Also, the large holdings can always be broken up into smaller holdings, that can be worked on a family or small-group scale.

Horse-drawn equipment will probably come back into use; surprisingly, this is entirely viable.

That’s why the information needs to be maintained.

All that land is either laying fallow or owned by large corporations.
The people that worked it are gone. if TSHTF, someone is going to have to work that land to produce food. Who will do it? Who will know how? the people that already do it will have their hands full with their own land. Farming anything larger than a small backyard plot is a full time job. I know that there are people out there that have the knowledge, but they won’t have time to be teaching classes.

We are in an age of competition between evangelical meme-systems. In that way it has something in common with the 1920s - 30s, where the emerging evangelical memes were communism and fascism.

Today the primary axis of competition is between religious extremism and its co-evil of fanatical obscurantism on one hand, and on the other hand, abject greed + its rationalizations, that can be called, for want of a better word, “grab-ism.” As in “grab-and-run.” (Note, when I refer to religious extremism as evil, that does not assume that religion in and of itself is evil; religion, like other philosophical systems, can be put to good ends or evil ends. Let us not forget Martin Luther King and Bishop Desmond Tutu, among others.)

Each of these (religious extremism, and grab-ism) is “evangelical” in the sense that it seeks to proselytize, often by force. Each of these has been successful at creating highly contagious viral memes, with perhaps billions of adherents around the world.

What we here are promoting is nothing more or less than a return to realism and reasonableness on a sustainable footing. Realism in facing the pending crises of our times, and reasonableness in seeking solutions that preserve “freedom and dignity” (to use B.F. Skinner’s phrase; and he was in the end far more of a humanitarian than his critics made him out to be).

The problem is, realism and reasonableness don’t sell so well, compared to martyrdom and mayhem, or shiny & new baubles and piles of ill-gotten loot. Realism and reasonableness are the equivalent of “plain vanilla.” Everyone “likes” them, but the more “exciting” stuff is behind the counter or in the back room.

So to overcome that limitation, we have to become somewhat evangelical ourselves. Contagiously enthusiastic, in the manner of the early pioneers of the space program or the internet, but about something far more prosaic including the deliberate return to a simpler material standard of living.

This is not going to be easy. And yet we must.

There *is no* putting things back the way they were. As someone commented in BoingBoing, we bounced back nicely after WW2, but then they assumed we could repeat that performance. That assumption was dead wrong.

1940s: Lower population, greater resource base, plenty of cheap energy (oil), and stable climate.

Today: The Earth is overpopulated by about 60% and overconsuming by about 60%, the present era of cheap energy is closing (until or unless a replacement comes along (don’t hold your breath; nuclear + renewables + conservation all still take time we don’t have enough of), and climate systems are about to go over the tipping point if they haven’t already.

The likely outcome is a protracted dark age lasting a couple of centuries, during which time there will still be areas of light, as it were, where knowledge is preserved. However we will no more get back what we have now, than we will get the mythical flying cars of Atlantis.

“Mom, grandpa must be smokin’ funnyweed again. He just told me that when he was my age, they had living rooms on wheels that would take them wherever they wanted to go…”

The best that can be hoped for in the rebuilding phase, is to develop a sustainable culture that is largely agrarian but can support a high-technology science sector dedicated to solving our most urgent problems plus continuing space exploration (think “off-site backups” of Earth life & knowledge; otherwise, when the sun goes, it’s *over*). I’ve even got some notes for a fictional workup based on that idea: a story with the working title “And then nothing happened,” referring specifically to a *lack* of conflict & drama compared to “before.” One of the main characters lives in an agrarian town and works in local production. The other main character lives in a compact high-tech city and works as a mid-level tech on a NASA project. One visits the other, which enables depicting the juxtaposition of those seemingly unrelated worlds.

Worst of all would be humanity fighting itself over the remaining resources while going down the drain and back to the caves in the worst sense of that phrase. Think “Taliban World.” Very bad. (Worse than Lovelock’s +5C scenario because it would be a stable state rather than a complete re-initialization of the proverbial hard drive.)

Somewhere in between is the “neo-primitivist” scenario of a humane return to hunter/gatherer ways, advanced by Jason Godesky on http://www.anthropik.com. (think Daniel Quinn, _Ishmael_) I differ with Godesky about a number of things, but he and some of his folks are darn good thinkers & writers who make a coherent case, so I see them as kindred spirits in a way.

