Gentle Decline 1/7: Skills & Survival

Hi. I'm composing this almost immediately in the wake of Issue 6, since I got some replies and wanted to hit the ground running. The gods only know how long it'll take to write, but since I'm mostly approaching this one freeform rather than researching much, it might be out sooner rather than later. This time, I want to talk about a post-apocalyptic skill set.

The term itself is from a joke that circulates occasionally about the Society for Creative Anachronism (SCA) and other historical re-enactment/re-creation groups, most usually as a t-shirt: "I don't have hobbies, I'm developing a robust post apocalyptic skill set". Some half-hearted poking has not found a point of origin for it; it's just out there. But it's an area I think is worth considering.

So what does constitute such a set of skills? Well, in the simplest terms, anything that was done before 1914 (the end of the 'long nineteenth century') is probably going to be useful, with a steadily decreasing proportion of activities from afterward. The ability to quickly create snappy memes on the latest version of Canva, for instance, will not be a survival skill in most forms of disaster, but being able to light fires will. I don't propose to go into a lot of detail on these skills, but I'll list some useful ones. I like lists.

Obviously, a lot of this is dependent on the exact disaster that happens. By now, you know that I'm not expecting anything sudden from the climate, but a slow process of change that gradually makes itself felt. Much of it will be in the weather and in public policy, and some of it will be places we can't live in anymore, and some small amount will be places we couldn't live in before. But we're not going to know the parameters until it happens, and really they may not be visible until a few years or decades afterward. So while to talk about the skills, I kind of need to think about a situation where they're wholly necessary, in fact they're much more likely to be only a little bit necessary, making your life a bit easier rather than being wholly necessary for survival. (Although it's worth noting that while sudden change won't happen to societies, it can happen to individuals: one bad flood or forest fire, and your entire life can be upended.)

Let me set out a few potential scenarios, so:

I) You may end up living in a place that does not have much infrastructure. "Infrastructure" is, of course, not a well-defined term, because nothing is ever simple, but let's say in this case it covers anything that allows goods or energy to move from one place to another. So roads, rail, canals, electricity and phone/internet cables, gas, water and sewage pipes, and also the mobile networks, and maybe GPS and other satellite services.

II) You may end up without an adequate supply of food. A few years ago, I'd have said this was less likely than others, but to be honest, it's becoming clearer to me that our Western food security is a pretty thin veneer over the long historical reality that food shortage is one bad season away. Condition I may lead to Condition II.

III) You may end up in a place where the normal rule of law is not functioning. I don't mean a full-on Mad Max scenario of might makes right here, but one where, for instance, currency isn't available because the ATMS are down due to Condition I. Or martial law has been declared, as is apparently a possibility in the UK within the next two months (that is mad shit, I tell you). Or someone is engaging in intimidation or assault to get food (Condition II) and the police can't get there because they're overburdened, or Condition I means you can't call them or they physically can't reach you.

You can see how Condition I can lead to the others. Condition II can occur without Condition I. Condition III will usually be quite temporary, and might arise for lots of reasons I haven't thought of - a riot is a very brief example.

So despite the temptation to start with Condition II because it's simpler, let's look at those in order.

Condition I takes away various capabilities we currently expect to have. The things enabled by electricity are far and away the foremost among these - we get light, heat, the ability to cook food and to keep it frozen, communications, and in the case of people living in high-rise buildings, lifts for actual movement. Some of this can be achieved by other means, and some can't - if the power goes, and your food is defrosting, then your only real option is to eat it, cooking it if necessary and possible. Stairs will work even if the lifts don't, although you might really feel it if you live higher than the 8th floor or so.

But the applicable skills here include: lighting and maintaining fires; cooking over fires (and baking, if possible); keeping warm in cold conditions; washing clothes without machines; drying clothes without machines; managing light from candles, lanterns, etc; disposing of waste (both household and sewage); running and maintaining a generator; making sure water is safe to drink; and in the extreme case, how to make a living without particular bits of infrastructure (electricity & internet, in my case). There are almost certainly a few I've forgotten.

(Not really a skill per se, but worth noting for short-term cases of Condition I: if you don't already know your local area well, have a map which has local services marked on it - police, fire service, doctors, pharmacies. In the conditions we're talking about, none of these are going to be operating normally, but if you need to find the closest doctor and don't have access to the internet, this is a Very Useful Thing.)

