYS work.
What Community Building does is enhance the probability your community is one of the survivors. Even Duke agrees with that idea, just his idea of community is a few people he interviews and puts up at his Doomstead. There are a few things WORSE than Death though, and being holed up with Duke would have to be counted as one of them. LOL.
Just as there are maximums in size to a community where its Goobermint becomes too large to actually serve the interests of the people, so also is it true that too small a size is not sustainable, at the very least because of inbreeding problems. beyond that though there is the problem of having enough people involved in different aspects of the group welfare that your total needs are met. Certainly an individual can go out into the Yukon and probably live a long life if he is well skilled in such subsistence, back in the day of course you had Mountain Men who lived like this and we still do have a few of these up here. They are recluses and kind of odd fellows generally speaking, I doubt many of them will even NOTICE when we go into a depression. They live out their life spans fairly normally, but they aren't a part of any community at all really. A small group of people doing the same thing would be a bit different, but it would be a bit like the descendants of Fletcher Christian on Pitcairn Island.
Sustainable community size long term has to be more than 100 for sure, and really over a thousand. Now, you might hope to put this together later, or you could try to do it sooner. I think there will be a variety of outcomes here in this regard. In some places, people will all be looking out for themselves and treating everyone else as an enemy. Fights between neighbors, some Haves and many more Have Nots. If you devolve to this kind of fighting, then quickly enough the Haves get dispossessed by the Have Nots, because there are so many more Have Nots in any area they overwhelm the Haves.
If you avoid this scenario by building community FIRST, all the energy wasted in fighting amongst each other for the few preps left can rather be spent on working together to farm more land, fish more fish and hunt more meat. Obviously as noted any given area can only support so many by any of these means, so yea you have to have a limitation on this in any given area or even any given Doomstead. By no means however do I see that where I live is overpopulated by any stretch of the imagination, and for it to become overpopulated any time too soon with massive immigration to the area also seems unlikely to me. So what then would be the purpose here of fighting amongst ourselves and groups of Doomsteaders hoarding their food? There is no benefit to this I can see.
Plenty of people around here have good survival skills and knowledge, and while the population of Moose might be hunted out quickly if it isn't managed well, its about impossible for this population by itself to consume the fisherie currently extant, long as we have boats that will handle going offshore a few miles anyhow. Mainly its important for the community not to go bonkers and everyone fighting amongst themselves, and the only way to prevent that is through proactive community building, which IS possible. Not if you hole up its not, but already people are asking me about this stuff and NOT people I solicited in any way. Out fo the blue today one woman I know mentioned to me that her Boss had come in warning everyone of a Coming Depression, and she had heard I thought the same thing and what should she DO? This woman wasn't on my list of Community People getting prepped, now she is. I laid on her the importance of getting her preps together, buying food and putting some cash away in a safe place as first steps.
No, it simply is not possible in the Overshoot situation we are in to save everyone, many must and will die. By community building though, you can lessen the chances that this die off hits your particular area so hard or quite so rapidly as having Gunfights out in the streets over a can of beans. In abut any are short of the Big City where I really can't see any good outcomes, I can envision at least possibilities for good (or at least not catastrophic) outcomes in less densely populated areas. Not if you don't work together though. Then it will devolve into a battle between the Haves and the Have Nots which won't stop until all the Haves are dispossessed and then the stores run out for all, leading up to the next battle and finally Cannibalism in the end in this scenario.
My intention is to work together with my friends to make sure we don't walk down that road. I'm not going to isolate myself, I'll share what I have both in physical preps and my knowledge base, which is pretty vast. I depend on these people, and they depend on me, for no man is an island unto himself.
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('John Donne', '[')b]Meditation XVII: No man is an island...
All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated...As therefore the bell that rings to a sermon, calls not upon the preacher only, but upon the congregation to come: so this bell calls us all: but how much more me, who am brought so near the door by this sickness....No man is an island, entire of itself...any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.