First off, I offer profuse gratitude and embarrassing obsequiousness to the wonderful minion who sent me a care package with the book “Warrior Herdsman
” by EM Thomas. I can’t make out the senders name, no doubt obscured by an advanced state of palsy or a deliberate attempt at operational security, but you know who you are. So, my plan for this Sunday, aside from spewing more venom in the form of an article if I don’t get to it the day before, a little Jim Time where I take time out from the hard work of Empire Building
( global domination
would have been far too exhausting ), is to brew up a cup of European coffee and eat fruit cake from the last care package while I read the book from today’s care package, all the while thinking you can kiss my package. I really am looking forward to the book, the “day to day lives of primitive dudes molesting sheep and killing neighbors” kind of thing right up my alley. I’ve been wanting to learn more on the micro-level of these things rather than just having a Big Picture. You may all pause to be insanely jealous.*
I’ve talked a bit on this before, but since I know you all appreciate my incessant worry about the tiniest details in post-apocalypse
living I knew you would like far more detail. Let’s try to simplify transportation. It isn’t living in the suburbs and commuting to the city. It isn’t visiting grandma in Florida where you safely stashed her to degenerate at a distant, but at least while warm. It isn’t entertainment. Transportation is the act of getting a good grown, mined or harvested in one area to another area with something to trade. It enables a group to live in a marginal area. If you have a salt
mine and no grain, you can survive by trading for food to farmers lacking access to their own mine or close to a saltwater body. We all need transportation, because almost no area on earth is self sufficient. Those that are shoot themselves in the ass by overexploiting and/or overpopulating. Rome, with its marvelously engineered roads ( which put our six inches of asphalt $28 million a mile crap to shame ) spent the money on those roads to enrich itself. Not to allow Senators to commute from satellite cities. Not for Sunday drives. Fundamentally, it was to bring bread to Rome. Naval merchantmen built the British Empire
, with a nice navy to protect it. *
I bring this up to point out the obvious. You must have transportation. Yet, what exactly is available after there is no oil? Visions of soybean diesel or steam engines dance in your head. Are you certain you have the acreage to spare from feeding humans? You might have twenty acres of feed, but that might be looked on as potential population fodder to the nearby baron who will “borrow” the land. Do you need the boiler wood to cook with, or heat your home? How about horses? Don’t horses eat off land better used to grow people food? You scoff, as you easily grow your own horses feed from your land. Of course, the nearby city of a quarter million are driving cars and eating off of Midwest corn. They are not in competition with you over fertile soil
. Yet. They will be, and even if only a small percentage survive the collapse it will be enough. Also remember the figures. Revolutionary Colonies
population over the original thirteen states was less than the current population of New York City
. They had plenty of wood to use as the only energy source outside water power, and their transportation had plenty of fields to eat out of ( other than water transport, much cheaper ). *
But wait! If you order now, you get two problems for the price of one. Even if you overcome the problem of fuel competing with food or fuel for heat, how does your conveyance roll? In WWII the US was the world’s largest oil exporter. We were swimming in it, one of the reason the Texas Railroad Commission
was created was to regulate the oversupply to keep the price from plunging too much. Yet we had fuel rationing. Not because the fuel was scarce but because rubber for tires was. The tropical forests couldn’t produce enough rubber. Even at the onset of their production, just to satisfy rubberized garment and bicycle tire demand, the supply was never enough. That was why the incentive was there to brutally enslave and kill off those areas populations. The profits ensured it. Yes, ties are now made from petroleum. But in the very near future that too shall be scarce. We went from rubber to petroleum to escape the limitations of scarce rubber. Now both will be rare. Tires will become a scavenger only commodity. If effect, you may have fuel, but you won’t have wheels.*
Old Timey dudes cranking out wood spoke wheels won’t spring up overnight. And even if they did, our roads are even now in an almost perpetual state of disintegration. Will anything other than tires tear it up too quickly? Remember the problem with mud and old fashion wheels? This does leave the railroads. One of the whimsical scenes in the book “Go-Go Girls Of The Apocalypse
” were the drug fueled musclemen powering the rail car. Under attack by bandits, they pumped away so hard to pick up speed they had heart attacks. More than likely the food to fuel ratio is unrealistic so you will be stuck with mule or horse power. If there is the feed. Horses can eat from weed filled ditches but without quality grain they don’t last long. And if the railroad construction allows teams of horses to be there in the first place. Which might bring you back to horses pulling those stripped down cars. Bringing us back to the tire issue. Tires will have to be an obvious item to fight over. You need to control those items to have a chance of using the asphalt as long as possible. Until you can figure something else out. The fuel is important, the wheels more so. They aren’t a renewable resource.END
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My e-mail is jimd303@netzero.com
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7 comments:
Let me add to the problem by mentioning that it won't take long for people to realize that asphalt burns. Those roads will really deteriorate under the onslaught of picks and shovels. That cute little mule is starting to look pretty attractive now isn't it?
