We didn’t plant the tree of survival twenty years ago. Now, storms are here—and there's no more time to waste. In this raw, practical, and unflinching guide, three collapse-aware thinkers answer six urgent questions about building resilience, growing food, forming survival networks, and finding meaning in a world coming apart. It’s not about bunkers or billionaires—it’s about skills, soil, and solidarity. Read it now. Share it like firelight.
.. or to fix that broken impeller in the pump, or harvest the sunflowers before that freak storm washes through. Alone is tough, tough ground, with an ever shrinking circle of achievement and happiness.
Beyond that, even if it's an isolated household--I grow half our food and I have chickens. I could raise milk goats, but it would take time and energy (especially for fencing pasture) that I can't afford. But if someone in my network does it, I could trade for eggs or produce. Not everyone needs midwifery and medical skills--as long as at least one person in your cadre does. Etc.
Great article, Margi, Matt, and Justin! I subscribe to all of you individually, but I think it's a brilliant idea and an excellent example to collaborate on essays like this. Building community, indeed. Many thanks!
Who knows how to start a fire with only what is around them in nature? No more Bic lighter or matches. Flint and steel is acceptable. You're going to need it for the firelight part.
As for the above link -
Print out what you need and practice practice practice!
Great initiative. Keep it coming. Some suggestions: 1. think of resilience in terms of securing universal basic needs, both material (food, water, shelter, health support, etc) and non-material (identity, leisure, meaningful role in community, and voice in community decisions). We now take these for granted, but a host of threats mean they are increasingly at risk. 2. find ways of meeting basic needs that have the lowest ecological footprint possible - this not only reduces our demands on nature, but it also increases our resilience. 3. find ways of working with your neighbours - this can be one of the most difficult aspects of a transition, as so many dont see the need. But growing simplification will mean less travel and more very local activities. 4. Enjoy!
Interesting collaboration. I'd love to see more ideas on what this looks like in a city, since many people live in urban environments (80+% in the U.S.) I'm having trouble visualizing many of these things that seem like survival skills in the countryside. Isolation definitely isn't an option in cities, lol! Thanks for your compilation.
There are specific urban strategies for sure. Still, many of the skills cross over. Urban food growth, scouting skills and others we discussed are a thing. I did an urban scout camp a few years ago in Las Vegas. In the longer term, cities aren’t really sustainable choices for the very reasons collapse is happening. Instead of factory farms owned by mega corporations, there’s the possibility of people taking up space and building small communities in rural areas. Population collapse is strong likelihood as well.
An excellent collaboration, chock full of thoughtfulness. The one place where I differ in my views is that we do have time to build community, before everything flies apart. Collapse, as I see it, is a process, not an event. We’re on the downward slide, possibly gaining momentum, but we do have some time left before it’s full-on Mad Max Under the Thunderdome.
Speaking of building community… Please, is anyone out there in Substack land interested in getting together to create a greenfield intentional (appropriate technology/permaculture-based/off-grid) community? Lots of adjectives here, but each is integral to the concept of the project.
My initial thinking is that it would be multi-generational, have five to seven ownership shares, and be located at or slightly above 45 degrees north latitude in North America on a 35 to 50 acre parcel. Interested parties would co-create and organize as a land trust owned and controlled by shareholders, operating as a democracy, with a “town meeting” governmental structure. All this is subject to being shaped and finalized as interested parties come forth and invest time in planning and launching in the project.
Why build an intentional community, Margi? Quite simply because it eliminates so many of the variables that will stymie people trying to convert their existing communities into self-reliant networks. The lessons from the Transition Town movement are quite instructive here, versus the lessons from greenfield projects…
Direct mail me if you are interested in exploring this idea. I will happily share information about my skills, background, and experience in projects relevant to this one so you know with whom you are conversing. Thank you.
Circling back to your comment about building and moving to an intentional community, Angus, I certainly don't disagree. I grew up in one and my parents remained there for many decades. So I know it can work and well, but it takes resource (land and money) and a different kind of commitment that is alien to most people now-a-days. It can also be an absolute mess if people don't know what they are doing. I've seen that up close, too. I'm hoping to unlock people's thinking that it's not the only route, and if they don't have that capacity they can still act where they are.
I like the logic you are pursuing - that having options to choose from is a preferred path to resilience.
