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I’m curious, since you seem to have thought a lot about this - any suggestions for defensible locations with plenty of natural resources? I’m guessing suburbia

by ericd 6y ago

I’m curious, since you seem to have thought a lot about this - any suggestions for defensible locations with plenty of natural resources? I’m guessing suburbia generally doesn’t meet that definition.

nostrademons 6y ago
When I looked into it the top locations were in the Pacific Northwest (extending down to the Lost Coast in California) or Northern New England. Ample rainfall, surrounded by mountains, lots of timber, sea routes to reestablish trade or for fishing, and potentially farmable. Some runners-up included the Bay Area & Coastal California (easily defensible & fertile, but has overpopulation, water issues and limited timber), the Great Salt Lake valley (ditto), and the Colorado & Wyoming foothills (pretty dry, but a great mining/oil shale area). The worst areas were in the Southwest (which already has a migrant crisis and is going to get totally screwed by global warming) and the Great Lakes area (overpopulated relative to its natural carrying capacity). Suburbia could be a decent place, if the population density is low enough and it's surrounded by arable land and resources. Livermore, for example, wouldn't be a bad place. But the rows upon rows of tract houses (say San Jose or LA) would become a miserable place without the rest of society to support it, as would the inner cities. I think that the ideal density would be a small self-contained city of say 50-80K people: small enough to maintain social cohesion, but large enough to support some division of labor and have enough of a workforce to support & defend the region.
- ericd 6y ago
  Thanks for the comprehensive reply! I hope you’re wrong, but I can’t say that I haven’t considered a lot of the same things, and I had similar thoughts about PNW and New England being relatively good options. Hard to really look at this kind of scenario and come to any conclusions with enough confidence to act on them, though - so many unknowns and fundamentally different rules.
- AnimalMuppet 6y ago
  Not the Great Salt Lake valley - too many people for the available food supply. That's not going to go well. My own answer is Delta/Montrose, Colorado. It has water, good farmland, nearby mountains (timber) and coal fields. You could even do some hydro power from the river. It's somewhat defensible - an attacker would have to cross a fair amount of inhospitable terrain to get there, unless they came from the south, and the San Juans would not be that difficult to defend. The one issue would be oil - there's oilfields around Aztec, New Mexico, but that's kind of a long way in a collapsed society.
emodendroket 6y ago
People are just going to set your house on fire unless you have a 24-hour patrol. A bit of a fantasy to imagine you can just escape the total collapse of society.
- ericd 6y ago
  I don’t think what they’re describing is full Mad Max/total collapse, more like regional collapses/nation states breaking into states or city states.
  - emodendroket 6y ago
    Oh well in that case New England can't feed itself so you're still kind of fucked. Kind of hard to parse this out though since all of these regions have suburbs.
    - nostrademons 6y ago
      New England can feed itself minus the cities. That's what they did for hundreds of years - New England was almost entirely farmland until the 20th century. A lot of folks still have small-scale subsistence farms or vegetable gardens in Vermont, New Hampshire, even central/western Massachusetts.
      - emodendroket 6y ago
        And in this collapse scenario the cities -- incidentally where a lot of wealth and power tend to be concentrated -- simply consent to starve to death? Or are you defending against them too?
        nostrademons 6y ago
        The cities are absolutely going to invade the surrounding countryside. Mobs and gangs of hungry people banding together to take what they can from weaker neighbors has been a feature of nearly every instance of state failure. As a city-dweller, your strategy for surviving this is to join one. As a wealthy suburb dweller, you better hope you have a private security advantage where you can kill the whole mob before it kills you. As a rural dweller, your strategy is to be far enough away, high enough up, and insignificant enough that it's not worth going after you. Gas will be in short supply after a collapse; it's not worth driving 100 miles to take food from a farm that you don't know exists. Most of the towns and small cities in the regions I mentioned are easily that far away from the nearest city. It's pretty likely that the dominant political organization after a national collapse would be city-states. However, that doesn't mean that it's best for an individual to be within them. We might see 75% depopulation within cities, but people in rural areas can go on about their normal business, if they don't get conquered entirely by the local city. It's a choice between living in privilege in the aftermath of the collapse but having a good chance of not making it there, vs. a higher chance of survival but you'll be a vassal state to the local city.

