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Page added on June 11, 2015
The Era of Dissolution
The last of the five phases of the collapse process we’ve been discussing here in recent posts is the era of dissolution. (For those that haven’t been keeping track, the first four are the eras of pretense, impact, response, and breakdown). I suppose you could call the era of dissolution the Rodney Dangerfield of collapse, though it’s not so much that it gets no respect; it generally doesn’t even get discussed.
To some extent, of course, that’s because a great many of the people who talk about collapse don’t actually believe that it’s going to happen. That lack of belief stands out most clearly in the rhetorical roles assigned to collapse in so much of modern thinking. People who actually believe that a disaster is imminent generally put a lot of time and effort into getting out of its way in one way or another; it’s those who treat it as a scarecrow to elicit predictable emotional reactions from other people, or from themselves, who never quite manage to walk their talk.
Interestingly, the factor that determines the target of scarecrow-tactics of this sort seems to be political in nature. Groups that think they have a chance of manipulating the public into following their notion of good behavior tend to use the scarecrow of collapse to affect other people; for them, collapse is the horrible fate that’s sure to gobble us up if we don’t do whatever it is they want us to do. Those who’ve given up any hope of getting a response from the public, by contrast, turn the scarecrow around and use it on themselves; for them, collapse is a combination of Dante’s Inferno and the Big Rock Candy Mountain, the fantasy setting where the wicked get the walloping they deserve while they themselves get whatever goodies they’ve been unsuccessful at getting in the here and now.
Then, of course, you get the people for whom collapse is less scarecrow than teddy bear, the thing that allows them to drift off comfortably to sleep in the face of an unwelcome future. It’s been my repeated observation that many of those who insist that humanity will become totally extinct in the very near future fall into this category. Most people, faced with a serious threat to their own lives, will take drastic action to save themselves; faced with a threat to the survival of their family or community, a good many people will take actions so drastic as to put their own lives at risk in an effort to save others they care about. The fact that so many people who insist that the human race is doomed go on to claim that the proper reaction is to sit around feeling very, very sad about it all does not inspire confidence in the seriousness of that prediction—especially when feeling very, very sad seems mostly to function as an excuse to keep enjoying privileged lifestyles for just a little bit longer.
So we have the people for whom collapse is a means of claiming unearned power, the people for whom it’s a blank screen on which to project an assortment of self-regarding fantasies, and the people for whom it’s an excuse to do nothing in the face of a challenging future. All three of those are popular gimmicks with an extremely long track record, and they’ll doubtless all see plenty of use millennia after industrial civilization has taken its place in the list of failed civilizations. The only problem with them is that they don’t happen to provide any useful guidance for those of us who have noticed that collapse isn’t merely a rhetorical gimmick meant to get emotional reactions—that it’s something that actually happens, to actual civilizations, and that it’s already happening to ours.
From the three perspectives already discussed, after all, realistic questions about what will come after the rubble stops bouncing are entirely irrelevant. If you’re trying to use collapse as a boogeyman to scare other people into doing what you tell them, your best option is to combine a vague sense of dread with an assortment of cherrypicked factoids intended to make a worst-case scenario look not nearly bad enough; if you’re trying to use collapse as a source of revenge fantasies where you get what you want and the people you don’t like get what’s coming to them, daydreams of various levels and modes of dampness are far more useful to you than sober assessments; while if you’re trying to use collapse as an excuse to maintain an unsustainable and planet-damaging SUV lifestyle, your best bet is to insist that everyone and everything dies all at once, so nothing will ever matter again to anybody.
On the other hand, there are also those who recognize that collapse happens, that we’re heading toward one, and that it might be useful to talk about what the world might look like on the far side of that long and difficult process. I’ve tried to sketch out a portrait of the postcollapse world in last year’s series of posts here on Dark Age America, and I haven’t yet seen any reason to abandon that portrait of a harsh but livable future, in which a sharply reduced global population returns to agrarian or nomadic lives in those areas of the planet not poisoned by nuclear or chemical wastes or rendered uninhabitable by prolonged drought or the other impacts of climate change, and in which much or most of today’s scientific and technological knowledge is irretrievably lost.
The five phases of collapse discussed in this latest sequence of posts is simply a description of how we get there—or, more precisely, of one of the steps by which we get there. That latter point’s a detail that a good many of my readers, and an even larger fraction of my critics, seem to have misplaced. The five-stage model is a map of how human societies shake off an unsustainable version of business as usual and replace it with something better suited to the realities of the time. It applies to a very wide range of social transformations, reaching in scale from the local to the global and in intensity from the relatively modest to the cataclysmic. To insist that it’s irrelevant because the current example of the species covers more geographical area than any previous example, or has further to fall than most, is like insisting that a law of physics that governs the behavior of marbles and billiards must somehow stop working just because you’re trying to do the same thing with bowling balls.