Options can provide each of us customizable solutions. I tried the virtual community (not the intentional community) approach from 2007 through 2020 and found it very challenging. For me, now is the time to be a little more “invested” side-by-side with others who put skin in the game and work towards achieving specific quality of life goals. And one intentional community can network with others to expand the resilience of all, using virtual networking on a community, not household scale.
The intentional communities website at ic.org has a searchable directory with thousands of communities, and groups of people looking to start one. I think as lot of people have difficulty because existing communities in need of more members can't find the appropriate people because everyone wants to found a new one--probably mostly because they don't realize others have already done this.
I don’t disagree with your observation at all. I have searched the database of existing communities extensively (and am listed on ic.org) but have not found any that align with my list of criteria. I would say that this is primarily because too many of them are located in the latitudes of the globe that will become extremely stressed out by the worsening of climate changes.
My friend Diana Leafe Christian notes in her book, "Creating a Life Together", that nine out of ten new intentional communities fail.
Yet, as Mary Wildfire notes, established ICs struggle for members, because everyone wants to go off and start their own!
From personal experience (http://EcoReality.org) I can say that starting a new one will cost you 4-6 years or more of thrashing about and getting organized before you can even begin to address things like supplying a good portion of your own food!
We're running out of time.
As you mentioned elsewhere, collapse is a process, not an event. That means that every year you spend organizing is going to put you a year further down the slope of *being* organized!
So I would urge you to lower your standards a bit, and join up with an existing IC that "mostly" meets your requirements.
You can rank the importance of your needs on a scale of 0-100, then rank each situation 0-100 on how it meets each of your needs. Then rack and stack to establish a rank — then totally ignore that and fall in love with one of them! :-)
Then choose *anything* but adding to the pile of existing ICs hurting for members. Remember, you'll be hurting for members, too, and you'll be 4-6 years behind the others in recruiting when the excrement gets applied to the ventilator!
I have been applying your logic for making a personal decision among existing communities. I am struggling with the problem that the communities that score highest on the list take me far away from loved ones. So that makes the decision even more difficult. But I never was convinced that I would get everything lined up perfectly when I started my “off-grid” phase of life in 2005.
Just like all relationships, I held high hopes that community would be naturally occuring, built organically, via committed connections and ongoing mutual aid with my beloveds...But now I am older, no children, flying solo, and can't afford to be near where I grew up and know the land & have lifelong friends. My lot has been different than theirs. It's really ...surreal to cast out into unknown areas at a time in both life and history when it feels wise to hunker. As adventurous as I normally am, now it is what it is.. fully dystopian. Financially I don't see many options that would be sustainable for ones like me with no current ownership. That's all collapsing too. What I hold now, which looks like so much from a distant angle of time or place ( hello 3rd world country economies!) amounts to a goose egg when it comes to property & housing here in the U.S....I see no way to stay in this country but to pool resources cooperatively..but what bigger commitment, moving from conceptual statements to the hard realities of personality differences, other values etc? Feels worse than online dating because there's more than just your heart and ideals to be lost. What Margie states about 'intentional community' absolutely resonates. Add a layer of wondering why I should invest in this country and its deeds at all, though we've entered a time of worldwide instability on every level. I literally set out on the road this coming week, nauseated by realities, equally inspired by 'solutions', ready to absorb and support nature's beauty and resilience- yet still feeling some attachment to cleave to what I know. After a period of enormous grief on top of housing instability (years of fully engulfing elder caregiving...need I say more)...I notice and resent that i'm often boiled down to guesses about how my $ relates to a timeline of health and mortality in the destabilized world . Leaning in to my scrappy capabilites and focusing on the now, being of use til I'm compost (then still!) and what I can make and grow and share til then... It's a choice to step into. I've swallowed many a hard pill already... Hands in the dirt with like- hearted people is my true north. Thanks for the space to muse and reflect.
I suspect that as soon as we privileged folks in the EuroAmerican world stop using / including the apparently requisite word "hope" (no matter how we modify it — "stubborn" or otherwise), we'll finally get somewhere. Let's just stop pretending that there's any "hope." Hope schmope. Action is our only hope. And, as you've pointed out, it's too late. But we've got to plant the tree anyway, so that today's young will know — as their lives' paths turn into hell and ratsh!t — that some of us cared enough to plant it for them.
