In the post-apocalyptic science fiction of my youth, there was a stereotype of the rugged individual that prepares a lair fully stocked to allow him (never her) and his family to live out the chaos of the after. They were called survivalists then and, I think, preppers now (or maybe that was last month).
I found the idea seductive, but as I’ve aged and (I hope) matured I have come to realize that solo self-sufficiency is unattainable with anything like a budget I’d be able to muster. Like it or not, we’re a social species and, at best, we might be able to have the means to survive for weeks, not years, before we would be relying on our neighbors for something.
Nonetheless, we are on an island and the nearest major port is some 2,500 miles away. In times of global unrest and economic uncertainty (aren’t they all?), one cannot help but worry about having that long, fragile supply chain disrupted.
Not only is our island isolated, but we live on a remote part of that island. What resources the local governments might be able to muster are unlikely to be available to us until the more densely populated areas closer to the seats of government have been served. But just because I cannot be 100% self-sufficient doesn’t mean I have to completely buy into the system. And, without benefit of a master plan but driven by anxiety and distrust of centralized systems…
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We have long essentially been our own telephone company. I built a distributed phone network to run my old company and it’s still around. I need to buy SIP trunking service to connect it to the rest of the world, but that’s available for a number of providers.
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I’m helping put together an emergency mesh radio network to help keep us and our neighbors connected.
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We have been our own electric utility since we first moved here, and now we’re a pretty big one in that we don’t really need propane for anything except hot showers (I’ll fix that soon). Even our transportation runs on solar energy.
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We have an independent source of water, though if the current conditions are the result of persistent climate change and not just a dry spell we would have to be very careful with water use.
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We have what seems like a limitless source of pork and pork products including my life-sustaining thyroid replacement thanks to an all-out invasion of feral pigs.
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We will soon have a good supply of eggs as long as we can come up with enough scratch, which shouldn’t be a problem with the land available to us.
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It really helps that I’m a retired physician and HA is an herbalist and acupuncturist. No, I didn’t stockpile any drugs, but we have the knowledge to treat a lot of what might come up.
We can’t survive on eggs alone, but we’re working on the food issues. We have some bananas growing and a lot of citrus. We have more guava than we know what to do with. HA is planning other fruit orchards. And she’s started a vegetable garden in raised planters on our deck.
We do have a well-fenced, irrigated garden area, but it is too far from the house to be seen, is quite overgrown, and some trees have grown up that shade it too much. In an exigency, though, it could be re-activated.
Apart from the sheep, whose only practical value is keeping the place mowed and producing fertilizer, I don’t want to get any deeper into the livestock trade. But I think with HA and my medical backgrounds, our eggs, water, produce, and electricity we would have enough for us to become part of a local support network that could keeps us all alive until the chaos passes.
—2p