There is always some variation I hear. "Buy seeds and gold to save yourself!" "Stock up on medicine and ammo!" I always find these "answers" to collapse as short sighted and ultimately ineffective as well as a waste of money. I mean really, we are talking about nothing short of the collapse of the industrial world and reverting to a world before when medicine was mass produced and available at every pharmacy with correct dosages and pure ingredients. We are talking about a world before bullets that have copper jackets and pins. We are talking about a world that required a scythe to mow the lawn, and your lawn had better be wheat or something, or you would be hungry.
Besides, what good is it to have seeds if you can't grow anything because you never learned? What good is having a cabinet full of emergency medicines that go out of date in a year or two and you don't even know how to use them? What if "collapse" becomes bad enough that you need" those medicines just five years after they expired and were thrown away? Isn't that a waste of valuable resources that would have been better spent on something else?
I mean even buying water filters is ineffective eventually. How do you replace them?
So we shouldn't be looking to "buy" anything to save us. We should be learning how to MAKE what we need to save us. We should all know how to produce the absolute basics in life. I don't mean specialty medicines, your cherry quinoa you just can't live without, or those triple stitched angus bullhide hiking boots either. Unless you have a medical condition or you have a specific one in the family, don't worry about it.
If you have something that runs in the family, (asthma, high blood pressure, diabetes) look for things that will prevent and treat them. There are herbs, dietary choices, and even breathing techniques that help those. You can not buy yourself more time...you can only delay the inevitable. Instead face the inevitable and learn to handle it.
Learn how to make your staple foods. That means your breads, milk, eggs, butter, vegetables and fruits. Just enough to stay alive.
Learn how to clean water without a special filter you picked up from the store.
Learn how to cut and split wood as well as care for the tools to do that.
Learn how to be a mid-wife, doula, and herbalist for the general aches and pains everyone gets.
Learn how to fix your house with trees and hand tools.
Once you have done all that and have the tools to do all that, sure buy some gold and specialty seeds. After all, you have this survival crap by the balls then.
Finally, there are less fish in the streams, less deer in the woods, and a whole lot less squirrels than when I was a kid. In fact, the only "meat" I see in abundance is snake. So if you intend to hunt your food, when everyone else is hungry too, expect to go hungry too. Just my two cents.
By the way...all of my children are learning these skills. Someone once called them "princes and princesses" of poverty. We'll see who is the prince and princess when everyone else is starving and they have fields of food for their family' s dinner table. To the poor starving man or woman, they would be as kings and queens.
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[–] Ulluses ago (edited ago)
If you can't survive without your emergency kit then there's not much hope for you. That doesn't mean you shouldn't have one or two or that you shouldn't have a secure long term storage location that's trapped and powered.
I've found that knowing how to perform maintenance on tools is where most people fall down, I've gone hiking with people and they have damaged their gear before the first weekend because they were being heavy handed and didn't look after the kit. Knowing how to sharpen edges for different tasks, knowing how to fix cracks in wooden tools or get dents out of metal ones before either leads to a piece of scrap instead of a hatchet.
If you're finding less wildlife than you remember then just head further out, cities have expanded and that means the wilderness is further away. I went into the hills near me and they were near quiet compared to how they were growing up, but I drove up to the mountains near my brother's house and it was much more busy. Rabbits all over and even the odd badger within eyesight from his back garden. That said if people are expecting meat to be a staple food then they are going to be disappointed, even the most ardent fishers are going to find shortfalls unless they maintain reliable farm plots year on year.