empty promises

[OffGrid rdnck]

I believe your assertions about the prospect of our country (and for the over consuming first-world countries in general) are correct, bitRAKE. We will have a rough transition into living for ourselves once again. Done will be the days of driving 10 to 30 miles to your office job which supplies money to buy food and goods for everyday living. This system has too many holes in it and it leaks far too much.

We will become more direct and one with the land. Instead of large farms producing food for thousands and thousands of people, I believe it is more practical for each or a smaller group of households to have a farm or large garden to supply food for themselves. This liberates us from the need to drive somewhere to make money which then is purchase food which was also shipped from somewhere else to a location where you must drive to in order to achieve possession.

This is only one example of the many changes that will happen to the world's societies. As we decentralize and become more independent, self sufficient entities, government will become less powerful, and eventually I see it evolving into more of a societal guideline for moral behavior in an area. This is one reason the government tries to push more industrialism, consumerism, and large commercial capitalism. Keeping the need for regulations preserves the need for government. Specific countries and borders will no longer be such big issues, and people will [hopefully] become more harmonized with each other.

Unfortunately before we develop such an enlightened and free society we must see a need to, and though some of us can accept the need, others are too entrenched in every-day living, trying to support a family and themselves, to take a step back and see whats going on can and must be changed. Others still refuse to accept a need for change because they are blind that their drive for more 'stuff' and more 'money' is a mere veil of distorted reality engendered by their false identity (ego) with material possessions and physical manifestations. Something universally threatening must occur, which shakes the very bones of every man in every society, before the need for change will become apparent and accepted. I only wish we could avoid this fate, but unfortunately it is the only conclusive answer I have come to.

Just my two cents.

Rubbish. We are already far too overpopulated for everyone to own their own little plot of land  to produce enough food to sustain themselves.

Farming pracvtices today are a thousand times more efficient, and is all that keeps this world population alive on the airable land available.

I don't think you gave very much thought to your post, but perhaps you will find many interesting facts  if you take the time to reseach some of your assumptions.

As it is, we are far, far beyond any possiblility of "returning to the land"  and living like cavemen.  Thousands of years beyond in fact.

90% of the worlds population would have to be killed off for individual people to be able to sustain themselves off the land, and even then I doubt many could.

Collective farming  has been the way of even the earliest civilizations, simply because
it greatly increases the chances of survival. 

Reverting to those type of civilizations however, would be much harder, because people simply do not know how to farm, nor hunt.  Plus there is all the other skills, like preserving food to eat while your crop grows, not that it will grow anyways,  because you have no fertilizer, and don't know how to keep the weeds and animals from eating it., no tools.

Then, even if you overcome all those difficulties, a better hunter and surviver will probably come along and kill you and take it all anyway.

I get a good laugh at  greenies who daydream about   'going back to the land'.

You had better get started now, because it's not easy living a rural life  even now with all the conveniences, and you'll need to learn that it's impossible to grow all your own food, so you are going to have to build up stores and stock up on things like ammo. And get to know others that will form part of your post collapse community.

I've been doing it for 15 years, and you can bet when d-day comes, I won't be turning my lights (from my own home made electricity) at night.  Anyone thinking they are going to walk out of the cities and return to the land are going to be in for a suprize and a sudden reality check.

[Sataur]

Yes we are overpopulated. Too much so. We have created and environment for ourselves which is unnaturally fertile, and as such we take away from the life of other species and organisms. There are simply too many humans all fighting to get as much as they can from everyone else.

And regarding your earlier posts, it doesn't matter where oil comes from or how long it will last, we have to be responsible and stop using it all together. The same goes for coal, natural gas, and nuclear energy as well (though nuclear energy is probably the best of them all, but is far more dangerous if not handled correctly). These products produce harmful effects which aren't temporally specific to our times, which makes them all the more dangerous. We won't necessarily see effects from the oil we burn today in our lifetimes, and perhaps not even our children's lifetimes, but we have to go beyond our egotism and false sense of superiority and uphold the responsibility to seize the use of oil and other non-renewable resources all together.

You need to get off your fantasy for a 'fallout' like aftermath, and realize it won't be beneficial to you or the earth to perpetuate our self-destructive tendencies which brought us to the collapsed state in the first place. Stocking up on resources and trying to gain an advantage over the rest will only hurt you and our successors in the long run. It is nothing more than a physical manifestation of a false egoic image withheld by most of the world, the same one that has created the corruption and destruction we are faced with today.

What I would suggest to you my dear friend would be to stop, step back, and look at what the root of the problem is. View beyond the physical, and enter the profound. It is not a physical cause which has created these physical effects. It was not what we did that got us here, it is how we were and how we are that did. Meditate, and you will see that the 'you' who you have come to know and identify with is merely a product of our ego-driven society, and is a sad and upset identity to which we have seemingly become perpetually bound. We need to break our bonds, and integrate our ego's into our true, loving identities in a healthy way.

Just my two cents.

[2012]

I agree. If oil did run out it would not be long before new ideas on how things work came into mainstream thinking. The difference between then and now is who is paying the research money, for what and why....We hardly know anything about water, H2O. Its properties are unusual and its energy capabilities are 10,000 times greater than Nuclear yet research dollars go into Nuclear simply because its already done, has a shorter R&D investment cycle and yields a greater share of Corporate welfare simply because, its already there! Investing in H2O is not going to happen when the best we can do with it is make steam using oil........

If its true that radio transmissions can "crack it" then good, start using a radio frequency device and bump up the volume, see what does what! Nothing will happen Unless the Oil peters out and screws the world economy or someone beats the giants to it....

Remember the best inventions are the simplest ans most elegant, nothing has to be complicated! After all a silicon chip is a simply a very small screen print of a 2 way diode on a glass substrate, its elegant, simple and easy to make if you know how...Got a microscope?

[bitRAKE]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YpKbO6O3O3M

[bitRAKE]

OffGrid rdnck, there is a lot of truth to what you say - I don't think large scale agricultural is in danger of being stopped by humans anytime soon. Yet, there is technology that can almost match yields on some crops at a smaller scale. Of course, I'm ignoring the steep initial costs of such systems.

For example, yearly lettuce yields are 500 plants per square yard at a specialized farm. An advanced hydroponic setup can almost match that yield.

There are many pluses for the local grow method. Sataur? mention some and I'll add that crops could be grown in any climate. Like you said, we are pushing the limits of the land that we have to work with. I think other techniques merely help to spread the risk and reduce the burden on an already stressed environment.

Let me make it clear I am not suggesting an energy savings from localized growing. What I'm suggesting is diversification is worth more than small energy losses, and possibly higher quality produce can be grown.

[On a side note: "d-day" would bring out the expert hunters and they will be at your house - talk about a reality check. If not expert hunters then a mob of thousands. "d-day" can/should not be prepared for - it is not a world I'm willing to live in.]