A difference of scale is not a difference of kind. Differences of scale have their own implications, which we’ll discuss a little later on in this post, but the complex curve of decline is recognizably the same in small things as in big ones, in the most as in the least catastrophic examples. That’s why I’ve used a relatively modest example—the collapse of the economic system of 1920s America and the resulting Great Depression—and an example from the midrange—the collapse of the French monarchy and the descent of 18th-century Europe into the maelstrom of the Napoleonic Wars—to provide convenient outlines for something toward the upper end of the scale—the decline and fall of modern industrial civilization and the coming of a deindustrial dark age. Let’s return to those examples, and see how the thread of collapse winds to its end.
As we saw in last week’s thrilling episode, the breakdown stage of the Great Depression came when the newly inaugurated Roosevelt administration completely redefined the US currency system. Up to that time, US dollar bills were in effect receipts for gold held in banks; after that time, those receipts could no longer be exchanged for gold, and the gold held by the US government became little more than a public relations gimmick. That action succeeded in stopping the ghastly credit crunch that shuttered every bank and most businesses in the US in the spring of 1933.
Roosevelt’s policies didn’t get rid of the broader economic dysfunction the 1929 crash had kickstarted. That was inherent in the industrial system itself, and remains a massive issue today, though its effects were papered over for a while by a series of temporary military, political, and economic factors that briefly enabled the United States to prosper at the expense of the rest of the world. The basic issue is simply that replacing human labor with machines powered by fossil fuel results in unemployment, and no law of nature or economics requires that new jobs can be found or created to replace the ones that are eliminated by mechanization. The history of the industrial age has been powerfully shaped by a whole series of attempts to ignore, evade, or paper over that relentless arithmetic.
Until 1940, the Roosevelt administration had no more luck with that project than the governments of most other nations. It wasn’t until the Second World War made the lesson inescapable that anyone realized that the only way to provide full employment in an industrial society was to produce far more goods than consumers could consume, and let the military and a variety of other gimmicks take up the slack. That was a temporary gimmick, due to stark limitations in the resource base needed to support the mass production of useless goods, but in 1940, and even more so in 1950, few people recognized that and fewer cared. It’s our bad luck to be living at the time when that particular bill is coming due.
The first lesson to learn from the history of collapse, then, is that the breakdown phase doesn’t necessarily solve all the problems that brought it about. It doesn’t even necessarily take away every dysfunctional feature of the status quo. What it does with fair reliability is eliminate enough of the existing order of things that the problems being caused by that order decline to a manageable level. The more deeply rooted the problematic features of the status quo are in the structure of society and daily life, the harder it will be to change them, and the more likely other features are to be changed: in the example just given, it was much easier to break the effective link between the US currency and gold, and expand the money supply enough to get the economy out of cardiac arrest, than it was to break a link between mechanization and unemployment that’s hardwired into the basic logic of industrialism.
What this implies in turn is that it’s entirely possible for one collapse to cycle through the five stages we’ve explored, and then to have the era of dissolution morph straight into a new era of pretense in which the fact that all society’s problems haven’t been solved is one of the central things nobody in any relation to the centers of power wants to discuss. If the Second World War, the massive expansion of the petroleum economy, the invention of suburbia, the Cold War, and a flurry of other events hadn’t ushered in the immensely wasteful but temporarily prosperous boomtime of late 20th century America, there might well have been another vast speculative bubble in the mid- to late 1940s, resulting in another crash, another depression, and so on. This is after all what we’ve seen over the last twenty years: the tech stock bubble and bust, the housing bubble and bust, the fracking bubble and bust, each one hammering the economy further down the slope of decline.
With that in mind, let’s turn to our second example, the French Revolution. This is particularly fascinating since the aftermath of that particular era of breakdown saw a nominal return to the conditions of the era of pretense. After Napoleon’s final defeat in 1815, the Allied powers found an heir to the French throne and plopped him into the throne of the Bourbons as Louis XVIII to well-coached shouts of “Vive le Roi!” On paper, nothing had changed.
In reality, everything had changed, and the monarchy of post-Napoleonic France had roots about as deep and sturdy as the democracy of post-Saddam Iraq. Louis XVIII was clever enough to recognize this, and so managed to end his reign in the traditional fashion, feet first from natural causes. His heir Charles X was nothing like so clever, and got chucked off the throne after six years on it by another revolution in 1830. King Louis-Philippe went the same way in 1848—the French people were getting very good at revolution by that point. There followed a Republic, an Empire headed by Napoleon’s nephew, and finally another Republic which lasted out the century. All in all, French politics in the 19th century was the sort of thing you’d expect to see in an unusually excitable banana republic.
The lesson to learn from this example is that it’s very easy, and very common, for a society in the dissolution phase of collapse to insist that nothing has changed and pretend to turn back the clock. Depending on just how traumatic the collapse has been, everybody involved may play along with the charade, the way everyone in Rome nodded and smiled when Augustus Caesar pretended to uphold the legal forms of the defunct Roman Republic, and their descendants did exactly the same thing centuries later when Theodoric the Ostrogoth pretended to uphold the legal forms of the defunct Roman Empire. Those who recognize the charade as charade and play along without losing track of the realities, like Louis XVIII, can quite often navigate such times successfully; those who mistake charade for reality, like Charles X, are cruising for a bruising and normally get it in short order.
