I haven't posted on here much in the past year or so, but I had to post about this. I'm reading a book that is the most profound, not to mention challenging, book I've ever read aside from the Bible. It's titled "Surviving Off Off-Grid", subtitled "Decolonizing the Industrial Mind" by Michael Bunker.

This is NOT another how-to survival manual; this is the book every survivalist will wish s/he could have read before getting into it. As one reviewer put it, "So profound there may not be a large market for it. A thinker's book."

In short, rather than being a how-to book, this is a how-to-think book. Rather than telling the reader to buy these things and do these other things to be safe from a societal collapse, the author shines a harsh light on where society went wrong and why, and then offers ideas to encourage readers to make the journey back to right thinking and right living.

Rather than having me blather on about it, here is a link to the customer reviews on Amazon. This book is so profound, it's worth a discussion topic all its own. If you've read it, please post your thoughts about it here.

Peace.

Friend, Where society went wrong and why, that would be a very very very long list.

Now where society went in the proper direction and did it the right way would be a much much much shorter list.

True enough. There are many points at which society took wrong turns. This author traces the crux of it to the advent of electricity. His arguments are compelling. He even shed new light on the War of Northern Aggression (for me).

Actually the Civilized World went to the Bad long before Electricity became a common word.

One thing is Man does not belong living in large cities but should have remained in Villages and small towns and living an Agrarian lifestyle if possible.

One thing I believe for certain is that Cities like New York and Chicago et al. are very very bad for people in general.

Here is something to consider, I believe that if I, being a white man had to chose between living in an American Black Ghetto like Harlem or Watts or living in Africa in a Masai Village or probably also a Zulu Village I would be a lot and I mean a LOT safer living with and trusting an African Tribe by living with them in a Village then by living among American Blacks in their Ghetto.

I do not know very much about the Masai or Zulu but what I do know I like.

Another way Civilization went wrong is this entire idea of Mixing Races or Cultures, and the United States is at the lead in this collective stupidity.

The Great Melting Pot of the United States was doomed to failure from the very beginning.

In truth Western Europe is actually ahead of the United States in seeing the folly of inviting People of vastly different and incompatible Cultures including Religions to live among them.

As an example Islam is totally incompatible with Christianity and Judaism and Western Europe is now witnessing the inevitable outcome of Muslims moving into a Christian Country.

I don't know about anyone else but I for one love dogs and I do not want to live next to people who consider Dogs to be good eating and the same goes for Cats.

I also know people who are horse owners and who have had City People move next to them and the City People cause nothing but problems over everything having to do with horses.

One person even got upset just because he could see the horses in the neighbors pasture, he said it ruined his view of the trees behind his new home.

So this is not just an issue of Race, Color, National Origin or Religion it is also about anyone who is totally incompatible with his neighbors.

Whomever got there first should be able to have a say in who moves into his Neighborhood.

And there are a lot of other mistakes that have been made but these I believe are the very biggest mistakes that man has made on his road to Civilization.

We went wrong with that first bite of the apple.

I guess the question I have is, how was his book published without electricity?

I'm not a Luddite. I've been a survivalist for nearly as long as I've been a libertarian and, even as old and half-crippled as I am, I'd still put my trapping skills up against anyone here at AWRM. I could go "back to the land" if I had to--but I just don't want to. I like my computer, my indoor plumbing, and--yes--electricity. Why do you think I'm always talking about political and economic issues? Because I really don't want to have to put my survivalist skills to use.

With that being said, this book sounds interesting. Is the author Amish or Mennonite?

Onward and upward,
airforce

airforce, neither is the author a Luddite. He is not opposed to technology. His point is that, when we use technology connected to or reliant on the grid, we must ask ourselves that we won't have it in a collapse. If possible, and if it's something we feel we need, are there pre-electricity ways of achieving the same thing? He calls himself an agrarian separatist, and I read just today that he home churches as well as home schools.

Most people who plan for when the PHTF are actually not planning to survive. They're planning to make it over the hump until things return to "normal." A solar system, generators, windmills, batteries, etc. will last only so long. If the P continues to HTF for a long time, this kind of preparedness won't help; it will only delay being affected by a collapse.

The author points out that everything we need to survive is readily available to us, but because of our dependence on electricity, we have forgotten how to make use of them. Our ancestors knew, for example, how to make a house that stayed cool in the summer in the southern states before grid-supplied air conditioning. Before electricity, our ancestors knew how to store vegetables for long periods of time. These are a couple of examples.

He also points out that, if we're thinking that we'll "make the switch" when the PHTF, that won't work. He stresses that one should make the move now to that lifestyle so that, much like the Amish, we wouldn't notice or care if the grid went down or food stopped getting trucked to the grocery stores or gasoline went to $27 per gallon.

