| Archive for NEEPS North East Eco-friendly People's Site |
| Maria |
Hoarding stuff. Should we? Are you?When thinking about Peak Oil, and what we might need during a decline in cheap energy, hoarding is one of those things I think about. Yet I can't claim to do much about! I'm not an alarmist person and greatly believe in providence and reaping what you sow. I suppose this is why thoughts of hoarding drift through my mind - but never settle long enough for me to act seriously on them. One of our members has just shared a website on oil depletion and a section on the 'solutions' page says...
I can't say that I have 'enough' of anything on the list if it were to last any length of time. Should we hoard? Do you? What is 'enough'? 
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| andybebbington |
Should we hoard? do you?
I do hence the big list on the emporium and i have not even started looking at what fishing tackle engines etc i have to get rid of i have a cupboard full of tackle at home thats my own - and god knows what at the fishery i mean is there any need for 6 fly rods aswell as the ones i have at the fishery? esp as you can only use one at a time As for things like candles we have enough t lights to light a village and boots i hit the sale at the spotty bag shop and got 8 pairs of work boots i will prob never get through. now my nan she is a master hoarder, when i take her home after christmas i will visit asda,tesco, lidl and aldi and get her shopping, she has a min of 6 months food in incase the weathers bad and she can not get to the shops she panics if the bleech and washing up liquid levels drop below 6 bottles of each. her shed is packed with stuff, she has prunes every day so 2-3 times a year i have to go to asda for 4 trays of prunes and 2 of irish stew we then have to visit lidl for 20 tins of milk powder, you can never have enough in and it wont go off! |
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| Smooth Hound |
it makes sense, its what i do, but i havent got to the aspirins, or rice yet, im working on it,  my brain thinks the same way, im not sure if it good or bad but my instincts and beliefs tell me to hoard stuff like that.
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| Smooth Hound |
i even have a 350 engine here that will run on alchol, and you can make that 
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| Ina |
hoarding's all very well if you have a large house to keep the stuff in - safe from deterioration, too. Looking at the number of times I have moved house in my life, traveling light seems the better option! | ||||
| lachlanandmarcus |
My dear husband has what he calls his 'nuclear store' of unappetising tins of stew and tinned haggis. Quite why he thinks these tins will miraculously escape contamination in the event of a nuclear strike is something he has not yet been in a position to explain.
He gets around the storage issue by filling up the storage lockers in the living area of our old horsebox with the booty 
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| Martin |
Having grown up with a father who was a past master at "make do and mend", I find it terribly difficult to throw anything away in case it may prove useful - as to quite when I'll be using a 1940's Seagull outboard and a box full of Primus type paraffin stoves I'm not sure........but I'm hanging onto them (and several tons of other detritus) "just in case" 
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| JamesB |
Ive thought about this many times. My current list of must have items is
1) A manual water pump, like the ones you see in India. Our current water supply is pvt and completely dependent on electricity. A nice simple manual pump would be ideal for backup, doesn't have to connect to the existing pipework at present. We have a inline ceramic filter at the moment for drinking water but in the caravan we had a gravity fed 2 container ceramic filter system which worked well enough and we'll keep as backup. 2) A lot of rice, once we have our utility room sorted, I'll be ordering a 25kg bag of rice 3) A gun, partly for defence and partly for free meat in the form of rabbits. Obviously anything beyond a airgun requires a license at present so it might take me a while to do the training and get a license. It is rather worrying when one looks at investing and some people say the really smart money is going to weapons manufacturer since conflict on some scale is unavoidable in the future as oil becomes more expensive (note, it will never really run out, just become more and more expensive, there lots of oil out there is you are willing to pay the high cost of extraction) 4) Self dependent fuel source. At the moment we have about 2 years of wood stacked up and we have planted 3 acres of woodland to provide for the future but will need 10 years I reckon for this to be of any use! 5)Self contained electricity generation. Solar electricity for lighting. Still a while off for us. We are also considering a wind turbine but again a while off. As long as we have wood then not really a priority. On hindsight I wish i'd made our solar hot water gravity fed, it would of been more awkward to make the tank higher than the solar panel but possible. Hopefully will replace the 240V pump eventually with a solar one aka solartwin (although I dont like their solar panel designs). OUr house relies on electricity for ventilation but doesn't require much. Could just open the window slightly if we get long power cuts. Yes i kow about passive stacks for ventilation and I guess we could adapt in time but for a true passiv haus then it is difficult to achieve the sort of heat retention required without using a powered ventilation system. Whilst Im not too pessimistic about the future (maybe reading my list people might think otherwise!) but I do think that within my lifetime we will see some major shocks in food/energy/employment/lifestyle and to me it makes sense to think about the what ifs. A friend of mine said you'll be ok since you now have land but i said well if its gets really bad it will just get taken over by the goverment in some form of enforced nationalisation! James |
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| Maria |
One of my deepest darkest fears. 