Thanks for this great article. I’m wondering if you might share your thoughts on the implications of economic collapse and what we can do to prepare for that. Do you have a sense of what might happen to our debts (e.g. mortgages)?
One thing has been obvious for awhile: the Lone Ranger and the Marlboro Man are totally defunct paradigms. The house set above the rest on the hill.. The cabin far away in the woods. Not knowing ones neighbors, or caring to.
Why in our culture, we thought the children had to fly as far from home as possible to find themselves ..permanently .. Though in some ways I wish I would have done so, I would bet this broke more than strengthened most communities in the long run.
From a Christian standpoint Mind over Matter is our survival, moving away from paganism is essential, we are in a harsh transition from the material to the non material. We are a planet with an Atlantis... The gulf islands that used to float in the Pacific Northwest... Another planet spread over earth which is the panacea.. all the land we live on save Australia which is the center of another planet which as it came from the NGC 1961 galaxy burned out it's carbon and became all the sand on the planet. Fire and Brimstone, heat and volcano 🌋 are coming and our flood from the other planets in the solar system need to become atmosphere before the sun goes in some 44 years.... I don't like the word cadre... But the convcept is right...telepathy is possible but will likely appear after the collapse of electronics when only the few people who have maintained value will be listening to positive voices.. Going vegan is essential if only to lower the upcycled toxins you are consuming... Remember North America is the first land mass to go! Keep in mind that God is really Nature which humans as small gods must somehow appease and to do so we will have to get beyond original sin which was eating itself.
Yes, and. There's a whole other category to deal with, not about what to do but about how to think. Who are we? Are we sinners needing redemption and forgiveness, or are we divine beings in a sacred universe? If the latter, we are devoted to doing the best by humanity, like the things you all are writing about and more. If we are still rugged individualists, we will stay in acquisition rather than cooperation. Here's my latest:
Sounds like you are giving us another assignment.
“No individual, no matter how skilled, thrives in isolation.” Exactly!
Anyone who thinks they can survive alone hasn't needed someone to hold a ladder for them, or help carry a hundred pound sack of grain.
.. or to fix that broken impeller in the pump, or harvest the sunflowers before that freak storm washes through. Alone is tough, tough ground, with an ever shrinking circle of achievement and happiness.
Beyond that, even if it's an isolated household--I grow half our food and I have chickens. I could raise milk goats, but it would take time and energy (especially for fencing pasture) that I can't afford. But if someone in my network does it, I could trade for eggs or produce. Not everyone needs midwifery and medical skills--as long as at least one person in your cadre does. Etc.
Perfectly said, Mary. 🙏
Great article, Margi, Matt, and Justin! I subscribe to all of you individually, but I think it's a brilliant idea and an excellent example to collaborate on essays like this. Building community, indeed. Many thanks!
This may help -
https://open.substack.com/pub/audhdphilosopher/p/links-to-file-preservation-project-c46?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=264dj0
Now -
Who knows how to start a fire with only what is around them in nature? No more Bic lighter or matches. Flint and steel is acceptable. You're going to need it for the firelight part.
As for the above link -
Print out what you need and practice practice practice!
That's brilliant, Toma, thank you. I'll add the information to my BRACE FOR IMPACT resource list. 🙏
Great initiative. Keep it coming. Some suggestions: 1. think of resilience in terms of securing universal basic needs, both material (food, water, shelter, health support, etc) and non-material (identity, leisure, meaningful role in community, and voice in community decisions). We now take these for granted, but a host of threats mean they are increasingly at risk. 2. find ways of meeting basic needs that have the lowest ecological footprint possible - this not only reduces our demands on nature, but it also increases our resilience. 3. find ways of working with your neighbours - this can be one of the most difficult aspects of a transition, as so many dont see the need. But growing simplification will mean less travel and more very local activities. 4. Enjoy!
Interesting collaboration. I'd love to see more ideas on what this looks like in a city, since many people live in urban environments (80+% in the U.S.) I'm having trouble visualizing many of these things that seem like survival skills in the countryside. Isolation definitely isn't an option in cities, lol! Thanks for your compilation.
