Population Density

One of the basic issues facing a survivalist in New England is a simple problem: population density. In a scenario where basic law and order has broken down, government has collapsed, and the power grid has gone inoperable, you have an immediate problem -- too many people, and no way to get them the basic supplies of life.

Most people, when considering this, say: "Well at that point the National Guard is activated, and the Federal Government steps in."

Perhaps. But as we saw in Hurricane Katrina, sometimes local government does not act responsibly, sometimes the state government is incompetent, and sometimes it takes the Feds a week or more to get their act together. What happens at street level when this occurs?

First, you have looting. With the breakdown of government in Katrina, the first looting began within 24 hours. The age old proscription "Thou shalt not steal" was overridden almost immediately by hunger and thirst. People living in a hurricane zone, with ample warning of the approaching storm, did not act appropriately and did not set aside a 72 hour supply of food and water. In some places, even if they did, the rising water quickly inundated formerly safe places, and people had to seek refuge, with no supplies, on whatever high ground they could find, sometimes becoming stranded on their own roofs. A sudden catastrophe triggers the inner child in just about everyone -- "Someone ought to have prevented this, someone ought to be taking care of me." When that someone fails to appear, then people quickly rationalize and say "Well, I'm going to take what I need." A brick gets thrown through a window. Once that line is crossed, it is not only bread and water that get taken, but anything else people feel they need in order to comfort themselves -- "I'm suffering, therefore I deserve a new TV." These desires do not always focus on the immediate and practical. Once the first brick gets thrown, everything inside the store becomes fair game.

From there it is a short distance to murder. "You have water, and I need it -- or better yet, my baby needs it? Hand it over. Stand and deliver." This is the practical language of the highwayman. Soon people are armed, and then it becomes a question of who is willing to shoot first.

Without continuous delivery of food and water, the cities soon descend into a maelstrom of violence. And when the city's supplies are used up, the population heads out first to the suburbs, and then to the country, in order to find food. A lot of people will suddenly get the urge to take up hunting, but without the experience and skill, it becomes more practical to find people with supplies, to shoot and loot. A rolling wave of violence spreads out of the city. People form together in bands. To overwhelm a strong point, you need a group. A man and his wife holed up in a house, with guns, could soon find themselves surrounded. They might kill three or four, but eventually, numbers prevail.

If you assume society is headed for chaos, you then find yourself facing a hard number very quickly -- how many people are there around me? In New England, there are a lot of people around you. Consider where the New England states stand in this table of population density:

Rhode Island is # 2 in the nation with 390.78 people per square kilometer.
Massachusetts is #3 in the nation with 317.63 people per square kilometer.
Connecticut is #4 in the nation with 279.11 people per square kilometer

Southern New England becomes a demographic nightmare almost immediately in a disaster situation. There are a lot of people with too little land to feed and water them.

Head north, and it gets a little better:

New Hampshire is #20 in the nation with 56.65 people per square kilometer.
Vermont is #30 in the nation with 25.93 people per square kilomter.
Maine is #38 in the nation with 16.38 people per square kilometer.

New Hampshire has a slightly higher population density than the average U.S. state. Vermont has fewer than half the people jammed into it than New Hampshire, and Maine less than a third.

All things being equal, if you are in New England and you want to survive a societal collapse, your best bet is to go North. If you are planning a refuge ahead of time, you really ought to think about Maine and Vermont.

To me, Maine has two considerable advantages. First, it is the farthest away from New York City. In looking at New England, we haven't considered where the urban population of the five boroughs heads in times of trouble. We certainly know where they go for vacation. If I'm a well-off New Yorker and the power grid has gone down, I'm going to remember those summers in Vermont pretty fondly. Route 91 becomes crowded quickly in the summertime and in ski season. Vermont is empty much of the year, but it has a lot of New Yorkers with vacation homes. In a disaster, its population will go up very quickly.

The second advantage to Maine is that once you get off of the coast, it has a huge amount of undeveloped forest, owned by a lot of lumber companies. Most of it is empty. If you are in the far north or northwest of Maine, you're surrounded by forest. You've got a virtually unlimited supply of firewood and game. You've got plenty of rainwater. All you need is a hunting lodge well off the main roads, and some rifles.

Because of family, my current "bug out" scenario is in Vermont. My home in Massachusetts is in a small town, but two of the major roads out of Boston run right through the middle of it. I could hole up here for only a few days, at best. But if I did so, the roads would be jammed, and it would be a very long walk to Vermont, indeed. My best bet would be to head out early, and get to family in Vermont.

But if I have a long time to prepare, I'm going to think hard about a cabin up in Maine.

So, How To Proceed

If you are convinced that society is headed toward collapse, what do you do?