There are other situations like this one that I also fear. And yet, If enough people listen and then act on the knowledge that we are heading for a lower energy future, we can only hope folk who have worked (hoarded?!) hard to be ready, will be respected and not robbed! |
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| Smooth Hound |
im sort of expecting them to have killed each other before they reach me, but who knows  thats the theives im talking about
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| StuP |
I think there's a big difference between having appropriate supplies and 'hoarding' - a word which often has very negative connotations. Personally I think that getting to know your neighbours and establishing a sense of community is one of the most important things to do for making it through hard times.
Also, in the words of Saint Ray Mears, "Skills weigh nothing". If you know what plants you can eat, how to catch and process wild meat etc you're well ahead of the game and these skills can be acquired for the cost of a book and a little effort.
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| wildgarlic |
Good points StuP 
Skills - excellent! If you've got them, share them with others too - something we try to do as much as possible. |
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| Smooth Hound |
i agree with all that, but ts the 95% that have not thought to do anything that worry me, and the people that only think of themselves, they worry me enough now, but how will they react if put in a position of needing to survive. and how will i react in defence against them, who are friends and whos pretending, all of this i think is yet to be discovered, personally i dont have a good opinion on this. i do hope though.
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| Stonehead |
Re: Hoarding stuff. Should we? Are you?Deleted. Sorry, misinterpreted the original post. |
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| Maria |
StuP - you gave me a very timely reminder to get some reading material!! Will let you know how I find it....I feel a shout out to other would be bushcraft and foragers when the weather warms.
Stoney - I missed out the note from my first quote as it's quite long...but it's about fuel safety not engine use - apols. I've added below as I found the fuel storage regs interesting, and although perhaps difficult using diesel subsitutes long term, it would be good to have some transition fuel. Wouldn't it take a growing season to have enough ethanol? Like the idea of alcho power (as long as it's not tasty enough for my own consumption )
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| Smooth Hound |
ive just got hod of a hedgerow chutney recipe. when ive got time ill put it on the foods section. a good book for your collection would be food for free, i had it once, i could do with getting it myself again as well. | ||||
| Fia |
What a fabulous thought. Possibly the excuse some of us need?
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| Maria |
SH wrote
Have now got the Collins gem 'Food for Free' and 'SAS Survival Guide'. Amazingly Al (aka Fine Malt) recieved both for his birthday.  As they're pocket sized the text size might be a tad small for some? Need to 'do' now! Think I'll start with the knot section in the SAS guide, and take the foody one out and about on my walks.
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| oakesme |
Hoarding or InvestingShould we hoard? I would say that most people do it already. Often they call it investment, savings, pension or insurance. Trouble is much of the reality behind these financial devices is abstract, remote and giant scaled. This means it lacks resilience to use transition speak. Or to peak oil doomers its simply worthless. You save up stuff for the same reason you save money now. To help yourself and to help others, to influence events and to live. You can't help others if you are a casualty.In a modern urban household often people have zero useful stuff. They have no tools, no warm clothes, no wet weather gear and one day's food. Every need arrives just in time by car, and the car separates people from real weather. 50 years ago this would be different. Hoarding can bring back some resilience in the home. I would agree that skills are worth more than physical stuff, they cannot be stolen, are easy to transport and can be cheap to aquire. Ray Mears' courses are expencive. Ultimately if we cant buy stuff we need then sustainability demands we do something different. Hoarding is for the transition period. Hoarding now means not using stuff, keeping it for later. Its a discipline lacking in an age of credit (now ended). Its about getting people to think about what is really essential and how dependent we are on daily shopping. We will need to last from one harvest for a whole year, maybe two in a bad year, we don't think like that now. Culture change is essential, community and personal. Other stuff I would add to the list might be: Practical warm clothes and repair kit Kilner type food storage jars Metal boxes to keep rodents out of food (old chest freezer). Books (on growing, medicine, entertainment, education) Musical instruments (no TV on dark evenings) Camping gear (people will be on the move) Roofing material (slates, nails, felt) All building materials (difficult to store paint, cement or lime) Woodstoves and spare parts Ray Mears type kit Bike trailer (you wouldn't use it now, but in future with no cars?) Wind up torches Fencing Seeds Woodsaws (old style that can be sharpened repeatedly) Hand tools (when was the last time you drilled a hole by hand) |
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| Julie |
We tend to stockpile as a result of our lifestyle anyway. Anyone who has seen my stash of filled Kilners and dried food can verify that. It's only the preservation of this years harvest though, not hoarding. We also need to keep several weeks supply of perishables in the freezer, and the same in animal feed, as a precaution against getting snowed in in the winter - or just to save unnecessary trips to the shops for just one item...very wasteful of fuel, imo.
I think a better long-term approach would be to find ways of doing without these oil byproduct items, after all, no matter how much you hoard, sooner or later it will run out and then what are you going to do? Maybe we should look to the past and see what people used before this stuff was available. |