So far the main routes are being kept open and food supplies are getting through to all but the most remote households, but with ice storms on their way in the next few days from the east expected to worsen conditions in Europe and here over the weekend, shortages could become an issue. Already potato crops have been affected with thousands of tons of unharvested spuds destroyed in farms a round the country.

Water is also an issue in many towns and cities, with increased demand apparently caused by people staying at home more, and losses due to frozen pipes.

Some homes have also been without electricity as storms and snow damage lines and maintenance vehicles find it hard to reach them.

Already the schools have been closed for next week, and this includes my own college so Ill be grounded for the moment. Martin, who is from Chicago, thinks it is a joke the country is coming to a standstill. Hasn’t anyone here heard of snow tyres? Apparently not, Ive never heard mention of them.

It is 30-50 year events like these that test our mettle and preparedness- as a nation we are failing miserably, such disruption interferes with the Great Plan of Keep on Growing the Economy. We are just not set up for hunkering down and doing as little as possible- sledging and snowball flinging excepted.

What might have seemed fun for some up till now has been a real hardship for others, but the real question is, how long will it last? If they are already closing the schools it hardly looks like the authorities will be able to be more organised than they already are.

It looks highly likely to remain unchanged for the next two weeks but seemingly the last Big Freeze, sometime in the 1960s, lasted well into March, even April in some parts. Another 6-8 weeks of this is surely not something this country is ready for.

I’m someone who is supposed to be more prepared than most, but in truth I am only half way there. Ive spent some of the time coppiceing next winter’s wood supply, the perfect activity for this time of year and weather, the first warming from the cutting of the wood being very welcome.

I have left the van over the bridge because the steep hill up here has been so icy, so it is possible to drive carefully and slowly into town, but I have only been out once this week and am keeping journeys to a minimum.

The cabin really comes into its own with the low winter sun warming the interior to a cosy 18 degrees most days by 11am. I don’t really need to light the range until the evening. Current wood supplies are probably OK for another three weeks; I could stretch it out longer if need be.

Water will be the first to go. It currently freezes each night but thaws out by lunch time. However, my main supply is currently rain water off a shed roof in a 1300L tank. With careful use I only have another maybe 8 or 10 days if there is no precipitation. I havnt investigated the well yet but presumably can break the ice and carry buckets.

One thing I have ample of is solar electricity. The sun is warm on the rocks and dazzling each day. No SAD this year! The electric chainsaw is getting some use, but otherwise apart from the computer I have far more power than I can use- not a situation I ever envisaged at this time of year.

I had made no special preparations for food but have a stock that would see me through a couple of weeks at least if I couldn’t get out at all, including two sacks of Bantry CSA spuds, and a supply of rice and pulses. There is still a couple of large squashes in the store and a few shallots left, but very little in the garden- just some leeks and a little kale. Oh, and some artichokes for when all else fails!

Contact with the immediate neighbours has been more frequent which has been nice, otherwise very quiet, leaving one to dwell on what real survival conditions would feel like, and whether, if the weather continues for long, it will come to that, and if it will be anything like the scenes from Cormac Mccarthy’s novel, now just released as a film, The Road.

Matthew Stein

Chelsea Green 2000, 2008

494 pp

Matthew Stein’s massive survival manual When Technology Fails packs into one volume everything you need to survive “The long Emergency”- (a phrase later used by Kunstler in his 2005 book of that name on peak oil and its consequences) from fire making and hunting, gardening and wild food gathering, technology and power, metal working and constructing simple shelters.

There is a detailed discussion at the start of the book on the environmental crisis, pollution and resource depletion, as well as climate change and peak oil- and the consequent need to learn many new skills to survive; perhaps this section isnt srictly necessary for such a book.

More of an encyclopaedia than a handy book to throw in your grab-and-run bag, it probably suffers from trying to do too much; nevertheless, there is a serious amount of information here to help survive emergencies, powerdowns, social collapses and energy descent transitions- most of it useful and well laid out, while some of it smacks of New Age-ism and gives advice which would be more of a hazard than a help in a survival situation.