Combine these two lessons and you’ll get what I suspect will turn out to be a tolerably good sketch of the American future. Whatever comes out of the impact, response, and breakdown phases of the crisis looming ahead of the United States just now—whether it’s a fragmentary mess of successor states, a redefined nation beginning to recover from a period of personal rule by some successful demagogue or, just possibly, a battered and weary republic facing a long trudge back to its foundational principles, it seems very likely that everyone involved will do their level best to insist that nothing has really changed. If the current constitution has been abolished, it may be officially reinstated with much fanfare; there may be new elections, and some shuffling semblance of the two-party system may well come lurching out of the crypts for one or two more turns on the stage.
None of that will matter. The nation will have changed decisively in ways we can only begin to envision at this point, and the forms of twentieth-century American politics will cover a reality that has undergone drastic transformations, just as the forms of nineteenth-century French monarchy did. In due time, by some combination of legal and extralegal means, the forms will be changed to reflect the new realities, and the territory we now call the United States of America—which will almost certainly have a different name, and may well be divided into several different and competing nations by then—will be as prepared to face the next round of turmoil as it’s going to get.
Yes, there will be a next round of turmoil. That’s the thing that most people miss when thinking about the decline and fall of a civilization: it’s not a single event, or even a single linear process. It’s a whole series of cascading events that vary drastically in their importance, geographical scope, and body count. That’s true of every process of historic change.
It was true even of so simple an event as the 1929 crash and Great Depression: 1929 saw the crash, 1930 the suckers’ rally, 1931 the first wave of European bank failures, 1932 the unraveling of the US banking system, and so on until bombs falling on Pearl Harbor ushered in a different era. It was even more true of the French Revolution: between 1789 and 1815 France basically didn’t have a single year without dramatic events and drastic changes of one kind or another, and the echoes of the Revolution kept things stirred up for decades to come. Check out the fall of civilizations and you’ll see the same thing unfolding on a truly vast scale, with crisis after crisis along an arc centuries in length.
The process that’s going on around us is the decline and fall of industrial civilization. Everything we think of as normal and natural, modern and progressive, solid and inescapable is going to melt away into nothingness in the years, decades, and centuries ahead, to be replaced first by the very different but predictable institutions of a dark age, and then by the new and wholly unfamiliar forms of the successor societies of the far future. There’s nothing inevitable about the way we do things in today’s industrial world; our political arrangements, our economic practices, our social instutions, our cultural habits, our sciences and our technologies all unfold from industrial civilization’s distinctive and profoundly idiosyncratic worldview. So does the central flaw in the entire baroque edifice, our lethally muddleheaded inability to understand our inescapable dependence on the biosphere that supports our lives. All that is going away in the time before us—but it won’t go away suddenly, or all at once.
Here in the United States, we’re facing one of the larger downward jolts in that prolonged process, the end of American global empire and of the robust economic benefits that the machinery of empire pumps from the periphery to the imperial center. Until recently, the five per cent of us who lived here got to enjoy a quarter of the world’s energy supply and raw materials and a third of its manufactured products. Those figures have already decreased noticeably, with consequences that are ringing through every corner of our society; in the years to come they’re going to decrease much further still, most likely to something like a five per cent share of the world’s wealth or even a little less. That’s going to impact every aspect of our lives in ways that very few Americans have even begun to think about.
All of that is taking place in a broader context, to be sure. Other countries will have their own trajectories through the arc of industrial civilization’s decline and fall, and some of those trajectories will be considerably less harsh in the short term than ours. In the long run, the human population of the globe is going to decline sharply; the population bubble that’s causing so many destructive effects just now will be followed in due time by a population bust, in which those four guys on horseback will doubtless play their usual roles. In the long run, furthermore, the vast majority of today’s technologies are going to go away as the resource base needed to support them gets used up, or stops being available due to other bottlenecks. Those are givens—but the long run is not the only scale that matters.
It’s not at all surprising that the foreshocks of that immense change are driving the kind of flight to fantasy criticized in the opening paragraphs of this essay. That’s business as usual when empires go down; pick up a good cultural history of the decline and fall of any empire in the last two millennia or so and you’ll find plenty of colorful prophecies of universal destruction. I’d like to encourage my readers, though, to step back from those fantasies—entertaining as they are—and try to orient themselves instead to the actual shape of the future ahead of us. That shape’s not only a good deal less gaseous than the current offerings of the Apocalypse of the Month Club (internet edition), it also offers an opportunity to do something about the future—a point we’ll be discussing further in posts to come.
51 Comments on "The Era of Dissolution"
hiruitnguyse on Thu, 11th Jun 2015 9:17 am
….speaking of dissolution….
http://www.wcvb.com/news/texas-kids-told-its-illegal-to-sell-lemonade-without-a-permit/33522848
hiruitnguyse on Thu, 11th Jun 2015 9:18 am
….more dissolution…..
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NhcXH0tSx_M
hiruitnguyse on Thu, 11th Jun 2015 9:18 am
more dissolution….