Obviously, Condition I can be of variable length. Except during very cold weather, a temporary power cut is a minor inconvenience for most people, and even reasonably developed countries get them occasionally (see, for a rather extreme instance, the North American Northeast Blackout of 2003). And other outages happen as well; rail lines are prone to getting blocked, roads flood, and so on. So there's a gently sliding scale here from "feck, have to reset the alarm clock" up to ".. the power is never coming back, is it?". The skills you might need scale with that.

The main one, really, is how to work with fire, and it astonishes me on a regular basis how many people don't know how to do this, or indeed anything about fire. I've had people come up to me at Raglan Castle, where we camp medieval-style for a week every August, and ask "is that a real fire?" and one occasion, had a chap try to stick his hand in it to demonstrate to his son that it was not. There are plenty of guides to lighting fires out there - this heavily-gendered one from Art of Manliness is otherwise pretty good. And if you can light a fire - and keep it going - you've nailed down the core of the post-apocalyptic skill set.

The long-term question of how to make a living in a changed world is so broad and so variable that I can't possibly answer it in one issue, and indeed, it may form the core of these newsletters for some time to come. Again "anything from before WWI" is a good place to keep your thinking. It's worth noting, though, that pre-20th-century occupations are often not particularly friendly to those who are not able-bodied. So it's useful to put some thought into how you can take care of friends and family members who fall into that category, or how to handle things if you're in that category yourself. Organisational skills will still be useful here, the more so if you can apply them without needing IT backup. Knowledge skills - finding information, the more practical sciences, and all the areas of entertainment and counselling remain open too.

Condition II is fairly simple: the skill here is knowing how to produce, forage for and preserve food. Ireland is not badly off for this - there are plenty of people around who are only one generation "removed from the land", and retain some knowledge of how to farm and grow garden crops. And in terms of acreage, we can feed the population of the country fairly well if we ever needed to - there's currently a complex of imports and exports that would need to adjust, but that's by no means impossible.

The UK is in a considerably worse position for this - if you could press every acre into service, there'd still be a 10% shortfall, and there's no way every acre can be put into agriculture; between mountains and other marginal land and urban spaces, you can't even approach it. So if you're in the UK, and some sort of food supply disaster hits and lasts, you're probably better served by putting your resources into leaving than staying - but if you stay, knowing how to grow vegetables and manage farm animals will be a pretty valuable skill. If you know how to process grain into flour, and can do so on relatively low tech, you'll be in very high demand. This comes with the awkward side note, though, that the slow creep of climate change will both reduce available farmland and change the conditions of that remaining. So you need to keep the skills up to date.

Condition II does, however, have the side detail that it can have effects in the relatively short term, and can't be solved in the same timeframe. Stockpiling is the way around that - see the earlier issue on that topic.

Condition III is the really weird one. We live most of our lives in the absence of law enforcement - there isn't a police officer in the room with you. But we also live, for the most part, assuming that if you needed to have one in the room, you could. When that's no longer the case, stuff can probably get weird. Most people will continue as they were for some considerable time, but others will decide that looting and intimidation are now working possibilities for them. And if Condition I or particularly II continue for some time, that proportion of the population inevitably increases.

The relevant skills here are essentially those of the negotiator, the manager, and possibly the con artist. All of these are "soft skills", and hard to pin down, but essentially, we're looking at the techniques and methods to keep people calm, to calm them down if they're not, to direct people's efforts to a particular end, to plan ahead, and possibly more than anything else, to look after your people. This isn't in a patriarchal one-man-leading mode, and while one-person-in-charge may arise in immediate emergency situations, one of the long-term necessities is to make sure everyone feels heard and understood. So in the longer term, it involves coming up with decision-making structures and arrangements which will allow everyone to contribute and benefit.

It's worth noting, though, that the government monopoly on violence (as my friend Anna puts it, usually in the context of me grousing about how fiat currency is bullshit) is the first thing to disappear in many instances of Condition III. So the ability to both deal with and apply some short sharp violence is a good skill to have. I'm not really talking about the ability to shoot, box, or wield a hand weapon, per se, but more the experience of having been in a fight a few times, so that if someone else tries to use violence as a solution, you don't panic. The ability to shoot, box, or wield the hand weapon may also be useful, of course. Under the other form of Condition III, martial law, my official advice is to cooperate, and keep in mind that resistance, when necessary, can take many forms.

