Ask Lemmy

Know your neighbors, befriend your neighbors, when the collapse happens you'll need food in your gardens sure, but you'll need your neighbors to think you're more than a spare pantry when their food gets low, even better if you like each other enough to form a real community thats more defendable and resilient than any single household could be

By living my best life now while I can.

Collapse, a world war, apocalypse etc? Fuck that I'm out.

Been learning to garden for a few years. This year I'm focusing on perennials, specifically heirloom species that were staple food crops prior to the modern agricultural era.

Turns out pretty much every non native plant in North America is a food crop. These plants often have superiour nutritional content as well as being more drought resistant, hardy, and ecologically sustainable.

A few to google.

Bambara 'Beans' - West African Staple for 300 years. All 9 amino acids. Bio available B12. Grows like legumes. Nitrogen fixer

Bamboo - Edible varieties have lots of fiber and potassium, some protein and low fat.

Old King Henry - Edible shoots like asparagus, edible leaves like spinach, edible grainlike seeds similar to quinoa

Skirret - clumping root vegetable that looks like carrots. Has higher carb density than carrots.

Comfrey - Top Tier mulch/fertilizer.

Clover - Edible nitrogen fixer

Dandelions - Edible nitrogen fixer

Cat Tails - Indigenous, all parts are edible, winter survival crop.

Ashitaba - apparently this plant has insane nutritional benefits for the body and originates from an Okinawan island with the longes average lifspan in the world.

First thing to understand is global collapse isn't an event. It's a slow process that unfolds over years, or more likely, decades. We are already seeing it happening, but since it's not like the movies most of us don't recognize it.

The second thing is that baring some catastrophic imminent localized danger you aren't going to see hordes of displaced people fighting for your potatoes. It takes real desperation to pack a bag, leave all the rest of your things, leave your home, and walk far away hoping it'll be better somewhere else. Even now people stay in some of the most dangerous and inhospitable places.

So, odds are you'll have time to set up a garden, set up a rainwater collection system, maybe get some solar panels. Whatever you want to do to prepare for what you expect is coming, you can probably do it. One guiding principle in this is try to minimize your external dependencies. If you can feed yourself and live comfortably without a big shopping trip every week you are doing better than most. Independence from utilities is more difficult, but doable if you want to put the effort and money into it. Another principle is learn useful skills. Learn how to build things, fix things, buildings, cars, electric motors, etc. Most people jump to protecting yourself from bandits. Do you live in a high-crime area? If so maybe move. If not, take some reasonable self-defense precautions. You aren't going to fight off an army or even a coordinated gang, so just don't worry about it too much. Basically, live in an area where you get along with your neighbors and you help each other out. Bonus points if they are self-sufficient too.

I mean, you can't predict what's going to happen, so just try to insulate yourself from whatever system shocks might appear. You'll need to adapt as the years go by and things get worse. Good luck. :-)

Most prepping is bullshit, right wing fantasy jerking. How they'll be the lone man in an unjust land, killing and pillaging as they please. Realistically, if there's an event that there's a global collapse, you'll likely die from it as well.

Nuclear war? Best hope you're in a target zone, you don't want to try and live through a nightmare where growing food may be impossible. Your canned goods will run out in months unless you can supplement them.

Global pandemic beyond what COVID-19 was? Yeah, COVID sucked, but it had a rather low kill rate. A super bug that has a rate to kill society as we know it around the globe is going to spread quickly, easily, and be highly deadly by comparison. You're more likely to contract it and die than survive.

Climate change? You may be able to survive this one but you'll need to think of how high waters will rise, how that'll effect local growing ecology for food, etc. It's going to be insanely rough.

Any other plausible event? Again, it requires a massive die off in a short time or just general destructiveness that'll kill a lot of people initially then everyone slowly afterwards.

Introduce yourself to your neighbours. Communities share resources and it makes them resilient.

Usually I grab something sturdy.

I could go into specifics, but there's lots of that out there. Maybe the most useful thing I can say is that preppers massively underestimate skills and connections, and overestimate just having whatever stockpile or tool. Don't get me wrong, it's better than not having that, but between the two having skills and connections will actually keep you going longer and under more circumstances.

At the beginning of Covid searches for "how to cook rice" spiked, IIRC.

If you're starting fresh, maybe figure out what you'll be doing and who you'll be doing it with, get ready and organised for that, and then buy stuff to make it easier. If the collapse is global or local doesn't matter much for this, BTW, only how it will look where you live.

Edit: If that sounds like work, it basically just is. The apocalypse was never going to be easy. Preppers who just buy stuff is a thing, because disposable income is much more common than disposable time and disposable interest in an unpleasant scenario.

I drink whiskey and enjoy the sunset.

I always see some truly naive optimism in threads like these. Global collapse means shipping is dead, which means every city is in a state of famine.

Pick your closest city, split the population in 4 for each cardinal direction and run some rough estimates on how many will be walking near your door. That's ignoring all the people in your own town that don't have gardens.