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NhcXH0tSx_M
penury on Thu, 11th Jun 2015 9:57 am
I think his points of view are valid and need to be carefully considered. At the same time I can also believe that other possible scenarios will exist. But the issue which gives me the most comfort is the fact that “predictions are hard, especially about the future.”
ghung on Thu, 11th Jun 2015 10:29 am
Past behavior is generally a good predictor of future behavior, and human behavior hasn’t changed much, at least the motivations for such. Since Greer bases his predictions on historical cycles, I’m betting his are better than most. We, collectively, will keep doing the same stupid crap we always have, albeit at an unprecedentedly larger scale (until we can’t).
GregT on Thu, 11th Jun 2015 10:30 am
” our lethally muddleheaded inability to understand our inescapable dependence on the biosphere that supports our lives. ”
This is the reality that people really need to wrap their heads around. Empires will always rise, and they will always collapse. What we are facing now is not just the collapse of modern civilization, it is the collapse of the biosphere, and with it, our entire species.
Northwest Resident on Thu, 11th Jun 2015 10:58 am
I’ve enjoyed this “five phases of the collapse” series by Greer. He makes a lot of very good points. And I begin to get a better understanding of the long drawn out collapse process that Greer envisions, which I tend to find myself agreeing with — more so than when I first was exposed to his thoughts on the subject. We can be sure that the collapse of our high tech industrial civilization will come in waves and in fits and spurts. When does it finally begin? Hey, look around, it is happening right now, seemingly in slow motion but in a historical perspective, we’re probably collapsing at a rapid rate right now, picking up speed as we go. The duct tape and bubble gum and Elmer’s glue that are holding our modern civilization together are failing, catastrophically. It seems like slow motion to us right now, but when we suddenly hit bottom, I’m sure we’ll all feel it and there’ll be a lot of telltale splats all around us that will be impossible to ignore or “explain away”. Coming soon to a town near you.
Plantagenet on Thu, 11th Jun 2015 11:57 am
Did anyone notice that at the top of this piece Greer refers to the “scarecrow effect” i.e. phonies who are always loudly talking about collapse?
Greer makes the point that the phonies who frequently talk about collapse are often just doing it to “show off”, but aren’t actually prepping in any meaningful way themselves. If they were actually prepping they wouldn’t be wasting their time ranting about collapse.
Some of the frequent posters here sound like the phony collapse “scarecrows” that Greer is warning us about. These phonies rant and rave about collapse, but when it comes to quietly doing the work of actual prepping —- not so much.
Apneaman on Thu, 11th Jun 2015 12:28 pm
Plant maybe a real hardcore doomer is putting his money where his mouth is by not prepping. If one truly believed “the end is nigh” but was prepping/hedging on the side, I would say they are not demonstrating the courage of their convictions.
GregT on Thu, 11th Jun 2015 12:31 pm
On the other hand, there are also those who recognize that collapse happens, that we’re heading toward one, and that IT MIGHT BE USEFUL TO TALK ABOUT what the world might look like on the far side of that long and difficult process.
I’ve tried to sketch out a portrait of the postcollapse world in last year’s series of posts here on Dark Age America, and I haven’t yet seen any reason to abandon that portrait of a harsh but livable future, in WHICH A SHARPLY REDUCED POPULATION RETURNS TO AGRARIAN OR NOMADIC LIVES in those areas of the planet not poisoned by nuclear or chemical wastes or rendered uninhabitable by prolonged drought or the other impacts of climate change, and in which much or most of today’s scientific and technological knowledge is irretrievably lost.
GregT on Thu, 11th Jun 2015 12:45 pm
“Some of the frequent posters here sound like the phony collapse “scarecrows” that Greer is warning us about. These phonies rant and rave about collapse, but when it comes to
quietlydoing the work of actual prepping —- not so much.”That has not been my experience at all planter, most of the people here that find “that it might be useful to talk about” what is unravelling in front of our very eyes, are already “prepping”.
Northwest Resident on Thu, 11th Jun 2015 1:19 pm
GregT — I don’t think the troll was making a sincere observation so much as he/she/it was just trying throwing another load of troll bait out to see who bites. I blame Pops and the management of peakoil dot com for allowing sick puppies like Plant to post on this forum when clearly his only reason for doing so is to stir up shit and disrupt legitimate and sincere discussion. It is sad to think how what was once a happy innocent baby grew up to be such a corrupted and loathsome piece of shit.
Apneaman on Thu, 11th Jun 2015 1:20 pm
The wizard is being disingenuous when he groups all hardcore doomers together with histories religious fanatics. He has to do that, because instead of “men of god” we have phd’s giving their professional opinion that humanity is done for or soon will be if we don’t shut it down. Their opinions are not based on some 2500 year old desert goat herders religious texts, but rather a few hundred years of accumulated knowledge of physics, chemistry and biology all applied in detective like fashion to coax the mystery of the history of the planet from the rocks, ice, ocean, atmosphere, etc. What the evidence shows is that extinction from climate change is the rule on this planet. That’s big history – like some 3 billion years of life with 15 know major extinction periods. What is John’s puny 5-6 thousand year history of ape civilization in comparison? Even going back to the start of our journey, 6 million years ago, when we split from our chimp like ancestors is small potatoes in the big picture. John likes to talk up cycles of civilizations, but needs to stay away from the big picture cycles of life and extinction on planet earth. It’s understandable he is a writer/storyteller and the story must have redemption or no one is going to read it. The last time there was this much CO2 in the atmosphere was 3-5 million years ago when we were still monkey people. Will human extinction happen within a century or so? We will never know, but to dismiss the possibility of it as the ravings of zealots is major denial and unscientific. But don’t feel bad if you do, it’s not your fault – it’s your brain’s fault.