There are specific urban strategies for sure. Still, many of the skills cross over. Urban food growth, scouting skills and others we discussed are a thing. I did an urban scout camp a few years ago in Las Vegas. In the longer term, cities aren’t really sustainable choices for the very reasons collapse is happening. Instead of factory farms owned by mega corporations, there’s the possibility of people taking up space and building small communities in rural areas. Population collapse is strong likelihood as well.
An excellent collaboration, chock full of thoughtfulness. The one place where I differ in my views is that we do have time to build community, before everything flies apart. Collapse, as I see it, is a process, not an event. We’re on the downward slide, possibly gaining momentum, but we do have some time left before it’s full-on Mad Max Under the Thunderdome.
Speaking of building community… Please, is anyone out there in Substack land interested in getting together to create a greenfield intentional (appropriate technology/permaculture-based/off-grid) community? Lots of adjectives here, but each is integral to the concept of the project.
My initial thinking is that it would be multi-generational, have five to seven ownership shares, and be located at or slightly above 45 degrees north latitude in North America on a 35 to 50 acre parcel. Interested parties would co-create and organize as a land trust owned and controlled by shareholders, operating as a democracy, with a “town meeting” governmental structure. All this is subject to being shaped and finalized as interested parties come forth and invest time in planning and launching in the project.
Why build an intentional community, Margi? Quite simply because it eliminates so many of the variables that will stymie people trying to convert their existing communities into self-reliant networks. The lessons from the Transition Town movement are quite instructive here, versus the lessons from greenfield projects…
Direct mail me if you are interested in exploring this idea. I will happily share information about my skills, background, and experience in projects relevant to this one so you know with whom you are conversing. Thank you.
Circling back to your comment about building and moving to an intentional community, Angus, I certainly don't disagree. I grew up in one and my parents remained there for many decades. So I know it can work and well, but it takes resource (land and money) and a different kind of commitment that is alien to most people now-a-days. It can also be an absolute mess if people don't know what they are doing. I've seen that up close, too. I'm hoping to unlock people's thinking that it's not the only route, and if they don't have that capacity they can still act where they are.
I like the logic you are pursuing - that having options to choose from is a preferred path to resilience.
Options can provide each of us customizable solutions. I tried the virtual community (not the intentional community) approach from 2007 through 2020 and found it very challenging. For me, now is the time to be a little more “invested” side-by-side with others who put skin in the game and work towards achieving specific quality of life goals. And one intentional community can network with others to expand the resilience of all, using virtual networking on a community, not household scale.
Life is good when we have choices!
The intentional communities website at ic.org has a searchable directory with thousands of communities, and groups of people looking to start one. I think as lot of people have difficulty because existing communities in need of more members can't find the appropriate people because everyone wants to found a new one--probably mostly because they don't realize others have already done this.
I don’t disagree with your observation at all. I have searched the database of existing communities extensively (and am listed on ic.org) but have not found any that align with my list of criteria. I would say that this is primarily because too many of them are located in the latitudes of the globe that will become extremely stressed out by the worsening of climate changes.
My friend Diana Leafe Christian notes in her book, "Creating a Life Together", that nine out of ten new intentional communities fail.
Yet, as Mary Wildfire notes, established ICs struggle for members, because everyone wants to go off and start their own!
From personal experience (http://EcoReality.org) I can say that starting a new one will cost you 4-6 years or more of thrashing about and getting organized before you can even begin to address things like supplying a good portion of your own food!
We're running out of time.
As you mentioned elsewhere, collapse is a process, not an event. That means that every year you spend organizing is going to put you a year further down the slope of *being* organized!
So I would urge you to lower your standards a bit, and join up with an existing IC that "mostly" meets your requirements.
You can rank the importance of your needs on a scale of 0-100, then rank each situation 0-100 on how it meets each of your needs. Then rack and stack to establish a rank — then totally ignore that and fall in love with one of them! :-)
Then choose *anything* but adding to the pile of existing ICs hurting for members. Remember, you'll be hurting for members, too, and you'll be 4-6 years behind the others in recruiting when the excrement gets applied to the ventilator!
I have been applying your logic for making a personal decision among existing communities. I am struggling with the problem that the communities that score highest on the list take me far away from loved ones. So that makes the decision even more difficult. But I never was convinced that I would get everything lined up perfectly when I started my “off-grid” phase of life in 2005.