In any case, the future looks like a much smaller population living at a much lower consumption level, with energy/resource-intensive technologies used primarily for essential purposes, and with considerable potential for conflicts along a number of axes (the most likely being for control of resources, obviously).

And our place in that world, those of us who don’t get Darwinized along the way, is to take the best of what we have today and make the best of what we will have tomorrow.

The library idea is really your best bet, though. Everybody likes to think that they’d be the one to survive the plague/nuclear war/alien invasion/climate crash/zombie assault, but they seem to forget the statistical assumption of the whole thing. Most every one is dead. Most likely, that includes you.

Something to keep in mind: Core definition of civilization: “a society within which violence decreases over time, and knowledge increases over time.” Everything else we attribute to civilization, such as rights and justice under law, cities, economic development, and so on, comes from those two key points. Civilization does not depend on any particular level of technology; you can have a civilized society operating with hunter/gatherer technology and limited horticulture (e.g. the Iroquois Confederacy), or with space-age technology.

The important things are to prevent the increase in violence, and prevent the decline of knowledge.

Toward that end, two sets of institutions are vital, and they deserve our support no matter how bad things get.

One is the system of law and justice; in the US that means our Constitution and state constitutions, and all of the apparatus of representative democracy. On the local level, it means the local court system and its ancillaries: the judges and their core admin staff, the police/sheriffs, public defenders, district attorneys, local jail, probation officers. For those of us who consider the question of “community defense,” the legal system is the first line of defense against the potential for an increase in violence. As per the US experience in the Middle East in recent years, don’t treat something as a military problem if it can be handled via criminal prosecution or civil trial.

Supporting the local justice system includes practical steps such as continuing to collect taxes or take contributions as needed to keep judges and staff etc. employed; providing volunteer labor for tasks such as maintaining the local courthouse; providing donations of essentials such as locally-grown food to feed those who are serving jail sentencees; and so on.

The second core set of institutions are those related to preserving and passing along knowledge: the local schools and library system, and community colleges as well as any other colleges and universities in your area. Here also, continuing to collect taxes or voluntary contributions is vital, along with volunteer labor to maintain buildings & infrastructure, keep staffs fed, provide housing for students if needed, and so on.

Libraries and expert academic staffs are your preservers of knowledge; teachers and their teaching assistant staffs are those who pass knowledge along to others. In a crisis, your local libraries should probably put vital books (those dealing with core skills) on a non-lending basis for use only inside the library, to keep these books maximally available for use by all who need them. In a crisis, public and private schools will have to establish additional classes where people with vital skills can teach anyone who wants to sign up (this can be done in the evenings). It will also be highly useful to have a listing of skilled people and experts of various kinds who are in the area, and those who are willing to teach what they know to others. Obviously, continuing the education fo children is vital; otherwise the links of knowledge between generations, that keep society going, will break. And it’s vital that such education also include what used to be called “civics,” the details of how to keep a representative democracy going.

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Re. the whole idea of “apocalypse.” Peak oil and the climate crisis, taken together, add up to something that could cause major economic and social breakdown, and widespread death from various causes including disease, hunger, and violent competition for resources. We normally think of “apocalypse” along the lines of “wake up one morning, and then the sirens go off, and the lights go out, and the s— hits the fan all at once.” (Think of how you felt on 9/11 when you first got the news and saw the pictures.)

However, reality doesn’t usually work like that. What’s more likely is that things just gradually get worse and worse, one crisis after another with lengthy periods of “nothing much is changing” in between. Think of the analogy to frogs in water that is slowly coming to a boil.

Our brains are tuned to recognize changes that occur rapidly. The changes we have to be concerned with are those that are occurring more slowly. We notice a 9/11, we notice when gas prices cross another dollar threshold (from $3 to $4, and next to $5), we notice when another big chunk of ice breaks off at the north or south pole. We notice a Katrina, a heat wave, a war in the Middle East fought ultimately for oil.

But it’s the slower changes that will get us if we don’t prepare for them. And there’s no time to start like the present.

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OK, two long postings in a row are (more than enough for now; I’ll be back tonight.

(Note, in case my email address is accessible via this system: spam-filter: remove the marsupials from the userID and the domain name.)