Your brain won’t allow you to believe the apocalypse
http://io9.com/5848857/your-brain-wont-allow-you-to-believe-the-apocalypse-could-actually-happen
penury on Thu, 11th Jun 2015 1:25 pm
really would hate to see Plant banned from posting. The only thing I think he needs is a (SARC) tag on most posts. I really enjoy reading good sarc remarks and we should treasure the few we have.
Plantagenet on Thu, 11th Jun 2015 1:38 pm
@nordent
You clearly fit the profile of Greer’s “phony prepper” who is creating a “scarecrow effect” by always ranting about doom.
Please listen to Greer’s words of wisdom—if you are really a doomer then shut up and get busy with your preps. But you are just a big phony, aren’t you. AND Your phony prepping has now been exposed by the Archdruuid himself!
Cheers!
GregT on Thu, 11th Jun 2015 2:02 pm
“People who actually believe that a disaster is imminent generally put a lot of time and effort into getting out of its way in one way or another”
Few people here have put as much time and effort in as NWR has planter.
“On the other hand, there are also those who recognize that collapse happens, that we’re heading toward one, and that it might be useful to talk about what the world might look like on the far side of that long and difficult process.”
NWR clearly fits the profile of an intelligent, concerned individual.
You planter, are a complete and total useless idiot.
Apneaman on Thu, 11th Jun 2015 2:03 pm
Go suck cock plant
Cheers!
Apneaman on Thu, 11th Jun 2015 2:04 pm
Fuck off and die Plant
Cheers!
Apneaman on Thu, 11th Jun 2015 2:05 pm
Hope you get hit by a bus Plant
Cheers!
Northwest Resident on Thu, 11th Jun 2015 2:25 pm
Plant never stops proving what an absolute moron he is.
But please, Plant, relax. My two beehives are now kicking butt — I had to add a honey super onto one last week because they are rapidly producing. I just harvest five gallons of snow peas, most of which we froze but a lot of which we let go to seed — and the harvested plants are turning my huge compost piles ultra-hot. Two types of corn planted in about 400 square feet last week are now sprouting. Two days ago we harvested the garlic crop and got 99 large and very healthy bulbs. About 200 square feet of carrots are doing great. Eight hundred square feet of wheat is doing great, except a little lodging going on. My dug-in 2000 gallon rain capture water tank is full and my pump is working great, pushing water all across the mini-farm. My four chickens are still laying eggs regularly, more than we can eat. Zuchini, cabbage, rhubarb have sprouted and going good. This weekend we plant the tomatoes and pole beans, and should get excellent crops just like last year. My hardcore digging to create an underground root cellar is progressing well — very tough physical labor, but a great workout. Many hundreds of pounds of white rice, brown rice, pinto beans, oats and wheat are all sitting in air tight storage, along with a huge amount of canned goods and spices and condiments of all types. One closet full of ammo, enough to last for a long long time. Still practicing with my 50 pound recurve bow and getting better all the time — I wish you’d let me shoot an apple off your head at 50 paces — if I miss, oh well.
Hey Plant — WHO is the phony here? As is usual, your accusations are much more a reflection on yourself than on your intended target — it is called “projection”, Plant. All mentally ill and sick fucks like you are prone to do it.
Hey Plant — look at my “potty mouth”.
Fuck off!
Northwest Resident on Thu, 11th Jun 2015 3:04 pm
Here is what a phony prepper’s backyard looks like:
http://s1383.photobucket.com/user/NWR2015/library/Early%202015?sort=6&page=1
Forgot to mention the large amount of potatoes that we planted — one of the main reasons for my hard work on the root cellar — those spuds are getting big already.
Also forgot to mention the little but very productive strawberry patch — man, those things are tasty.
But other than that, yeah, Plant is as correct as he ever is — I’m just a phony prepper.
JuanP — If you’re reading, you can see my custom made rocket stove in one of the pics mounted on a wood frame under the back patio cover. Works great!
Got a 16-pound 4-cup capacity mortar and pestle grain grinder in the mail from Amazon yesterday — backup to my high quality hand crank grinder. I have a LOT of corn and wheat (and rye) grain to grind, or will if/when I need to survive off of it.
Now, back to my phony prepper sideline job of being a software developer for a financial software vendor…
Another Northwest Resident on Thu, 11th Jun 2015 3:07 pm
So if we’re serious about the collapse of industrial civilization we can’t actually talk about it or we’re fakes?
I don’t get it…
Well, whatever. Trolls are gonna troll.
Northwest Resident on Thu, 11th Jun 2015 3:26 pm
Amen to that Northwest brother!
GregT on Thu, 11th Jun 2015 3:53 pm
NWR,
What is the bench with the metal roof for?
