(Part 2) Top products from r/collapse

This book was my main introduction to permaculture. I'm still learning, and slowly bringing our suburban yard back to life after years of soil erosion and neglect by a previous owner.

Another good suburban food growing system is the Square Foot Gardening (SFG) (also as Square Meter Gardening) by Mel Bartholomew. I put in three small beds this year and so far the plants are doing very well.

Here's a tour of Richard Heinberg's suburban permaculture home in California.

Videos from Huw's Nursery have been really helpful

I didn't know just how many edible plants there were honestly. Industrialized agriculture could get hammered, but a vibrant home garden with permaculture principles and diverse crops could be scaled up relatively quickly. I've started some survival crops as well (e.g., hopniss, sunchoke, tigernuts) that thrive without much human intervention. If you start growing things like comfrey (non-invasive "bocking 14" cultivar!) or some other plants in Toby Hemenway's book, you could probably sell cuttings and seedlings on the side. I've heard of several people getting started that way.

It's not too late in the season to start some containers with tomatoes if you aren't growing anything yet. You don't even have to tell people that it's a prep for collapse :) People just love good food. My wife has begrudgingly put up with my new hobby, and she knows I do it because I'm very worried about collapse events. My cousin put in some SFG beds after I explained that I was worried about instabilities in our just-in-time industrial food system. Gardening is already a popular hobby, so your family will probably be supportive. And they get some delicious healthy food out of it.

Personally, the time I spend gardening is like my collapse zen time. It's healthy on multiple levels. With that said, my wife and others would claim I've gone overboard with it, but hopefully it's viewed as a kooky hobby and not a pessimistic doom funk like I was in before I started gardening. If you have any questions I'll do my best to field them (I'm a beginner myself).

One last recommendation, this collapse-aware career book by Charles Hugh Smith is really good

Don't count yourself out. You have a lot to offer the world.

Watch this video: https://youtu.be/8DEfIqIrYpY

Its a pretty great exploration of the relevant ecology here.

Then, plant native plants in as many places as you can. This can support a huge range of organisms, even if done in a city.

>(For those that don't watch, the argument is basically: native plants can house thousands of types of insects. Insects are specialists in what they eat, and so plants that have a natural history in a place ("native") can support far more insects than can a recently introduced one. 96% of bird species that aren't devoted to fish or large animal meat are 100% insectivorous during the time in which they raise their young. The ones that are not are dependent upon things which eat insects for almost all their diet, such as fish, small mammals, or other birds. Thus, there is a direct line from native plants -> insects -> all species of bird. Furthermore, not only birds, but nearly all animals depend on insects in this way. They form ~25% of the diet of bears, foxes, etc. When, in florida, a city began reincorporating a native plant all through their city, they found a large increase in the number of butterflies that were associated with that plant, which were almost extinct. The speaker in the video wrote a book on how and why to plant native plants in your surroundings, and all the good it can do).

Here's the book he wrote on the subject: Bringing Nature Home: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0881929921/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_Vi3RCb3XR9QK3

Other than that, learn as much as possible about ecology. Learn to identify the plants and animals around you. Learn about disturbance and succession in forests, it'll give you an infinite number of interesting things to ponder. Or if you live where there are plains/prairies, start thinking about and researching all the soil dynamics at play. Near an ocean, start researching coastal ecology. Give yourself a full on ecological education. Not only is it very satisfying, it'll empower you to be able to forward good decision making, and honestly for me it gives me some hope as well as I study more and more.

Winning goes to the winners---in any system.

A great book that explains this by Donella Meadows: https://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Systems-Donella-H-Meadows/dp/1603580557

Winners use their winnings to consolidate and grow their wins. Ever play monopoly?

The only reason that nearly every matured market has exactly 2 dominate players is anti-monopoly laws.

Coke and Pepsi, McDonalds and Burger King, PC and Mac, Android and iPhone, Facebook and Twitter, Wal Mart and Target.

It's a meritocracy, yes--but winning goes to the winners. Meritocracy over time equals monopoly.

The best book I've read on the subject urban survival is How to Survive the End of the World as We Know It.

For wilderness survival go for The SAS Survival Handbook.

