Fun with emergency preparedness

…At the peak oil workshop Catherine and I attended, we learned that grocery stores only have two or three days of food on hand. Should supply lines be cut off due to a gas shortage, the whole town would clear the shelves in a day.. It wasn’t hard to imagine. On New Year’s Eve in 1999 I went to the gas station to fill up and their candy bars and bags of chips were completely bought up. At Safeway the bottled water section was almost entirely gone. I laughed. I didn’t believe in Y2K, but it did make me wonder at all these people with their last minute thinking.

Our modern way of life is precariously perched on long supply lines that reach across oceans, while our shelves are filled with back issues of magazines, CD collections and memorabilia. Nowhere in this system is there a back-up supply source for all that we have taken for granted, yet we laugh at the idea of shortages. Is there not a dark irony to this?

The peak oil inspired localization movement is trying to remedy the flaws of this centralized system by rebuilding communities with local food and energy sources in mind. They start by asking questions about what their citizens value and how might the community insure that they continue to get these goods and services should they be cut off from outside supply lines. They calculate what they needed to keep on hand in the ways of medicine and supplies. This is a similar process to how a family might talk about an emergency plan..

“I want to start canning our blackberries next summer,” Catherine said the other day. Our discussions about emergency planning largely revolved around food, which also tied in with what Catherine had learned from reading “The Omnivore’s Dilemma”. Eating out of one’s own garden had become increasingly attractive for ecological reasons, for economic localization and for increased self-sufficiency.

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