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this post was submitted on 10 Jun 2024
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The memes of the climate
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either travel until your last penny or buy a house in a very very remote location and stockpile enough food for a year or two. Continuing your life as usual and recycling your tin cans is the definition of insanity.
If your bucket list is "travel the world" then sure. If your bucket list is "enjoy a lot of chill times with my friends and family" then I don't really know what you expect to change.
I mean think of how many people know someone who died young and live with the very real knowledge that they could die at any moment, what do you expect them to change knowing that climate change might make life hard at some point in the next 2 - 100 years? Does that meaningfully change someone's life when they already know that they could be killed in a car accident the next day?
Do you think preparing for collapse now in a remote location is really the sensible thing to do? I sometimes wonder myself how fast it will happen. I think the planet will be uninhabitable within 300 years and chaos will ensue within 30 but i'm not sure the chaos will be without warning unless we hit an environmental tipping point and there's sudden major temperature change (like earth becoming 20 degrees warmer or cooler within a week), which could happen.
A house in a remote location is insanely naïve. Rambo isn't real life, if you want a snowball's chance in hell of making it in that kind of a scenario you need to have group support. When the sea people came you didn't want to be in major metros on the coast, but you also didn't want to the the guy alone who became the lonely corpse in the countryside. There's a happy medium where you have the best chances of survival. This is just delusional apocalypse porn.
The vast majority of people who think they can survive an apocalypse with a backpack of tactical axes and MRE's are delusional cosplayers. Even the people already out in the wilderness with gardens and animals and stockpiles of guns are woefully naive to how hard it would actually be to survive if the walmart they go to every week closes down.
All that said, there is absolutely good that could come from investing in some cheap land further north. Not to become some kind of wild survivalist but to do exactly what you said, be a part of smaller communities that can band together and share resources. The hardships coming are not going to be like The Walking Dead, this shit is going to take years or even decades to ramp up, but that's still lightning fast on a climate scale, meaning there will be storms on top of storms, inundated cities and coastlands, refugees swamping places that can't handle it, and a lot of really hard times with a failing economy and shortages of everything from food to power to fresh water. We will slowly see a pretty major social shift in the first-world as people are displaced and the wealth divide becomes extreme, there will be shanty-towns on American and EU soil that rival the poorest countries. But yes, it will take a long time and there's going to be an absolute mess of politics and economics and social upheaval through the entire time.
And there's no fixing it. This is the hardest part to sink into people. That it's not a "rough patch" that this temperature increase is effectively permanent. No human is going to see the Earth cool back down unless someone does a major, rapid, and successful, geoengineering project. All things that are still more fantasy than remotely reality at this point.
The PBS show Frontier House disabused me of any notion that it would be anything but insanely difficult to survive after societal collapse. Three families had to live as if they were in the 19th century in a valley in (I think) Montana over a summer to prepare for winter.
None of them would have done it. Not even the couple who busted their ass and wouldn't have had children to feed.
I loved that show! Yep, I live pretty remote with guns and livestock and prepper stuff, but I still rely on stores, the grid and of course heathcare. I hold no illusions about how much I would suffer if society went down. Maybe I'll live a month or two longer than someone totally unprepared but not much more.
group support?
:-(
that sounds hard to find
If you're at all capable, purchase property up north. You can get acres of undeveloped land for a few thousand dollars. If you can, have an ongoing project to get some basic services set up on the land like a secure shed to cover a well and a solar kit. Get an RV or a van and just know that if shit falls apart you can drive out there and at least have water and power. Wireless or satellite internet would be a good idea.
The coming disasters are going to take a number of years to ramp up, it will probably happen slowly enough that people will almost literally be the toad boiling to death as the heat slowly rises. It could be a few years, it could be a few decades. Whatever happens, it will happen and it will get worse. We're going to see the most drastic change to our world that anyone has ever seen and a lot of people are going to suffer and it's going to happen at the same pace which we read about school shootings, annoyance and impatience.
Most of us won't be able to afford land and even if we do move to cooler, less unstable areas, we still may have to deal with food shortages, economic crashes, and social instability. It's not going to be like The Road, we're not going into a sudden world of cannibals and post-apocalyptic fashion choices, it's going to be a long slog through more and more discomfort, storms that don't let up on coastal cities, political drama as people try to move or get federal help, refugees swamping places that can't handle the numbers, authoritarians trying to seize power, crime and looting in the aftermath of storms, cities slowly becoming abandoned as the flood waters never get a chance to recede, as happened in some parts of New Orleans as long ago as Katrina.
In societal collapse scenarios do you really think that property rights will be respected?
No, but again, I'm not talking about a hollywood drama here, this is real life, "collapse" is a thing that exists on a spectrum and can change radically depending on what the political powers do. Nations may restructure, there even may be fighting, but short of an actual nuclear holocaust it's not likely that we're going to see a scorched-earth wasteland.
Everyone on both sides of this are really hyped to the extremes, but there is no telling how the next several decades may pan out, it's not a bad idea to have some ideas that may benefit you, if you think you have better ideas for how to prepare, do share. If you are worried and hopeless and think nothing we do matters, that's obviously not a great mindset to have, we have lifetimes ahead of us and people who are going to make it through, we have a responsibility still to try to do the best we can with what we have.
edit: love that balanced and nuanced takes are making people seeth. Look, just believe whatever you want. The Earth doesn't care and what's going to happen will happen. If you rather believe it's going to be exactly, 100% identical to the Fallout universe and you wanna imagine walking the wasteland, you do you, king.