The “When Hi-Tech Medicine Fails” chapter in particular should come with a severe health warning: a credulous mish-mash of a range of Quackeries from homeopathy and acupuncture through naturopathy, “energy healing” and even the Power of Prayer. Anecdotal “evidence” is offered about miraculous cures achieved through the services of members of the whacky Christian Science cult. He quotes Larry Dossey’s Healing Words as providing “numerous scientific studies ” which “now confirm that p[rayer does, in fact, have a positive effect on healing” when in fact it does nothing of the kind.

Futile of course to suggest that if you believed in the Power of Prayer you wouldn’t need a survival manual, but even worse is the section promoting the use of colloidial silver for  a range of illnesses including some serious conditions.

Quackwatch surveys the evidence forand the dangers of use of colloidal silver here. Stein presumably thinks that if uncritical self-medication with such stuff lead to argyria, you always have the Power of Prayer as a Back-up.

The early section on Survivor Personality Traits is also tainted with pseudo-scientific nonsense. While stories of survivors of disasters are interesting and may provide useful insights, Stein seems to make he contradictory claim that your intuition is more useful than your rational mind- at least in emergency situations.

Now, there may well be situations where intuition is simply all you have to go on- and clearly we have evolved instinctive responses to danger which have allowed our species to survive as well as it has. This doesnt mean that intuition is superior to rational thought- after all, this is an emergency preparedness manual, the whole point is to use your rational ability to prepare for emergencies ahead of time. I dont see any scientific evidence tha shows people with New Age beliefs such as those promoted by Sein are more likely to survive an emergency.

These reactionary and dangerous ideas are enough to put me off he book entirely, and it is certainly a matter of concern that Peak Oil luminaries  Richard Heinberg and James Howard Kunstler would endorse it.

Nevertheless, there is much to offer in the other chapters, which are oddly rational and practical in  their approach(!)

Each section begins with a view of the global situation vis-a-vis current use of resources and environmental impact. There is then a survey of different techniques with a brief description, and a wealth of resources and further reading to conclude.

The section on food is wide-ranging, with good information on both gardening and wild-food gathering. Stein advocates Jeavons’ Bio-Intensive method; the section on permaculture is only a few paragraphs, with no mention of perrenial food crops or edible forest gardens, nor permaculture principles.

The sections on natural building, off-grid electricity and traditional methods of home-crafts such as soap-making, clothes-making, pottery etc provide useful introductions, though perhaps not much more than that.

In short, there are probably other survival manuals which are more useful as pocket-sized books for emergency situations; and specific permaculture books and building manuals would be more useful for long-term survival/powerdown scenarios.

Most worrying is the apparent unquestioning acceptance of the reactionary ideologies promoted here by at least some of  the wider peak oil/permaculture community.

Reinventing Collapse- The Soviet Example and American Prospects

Dmitry Orlov

New Society 2008

When I met Bill Mollison at the International Permaculture Convergence in Croatia three years ago, all he wanted to talk about it seemed was cannibalism. He had traveled in Russia after the breakup of the Soviet Union and told me that, in Moscow, the joke was, if you go to the provinces, be careful what they serve you up for meat.

There had been widespread hunger and general hardship, resulting in a dramatic decline in life expectancy, an underclass of the homeless and unemployed and those unable to care for themselves, and a loss of hope in the future.

Despite this, things could get much worse in an even more energy dependent USA.

“Reinventing Collapse” is perhaps the most important and disturbing- as well as amusing- peak oil book you will read. A Russian emigre who had the opportunity to observe the collapse of the former Soviet Union from the vantage point of someone living in America, Orlov sees a similar process unfolding in an America all but oblivious to how quickly things may change there. Peak oil will result very soon in the vast nation beginning to fall apart at the seams as the lifeblood of its economy drains away with no backup available. Big systems like agriculture are so energy intensive that they will quickly collapse and there is barely any resilient, self-reliant communities left.

All the ingredients are present: looming oil shortages, severe foreign trade deficit, a runaway military budget and ballooning foreign debt. Add to that a humiliating military defeat- Afghanistan for the Soviets, Iraq for America- and fear of crisis- Chernobyl in the East, New Orleans in the West- and collapse does not seem far away.