As for growing crops, first aid, things like that, I find its best to learn those skills from a non-survival oriented book. You can apply the skills you learn in them to your personal situation (geographical location, financial restraints, likely local disasters, etc).

That being said, the best books on growing food and livestock are The Encyclopedia of Country Living and The Backyard Homestead.

Finally, while it's technically not a book, The Survival Podcast has a priceless wealth of informational podcasts on different subjects pertaining to modern survivalism.

If you're raising it for small scale, you'll want to choose heritage breeds or locally adapted breeds. In the same way that the mealy, tasteless tomatoes you buy at the supermarket are bred for uniformity and transportability rather than flavor or adaptability to your local climate, "common" wheat and grain varieties are bred to withstand herbicides and pesticides, and to be productive in large monocultures. Small Scale Grain Raising is good. I haven't read The Organic Grain Grower but it looks good. If you're interested in corn, several homesteaders I know grow painted mountain corn and have only had great reviews.

• Primitive Technology on YouTube
  
  
• The book by primitive tech
  
  
• The recent AMA by the primitive tech guy
  
  
• Townsends A channel dedicated to exploring the 18th Century lifestyle.
  
  
  
• https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCfIqCzQJXvYj9ssCoHq327g how to make everything channel on YouTube that shows how with fairly minimal knowledge and practice you can make functional (although inefficient) tools and items
  
  
• The Society for Creative Anachronism Researching and re-creating the arts and skills of pre-17th-century Europe, non-LARP medieval reenactors that take it quite serious.
  
  
• /r/bushcrafting
  
  
• /r/PrimitiveTechnology/
  
  
• /r/Homesteading/
  
  
• /r/Leathercraft/
  
  
• /r/Fishing/
  
  
• /r/Hunting/
  
  
• /r/Trappit/
  
  
• /r/HomemadeTools/
  
  
• /r/soapmaking/
  
  
• /r/weaving/
  
  
• /r/knitting/
  
  
• /r/candlemaking/
  
  
• Book Country Wisdom & Know-How: Everything You Need to Know to Live Off the Land
  
  
• Book Restoration Agriculture
  
  
• Book Gaia's Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture, 2nd Edition Paperback
  
  
• Book The Encyclopedia of Country Living, 40th Anniversary Edition: The Original Manual for Living off the Land & Doing It Yourself Paperback – October 30, 2012
  
  
  
• Book Five Acres and Independence: A Practical Guide to the Selection and Management of the Small Farm Paperback
  
  
• Book Bushcraft: Outdoor Skills and Wilderness Survival
  
  
• Book Bushcraft 101: A Field Guide to the Art of Wilderness Survival
  
  
• Book The Trapper's Bible: The Most Complete Guide on Trapping and Hunting Tips Ever
  
  
• Book The Traditional Bowyer's Bible, Volume 1 ALL of the volumes in this series are great and for that matter all of his books are.

People such as Noam Chomsky have described the modern politician as essentially a middle manager. That is the interests of the majority actually has no influence on decisions made. Using the U.S as example:

" The report, "Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens" (PDF), used extensive policy data collected between 1981 and 2002 to empirically determine the state of the U.S. political system.

After sifting through nearly 1,800 U.S. policies enacted in that period and comparing them to the expressed preferences of average Americans (50th percentile of income), affluent Americans (90th percentile), and large special interests groups, researchers concluded that the U.S. is dominated by its economic elite. " The same study found that the majority had 0 impact on political decisions.

Here from that bastion of left wing'ism /s Business insider:http://www.businessinsider.com/major-study-finds-that-the-us-is-an-oligarchy-2014-4

Another important point, democracies are not necessarily different that autocracies in how leadership maintains power: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1098&v=rStL7niR7gs

20 min video. Enlightening , based on this book: https://www.amazon.ca/Dictators-Handbook-Behavior-Almost-Politics/dp/1610391845

http://www.amazon.com/How-Survive-End-World-Know/dp/0452295831/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1268968252&sr=8-1

In that book, the author suggests that when the shit hits the fan, you live/go someplace 300 miles from cities populated with more than 300k people. Of course, the mileage represented is "as the crow flies".