by ericd 6y ago

nostrademons 6y ago

When I looked into it the top locations were in the Pacific Northwest (extending down to the Lost Coast in California) or Northern New England. Ample rainfall, surrounded by mountains, lots of timber, sea routes to reestablish trade or for fishing, and potentially farmable. Some runners-up included the Bay Area & Coastal California (easily defensible & fertile, but has overpopulation, water issues and limited timber), the Great Salt Lake valley (ditto), and the Colorado & Wyoming foothills (pretty dry, but a great mining/oil shale area). The worst areas were in the Southwest (which already has a migrant crisis and is going to get totally screwed by global warming) and the Great Lakes area (overpopulated relative to its natural carrying capacity). Suburbia could be a decent place, if the population density is low enough and it's surrounded by arable land and resources. Livermore, for example, wouldn't be a bad place. But the rows upon rows of tract houses (say San Jose or LA) would become a miserable place without the rest of society to support it, as would the inner cities. I think that the ideal density would be a small self-contained city of say 50-80K people: small enough to maintain social cohesion, but large enough to support some division of labor and have enough of a workforce to support & defend the region.

ericd 6y ago
Thanks for the comprehensive reply! I hope you’re wrong, but I can’t say that I haven’t considered a lot of the same things, and I had similar thoughts about PNW and New England being relatively good options. Hard to really look at this kind of scenario and come to any conclusions with enough confidence to act on them, though - so many unknowns and fundamentally different rules.
AnimalMuppet 6y ago
Not the Great Salt Lake valley - too many people for the available food supply. That's not going to go well. My own answer is Delta/Montrose, Colorado. It has water, good farmland, nearby mountains (timber) and coal fields. You could even do some hydro power from the river. It's somewhat defensible - an attacker would have to cross a fair amount of inhospitable terrain to get there, unless they came from the south, and the San Juans would not be that difficult to defend. The one issue would be oil - there's oilfields around Aztec, New Mexico, but that's kind of a long way in a collapsed society.

emodendroket 6y ago

People are just going to set your house on fire unless you have a 24-hour patrol. A bit of a fantasy to imagine you can just escape the total collapse of society.

ericd 6y ago
I don’t think what they’re describing is full Mad Max/total collapse, more like regional collapses/nation states breaking into states or city states.
- emodendroket 6y ago
  Oh well in that case New England can't feed itself so you're still kind of fucked. Kind of hard to parse this out though since all of these regions have suburbs.
  - nostrademons 6y ago
    New England can feed itself minus the cities. That's what they did for hundreds of years - New England was almost entirely farmland until the 20th century. A lot of folks still have small-scale subsistence farms or vegetable gardens in Vermont, New Hampshire, even central/western Massachusetts.
    - emodendroket 6y ago
      And in this collapse scenario the cities -- incidentally where a lot of wealth and power tend to be concentrated -- simply consent to starve to death? Or are you defending against them too?
      - nostrademons 6y ago
        The cities are absolutely going to invade the surrounding countryside. Mobs and gangs of hungry people banding together to take what they can from weaker neighbors has been a feature of nearly every instance of state failure. As a city-dweller, your strategy for surviving this is to join one. As a wealthy suburb dweller, you better hope you have a private security advantage where you can kill the whole mob before it kills you. As a rural dweller, your strategy is to be far enough away, high enough up, and insignificant enough that it's not worth going after you. Gas will be in short supply after a collapse; it's not worth driving 100 miles to take food from a farm that you don't know exists. Most of the towns and small cities in the regions I mentioned are easily that far away from the nearest city. It's pretty likely that the dominant political organization after a national collapse would be city-states. However, that doesn't mean that it's best for an individual to be within them. We might see 75% depopulation within cities, but people in rural areas can go on about their normal business, if they don't get conquered entirely by the local city. It's a choice between living in privilege in the aftermath of the collapse but having a good chance of not making it there, vs. a higher chance of survival but you'll be a vassal state to the local city.