March 19, 2008. Rob asks for a list of my favorite field guides. The problem here is that you're going to need some regional guides, and I mostly only know my own region. For plants, I use Plants of Southern Interior British Columbia and the Inland Northwest. The publisher of that one, Lone Pine, has lots of other plant field guides. Also I use an obscure old book, Trees, Shrubs and Flowers to Know in Washington by C.P. Lyons.
The best mushroom guide is Mushrooms Demystified by David Arora, which is focused on California but works everywhere in the USA. You should supplement it with a regional guide, if you can find one.
For birds, I looked at a bunch of reviews and picked the Stokes guide, and I'm totally happy with it. It's not as pretty as some other guides, but you can get it cheap, it's very easy to use, and the size is perfect -- big enough to have good information and small enough to carry out of the house. And it matches the Stokes guide to bird songs, which has way more birds than the other audio guides.
Also I have both Mammal Tracks and Sign and Bird Tracks and Sign by Mark Elbroch.
November 19, 2007. Mike writes:
I recently crashed my truck and have had to bicycle everywhere. It is fucking liberating! I ride an old Trek steel frame fixed gear and yesterday did 40 miles. I am thinking that with energy decline, fixed gear/singlespeed bikes will be the easiest way to go because of less extra parts and complexity... but do you think that would work as a touring bike? Basically which do you think is a better apocalypse bike, a well done rigged out single speed or the more traditional geared type?
First, for readers who aren't bike geeks, "fixed gear" means the back wheel is locked to the pedals. Nothing beats it for maneuverability, but you would be mad to use it for touring, because your legs have to keep going all the time. At the other extreme is a bike with front and back derailleurs and twenty-some gears, and a freewheel that allows you to coast without pedaling. My bike is an old Schwinn Super Le Tour, looks worthless, but it has an aluminum frame so it's not terribly heavy, and I keep it well lubed and use smooth tires, so it's super-efficient. I stripped it down to a singlespeed but kept the freewheel, which to me is the best of both worlds -- I can coast, but I don't have to mess with gears, and I can really feel a boost in power and acceleration when the chain isn't bogged down by derailleurs.
I recommend starting with a multi-speed. If you enjoy using the full range of gears, keep it. If you find that shifting is a hassle and you spend most of your time in one gear, take all the shifting apparatus off, shorten the chain, remove the extra cogs if you can, and there you go! I use a gear ratio that's perfect for city traffic and easy hills. I walk it up steep hills, only a little slower than riding in low gear, and downhill you can coast so gears don't matter. Where a geared bike has the advantage is on long flat stretches, because you can build up to a high gear and really move. So my advice for apocalypse biking is: singlespeed for city and mountains, multi-speed for riding across Nebraska, and fixed gear for playing bicycle capture-the-flag in the abandoned Wal Mart parking lot.
February 23, 2007. Guest post from Patricia: How to get a college education and not sell yourself into bonded servitude for the next 10 to 25 years:
1. Choose a large state, or state-related university. You can always transfer "up" closer to the end, if you want to have a Big Name School on your piece of paper. State schools have a wide variety of programs, normally well respected, and they always offer much cheaper tuition to in-state students. Make sure they offer tuition to employees! Almost every one at least offers half, usually 100% to staff for undergraduate course-work in any field, regardless of your job on campus. They employ hundreds and hundreds of people in relatively low-paying, low-competition, high-security, good benefits, staff jobs. Positions may or may not be low stress [stay clear of anything medical!] or have much slack time, but they will have lots of paid holidays, no overtime, and paid vacation and sick days, and offer affordable health insurance.
2. Move to the cheapest place you can find on a good bus line to campus.
3. Start trying to land any type of employment with that university. Most big colleges have their own temp programs, which can get you in the door, and also earning some money, quickly.
4. Watch for a good full or part-time staff level position that looks like you could do it without too much effort. When you get one, begin school one or two classes per term, until you are sure about what you want to do there. If you are in no hurry, you can take your time and earn your entire degree this way, and never go into any debt at all.
5. If you want to finish faster, see if you meet the
conditions to be declared an independent student. If you do, you have a much better chance of getting grant money from your state government. Grant money is free, but you often have to be quite poor to qualify.
Note: Some states, like Georgia, offer part or full tuition to all their high school grads who keep a certain grade average if they want to attend a state school full time. This is more or less how higher
education works in the rest of the industrialized world -- you pay for room, board and books, but the classes are free to any citizen with good scores.
February 21. Chuck asks about surviving anomie:
For the next three months, I'm going to be unemployed for the first time in my adult life (I'm 24), and I find myself not just feeling anxious about so much unstructured time, but actually dreading it! My reptilian mind can't help but think of the next three months as one where I'll be a "slacker" and a "leech."
If you could give someone in my situation three pieces of advice, what advice would you give?
1) Learn to cook. The best way is to think of your favorite food, and learn to make it, or something similar, with healthful ingredients. In my twenties I ate a lot of waffles and nachos.
2) To avoid getting stuck circling around in your own energy, it really helps to hang out with other people, or better yet, to live with other people as equals, like in a shared house or apartment.
3) Take care of the little things. Practice paying bills and washing dishes immediately, until it becomes a habit.
4) Try to remember the way you saw the world when you were a little kid, and practice it. This will help with the guilt, since kids never feel guilty about playing, and it will also keep you from getting too spiritually stagnant.
January 3. Mike asks for my top ten essential survival tools. Of course, what's essential depends on what you'll be doing. But I can tell you my ten favorite survival tools, in no particular order. You can get them all for about $800.
January 2, 2007. I asked readers for advice on buying foreign currency to shelter my savings from the dollar collapse. Kevin was especially helpful. Basically there are two ways to do it. You can get an online currency trading account with someone like FXCM, or you can order cash in hand through someone like eZforex. Kevin comments:
Physical possession of foreign currency is very expensive. The companies that handle this screw you two ways, with a transaction fee, and with retail rates that are several percentage points away from the underlying rate.
I don't see much practical advantage of cash in hand, since in a crash so severe that you couldn't retrieve money from an internet account, you also couldn't do anything with foreign cash. For that scenario, several readers recommended silver -- here's a good page on survival coins. Kevin writes that he lost faith in metals because...
speculators are able to trade futures contracts with face values that bear almost no relationship to the underlying supply of the metals, and anyone with dollars can trade these contracts with leverage. So, if the value is determined by who is able to speculate with the most fake leverage, what's the actual value of the commodity? The criminal financial system has turned all "investing" options into rolls of the dice.
I can imagine a collapse scenario in which cash is worthless but you can trade silver coins for food and services, but if things get just a little bit worse than that, even gold will be worthless, because it has no value beyond cultural agreement. Ryan comments that it's very likely people will be using alcohol, marijuana, or tobacco as money. Dmitry Orlov has written about how vodka was more valuable than cash in the Soviet collapse.
Also, some of us don't feel good about the spiritual space of hoarding precious metals. Gold is incompatible with a healthy society. It goes hand in hand with selfishness, disconnection, and zero-sum competition. It's impossible to share it and very difficult to give it away. At the other extreme are tools and skills and information, which are more valuable the more you share them! We need to think beyond staying alive, and choose survival strategies that will grow into the kind of economy and society we want to live in.