Northwest Resident on Thu, 11th Jun 2015 4:02 pm
GregT — I have three structures currently with a metal roof installed. One is a 2000 gallon water tank dug about 1.5 feet into the ground — that’s the one with the pump and the blue hose taken out because it already filled up. Another is the chicken coup, which I’m sure you’re not referring to. The other one is in the back corner of the yard — that is my “compost station” and probably what you’re referring to as a “bench” — I put a big pile of compost in one end, and every few days I grab a pitchfork or shovel and flip it over to the other side. Thanks for asking!
GregT on Thu, 11th Jun 2015 4:18 pm
NWR, I guess I was referring to your water tank.
Questions:
What is the tank made out of?
Did you fill it with rain or tap water?
Mainly for irrigation?
If so, how long do you figure 2000 gallons of water would last you?
It’s one of the first things that I plan on doing, three weeks from today. We are now officially in a moderate drought here in the ‘rainforest’ of South Western BC, and it is expected to get worse.
GregT on Thu, 11th Jun 2015 4:29 pm
Also NWR,
Three hens?
How many eggs per week?
Do you access the brood box from inside the house?
Apneaman on Thu, 11th Jun 2015 4:33 pm
Northwest Resident, do you need to refrigerate your eggs like store bought?
Apneaman on Thu, 11th Jun 2015 4:40 pm
Greg, look how we are helping our American friends. It’s all part of the treaty, but what happens when BC levels fall? Should be highly entertaining when the treaty gets challenged in the near future.
http://www.spokesman.com/stories/2015/jun/11/bc-reservoirs-will-help-aid-northwest-during/
Northwest Resident on Thu, 11th Jun 2015 4:46 pm
GregT — The frame is made from cedar 2×4’s and 3/8″ cedar plywood. Inside is a specially made custom-ordered 12-ply potable water plastic liner, joined to the frame by special fasteners provided by the company that I ordered the liner from. The metal roof is strictly intended to capture rain water, and that is all that’s in it. It filled up fast! The gutter is just the best plastic rain gutter I could find at Home Depot, and I have the debris filters installed along the top of the gutter to keep wind-blown crap out. The rain water captured is pristine, for the most part. It is mainly for irrigation at this point, but I do not doubt but that it is safe for drinking, especially if boiled first. The 2000 gallons is more than enough to water my corn and other summer crops every day if needed until harvest time, with plenty to spare. The metal roof surface area is actually another 16 square feet more than the tank — we get on average 42 inches of rain here per year — the tank is 48 inches deep, but that extra 16 square feet captured enough additional rainfall to fill the tank up by end of March, and I didn’t even get it completed and put into action until end of October last year, so I missed a little rainfall. — Hey, when you’re a phony prepper like me, you want to make sure that you have plenty of extra water no matter what — you know, because when it comes to prepping, I’m a phony. Just ask Planter. (snicker…)
P.S. I’m really happy with my design and the way it worked out, but there is one small problem. The long side facing the house started bulging out — it couldn’t take all the weight of the water captured inside. It still held, but caused some damage. I should have dug it three feet deep, then I wouldn’t have this problem, but digging is hard work in case you didn’t already know and I just wanted to get it done. Once I get enough water pumped out at the end of this summer, I have plans to reinforce the long middle sections with 2×4 angle braces set in concrete. That ought to do the trick!
Yeah, actually four laying hens. One was camped out inside when I took the pic. But one of those hens is a non-producer, enjoying a free ride. Over by the compost station, that big white box is soon to become my second chicken coup. Once I get that done, I’m going to separate the chickens and find out which one is taking a free ride, and chicken soup or stew will be on the menu shortly thereafter. We get three eggs per day, like clockwork, except when the temperature changes to really hot or really cold they take a break and we only get one or two. Otherwise, a constant 3 eggs per day. We eat a lot of eggs! No access to brood box from inside the house — no way!! Just a good-enough door on the side of the cage facing the patio.
Can’t wait to see what you end up putting together in your new place!
Northwest Resident on Thu, 11th Jun 2015 4:48 pm
Apneaman — Yes, we do refrigerate the eggs after washing them off. That’s quick and easy and a sure fire way to preserve them. There are other non-refrigerated methods of preserving fresh eggs which I have studied and documented and put into my “phony doomer survival guide”, but I won’t do it that way until I have to. I’m thinking that in a true collapse scenario, those eggs will be worth their weight in gold or lead, or maybe I can trade for a horse and saddle, maybe a cow, who knows…
GregT on Thu, 11th Jun 2015 4:55 pm
Do you have a drip irrigation system installed NWR?
Northwest Resident on Thu, 11th Jun 2015 5:00 pm
No drip system, and no intention to install one. Maybe it is personal preference. I like to pump the water and watch it go onto the soil, that way I see how much the plants are getting and I don’t have to worry about a lot of drip lines and hoses and clogged up lines. Maybe ghung will tell me I’m doing it the hard way. But I kind of look forward to getting home every other day or so and doing the ritual watering — just a thing. I knew a guy who grew a certain type of plant a few years back, he used drip lines, and was always having problems with his timers and dirt getting into his hoses. But maybe there are better ways to do it.