One of the more appealing aspects (to me) of making the switch is the cost savings. Done right, one wouldn't need to work a mind-numbing job for 40 hours of every week.

True enough. This sounds pretty interesting. I'm going to put this on my "to read" list (which unfortunately, is far too long already, but I'll move it up a few spaces).

Onward and upward,
airforce

What you posted is just one of the reasons I believe as I do.
When Mankind moved from Villages and Small Towns into Mega Cities like we have now with NYC and Chicago et al. the coming situation caused by the loss of Critical Infrastructure was inevitable.

Reading that book will not change one single thing for people who are trapped in Mega Cities the only way to survive is to get out of the City and move to a good rural area where they can have a chance to survive.

If you live in a Big City and there is no more Electricity you might as well put your head between your legs and Kiss Your Sweet Ass Goodbye.

By the way I currently live in a City, not a very big City but just big enough that I would have a very very small chance of Survival. I am hoping to be able to move to a small town near Phoenix before the Stinky Stuff Hits The Fan, if I can't make it there in time then I will join the Kiss My Sweet Ass Goodbye contingent.

I live smack dab in the middle of a major (but not mega) city because it gives many more economic choices and options than any small community would. I look at the past few weeks, and in part due to the international nature of this city (and most West Coast port cities), and the fact that I have mastered "Business English" with an understanding of the thought process of various foreign cultures, only about 20% of my clients are American by birth.

Now this may vary city by city, but reality is that survival is still possible in the cities, but it depends a lot on how the were originally designed and laid out. Most in the southwest would quickly become non-inhabitable due to the lack of water. Many in the north would have problems without centralized energy distribution hubs providing for heat. Now in a middling sort of thing though, we look at the big freeze, snowed in winters that have happened, in the cities, the very poor can get to warming centers. Schools, churches, other public places set up and heated overnight. In the country, you lose power and heat, then read in the newspaper about how some isolated old folks died overnight when their relatives could not get over to check up on them, or someone got hurt loading firewood, fell asleep in the snow instead of making it back to the house, and did not get found until the snowdrifts thawed in the spring.

Then you have the roving criminals. A real problem in isolated places where sure, you may be armed, but the bandits can get clever about that too, and don't think you can always outsmart a pack of murderers when you have regular country chores to deal with. Now if SHTF and you have an organized neighborhood, that can be a different story. Maybe police response times might go up, but with the right street politics, your "buddy with a 12 guage" response times can be cut down to seconds because he lives just two houses down, and when trouble is in the air he keeps the hardware handy.

I could not disagree with you more Breacher. Im one of those country folk your talking about. Guess what? you can have the city, and I can have my chores. You forget, that we in the sticks have a more likely hood of having skill sets that many city slickers no longer possess, plus we tend to be more community oriented.

Yeah, give me my local folks and the ones I train with and we will be fine. Cities are hell on earth before a collapse of society not to mention afterward. Best of luck to you.

Leo out

airforce, when you start reading it, you'll wish you had moved it to the top of your list. After reading the introduction I found myself wishing I had read this book 10 years ago.

Sniper_762x51, you and this author would have much in common, I think.

Breacher, if you're living in your city and the grid takes a dump, there will be no food, no power, no gasoline, and no services. If it is a one-day or two-day dump, then you'll likely survive. What if it's for a year? What if it's for two years? Or five years? How do you plan to eat? If you can acquire food somehow, how do you plan to store it? Will you be using skills that you already have, or will you just figure on picking up these skills when they're needed?

Leonidas, I'm with you on this one. Last October I made the move from a D.C. suburb to four miles outside of a small town. The difference is night and day. There are five houses reasonably close to mine (within earshot), and all of them are owned by shooters who have common survival skills (although they don't view them as survival skills, just living-in-the-country skills). During last winter's big snow storm, our power went out for a day and a half. I came home from work late that night to find a running generator providing power to a portable heater in my daughters' bedroom. Neither the generator nor the heater were mine. Nor did my wife have to go ask for help. A neighbor took it upon himself to help out us newbie city folks. Man, I thought I was good people, but they keep showing me what good people is all about (another neighbor mows much of our 5 acres each week just 'cause).

Anyway, this book is much more than "move out of the city." It's full of history and economics and philosophy and enlightened ways of looking at what survival really means and how to think about approaching it.

Peace

Hey there Flick. Hope your remember me. We used to be on the same team just a different regions. Hope your doing OK and just wanna let you know if you ever get into a jam or need us down here in Central part of the state, just let me know. PM me sometime.

Leo out

Excellent video on this subject...