Written with the satirical wit of modern Voltaire, Orlov goes where few other peak oil writers have dared to go, and his sardonic Russian humor allows a stark look at American prospects through the eyes of someone who has witnessed collapse first hand. Snapshots and stories of what he witnessed in post-Soviet Russia make for colorful reading and help fill in some of the gaps in our imagination in thinking of what may happen as the oil begins to run short.

Dmitry Orlov was born and grew up in Russia before emigrating to the US. He visited the Soviet Union many times and was able to witness both the gradual and sudden changes that occurred there during the collapse of communism. On returning to the US in 1996 he felt he had witnessed enough to see that what had happened in his home country had little to do with the failings of Soviet ideology, but was a result of Superpower overshoot- and that a similar process is likely to occur in the US in the near future:

And so I came back to the United States expecting that the second superpower shoe would be dropping sometime soon, certainly within my lifetime, and the question for me became:How soon?”

Dmitri does not answer this question directly, but instead takes on a journey back and forth between the two political Giants, and compares the standing of each one to face collapse: housing, food, money, employment and transportation are some of the areas he looks at.

The prognosis is not good for the United States: in each of these categories, harsh though it was for the Russians, the US appears to stand worse- much worse. While in Russia, the communist system had provided resilient services in terms of housing and transportation, for example, Americans tend to live in sprawling suburbs which depend entirely on almost universal private car ownership to remain viable; as oil gets scarce driving will become less and less feasible and many people will find themselves stranded.

The public transport system in Russia was reliable and few people had cars; for the most part it continued to function; likewise, most people were able to continue to live in their Soviet-issue apartment blocks, while in the US, personal debt is very high and many will have their houses repossessed as the economy tumbles and unemployment rises. This could happen much quicker than it did in the Soviet Union since Private corporations in the US tend to rely on just- in- time inventories and will liquidate their assets quickly; state bodies would be able to hold out at least in some shape or form a little longer.

In Russia, many people had always gardened to provide some of their own food. while local officials considered bread riots to be career-ending and always kept some basic food stocks; in America, a nation grown obese and addicted to fast food will not be in great shape to start fending for itself when the transcontinental trucking service stops rolling.

A lot of people, who just waddle to and from their cars, seem unprepared for what is coming next. If they had to start living like Russians they would blow out their knees. Most of them would not even try, but would simply wait, patiently or impatiently, for someone to come and feed them.

Orlov’s analysis of the different societies brings up some very interesting insights. Of particular interest to me as a teacher is his description of the education systems in Russia, and how it compares in the US. In Russia, he says, students were taught general principles which they were able to apply to any situation, and the college process involved learning how to research and learn what they needed to themselves; his experience in America was much different, where they fail to produce in four years what the Soviet system achieves in two:

“They fail to produce graduates who have adequate general knowledge, good command of their native language and the ability to acquire specialist assistance without any further assistance.”

So I feel partially vindicated in my approach to teaching permaculture- emphasize the core design principles and encourage people to use them to think for themselves and work out their own solutions to specific problems while using them.

“Reinventing Collapse” differs from most Peak Oil books not so much in its lack of analysis of the peak issue itself- there is an abundance of literature already available on this- but in the kind of advice he gives to mitigate the problems. Most entertainingly is in the satirical idea of the “Boondoggle”- a solution guaranteed to make the problem worse. Examples include corn-based ethanol, energy efficiency, hydrogen as responses to the fuel crisis. This is the kind of solution we should indeed be advocating, Orlov argues, as

“The combined weight of all these boondoggles is slowly but surely pushing us all down. if it pushes us down far enough, the economic collapse, when it arrives, will be like falling out of a ground-floor window”.

Instead of injuncting us to grow more vegetables, learn home-preserving, form a local powerdown group, and starting a car-pool scheme, Orlov takes a distinctly off-beat view of the kinds of “preparations” we might need to take. Clearly based on his own experiences of human behavior during meltdown, Orlov focuses on survival skills such as being useful and helpful to others while successfully hiding anything you may have of value; of perhaps living in two places while convincing the neighbours at each that your permanent residence is the OTHER place; of adapting the body to hardship and through necessary discomfort:

“To eliminate the need for transportation, you need to cover significant distances on foot, carrying loads, until your body adjusts by developing denser bone, thicker cartilage, stronger muscles, and a more powerful cardiovascular system”.