JuanP on Thu, 11th Jun 2015 7:11 pm
NWR, Very nice pictures! Your garden is looking great with all your crops, hens, bees, rainwater collection and storage, rocket stove, and composting station. It must feel good. Combined with your worms, root cellar, and other supplies and your knowledge and training, I’d say you are undoubtedly better prepared than most of us. Your garden soil is getting better every time you apply compost and castings, and your crops look better than in your older pictures, IIRC, though they are at a younger stage of growth, too, so it’s hard to tell. Are you growing this year’s crops from your saved seeds and spuds?
I am trying to get the city to allow hives and/or hens in the community gardens or some nearby public areas, but no luck so far, the bureaucracy is very discouraging, maybe we will be allowed two hens at each garden. We had a hen for about a year at the garden that came out of nowhere and disappeared without a trace one day. So, I channeled my frustration by ordering a worm factory 360 at Amazon. http://www.amazon.com/dp/B002LH47PY/ref=wl_it_dp_o_pC_nS_ttl?_encoding=UTF8&colid=2DCZZ4BU2LZDJ&coliid=INWWQVZ3E7X5I&psc=1
Do you have one of these or did you make your worm bins?
I measured 162 degrees in one of the compost piles yesterday and had to split it in two and start a new one. I can’t put a whole cubic yard of material on a pile here in Summer. The piles get smaller in size to prevent overheating because the bigger the pile the hotter it gets and if they get too hot the bacteria die and the composting slows down until the bacteria population grows back, and this cycle takes a few days. The opposite probably applies to your piles, they should be bigger in Winter to keep the bugs warm. 😉
Face-Plant on Thu, 11th Jun 2015 8:42 pm
How does plant know who,is and isn’t quietly doing the work of actual prepping? Maybe I have a retreat all ready to go. Maybe I don’t. How the fuck does he know. What a fucking troll.
Davy on Thu, 11th Jun 2015 8:56 pm
Nice garden NR! And nice thread of comments.
I planted my last batch of cucumbers and melons today. I did some weeding and tilling. Played with the grapes some. I also mowed fields and disked my firelines for summer burns. I love summer!
GregT on Thu, 11th Jun 2015 9:39 pm
Davy,
Photos? I’m sure you can edit them so as to not disclose your location. I promise to send my own once I get established.
Northwest Resident on Thu, 11th Jun 2015 9:43 pm
Face-Plant — Our resident troll Planter sets out every day to prove he’s one of the biggest assholes on earth, and he succeeds on a regular basis. He may be a moron, and he may be obnoxious, and he may be purposely annoying, but one thing he is good at, and that is being a pathetic troll. I think he enjoys the abuse he gets here — some mentally disturbed individuals are like that, ya know…
Northwest Resident on Thu, 11th Jun 2015 9:44 pm
Davy — I’m with GregT. Let’s see some photos, dude!
GregT on Thu, 11th Jun 2015 9:54 pm
I’m envisioning a complete Doomer-Davy utopia. You’ve been working your ass off Davy. Please do show!
Northwest Resident on Thu, 11th Jun 2015 9:59 pm
JuanP — Hey, thanks for the feedback and comments. Yeah, the soil is much better this time, but not nearly good enough. I planted winter rye in almost every one of those planters and then cut it and mixed it into the soil in February – early March. The roots broke up the clay as intended, but not as good as hoped for. And not being a fossil fuel powered machine, I didn’t do a great job of mixing the cut green rye into the soil so didn’t get the maximum nitrogen burst out of it, to say the least. But still, big improvement. My corn, wheat, tomatoes, zucchini, cucumbers and kale are growing from propagated seed. This was my first year with garlic — here we plant it in October or November and over-winter it. But after harvesting it over the weekend, trust me, I’ll have plenty of cloves for planting this coming November. My potatoes from last year I tried to save for planting, but it was a warm winter and they all started sprouting way too early in my garage. That’s one reason I’m gung-ho to dig deep down to cooler steady temperature for spud storage this winter. Amazingly, we had quite a few “volunteer” potato plants start growing from little potatoes that we missed when we harvested last year. So, in July, after harvesting this early potato crop, I’m planting a summer crop, and those are just going to stay in the ground until end of February where they’ll preserve just fine, and by then I’ll have more room in the little root cellar, so I should be able to propagate my potato crops year round, we’ll see. Compost — what a learning experience. I just don’t have time to monitor it regularly and turn it as needed, so I have to live with just turning it every few days. Sometimes it is burning hot, other times it is a nice warm temperature, but it is composting slowly but surely. Being the phony prepper that I am, last fall I went around and collected 30 large garbage bags of freshly fallen leaves, and that is the majority of what I’m composting. I need to add a lot of green — the snow peas worked great! — lots of grass and weeds added — it is a slow process, but it is working. Finally, my red wriggler worms don’t make worm castings fast enough, yet — I have three colonies going just in plastic storage bins that I bought at the local store, then drilled little holes on top and bottom for air and water drainage. They seem to be doing just fine, just not eating and pooping fast enough!