Just like all relationships, I held high hopes that community would be naturally occuring, built organically, via committed connections and ongoing mutual aid with my beloveds...But now I am older, no children, flying solo, and can't afford to be near where I grew up and know the land & have lifelong friends. My lot has been different than theirs. It's really ...surreal to cast out into unknown areas at a time in both life and history when it feels wise to hunker. As adventurous as I normally am, now it is what it is.. fully dystopian. Financially I don't see many options that would be sustainable for ones like me with no current ownership. That's all collapsing too. What I hold now, which looks like so much from a distant angle of time or place ( hello 3rd world country economies!) amounts to a goose egg when it comes to property & housing here in the U.S....I see no way to stay in this country but to pool resources cooperatively..but what bigger commitment, moving from conceptual statements to the hard realities of personality differences, other values etc? Feels worse than online dating because there's more than just your heart and ideals to be lost. What Margie states about 'intentional community' absolutely resonates. Add a layer of wondering why I should invest in this country and its deeds at all, though we've entered a time of worldwide instability on every level. I literally set out on the road this coming week, nauseated by realities, equally inspired by 'solutions', ready to absorb and support nature's beauty and resilience- yet still feeling some attachment to cleave to what I know. After a period of enormous grief on top of housing instability (years of fully engulfing elder caregiving...need I say more)...I notice and resent that i'm often boiled down to guesses about how my $ relates to a timeline of health and mortality in the destabilized world . Leaning in to my scrappy capabilites and focusing on the now, being of use til I'm compost (then still!) and what I can make and grow and share til then... It's a choice to step into. I've swallowed many a hard pill already... Hands in the dirt with like- hearted people is my true north. Thanks for the space to muse and reflect.
I suspect that as soon as we privileged folks in the EuroAmerican world stop using / including the apparently requisite word "hope" (no matter how we modify it — "stubborn" or otherwise), we'll finally get somewhere. Let's just stop pretending that there's any "hope." Hope schmope. Action is our only hope. And, as you've pointed out, it's too late. But we've got to plant the tree anyway, so that today's young will know — as their lives' paths turn into hell and ratsh!t — that some of us cared enough to plant it for them.
You can't eat hope for breakfast.
This is an excellent article, with clear, practical and grounded information. I hope there are more to come from your collaboration. Thank you!
Thanks for this great article. I’m wondering if you might share your thoughts on the implications of economic collapse and what we can do to prepare for that. Do you have a sense of what might happen to our debts (e.g. mortgages)?
REALLY good stuff. Thank you.
One thing has been obvious for awhile: the Lone Ranger and the Marlboro Man are totally defunct paradigms. The house set above the rest on the hill.. The cabin far away in the woods. Not knowing ones neighbors, or caring to.
Why in our culture, we thought the children had to fly as far from home as possible to find themselves ..permanently .. Though in some ways I wish I would have done so, I would bet this broke more than strengthened most communities in the long run.
From a Christian standpoint Mind over Matter is our survival, moving away from paganism is essential, we are in a harsh transition from the material to the non material. We are a planet with an Atlantis... The gulf islands that used to float in the Pacific Northwest... Another planet spread over earth which is the panacea.. all the land we live on save Australia which is the center of another planet which as it came from the NGC 1961 galaxy burned out it's carbon and became all the sand on the planet. Fire and Brimstone, heat and volcano 🌋 are coming and our flood from the other planets in the solar system need to become atmosphere before the sun goes in some 44 years.... I don't like the word cadre... But the convcept is right...telepathy is possible but will likely appear after the collapse of electronics when only the few people who have maintained value will be listening to positive voices.. Going vegan is essential if only to lower the upcycled toxins you are consuming... Remember North America is the first land mass to go! Keep in mind that God is really Nature which humans as small gods must somehow appease and to do so we will have to get beyond original sin which was eating itself.
Yes, and. There's a whole other category to deal with, not about what to do but about how to think. Who are we? Are we sinners needing redemption and forgiveness, or are we divine beings in a sacred universe? If the latter, we are devoted to doing the best by humanity, like the things you all are writing about and more. If we are still rugged individualists, we will stay in acquisition rather than cooperation. Here's my latest:
REPORT FROM THE FUTURE
https://suzannetaylor.substack.com/p/report-from-the-future