Security dimension

This topic must be active in the collective unconscious. Kevin at Cryptogon gets what I'm talking about. Mincing no words:

I haven't read this book [Gardening When It Counts : Growing Food in Hard Times], but I have read the introduction and the contents. As far as I can tell, the book ignores the security dimension of the situation that "backyard gardeners" will be facing in a collapse situation. If you live in a city and actually had to use this book, the local warlord would take a look at your backyard garden, rub his stomach and think, "Yummy!"

Then what are you going to do?

This is where the Berkeley vegans, Kerry-2004-bumper-sticker-on-the-hybrid drivers and other associated crackpot liberals will try to change the subject.

[...]

You take the state out of the picture for a day or so in an urban environment and someone is going to be pointing a gun at your head, making demands that you will probably find less than appealing. (I breathed the smoke of Los Angeles burning during the 1992 riots. I saw troop carriers and U.S. Marines on the streets. I didn't see any free love ecotopia breaking out.)

[...]

If you're not surrounded by neighbors who already have the mind-set that you have.... good luck trying to sway converts when armed men, taking orders from their stomachs, are roaming the streets. You either need to work on building a collective security plan with your neighbors now, or you need to find new neighbors who already get it; meaning, you need to move.

[...]

So, having said all of that, if you are planning on staying put, with your idiot, Jesus fish-embellished-SUV driving neighbors and their ADHD kids, sure, why not learn how to grow a backyard garden?

I'm always accused of being negative, probably rightly so. But if we're going to look at the future squarely in the face, we need to deal with at least the possibility of collapse, and not recoil from the full implications.

I agree with what Zac at Alchemical has to say about this: ultimately the solution has to involve the (for lack of a better term) spiritual dimension of the problem. Without that we are completely fucked.