Prepping is a major project but a really enjoyable and satisfying one, even for a phony prepper like me! And when the food trucks stop delivering and the restaurants shut down, I’ll have plenty of stored food, experience in storing it long term, experience in propagating seed, lots of seed to share with worthy others, and knowledge that ultimately is needed to be truly self-sufficient (along with a few chosen others). Everybody ought to be taking steps and doing the best they can to prepare — we all know that. Even if I never live to see a substantial economic collapse, it is still fun and healthy and rewarding — so what the heck!
GregT on Thu, 11th Jun 2015 10:04 pm
NWR,
I have one heck of a lot to learn in a short period of time. Expect PMs.
Northwest Resident on Thu, 11th Jun 2015 10:23 pm
GregT — Glad to help in any way possible.
Davy on Fri, 12th Jun 2015 1:54 am
Greg/NR, my wife may be able to help me get on photo-bucket. She is very good with net stuff. My management intensive grazing is not up and running yet. The cost share is due in July. The garden is not as impressive as NR’s. I only have one bee hive now as my trial educational one.
I will think about putting some photos out. A part of me gets nervous about giving away privacy to the net. A part of me thinks there is someone somewhere looking at me digitally. Greg, you could put out some pics too of your new town or at least the area. The same is true for you NR.
JuanP on Fri, 12th Jun 2015 1:14 pm
NWR, I think the three most important ways to improve soil long term in a sustainable way are using green manure crops such as rye up there in winter and peanuts down here in summer, composting, and using worm castings. We have the same approach to improving soil.
I am partial to fallen leaves as a composting material because they have a high nutritional value, particularly trace elements, based on what I’ve learned. Because they are a high carbon brown material they take a long time to compost by themselves. Are you shredding the leaves before throwing them on the pile. Shredding the leaves halves their composting time. I have used air blowers that have a shredder function/attachment that works very well. Shredding the leaves twice helps a lot.
“Volunteer” sweet potatoes are almost a pest here in SFL. I also get volunteer Jerusalem Artichokes.
Your worm bin choice is the best cost/value option and the one I’d recommend to anyone with a house and a yard. Living in a rented condo with a couple of small garden plots that are already over fertilized, and my wife in mind, I went for the Worm Factory 360B because the smaller trays are eaiser to manage. I like their system, it works well, but the money could have been spent on other things, like two more bags of Azomite to send back home. http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00AJVEKFQ/ref=wl_it_dp_o_pC_nS_ttl?_encoding=UTF8&colid=2DCZZ4BU2LZDJ&coliid=I3XTLS3G8IWAF
Northwest Resident on Fri, 12th Jun 2015 1:29 pm
JuanP — I like that unit that you posted a link to. One thing about it that I really like is that it has a “worm tea” capture basin. That brown juice coming out of the bottom of my worm farms is high nutrition so I have plastic underneath to capture it — but that isn’t nearly as cool as the capture basis on the unit you got.
I agree that chopping/shredding the leaves is the only way to go. I actually bought one of those leaf blower shredding units, then took it back because I wanted something more heavy duty to handle all the other plant material coming out of my garden. I could get an electric one for about $200, but reviews indicate that it is only good for really light material shredding. So I started looking at the $500 – $600 gas powered mega-shredders and wood chippers. That’s what I’m going to get — just haven’t done it yet.
In the meantime, I’m lining up to get a big load of vermiculite!! I managed to find a number of big bags and mixed that into the soil I grew my snow peas in, and now have my corn planted in — big difference. But it looks like I have more work to do on the other planters. Never a dull moment!
GregT on Fri, 12th Jun 2015 2:36 pm
“One thing about it that I really like is that it has a “worm tea” capture basin. That brown juice coming out of the bottom of my worm farms is high nutrition”
Mmmm, worm tea.
Sounds delish’ NWR…….
Northwest Resident on Fri, 12th Jun 2015 2:48 pm
Scrumptious! Delectable! Savory!
But only if you’re a plant…
Northwest Resident on Fri, 12th Jun 2015 3:47 pm
Speaking of phony preppers.
What about these preppers? Phony, or not. Plant, you seem to be the resident expert on who is or is not a phony prepper. Can you provide some of your wisdom on this question?
Billionaire Bunkers: Exclusive Look Inside the World’s Largest Planned Doomsday Escape
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jimdobson/2015/06/12/billionaire-bunkers-exclusive-look-inside-the-worlds-largest-planned-doomsday-escape/
For what it is worth, I think “development projects” like this one are AMPLE evidence that the super elite in the world are well aware of approaching economic collapse and all the dire threats that come with it. In public, they talk BAU forever, they put on a smile and assure us that all is well. Then they go behind closed doors, wipe the sweat off their foreheads, and make reservations to purchase one of these ultimate doomer getaways.
The big one is coming, guys and gals. People with enough money to buy one of these doomer hideouts don’t fall into the categories of suckers, losers or unhinged doomers. They are generally more “in the know” than the average J6P, are privy to inside information, and often in positions to see trends and events developing before the regular folks do. And if they’re shelling out big bucks for doomer hideouts now, we might be well advised to disregard their BAU happy talk and look at what they are doing, not what they are saying.
GregT on Fri, 12th Jun 2015 5:00 pm
planter probably stepped out to play a game of swat the mosquitoes, while frantically running to the drugstore to pick up more prescription meds.
Enjoy the sanity, while it lasts……..