You’re Not Going to Homestead Through Collapse

No matter how self-sufficient you become

Photo by Roger Darnell on Unsplash

“By collapse, I mean a drastic decrease in human population size and/or political/economic/social complexity over a considerable area, for an extended time.” — Jared Diamond in Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (2005)

People who criticize billionaires for foolishly building underground bunkers believe they can survive the impending doom of climate change by hunkering down on a homestead.

Both groups are attempting to escape the realities of collapse. It’s a race that most humans will likely lose. It’s now a question of whether the species can survive extinction.

On one hand the survivalists (rightfully) poo-poo plans for colonizing Mars as too difficult on a “dead planet” while simultaneously clinging to the belief that for all their beans and bullets, gardens and wells —the hoarded supplies of a prepper will see them through the sixth mass extinction on a dying Earth. It’s the poor-man’s version of an Elysium space station.

The cognitive dissonance must physically hurt.

And let’s admit what no one is saying out loud. The carefully made plans for some sort of Neo-Thoreau lifestyle is more about surviving the collapse of civilization in relative safety and comfort than reducing a carbon footprint — the same attitude that put us in this predicament in the first place.

Here are just a few of the reasons this fantasy won’t work.

6 Million US Workers Are on Strike

Collapse will be everywhere but not all at once.

The central idea of catabolic collapse is that human societies pretty consistently tend to produce more stuff than they can afford to maintain. . . .Sooner or later you run into the limits of growth; at that point the costs of keeping wealth flowing in from your empire or your oil fields begin a ragged but unstoppable increase, while the return on that investment begins an equally ragged and equally…