I thought this was required reading for r/collapse, but this is an excerpt from Emergency: This Book Will Save Your Life by Neil Strauss.

I highly recomend this one, trying to get the wife to read it now.

Even better,read the whole book Twilight's Last Gleaming. Great story.

Was it this?

Or was it a reddit post?

Was it a torrent of over 100GB of files/dvds?

Was it a link to a directory about what to do if a pole shift event happened?

I'm curious as to what you were originally referring to.

Awesome book; awful review.

The bulk of the review is contained in the following paragraph:
>The first half of the book is boring to read for me. In reality this first half was just a review of our world history. We all know their existence but what we don’t know is how they were phased out on the face of the earth and besides the past connects us to the present. If it happens to them, it might happen to us as well. Likewise, being self–sufficient doesn’t guarantee that we are “dilemma proof” in the future. Everything is interconnected now. The saying “United we stand, divided we fall” may be impossible to reiterate nowadays.

I quote at length to underscore both brevity and banality of the essence of this review and I say essence because this constitutes most of what passes as preamble to an extensive list of quotations from the book itself, without the benefit of context or commentary.

What's perhaps most bewildering is how one leaps from that pitiful assessment to proclaim:
>This book is “must have” to head of states, environmentalists, journalists, environment ministers, businessmen and above all to every citizens of the world 16 years old and above. Our future is at stake!!!

True enough, but it surely doesn't follow from precedes it.

Diamond's plan for the book "resembles a boa constrictor that has swallowed two very large sheep." Part I has a single chapter on Montana; Part II has several chapters on past societies: Easter Island, Pitcairn, The Anasazi, Mayans, Vikings in Iceland, Greenland and Newfoundland; Part III deals with modern societies: Rwanda, Dominican Republic & Haiti, China and Australia; and Part IV is about practical lessons.

Much of the "first half [that] was just a review of our world history" (which the reviewer found boring) actually dealt with present day Montana and is essential to what follows as it sets up a framework for analyzing various aspects of how a society is dependent upon its ecosystem (both natural and economic environments). The remainder of the first half of the book dealt with how various historical societies have indeed failed. This theme continues into the third quarter of the book, which assesses recent problems and risks of collapse facing current societies, and is wrapped up in the final part on practical lessons.

I highly recommend the book, although much better reviews are available on Amazon.

TL;DR: Read the book; skip this review.

That's disappointing, I haven't read his fiction. The best geopolitical thriller I've read in the collapse realm was John Michael Greer's Twighlight's Last Gleaming. The thing that was amazing was it was completely plausible for a future scenario in almost every detail as far as I could tell.

http://www.amazon.com/Twilights-Last-Gleaming-Michael-Greer/dp/1782200355

There's http://www.amazon.com/The-Knowledge-Rebuild-World-Scratch/dp/159420523X/ which is probably not going to do a lot of good if you don't already know or have done most of this.

In terms of general knowledge, the pocket ref is also useful.

Some good starting points

https://www.amazon.com/Wealth-Nature-Economics-Survival-Mattered/dp/0865716730/

https://www.amazon.com/Nature-Economic-History-Geerat-Vermeij/dp/069112793X/

https://www.amazon.com/Energy-Civilization-History-MIT-Press/dp/0262035774/

https://www.amazon.com/Overshoot-Ecological-Basis-Revolutionary-Change/dp/0252009886/

https://www.amazon.com/Environment-Power-Society-Twenty-First-Century/dp/0231128878/

https://www.amazon.com/Collapse-Complex-Societies-Studies-Archaeology/dp/052138673X/

http://bpeconomics.org/

https://biophyseco.org/

Jared Diamond can tell you all about it without going on a foolhardy tirade.

The Forager's Harvest appears to be in the same vein as well.

These pocket sized guide books are worth having a copy of too if there's one suited to your location.

Check it out if you want, or not.

Because I'm an asshole.

Because every storm cloud ought to have a silver lining....

Brexit + XR

We all know that economic downturns are the fastest, surest way to reduce carbon emissions.

Everything seems to be claiming that a hard Brexit will cause an economic crisis in Britain. That may well spread.

So maybe Boris is giving XR exactly what they actually wanted. The economic downturn (or crash) that will reduce, perhaps drastically Britain's carbon emissions.