Urban Danger

http://www.urbandanger.com/Watch-It-Online.html

I live in the city, but I also keep a pretty big focus on mobility. Like I posted earlier, there is also the issue of how a city is laid out. A lot of west coast (Portland is considered "coast" but is actually several miles inland) have wilderness areas which are even technically within city limits. This metro area has several uninhabited islands in the wide river channels which have game, airable land, and sustainable habitat. Then there is the river fish habitat which of course varies. I suspect there might be poison water issues with that though, as not a lot of people fish here.

What this and most of the cities do have is a fair number of low traffic waterways which used to be major arteries of commerce but are no longer running the volume of traffic as before. Just recently on a rafting trip I found a lot of places someone with a boat could "hole up" for quite a while, boat access only places along wide creeks and rivers where the land access was virtually nonexistant.

Then there is an individuals role in a community. There is one peninsula here with no permanent (human) inhabitants, all industrial. It is half deserted now, let alone in the future if there were major reductions in major shipping commerce. Another island between Oregon and Washington state is teeming with unused residential space in the form of houseboats, unused hotels, even a small unused military ship that is being restored by a "club" that I strongly suspect would readily serve as a naval militia for the island if SHTF. While water access to and from the island is easy, land access is only by two bridges, both of which can be easily blocked off and even normal traffic flow blocks them off frequently due to bad highway management.

I lived in "the country" through a big chunk of the 1990s and missed some strong economic times due to that, and what passed as our "survival community" were some of the worst human beings a straight up guy would ever have to tolerate. The neighbors were no better, and would loot your place if given a solid chance when we were away. The only thing that got my cabin from being looted was usually having someone home, and when I did come and go, I tried to randomize my patterns as much as possible. Never announcing long trips, never giving out a "work schedule".

In either event, I am fairly mobile. I can't afford a country property, but I have a truck, tools, and am able bodied enough to pull my own weight and make my own way in the world for the forseeable future. I recently got a camper trailer that I am making this years restoration project and in theory, I can quite likely build up one of these every few years and pre-stage them at country places belonging to people I know, but I sure don't want to be paying storage fees for them here.

The issue is with the here and now, I can get exposure to people who will pay me to get things done for them where I make enough to buy stuff, and when and where I lived in the country, people were pretty much already set, or had nothing and were only scraping by. Once the country people figure out a guy is only scraping by, they work it so that is about all he will ever get. My ambitions are a few steps above being the worn out old ranch hand living in someone's barn loft as a charity case after living a life of working below minimum wage.

I can go to the Safeway store right now and find whole fryer chickens on sale at under $5 each. That feeds me for a bit more than a day. I can eat sufficient and convenient meals at fast food joints for about the same money (frugally, eating out at $15 per day is nominal, but it is easy to jack that up to $35 per day if you go to regular sit-down restaurants). I can earn money and pay for meals faster and more efficiently than I can stalk, kill, process and cook any wild game. Given my lack of experience or efficiency in killing, plucking and gutting chickens, I cannot even make it worth the $5 each to have chickens in my back yard. Now if they went up to $20 each, then yeah, I would consider putting some bird pens in. A full on chicken raising outfit is maybe a weekend project at the most so constructing and equipping that now, stocking it with hatchlings now, would be a wasted effort and probably take my attention away from making money, which I use to buy things which quite likely would not be as available if SHTF. Chicken hatchlings though, yeah, I suspect someone will still be selling them if the grid goes down.

I could get by without a vehicle if I were on the welfare roles, but chose not to take welfare or food stamps when .gov was really trying to shove me into the gutter. Now living in the country without a vehicle, that's just plain not possible if you expect to maintain any standard of living.

I know a lot of "country people" and without exception, NONE of then own much of anything without getting money from the government one way or another on a regular basis. Usually it is a retirement check of one form or another. Then there are farm subsidies, and in some cases payouts from disability settlements. Few, very few, country places are actually self sufficient economically, not to mention being actually self sufficient to the point of being sustainable off the grid.

I have a mobile "living system" that I am engineering to be sustainable "off the grid" and right now, about $6500 into the project, I have come to the realization that it is only good for short periods of time off the grid, and accomplishes very little that could not be done better with a good size yacht. For all of the trouble I went through, I could have saved up for the two years, put money down on a 35ft motor yacht and be living in a nicely appointed local harbor at $300 per month. The mobility of the boat being even more difficult for hostiles to mess with than my camper/trailer/motorcycle system. Although vulnerable to getting hijacked or sunk, there is the issue of accessibility. Pull out onto the water and you effectively have a moat. My camper on the other hand, any prick who decides to have a problem with me can tow it, throw rocks at my windows or just burn the thing.