Orlov prepares us for a world of shadows, a world where only the wily and most adaptable can survive, where the most important skills will be to find ways to appear as little as possible in competition with others for limited resources.

Orlov brings a dose of reality to the peak oil debate in a world that has left it too late to adapt without turmoil and conflict. In many parts of the world, it has already happened, and as my neighbour who lived in Belfast in the 1970s has told me, the speed with which civil society can break down and everyone becomes someones else’s’ potential meal ticket can leave even the most prepared reeling.

It happened in Russia and it will happen in America and everywhere else as well, to greater or lesser degrees. After reading this book, only the foolish would assume “It can’t happen here”.

Crash Course- Preparing for Peak Oil

by Zachary Nowak

Green Door Publishing 2008

Peak Oil is upon us, and collective action on a large scale seems unlikely. Technical solutions are chimerical. Each of us must decide what the future may hold and begin working on a plan to face that future.

When Zachary Nowak began drafting this essential resource list oil was pushing $70 a barrel. Now nearly double that, peak oil seems ever more of a reality and its consequences are being felt even in the oil-guzzling west with an growing sense of urgency: the party really is over and all the chickens are coming home to roost (to mix metaphors): food riots, truckers strikes, inflation, rising unemployment, bankruptcies and the looming shadow of global recession.

It increasingly looks as if the time to prepare may have been yesterday, but as the title suggests, a crash course of emergency and more long-term preparation is still possible and Nowak provides an entertaining primer in the basics.

We are on a collision course with a difficult reality, an inconvenient truth that is much more immediate than global warming. Crash Course is an accelerated tutorial, a study-at-a-distance workshop on what you need to know to survive the Peak.

Nowak’s take on peak oil is essentially: prepare for the worst because that is looking most likely; your preparations will still be useful if the world negotiates a successful transition, but this is looking less likely. The book is aimed at the homesteader or would-be -homesteader, but anyone would do well to consider the advice he gives as much of it would be useful in any situation. The author brings six years experience of living the survivalists’ good life to bear onhis subject.

The first part is not so much for peak oil aficionados who might like to skip straight to the resource lists in part two, but is nevertheless well worth a read for the concise and informed perspectives Zachary provides.

Importantly, he takes an ecological perspective of human evolution from hunter gatherer to farmer to industrial consumer, and this helps shape his subsequent responses: the energy return changed as our numbers grew and we had to work harder for our food. Early humans had a considerable impact on their local resources as they migrated across the globe, apparently hunting to extinction most of the mega fauna they encountered and exacting a toll on the resources their environment could supply. This may have resulted in part of the push towards agriculture which allowed more total energy to be harnessed in the form of cultivated crops and storage – but at a cost:

It may come as a surprise, but the average hunter-gatherer, to get his 2000 daily calories, expends about 500 calories, whereas an agriculturalist “spends” about 1200.

Nowak challenges us, therefore, to think again about the romantic idea of growing all our food in a home garden- on its own, it will be too hard; we need permaculture- perennial agriculture with tree crops and fruits- alongside foraging for wild plants to get by.

I would question however the assertion that few people even amongst experienced back-to-the-landers are unlikely to be producing currently more than 2% of their food- I know several people who appear to be growing maybe 90% of their own vegetables for example which I would have thought at a guess could be nearer 15-20% of their total food.

In the second chapter, Nowak outlines the three variables that will effect how the crisis unfolds and define the kind of responses we may need to make: the speed of the onset of crisis; its severity; and duration.

Here he challenges the idea of community powerdown projects like Transition Towns: they may not be able to bring about in time the kind of localised, sustainable future in small communities that we may wish for, nor may they be able to withstand a sharper and more severe collapse:

Most people who share this vision of the future see a near-seamless transition riding on the crest of Permaculture teach-ins and community supported agriculture, but what if the duration is longer? What if a Peak event creates chaos which takes some years to transition from an urban society to sustainable communities? Look at your neighbors and imagine them hoeing weeds and making biodiesel before you answer this question (or imagine them hungry, and scared of the no-more-streetlights dark).

