Community Prep — Getting Serious

As the roller coaster of human civilization slides over the top of our long climb and starts to accelerate down the other side, a lot of folks are going to start waving their arms and screaming. At that point — could be next month, or next year, or ten years from now — your root stirring had better be pretty well along. Hopefully, by then, you'll be part of a focused group of friends and neighbors who are ready to step up, present the outline of an action plan to your community, and move to implement it.

Your plan will need to address issues of self-sufficiency, answer questions about how the less able and less cooperative members of the community can be cared for or dealt with, and provide the ways and means for the community to protect itself from the chaos that will almost inevitably roil around and within it.

Let's take these three main elements one by one.

Self-sufficiency

The idea that any group of modern Americans, large or small, could come up with all their own food, shelter, energy, clothing, tools, medical care, and what have you, is pretty ludicrous on the face of it; but a small fraction of us, at least, might have a shot at it. But even for rural people with lots of skills, it's going to require a huge organizational effort, a ton of extra work (extending into the indefinite future), and an abundance of deprivation and suffering.

A crucial factor in whether we survive will be our level of preparation. Adequate stores of food may allow us to make the transition to food production. The stockpiling of clothing, tools, and household goods will also make a big difference in the struggle to survive. Someday, we or our descendents will have to produce clothes, shoes, metal tools, etc. from scratch; and there simply won't be any more matches, toilet paper, batteries, galvanized nails, or a thousand other manufactured items we take for granted. Much of this stuff will be priceless — and some of it will be recognized as unnatural and unnecessary — but the more we have of it going in, the better our chances.

Most of us have a house of some sort to live in. If that house happens to be in a reasonably safe place, then the next question will be how to keep it warm in winter. Since most safe places are rural places, where there are more trees, then chances are you can heat with wood.

But how about cooking? A 250-gal. propane tank might let a family cook for a couple years, but sooner or later you'll probably need ways to cook with wood. Solar cooking might be a good supplement.

And you'll need something to cook. As mentioned, stored food will be important; but fresh food is essential to health. Vegetable gardening is a good place to start; but if you haven't done much of it lately, you may be surprised at how much there is to learn — it's both an art and a science. You'll need to bring a lot of attention and discipline to it to really be successful.

Seeds are another important topic. You'll want to raise open-pollinated (nonhybrid) crops, so that you can save seeds. Seed companies vary widely in quality and in the amount of seed you get for your money. The best deal I've found, by far, is Fedco, a seed co-op based in Maine (though their seeds come from growers all over the country). Their prices are often less than half those of just about any other company, and the information they provide in their free catalog is both informative and entertaining. They are also the best source for seed potatoes, onion sets, and similar crops.

Seed saving is a real challenge — you'll need help and a lot of practice and patience to get to the point where you can keep the yearly seed cycle rolling along, for all the food you want to grow. Seed Savers Exchange is the place to start. In their Seed Savers Yearbook, over 800 listed members offer some 20,000 seed varieties. Suzanne Ashworth's book Seed to Seed is also invaluable.

To grow fruit you'll need an orchard (or berry vines at the very least), which means getting young trees in the ground 3 to 5 years before you expect to harvest anything. Nut trees are an excellent protein source, but they're slow to mature.

Another excellent resource is Peaceful Valley Farm & Garden Supply. Based in Grass Valley, Ca., they ship worldwide.

Small-scale grain raising is well within reach; and growing, processing, and cooking with your own wheat is very satisfying (both to the brain and the tummy). Gene Logsdon's classic book on the subject is a good place to start — if you can find it. It's out of print, and copies are fetching from 60 to 80 dollars on Amazon! I found one in a used book store for $4.

Turning to animals, egg and meat chickens and ducks are easy enough to manage; but larger livestock — goats, sheep, and cows — require quite a lot of preparation, knowledge, and daily care. And don't forget that the grain you feed to animals can be used far more efficiently, in terms of food energy, if you eat it yourself. Around our place, we're attempting to get around this fundamental fact by feeding our poultry only the scraps we don't eat, plus what they can find by ranging, and by letting our hardy Kiko goats feed almost entirely on brush.

Worm raising might be another good thing to look into. It's a relatively easy way to grow a lot of high-quality protein (for chickens or whomever) without the need for store-bought inputs.

Lists and inventories

A key to survival planning is the compiling of a list of needed items. And then the list needs to be compared with resources already on hand — that is, you'll need to take an inventory.

My own list — definitely a work in progress — is available here for download (it's an Excel 98 file). It won't match your needs exactly, but it should give you a leg up.

Community organization and support

Those are some of the basics of personal or family survival. But how do you extend them to the whole community? There are two keys, it seems to me: attitude and organization.

By attitude I mean, is the community inclined to move forward with a "all for one and one for all" approach to things, or will selfishness prevail? You may not know the answer to that question until the process is well along. In the meantime you'll need to proceed with community organizing.