Well, if you're me, you start making a list of things you're going to need.

You, on the other hand? You're probably curled up in a fetal position under the blankets, hoping that mommy will walk in and make everything better. I say "mommy" because your daddy probably checked out of the picture long ago. But I kid. I'm a kidder.

We start making a list of things we need.

Water, shelter, food, stuff you can barter, and guns to protect it. And when all of that becomes too big to fit in a backpack, then you need to start thinking about the bigger questions. Where do I hole up with all my stuff? Where do I find land to grow the food and a population of serfs to till it?

Because if things collapse, feudalism is going to start looking pretty damned good to a lot of people.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

You start making a list. The first problem I confront is, how do I assure myself of a supply of water?

Turn on the tap? I live in a town where my water comes from public utilities, on a hill where the stuff has to be pumped up to a little standpipe nearby. If power fails, then the pressure in the pipes will get lower and lower until there is no water.

Then I face the basic, existential problem of thirst. In three days -- assuming Mad Max style biker gangs don't get me first -- I die from it.

So, how to prevent it? Make a list.

On my person, I need canteens. I actually have some from my days in the Army, and Web gear to put them on.

In my house, I need a several-day supply of water. Trip to Costco, bitches.

Into the future, I need something renewable, for Costco will get looted soon enough by the same crowd that looted it during Hurricane Katrina when they ran out of disposable baby diapers. Yeah, remember that? A Cat 4 hurricane was approaching and these idiots didn't even have a supply of baby diapers stacked up, or forgot about something called CLOTH. Morons. Children. If I lived in a hurricane zone, I'd be more prepared than Charlton Heston in The Omega Man. I'd be in a smkoing jacket playing chess with a bust of Caesar in my fortress (occasionally interrupted by the need to spray automatic weapons fire on the mutant vampires below). But I digress.

For renewable water, the best thing I've hit upon is to collect rainwater. This means I need three things.

1. A rainbarrel big enough to get me between rainstorms.
2. A method of filtering that water to get out leaves and debris, etc.
3. A method of purifying the water from biological contaminants. In other words, some bleach. Since a little bleach goes a long way, I need a few bottles of it in my cellar.

The rainbarrel has been ordered. Home Depot, bitches. 60 gallons, which ought to be enough to last between rainstorms here in New England, provided I don't take Caligula-style baths every day.

For filtration systems, I'm torn between the Big Berkey, which has a huge capacity, and is shiny, but real expensive; and the Platypus, which is cheaper but less capable. I'm leaning toward the Platypus because a) I'm not made of money, and b) it is portable, if I need to bug out.

And I'm betting that long term, I'll need to bug out, because of the problem of population density, which I'll post about in the next few days.

You know, unless between now and then it all collapses.

How Big Is The Tumor Inside My Head?

There is an old Saturday Night Live skit which parodied the PBS talk show, The McLaughlin Group. The host in the skit, playing the eccentric John McLaughlin, asked his panel of commentators a series of increasingly bizarre questions until he finally asked "How big is the tumor inside my head?"

No one dared offer a guess, so he revealed that it was "The size of a tangelo."

I want you to know, upfront, though even though I wrote in my first post that I am not a lunatic, well, even a lunatic might assert such a thing.

I accept two possibilities:

1. The stuff I am worrying about is real.
2. I am mentally ill.

Actually, there is a third possibility:

3. The stuff I am worrying about is real and I am mentally ill.

I find the third proposition to be strangely comforting, for it means that I eventually will be insane enough not to consider the problems of the world around me as it collapses. I'll be too busy making paper airplanes and talking to Napoleon to worry about the trivial issues of survival that concern you petty mortals. You want to know what I think? Hah! Talk to the tangelo, bitches. I will be of no help to you.

So, read with caution. I may be on to something. Or I may be headed for medications, icy baths, the straightjacket, and electroshock therapy.

Time will tell.

Systems

A tower is built upon a base, a flower is built upon a stem. Take enough stones from the bottom of a tower, and it collapses -- and, generally, not in an orderly way. It comes down all at once. Rot the roots or the stem of a plant and the flower dies.

We live, especially in New England, in a tower, or, if you prefer, as a flower. There are a lot of people in New England, and the region is not self-sufficient from a food point of view. We depend on things brought in from other places. Meat and bread are brought in from the Midwest, shipped by rail or by truck into the region. In dairy items we are, perhaps, self-sufficient -- though I have not researched the issue deeply enough to truly know. In water we are likely self-sufficient. Consider the problem of water and how necessary it is, and it is certainly better to live in New England than it is to live in Las Vegas.

