Project Overview
This book has been called “Doomsday Preppers meets Green America“, which is not too far off the mark.
As my own family has journeyed from the “blissfully clueless” stage through the “informed enough to be worried” stage and finally arrived at the “act now” stage over the past few years, we began to blog about our efforts at Opt Out En Masse.
In the age of Peak Oil and the decline of the American Empire, our blog is one North American family’s journey (awkward, groping, often mis-stepped) down the path of sustainability and self-reliance via the positive Eco + Organic + Go Local movements. To re-purpose grass farmer Joel Salatin‘s words:
“We ask for too much salvation by legislation. All we need to do is empower individuals with the right philosophy and the right information to opt out en masse.”
As we began to have more successes and less failures in our exurban homesteading experiments, it became clear that true self-sufficiency was not only not attainable, but not even desirable. The connections we made with other like-minded folks in our small town (and beyond, via the blog) made it clear that citizen change and modern day victory gardens were flourishing in backyards across North America, even as we saw stagnation in our White House.
Over the years we’ve found and purchased a number of excellent books on the topic which captured much of the knowledge that was almost lost between generations. Thank goodness for those books. More than once my ultra-successful father (in business, and life in general) has remarked to me with a bit of humorous wonder in his voice how proud my grandfather would be if he was still here. My grandfather maintained a significant victory garden until his death and had a wide variety of practical homesteading skills.
Despite my father’s PhD and years of running corporations (he’s a tremendous leader of people and projects), my grandfather’s knowledge simply did not transfer down to him. He lacks the hands-on practical experience to grow his own food or weather a two-week winter storm without electricity. These are skills I learned myself only in the last 5-10 years from books and blogs, plus a fair amount of trial and error. After speaking with many other folks of my generation with similar experiences, I suspect this is the case with most North American families.
In addition to the books on individual family preparedness, we’ve also found a fair amount of literature at the other end of the spectrum at the federal and international level. By definition this knowledge is useful primarily for large groups of people, full of technical jargon, and difficult to scale down to the neighborhood level. And yet this is exactly where we find the sweet spot for resiliency – being able to care for ourselves during an emergency whether it is a short-term natural disaster emergency or a long-term economically-induced emergency.
We must be able to care for ourselves without the aid of professionals during a short-term emergency (as they will also tell you) because they simply are not coming. After a natural disaster, the fire and police departments are required to do drive-by assessments of the entire damaged area before even beginning to respond to the first house fire or the first victim of a protest turned violent. We’ve seen this time and again in recent years, from the Los Angeles riots of the early 1990s to the southeast hurricane tragedies of this century.
And during the coming long emergency, these professionals will find themselves underfunded, exhausted, and simply stretched too thin to provide care for citizens street by street. It’s up to us to create more resilient neighborhoods ourselves, before the emergency hits.
One step in caring for ourselves in a sustainable fashion is to go beyond individual and family-level planning – and scale down the federal and international work – to something appropriate for small towns and neighborhoods. That is the citizen-level conversation on which this book will focus.
I’ll be pulling some content from our family blog, as well as borrowing wisdom from international friends who run some of the world’s most effective refugee relief organizations. But much of this conversation will be brought to you by neighbors and friends from our unique small town of Bainbridge Island, Washington and the surrounding Kitsap County.
I hope you’ll join me in the co-creation of this book to encourage North American citizens further down the sustainability continuum, towards a more resilient (and bright!) future.