I know I have close to a million people coming my way, and someone's going to kill me for my little dozen potatoes. You can't fight off that many people with a handful of neighbors. It also takes a shit load of gardening to keep a family of 4 alive.

If your plan doesn't involve getting the fuck out of dodge and having a cache of food somewhere remote (with a cottage or small cabin if you live in a winter region), it will fail.

First off start building yourself a "Shit has hit the fan and I need to get out of dodge." kit to keep in your car/close to your door so you can grab and run if it gets REAL bad.

Keep it stocked and up to date (certain first aid items are only sterile for a year. Antiseptic Creams like Savlon go VERY bad when they degrade)

https://youtube.com/GXYdQJsJ2JE

Additional components; heavy duty needles and some aramid or Dyneema thread (brand name of the high density polyethylene rope that's strong as Fkk) for repairing things that need structure.

Also get yourself on an emergency first aid course, one that covers serious injuries and stopping bleeding is more than worth any price you pay for the lessons.

Learning practical skills like simple electronic repairs (I'm not talking about house electronics, that's how you meet god in one of the most painful ways possible), how to diagnose car issues how to effectively tie knots in rope, and a few sewing stitches to repair clothes.

What kind of collapse?

If you can’t do the long term stuff others have been mentioning here is a bit more short term stuff:

• Make sure you have bottled water. Ideally a few weeks worth per person in your household. Remember that cooking uses water too.
• Medication for as long a period as you can reasonably cover for the people in your household
• potassium iodine tablets to protect the thyroid in case of nuclear fallout
• Canned food
• remember your pets need stuff too if you have them
• in case there is an infant involved baby formula, diapers and other baby needs

More long term:

• look into MeshCore or meshtastic for communication
• radio with a hand crank + spare batteries
• medkit with bandages, tourniquet, etc. Also learn how to use it.
• we have 3 ways of heating our house: fireplace, electric and gas. I’m sure that won’t be possible for everyone but the point is diversification where possible.

Preparing?

I mean, if there is a 'collapse', what use will there be to stock pile some food/medications? If those are not stolen by raiders (aka other people believing they ought to survive... a side note to those of our American friends who worship the holy gun: no, you won't own enough bullets to shoot them all). Those stocks they will only last so long, right? Then, what?

It's even simpler in my very personal situation: I'm alive today thx to constant medications. Stop the inflow of those medications and I will last a couple years at most (dixit the same doctors that have been keeping me running for many years now). And that is in the best conditions, which probably won't be what we will all be experimenting.

So, I prepare by being fine with knowing things and I will end. Which they will, even without any collapse. And by knowing other things will replace them, with or without that odd human species that once ruled the planet.

On the short term, as my humble way to try reduce the risk of such a sad collapse happening, I do my best to reduce the resources I consume, and by encouraging people (me included) to rediscover there is an alternative path to self-destruction through constant anger and hate against the other(s)... and against oneself.

A simple.22 riffle with a suppressor is quiet enough you could hunt small game even if it was illegal and no one would hear it unless they're close enough to also see it.

Truthfully? You can’t.

Buy seeds for staple crops and learn basic farming techniques. You just need a handful of potatoes to make a lot more potatoes, and humans can subsist on potatoes almost indefinitely.

You can’t prepare for a collapse because the circumstances will be unpredictable and probably not how you imagine.

What you can do is prepare for temporary events like blackouts, floods and so on. The German civil protection office has some helpful guidelines: https://www.bbk.bund.de/EN/Prepare-for-disasters/prepare-for-disasters_node.html

I'm going to sound confident here but I'm not this is just what I am doing.

Build and participate in systems of support. There are almost certainly already people in your area experiencing a collapse of social systems.

If you're now thinking, "i'd love too but I can't afford to" I would see what people actually need in your community and try to see what you personally can actually provide yourself. Not what you can afford from your job or could give up from your stuff, but what you could repeatably do to help even just a little.

You will build a niche that helps your community be more resilient and yourself too.

I've been making soaps for people and myself for example, and cleaning vinegar. I also been able help move people to more secure software, which is one my interests.

I don't. I'm not egotistical enough to think the world will collapse or that if it did I'd have any ability to survive it.

If there is a mass die off then I'm dying too.

Learning skills

If something happens I will try my best to die at the first blast. I am too old and tired and blasee for any apocalypse.

Accept that death is a natural part of life and hope you are gone before shit really gets worse

The collapse you praise for isn't the collapse you are going to get. World is just going to get fascist real fast and you are going to die producing warheads for misery wages. You can't really prepare for that

by making peace with death

Set up a meshcore repeater

Looking up closest shop for arms. Will likely be visiting places to test things out.

Plans are already in place. I'm gonna kick back, watch Blast from the Past, and kiss my ass goodbye while I get good and drunk/messed up. It's the same thing I do during storm season. I've started from literal nothing too many times. I refuse to do it again.

Cyanide pill.