New England has not been self sufficient since it industrialized, probably since the beginning of the twentieth century. It supports a large population because of the goods and services it produces. In the twentieth century, these products were finished goods -- shoes, paper, guns, garments. These items are useful for barter and have a higher added value than food does. So we made a wager -- I will make you shoes, paper, and guns, and you will provide me with food. As long as I can trust you to make food for me, and you can trust me to make finished goods for you, all is well, and we each prosper. The Midwest grows the corn and wheat, we make the finished goods, and specialization makes both of us wealthy due to the division of labor. This is Adam Smith 101.

Of course, since about 1950, the goods New England has produced have become progressively more intangible. Rather than secondary goods -- the shoes, paper, guns, and garments -- we are now producing, well, tertiary goods. We produce technology, health care, media, and education. All good things, and in an ideal world in which the rule of law and societal order prevails, things that have a higher value than food or even than finished goods.

And things that depend, to an even greater degree, on order and trust. We trust the Midwest to produce our food, the South (and increasingly, China) to produce our finished goods, and we provide high tech, medical specialization, education, and media.

But we are living farther and farther removed from the essentials.

What happens if the rule of law fails? All of our transactions are dependent on, as I see it, three things.

First, we are dependent on currency to facilitate the exchanges. This currency, like the goods we produce, has become increasingly intangible. It once was based on two metals -- gold and silver. It then was made in paper and was based on the full faith and credit of the United States government -- paper that had printed on it words to the effect that it was legal tender for all debts, public and private. It is increasingly digital -- Boolean ones and zeroes stored in digital form on silicon hard drives and on little plastic cards.

Second, we are dependent on transportation -- rail lines and roads that make commerce between separated regions possible. The trains and trucks that serve commerce are powered primarily by oil. Even an electric train is ultimately dependent on oil; the power plant that generates the spark is probably fueled by oil or its byproduct, natural gas.

Third, we are dependent on contract law and interstate commerce to make transactions possible. If I deliver you a railroad car of shoes for ten railroad cars of wheat, and you fail to provide the wheat, I can sue you, with reasonable expectations that a court will enforce our contract and ultimately make you pay for the shoes.

These systems have been pretty reliable for the last 100 years.

The dilemma I see is that if these systems fail, I still need to eat.

I am worried that these systems all face threats that make failure possible. Electricity is tied to oil, and oil is controlled by people who hate us. The currency is increasingly becoming fiat -- where once the promise of the United States government was "as good as gold," the government is increasingly looking financially shaky. And our system of commerce is becoming so regulated that if I did indeed need to sue you, the courts are so crowded and Byzantine that I would probably starve to death while the lawsuit was still in the discovery phase.

I see a government run by, at best, adolescents, and in some cases, children -- not in terms of their age, for the President is older than I am in years, but in outlook -- a child always knows that no matter how bad he screws up, his parents will straighten it out for him. Mommy and daddy will step in and make everything right. This is the mindset of our leaders in government right now. They are not leading. They are playing games in the backyard. "Let's make Barry our King, and he can fix everything by magic." Except that there is no one minding the house, ready to call us in for dinner when night falls. Barry is not our king, and magic does not exist.

The problem is that in the world, America is the only adult in the room. Europe may think it is the parents -- for certainly, the Europeans scold like parents -- but the only thing that kept the Nazis and the Communists from enslaving them was our military. Right now, they are suffering from demographic collapse, and the Arabs are moving in and becoming increasingly powerful at the ballot box. The Europeans may be our parents, but if they are, they are frail and elderly and living in an increasingly bad neighborhood. They are going to be hassled by punks, and if they don't hand over their wallets and purses, they will get knocked down. It's tough to be an American right now, but still a damned sight better than being a European. Over there, it's Clockwork Orange time.

In New England, we live producing intangible things, paid by fiat currency, supported by laws that are dubious at best and a government that can't even pay its bills, never mind bail us out in an emergency. I can feel the tower trembling.

Food, water, and shelter -- it would be nice to have a guarantee of all these things right now. Who is going to give it to us now that there are no adults left in the room?

First Things

First off -- I'm not a lunatic. I am just a former Army officer concerned by certain trends he is seeing in the broader society.

Brad Hamilton is not my real name, though people of my age will recognize the reference. I'm a guy who is working a series of bad jobs on his way to eventual retirement, hoping that at some point he gets to throw a pot of coffee on a guy robbing a convenience store and achieve his 15 minutes of fame. Again, you'll get the joke if you're my age. I once served in a National Guard unit where one of my NCOs told me, "The dream of every National Guardsman is that someday, he gets to shoot a looter."

That's a joke, of course. Though I'm not sure he meant it as one.

I look at society and I see the words of William Butler Yeats being played out in front of my eyes.

THE SECOND COMING

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?


I don't know. But whatever it is, I plan to survive it.