What Is a Viable Community?

In the context of Apocalypse, a viable community might be something like this: A place where people are able to self-sufficiently produce all the basics of food, shelter, energy, clothing, tools, medical care, etc. needed for survival, while getting along with one another and handling community problems well, and maintaining good relations with neighboring communities or else dealing effectively with outsiders who threaten or attack.

For such a community to exist, the people in it must have the skills and experience of self-sufficiency, they must have prepared well, and they must be able to work together peaceably. Faced with a world that is falling apart, they must be able to hang together.

If attacked, the community must be willing and able to defend itself, or it will be destroyed. Just as individuals will have to decide whether to engage in self-defense, so will communities. Conceivably, an entire community might elect to not defend itself, though it's a hard to imagine that an otherwise viable American community would have a lot of people in it who were averse to fighting back.

Conversely, if a community decides to preemptively attack others, and is sufficiently strong, then it may succeed. You and I, with our 21st-century peace-loving ways, might not like it; but strong communities have overrun and absorbed weaker ones for a lot longer than we've been human. However, in the throes of Apocalypse it may be much harder than it has been historically, for large, violently inclined communities to sustain themselves, because there may be pervasive, crippling resource shortages, made worse by a hell of a lot of social panic. It would take a strong tyrant indeed to sit stably at the center of all that.

Geography

When the shit hits the fan, it might be next to impossible to sustain a viable community in any area of the "developed" world that is currently urban or suburban. There will be a terrific, chaotic scramble for the basics of life; and it will only grow worse with time, until there are far fewer people scrambling. And the carrying capacity of cities and suburbs will be even further reduced by the survivors' lack of preparedness, tools, and self-sufficiency knowledge and experience.

It appears to me that the farther you are from population centers when the A Train rolls in, the better off you'll be – but only if you're well-established in your rural locale and on very good terms with your neighbors. (You might opt not to have neighbors – you might decide to set up camp in the wilderness – but are you really that self-sufficient?)

A good, thought-provoking primer on how to get out (and why) is Ran Prieur's "How to Survive the Crash and Save the Earth."

The ideal survival setting might be a small town in a place that is at least several miles distant from other small towns and far removed from all cities. Hopefully, there are physical barriers that make it difficult for refugees to reach you. (For example, if the only access to your town is by narrow mountain roads, then it might be easy to close them.)

It goes without saying that the town must be in a place where the basics can be provided sustainably. That means a temperate climate, arable land, ample water, building materials, and fuel, for starters. With global warming due to worsen throughout this century (and with interesting little phenomena like thermohaline stoppage popping up), not every place that has been desirable will continue to be.

And even if your town satisfies all these conditions (including the social requirements mentioned in the opening paragraph), it might be smart not to live right in the center of your town, surrounded by neighbors who might or might not really be on the same page as you, survival-wise. It might be better to be on the outskirts of town, or even a mile or three away, in a defensible location, with your "home community" of family and friends close by … just in case things get out of hand "downtown."

Size

I've suggested that a small town might be the ideal, sizewise, for a survival community; and at the same time I've warned against putting all your eggs in that large and unpredictable a basket. What's the bottom line here? It is, I think, that the size and diversity of skills and resources of a town could be a tremendous advantage; but in extreme circumstances a population of a few hundred or even a few dozen people could be impossible to manage, and you might have to fall back on your "home community."

Traditionally, hunting bands have formed into tribes, tribes into chiefdoms, kingdoms, and states, and states into empires, only as resources were available and technologies, economies, and political structures could be created and sustained. Our accustomed resource and technological bases are being undermined, and our global economy and political system are being destabilized. As they collapse, we can naturally expect a devolution from empires to states, and states to chiefdoms … tribes … bands.

What are the odds?

How many people live in a community that matches the viability criteria I've outlined? Not more than 1/4 of 1 percent of the total population of North America, maybe, considering that only about 20 percent of people live in rural areas, and (I guesstimate) only one in a hundred rural communities will actually prove viable. (Ten percent of these communities might be viable in terms of geography and capacity for self-sufficiency, but how many of them will actually see and comprehend what is coming and prepare?)

The long and the short of it is, if Apocalypse blossoms, North America will wither.

Elsewhere in the "developed world" the story is likely to be the same. Not as many guns, but a similar lack of viability. It is easy to imagine that deep in the Fourth (if not the Third) World, there are places that will emerge unscathed; but I'm afraid the corrupting influences of the globeconomy have spread to most of the far corners. Corporate agribusiness is now dominant in the Third World: local food self-sufficiency has been supplanted by cash crops grown for export, reducing hundreds of millions to peonage (or at least keeping them there). In the Fourth World the capital- and energy-intensive demands of the Green Revolution have left another billion or two in potentially desperate straits. Some of them might be able to revert to self-sufficiency in a pinch, but their numbers have swollen far beyond the traditional carrying capacity of their lands (which have themselves been degraded); and so in the Fourth World, too, only a fraction of the populace is likely to survive Apocalypse.

Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.