I'm not laying claim to having all of the skills above. I haven't operated a generator since I was about 12, and I don't know right now where you'd get one, and my Condition III skills come down to speaking softly and having a willingness to end a fight, if not start it. There may be some I haven't thought of, too.

Also, not fitting into any of the categories above, really: if you can't swim, learn. Not being able to swim is the thing that will result in an otherwise avoidable death faster than almost anything else I can think of. I can't swim well, and I have a mild phobia of being out of my depth, but I can stay afloat and move myself, which is all that's needed.

And now, some reader questions. Some of these came in as replies, which are great, and more have come up in conversation and I made a note of them. I am quite honestly happy to talk about this stuff at length, so feel free to get me started.

"If I have a back garden and some spare time, what's the most useful thing I can plant?"

Two answers, at either end of the scale: potatoes and herbs. Potatoes give the absolute best return of any crop that can be grown in a back garden, and they're incredibly broad sources of nutrition. If you eat potatoes, with the skin on, drink full-fat milk, and eat the occasional fish, you have almost all your nutritional needs met. This is why Ireland had the Great Famine; potatoes were working really well right up to the arrival of the blight. In that vein, though, don't rely 100% on potatoes. Turnips are a good side-option, and my friend Jasper, who's been a valuable source of ideas and discussion on these topics, points out that they go from seed to edible vegetable in about 60 days, which is pretty damn good.

Herbs, then. One of the things which will be most notable in any post-disaster scenario will be that aside from the ongoing panic of keeping things above water, life may well be kind of dull. So having herbs to lend some extra taste to food will be a huge bonus, and if you have a good supply of them, you can probably trade them for other things, as well as eating them yourself. They also supply marginal vitamins and other odds and ends of nutrition, so they're not just for novelty.

Everything in between this is down to what you can manage on what land and space you have. Peas go vertically, and there's nothing like fresh peas. Fruit trees and soft fruit take a lot of space for what you get, but tend to be low-maintenance. I have never successfully grown pumpkins; you might have better luck. On the other hand, courgettes are a low-effort sort of plant - once you keep slugs off them - and produce at a rate that is frankly unbelievable when they get going. Try stuff out before you need to, and see what you can manage.

"Is there any point to having water in my stockpile?"

Yeah. I mean, it seems daft in Ireland, but water arrives through infrastructure, and that has points of failure - floods and very cold weather can affect supply, very hot weather can mean the supply literally dries up, and if you need a pump to get it to you, and the power is out, you'll be left short. In urban areas, there may not be a useful water source for some distance, let alone one that's safe to drink (see above concerning the skill of knowing how to make water safe). In other parts of the world, even more so. A few 5l or 10l containers will be immensely useful in the short term, and stockpiles are not for the long term, so go ahead and get them, particularly before you need to carry them long distances.

"Can you provide a list of what should go in a bug-out bag?"

I can tell you what's (nominally) in mine, but they're a deeply individual tool. For those who don't recognise the term, it's the bag you grab when you're on the way out the door having been given 5 minutes to go. They're applicable in cases of flood, fire, and a selection of other things which are happening right now, whenever "now" happens to be. They're often more notional than real, but as a list of stuff to seize in those 5 minutes, they're very useful. So, not counting pets and people and not in a priority order: passport, wallet, keys, phone, phone charger, tablet and/or laptop and relevant cords, antihistamines, plasters, painkillers, cash, spare glasses if I have them, writing paper and pens/pencils, and the odd little calculator-like widget the bank uses for remote verification. Possibly also a torch, although the phone does one have one built in. I have no medication I need to take every day; if I did, that and the prescription for it would move right to the top of the list. As it happens, about half of this stuff does live in my day-to-day geek bag, or in my pockets, and I can lay hands on the rest in well under 5 minutes. The contents of yours may vary wildly, but should not exceed what you can stick in a medium-sized backpack in, well, 5 minutes.

Tinyletter is telling me that I have been even more verbose than usual, so probably time to wind this up. Questions, replies and commentary are all welcome, and unless I'm diverted by current affairs or really interesting questions or articles, I'm intending to start looking at the large question of what-to-do-for-a-living in the next issue. Obviously, if you feel that Gentle Decline would be useful to someone else in your life, please forward it on and/or show them the subscription link at https://tinyletter.com/gentledecline