It is a mistake, Zachary points out, to have too much faith in our ability to develop the necessary skills to sustain ourselves when all around us may be chaos.

Belief in progress and the idea that “technology can save us” or that humanity will just come through some how, what with our extraordinary ingenuity and so on, Zachary lists as some of the “dangerous axioms” that pervade especially American society and culture, but are strong elsewhere as well.

This leads to his very interesting observation that rational arguments do not really work that well.

People often ignore incontrovertible evidence and airtight arguments because the result conflicts with their belief systems.

Zachary tells us that his experience of trying to “change people’s minds”- to accept the error of our ways and the inevitability of a collapse of some kind- have been frustrating and perhaps not really time well spent. In many ways I can confirm this from my own experience- three years on from when I first saw “The End of Suburbia” and began film screenings and talks on Peak Oil, along with many others, there has been little to show in terms of any wide-scale awakening of the general populace, much less amongst our politcal leadership. Im not sure that I ever expected any- I always felt that even if one person present in a room was reached, and maybe able to set off on a more appropriate trajectory in terms of their priorities in life, then it was worth it.

Nevertheless, the point is well taken: the time for conferences and committees may be over. It is time to seriously consider much more immediate preparations on a personal and domestic level. These may still have a wider effect in leading by example and putting structures in place to help ride out the collapse.

In the third chapter we are taken through a range of different scenarios that could unfold as we ride down the slope of energy descent: “New Green Revolution”; “Powerdown USA”; “The Great Energy Depression”; and “The Crash”, each one as seen through the eyes of a student, a middle-aged father, and an older woman. This is the most useful and interesting part of the first section and takes us beyond simplistic one-size-fits-all and run-for-your-gun discussions. Collapse will be a very personal, tailor-made event for each of us and our experiences will vary widely according to location and degree of preparations, as well as the way in which the collapse unfolds.

The section finishes with a round-up of the issues so far: Powerdown for a slow transition or Survivalism or Collapse? While Zachary clearly feels the second is the most likely he points to failings in either extreme and advocates a “middle ground” which basically consists of preparing for the worst by focusing on personal preparations and expanding one’s self-reliance skills, while at the same time working with a community wherever possible.

…given my personal set of axioms (severe crisis, difficult to convince people), a summer spent planting fruit trees and experimenting with lactic fermentation is much more valuable.

The second part is essentially a resource list of books and websites worth collecting and researching which provide information you may need in an energy hungry future. .

He freely admits that the premise that you have money and resources for buying a smallholding and building a sustainable shelter is not in the reach of everyone and offers little solace for those who are not in as position to relocate.

It is a fascinating and comprehensive overview of many of the best resources available in the areas of the house; food production; and food preserving; followed by a more brief outline of resources for home medicine and disease prevention, survival skills, and tools, accompanied throughout with good practical advice. It could serve well as an outline for a permaculture course or peak oil survival training, and I found the references very useful even though I have been looking at a lot of the material for years.

The book ends with a discussion on the limits to the idea of preparing a refuge of some kind. As already said, it is not an option open to everyone. In answer to the common criticism that remote places with good supplies are an easy target for marauders, Zachary comments:

I have no response to this other than to say that I hope that it does not get that bad that quickly, or that it gets really bad really quickly, so desperate marauders diminish in numbers. Yes, that’s a horrible thing to say but I will not hide that I have pondered it.

It seems likely to me that the desperate are more likely to flee towards the cities, where there may be some level of organization at least for a while- soup kitchens perhaps. Historically, the country has faired worse that the towns in times of collapse, although parts of the big cities may become truly desperate places. Hungry people who turn up on your doorstep may be far more likely to offer to work for food, and be keen to learn all the skills you have been developing. People who are ahead of the game in terms of preparedness will be very useful to their community- perhaps the most important survival asset of all.

Peak Oil is upon us, and collective action on a large scale seems unlikely. Technical solutions are chimerical. Each of us must decide what the future may hold and begin working on a plan to face that future.

This book is an excellent place to start.