http://www.timebomb2000.com/vb/printthread.php?t=72776

Because this is a forum, there are lots of additional, and good, posts.

Hello TODers,

I think this article by Zachary Nowak on EnergyBulletin should be required reading.  Speed, Severity, and Duration are vital concepts to be added to the Peakoil discussion IMO.

Bob Shaw in Phx,Az  Are Humans Smarter than Yeast?

However, I'd like to link to the original article at Transition Culture, so that the comments can also be read:
Communities, Refuges, and Refuge-Communities - a Survivalist Response by Zachary Nowak.

A well thought out article, and Nowak has many good points to consider.  I like the balance he shows in his thinking, such as the following:

In reading Peak Oil essays, I've identified some of these ideas which I would call "dangerous axioms," dangerous in that we don't reflect on them before using them.

The first is "human nature," or the nature of human nature, or the nature of human nature in nature (sorry, I couldn't resist). Both explanations of human actions in past crises and guesses about responses to future crises are often based on what the author imagines human nature to be. Are we inherently evil and self-centered, willing to steal from our neighbors just to stay alive, or are we good, or at least smart enough to solve the Prisoner's Dilemma without many iterations, working together to our common benefit? I personally stand with Daniel Quinn, author of Ishmael, on this question: we have a nature capable of both selfishness and altruism, and what we manifest is based on what the environmental context encourages. In any event, assuming human nature is one way or the other determines how we imagine the future.

Also, the adage

Hope for the best, prepare for the worst.

I also resonate with the following comments:

Seraphima:
Preparing for the coming changes is not an either/or situation. There are a lot of lifestyle eco-niches that different people will fit into. Starting now, doing more and more practical things to powerdown and doing them in different ways and in very different places- sharing and educating as we can, and knowing when to keep silent when we can't- these are common to us all.

Jason Bradford:
I try to find a balance between the personal and the communal-though I am often drawn more to the communal now by established obligations. Sometimes I try to interweave them.

For example, look at all of the cars around you - no need to mine copper. Just the need to set different priorities. And CFLs are so 1995 or so - LEDs are much more promising, and at least in Germany, you can buy them in various lighting replacement configurations - from 12v to 220v, in different socket sizes. The LEDs seem benign both in manufacture and disposal (if only because they are physically smaller), unlike CFLs, which are considered toxic waste here due to the heavy metals. (Which is one of sveral reasons why CFL lighting in industrial settings uses replaceable tubes - the base lasts much longer than the tube normally, but it is the base which is costly to manufacture and dispose of - oh wait, did anyone mention that before selling you the expensive package to just toss in the trash?) The message - don't buy CFLs, buy LEDs - the new technology is radically more efficient and much less destructive. And did I mention they work just fine with a rooftop PV system? Though they do cost maybe as much as twice as much as a CFL, which here still cost 4 or 5 times a normal bulb.

Europe has 'collapsed' repeatedly, and yet somehow, it has never collapsed the way which people such as yourself seem to think our civilization will - that is, so utterly and completely that those left will be entering a pristine future, no longer members of a vanished culture. As for our civilization ending - well, sure it will - there are enough relics of other long gone civilizations in Europe that no one thinks that today and now equals forever.

I am a very pessimistic person, but even then, Europe during WWII did not collapse - that is, people kept farming (by hand and animal, without insecticides), burying the dead, and getting killed by war while sending their children to school. However, there weren't too many ravening hordes of survivors roaming the countryside. Though a good number of people did starve to death, and die from the cold, and die from a broken medical system and epidemics, and from contaminated water, or shot to maintain public order - need we go on?

Of course, the details of the future are open - but this vision of collapse seems to be very American, especially the emphasis on self-sufficiency.

I live in a town where the mayor and local council rode their bikes to see how the local forest was being managed, talking about how much lime will be needed to optimize future growth to enhance wood revenue, and saying that the local hunters are doing a good job keeping the newly planted trees from being ravaged by deer and boar (new trees due to massive replanting after a hurricane during Christmas, 1999). The town also pays attention to its fruit trees, along with a number of other basic issues, such as the demand for firewood. All reported in the local town circular.

And you know, they were having those same discussions 25 years ago, 50 years ago, and 75 years ago - under different forms of government, in different situations, and some of the participants having undoubtedly committed or planning to commit evil acts. And they will also very likely being having these same discussions into the foreseeable future - as this is how the future becomes foreseeable. Of course, the hurricane which wiped out a good 50% of the forest wasn't planned, but then, that's life, and why you plan and plant more trees.

Cultures that have survived over the long term do have other characteristics than much of what seems so typical and normal in the U.S.

This doesn't means that things can't get really bad - after all, just ask anyone over the age of 70 or so here, to know what it is like to live without electricity, running water, heat, or enough food - and to live like that for years. But then, you have to explain to them why your vision of hardship leading to total collapse contradicts their own personal experience of what they went through.

And I am not talking about economic miracles, by the way - East Germany, when finally re-integrated with West Germany, was found to be working with its 1930s era phone system pretty much unchanged, for example, along with autobahns which still had cobblestone exits (unbelievable to drive over in 1992 or so). People in East Germany learned to get along, even as the West Germans re-integrated into the industrial West. Uncle Joe wasn't like Uncle Sam, after all. By the 1980s, some East Germans even had color television, after all, and most people had a radio by that point.

And that just might be part of the difference - here, the state sees survival as its primary goal, regardless of what that means to the individual. But in America, survival is too often discussed in exclusively personal terms. 'What is in it for me?' is the American framework, to be cynical, not 'what are we in for, and how do we deal with it?'