Excellent post. These are all very valid points.
Roads will likely deteriorate much faster than any of us think, without petroleum fueled machinery to clear them, mow the margins, remove trees and landslides, cranes to repair bridges, etc.
Bad roads destroy tires quickly.
Rail seems like the best option for long distance transport, with pack animals bringing goods to or from rail stations. Horse owners turned gypsy traders might make a decent profit, though it will be hazard pay since traveling goods are vulnerable goods.
Maybe big goats as pack animals...goats eat almost anything; too much grain can actually make them sick, and they can act as living brush clearers to increase cultivated land.
Fence some goats in a bramble patch and see how long it takes them to clear (and fertilize) the soil.
Good luck out there...
I'm glad to hear the book got to you OK. Notice it was in a plastic bag, I learned to ALWAYS put books in a plastic bag when I sold shit on Ebay, occasionally a customer would email me, saying, "The package was soaked, but the book was OK!" and that was reward enough. The book actually cost me 25c or free, I forget which, the mailing was like $3, and people still wonder why our economy is in the tank. And yes, I love scribbling my address, apparently it's actually illegal to put a fake address on, or use no address. And I must assume your mail is monitored. So, make it difficult to read - and in any case all I'm doing it sending you a book.
The book does not stand up well under skimming, as few do. But if you really get into it, it's a great read right up to the end. Spooky to think that those people are all gone now.
For transportation, people and horses can do pretty well on trails, but once you bring wheels into it, you start to have problems. You can get by without wheels, by using sleds, sledges, and travois. Travois can be pretty bitchin' if you know what you're doing. They don't snag like wheels will, and the legs glide along with surprisingly little wear. They can be pulled by people, dogs, or horses, burros, etc. The Indians were so smart they didn't need wheels!
I wish I could find the stuff I found again on this, we are still very dependent on natural rubber. Military tires and racing tires are all natural rubber. The artificial stuff does NOT do the job. I think I came by this info looking at shoemaking, and found some hipster kid's shoe site bragging about how it makes the soles from Carlisle racing tires which are 100%..... I think this is sensitive information because it means an indigenous movement can cripple the Great Empire by crippling rubber production.
If transportation for commerce devolves to the point you write then folks will have much bigger problems.
We NEED transportation to bring us the supplies we consume daily.
If/Once that gets removed then there'll be a great die off in population.
Yes, the US would be a vastly different place then (if you all, reading this now, are even still around to realize that).
This would likely be worldwide.
And perhaps it's not a bad thing.
Short of Cold Fusion and Warp Drive (so humans can go out & infect the galaxy).... we're hard
pressed to survive going forward except in a brutal,resource-war torn way.
The reason for that statement is ...our numbers. Quite simply, there's too many consuming too much. Add two or three football stadiums more souls entering the world each and every day (that's right people...go do some Internet searching and educate yourselves with the reality of modern population growth)....
and the end result will certainly be a dystrophy future.
Before we go all the way back to the stone-age, we can make a pit-stop at the Steam Engine Age. But have a slave or one of your wives tend them, because they did blow-up every now and then.
Without gasoline or diesel, tires will be best used for new shoe soles.
North America had no pack animals (unless you count relatively small dogs) until the arrival of Europeans, and South America only had Llama. They managed fairly sophisticated societies.
In a lot of areas people will use bicycles to transport supplies. They usually walk themselves and load the supplies on the bicycle. If I recall correctly the North Vietnamese walked down a lot of supplies this way on the Ho Chi Min trail.
I think the reality is that with the greatly reduced circumstances of lower tech-level societies, there is not really much reason to go anywhere for most people.
So I am more pessimistic than you. You say we won't be able to get around. I say there will be no place to go! LOL
Anonymous 7:25 says:
My point was that if you look hard enough and critically enough at each of us, we're all scumbags.
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