In the early phases of organizing, you'll have stirred the roots, shared your personal survival strategies and resources with close friends, and worked out the rudiments of a community plan. Now, as the shit really hits the fan, your core group needs to broaden the root stirring and work toward full-scale community meetings, at which the plan can be discussed, fleshed out, and acted upon.

There will be a multitude of issues to addressed at the meetings. Let me pick just one, food production and storage, as an example of how things might go. You will want to assess, in rough terms, how adequate the food stores of each family are. You'll also want to know how well-developed their gardens, orchards, and animal operations are, and where they may develop surpluses or shortages. What major tools or equipment do they have? What basic tools do they lack?

Putting all this information together, you'll then ask where the major gaps are and what to do about them. The sharing of seeds, tools, and knowledge will probably be in order. Community gardening or farming projects may make sense (grain farming, in particular, might go better at a larger scale, especially if someone has the equipment for it). Such projects could help community cohesion.

It might be a good idea to develop a questionnaire. If every family fills it out (rather than members of the organizing group trying to question every family), then your assessment may proceed a lot more quickly.

At each stage in the process (right from the beginning, when you're still a small group), it may be helpful to have a community database, with the names, addresses, and phone numbers of every family. To it you might add what you know about the resources and skills each family has to offer, and special needs they are likely to have.

The database can be readily created in a simple program like Filemaker, which runs on nearly all computers (Windows and Mac). You can share the database via email — but be careful of "version control": you should always be clear about who has the master copy (it may pass from person to person, as information is added).

A community web site could also be a good focal point — if you don't forget that many people, especially old folks, still shy away from computers.

To really keep the community together, you'll need to get every family involved and not let anyone who is needy fall through the cracks. If people feel excluded or rejected, you'll have trouble. If opposing factions form, you'll be in real trouble.

A core issue may be that most people will wait until very late in the game to open their eyes and get their rears in gear. The point at which your core group expands its activities into the whole community may be crucial: too soon and people think you're just crying wolf; too late and, well, the wolf had you for lunch.

If only a fraction of the community is aware and prepares ahead — even if it's a large fraction — then there will probably be resource shortages. The bigger they are, the more the willingness and ability of the "haves" to help the "have nots" will be strained. And what if some of your biggest "haves" decline to help out?

Community protection

Which brings us to the question of protection … security … defense, call it what you will.

Almost inevitably, some people in your community will not want to cooperate, or they may be forced into "cooperating" with a powerful, undemocratic faction opposed to you. One way or another, serious rifts could develop, and you would be foolish not to anticipate and prepare for them. (Not that foolishness is the worst of vices: you might choose to sacrifice everything to the attempt to hold the community together; and eventually — long after you're gone, perhaps — your sacrifice could make all the difference.)

You could find yourself standing at the axis of concentric "circles of trust": in the first circle, closest to you, your family. In the next circle out, people who share your land and close, trusted neighbors. In the next, your community core group of highly aware, well-prepared friends. In the next circle, perhaps, friends who were slow to "get it" or to prepare. And so on, out to the farthest dark circle where the villians and monsters dwell. The point is, you may want to be careful with your trust.

But let's say for a minute that your community has held together, at least well enough that it can face up to questions of how to deal with outsiders. Outsiders could come in several flavors. The ones that spring to mind are refugees, vigilante gangs, governmental or quasigovernmental forces, and neighboring communities.

We might be able to arrange these different types according to how difficult they would be to deal with. The order, from easiest to hardest, is probably (1) neighboring communities, (2) refugees, (3) vigilante gangs, and (4) (quasi)governmental forces.

Obviously, if you can maintain harmonious relations with neighboring communities, then great. But that only works if they are as prepared and well-organized as you, and if you don't need to compete over resources that lie between you.

Refugees could be the toughest outsiders to deal with, in a way, because many of them will be good people who desperately need your help (and who might be able to help you). Remember, though, that your community has a limited carrying capacity, and if you exceed it you may doom the community.

Vigilante gangs, roving "militias" and the like might be nasty. These will be the guys who learned to field strip an AK-47 before they learned to read (and may not yet have mastered the latter skill). They will be kick-ass, and if you don't kick back, they'll terrorize you out of existence.

But the greatest threat may come from forces operating at the behest of the government — or what's left of it. If there is a general societal breakdown and the Big Boys are in trouble, then they'll turn all their dogs loose: the US military and every intelligence and law-enforcement agency in the land will be working 24/7 to make sure you and I don't stray off the preserve.

Whoever it is knocking at your door, the door had better be bolted shut. That could mean that you take out the roads coming into (and leading out of!) your town; it could mean that you station guards or run perimeter patrols. It could well mean that you raise and train a community militia.

It might be also be good to have in place a plan for retreat and guerilla resistance, just in case you're overrun.

In the long run, I bet people like us are going to be smarter, stronger, wiser, and more alive than people like them.

Next: Community Survival Forum