[Stay fed.] (https://www.amazon.co.uk/s?k=freeze+dried+vegetables&crid=1TW2FVNPOA3U3&sprefix=freeze+dried+veg%2Caps%2C244&ref=nb_sb_ss_i_1_16)

[However you can.] (https://www.amazon.com/Winter-Harvest-Handbook-Deep-Organic-Greenhouses/dp/1603580816)

The Encyclopedia of Country Living

Are we talking story type books or 'how to' books?

If 'how to', here's a couple to get you started:

The Forager's Harvest: A Guide to Identifying, Harvesting, and Preparing Edible Wild Plants - Full colored pictures of edible plants found in the wild

Back to Basics: A Complete Guide to Traditional Skills - I haven't picked up this book yet but it's been quoted in a few SHTF books I've read as a point of reference.

Recommended reading

Haven't read this yet. Bu tI can only imagine you will find it relevant.

Did you read Thinking in Systems: A Primer?

https://www.amazon.com/Small-Scale-Grain-Raising-Processing-Nutritious/dp/1603580778

Here is the mobile version of your link

I have this book coming to my doorstep: Emergency!

Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World — and Why Things Are Better Than You Think, coauthored with his son, Ola Rosling, and daughter-in-law, Anna Rosling Rönnlund.

One book? I don't think you'll find that all in one book. Some to consider:

• SAS Survival Guide
  
• US Army Survival Manual FM 21-76
  
• Pocket Ref 4th Edition
  
• Where There Is No Doctor
  
• Where There Is No Dentist
  
• Foxfire series (though it does contain faith healing, advice on how to handle deadly snakes and not die by faith alone, etc)
  
  
  

Read a book

The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics

It explains very well why democracies are better places to live and why autocrats are incentivised to keep the general population in crushing poverty.

Good article, except for this part:

> There are two obvious solutions to that problem:

> -Planned use of resources with intense recycling and heavy dependence on management of renewable resources, or;

> -Getting into space in a big way to expand the resource pool and put off much of the problem for centuries (at which point, hopefully, we figure out a better solution, or go to the stars).

About the first "obvious" solution:

Recycling (I assume the author is referring to things like metals and plastics) isn't a long-term solution because it's energy-intensive and not 100% efficient.

It would be nice if humanity could live within the Earth's yearly budget of renewable resources, but we've demonstrated absolutely no ability to do so, and we're already heavily dependent on renewables like forests, topsoil, fisheries, etc. If anything, we need to lower our dependence on all types of resources.

About the second "obvious" solution:

This one is ridiculous, and plays into our civilization's dominant mythology of "going to the stars." John Michael Greer devoted an entire book on this subject.

It's funny how so many people seem to have a blind spot for the one obvious (and unmentionable) solution, which is to drastically lower our population and consumption, but that will never happen, so the author is correct when he says:

> The complete inability of our society to deal with obvious consequences of our actions is what has doomed it. This society will not survive. The questions are only “How many people will it kill going down?” and “What will the next society look like in the ashes of a world left to us by this one?”

NoMoreNicksLeft... I always had the impression that you were one of the more informed crazy survival nuts around here.

You really ought to read this...

I recommend reading the book 1177 B.C., about the bronze age collapse. It seems that its aftereffects were a bit slow to get to other places in Europe, like this Ireland case, so the process was actually gradual, but indeed that collapse was something to think about; a sort of global economy, a resource base being depleted, climate hardships, global unrest and wars...

These guys: http://www.amazon.com/New-Confessions-Economic-Hit-Man/dp/1626566747

Look what just spring up: "you are doing that too much. try again in 7 minutes." Seven minutes! Who in hell is controlling this? I've been told to wait 1 minute in my many years on reddit...under different names.

For a Leftist reply, see this. Stopping immigration won't stop the corporations from ruining the planet. Even you admit that neoliberals use migration to lower wages (don't ignore that Capitalists had no problems exporting the industries themselves to the South to use the superexploited labor and that was and is more profound than migration), yet somehow your answer isn't fighting the system that creates such conditions of exploitation, but fighting the victims of destructive policies by the IMF, WB and WTO.