Are You Prepared to Survive GW?

Many modern homesteaders became modern homesteaders in a “back to the land” movement geared toward greater self-sufficiency in all things the average citified automaton expects government, corporations and society to supply. As government, corporations and society have begun to fall short of those provisions - either during exceptional circumstances or generally failing to provide goods and services cheaply, safely or consistently enough to be counted upon - we left to carve for ourselves a life where we can be primarily responsible for ourselves.

Now, it’s a long-term project. Unless you’re very rich to begin with, getting your homestead up to real self-sufficiency (and fully in your own name) can take decades. Maybe a lifetime or two. We can grow some of our own food, but probably not all. So we develop relationships with farmers and other homesteaders in our regions and learn to trade and barter for consumables. We can slowly but surely develop our own power sources (or learn to do without), but will likely remain tied to the grid or some other out-supply until the technology is developed and affordable enough for us to go off-grid. Etc., etc., etc.

We who keep track of the news - even if just to remind ourselves of why we decided to live so far out in the boonies now that gasoline has become a serious drag on our limited incomes - are increasingly treated to the impressive spectacle of what Global Warming is causing and how it may drastically affect survivability in tropical and temperate regions. The Arctic ice melt is dramatically increasing this summer, the largest ice shelf in the Northern Hemisphere has broken into three pieces, a 7 square mile ice sheet has broken loose in Canada, and Greenland’s glaciers are melting fast. Some predict the entire Arctic will be ice-free within just a year or two.It’s a fact - the temperatures hit 80º in the Arctic during the last week of July. Arguing about the cause of Global Warming (natural or man-made) is a moot point at this juncture. The climate change is in overdrive, irreversible, and we’d all better plan accordingly. No, the government, corporations and society will not take it seriously or plan accordingly. The result will be the very doomsday scenarios we once wanted to escape, one of the reasons we determined to become modern homesteaders. Things will get much worse before they get better, and as we’re discovering just how badly our economy has been wrecked by the idiot greed-meisters in power for the last 8 years, we don’t look to have much conserved wealth to bail ourselves out.

There is serious drought here at my homestead this year. But I’ve lived here for 16 years, and have seen the weather change quite a bit. Sometimes there is drought in my microclime, sometimes I get an inch of rain a day all spring and summer long. Some winters it snows a foot a week at least, some winters it never snows at all. Some autumns put on a spectacular leaf show, sometimes they hang on until mid-November before simply turning brown and falling off. Fact is that these mountains have long been known to “create weather,” and weather tends to occur in cycles.

Thus I’ve no idea how a rapidly changing global climate will finally leave my homestead. A desert or a rain forest? Too hot to live or too cold to be productive? Luckily, the very fact that my climate changes on a fairly regular annual basis (with four distinct seasons every year) allows me to consider a lot of possible scenarios I can plan for and hope to accomplish that will mitigate any drastic seasonal or annual changes. I will be talking about some of those in an upcoming series of posts, and would love to hear from my readers any ideas or actual projects they’ve entertained or engaged to help their homestead remain as self-sufficient as possible in a changing world.

It’s easy to simply say “don’t plan your homestead on any land scheduled to become sea-bottom when the ice melts.” That’s a no-brainer. But it’s also tempting to plan your homestead in heretofore unsuitable places of high elevation or northerly climes where land is cheap and dying forests are begging to be cut and turned into homes, outbuildings and fertile fields. Some climatologists warn that an unstable climate - even a warmer one - may not simply shift your homestead from one planting zone to another. Entire regions may become frozen, well south of the Arctic in places that were temperate before!

So… how are you planning to deal with the changes of climate humanity can no longer ignore? Please offer your thoughts in the comments.

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Filed under Emergency Preparedness, Environment, Food Production, Future Planning, Homestead, Independence |