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[Clansgian AT wmconnect.com]

> >I dunno, Marie. His idea of survival appears to be a loaded sailboat. 
> The ocean is large, so maybe his solution to collapse is safer than we 
> homesteaders'. But six months worth of supplies seems a bit short of how 
> long a 
> collapse might extend.
> 

In my personal lexicon this is what distinguishes survivalists and 
homesteaders as general philosophies.  

Many years ago I entertained that paradigm that one's continuing cash 
expenses could be met by stashing away enough money in some vehicle of 
savings, 
or invested in something like gold or real estate, and the the increase or 
interest would meet the fixed expenses of utilities, taxes, insurance, salt, 
motor fuel, etc.

It took a long time for me to see that this is a fallacy.  It falls into 
the sort of logical short circuit as "my roof never leaks when it doesn't 
rain."

Not only do I think that the collapse will be long, I think it will be 
forever.  That is, it is a paradigm shift from which we will not revert to 
the 
old economy.  For those who think economy and lifestyle of the 90's and early 
2000's is some sort of God given Nirvana, a shift away from that will 
indeed seem like a collapse.  The mistake is to look for that particular 
economic 
paradigm to return.

The survivalist mentality (my semantics) hopes to stash away enough goods 
and resources to endure the collapse until things return to "normal".   The 
problem with this plan, as Gene has alluded, is that eventually the food, 
funds, gold will run out and there you are.  

The homestead mentality (my semantics again) realizes that the current 
source of goods and resources is unreliable and unsustainable.  Sure, the 
homesteader has an emergency stash of the same sort of thing that the 
survivalist 
has, only it is only there to tide the homestead through a transistion 
period.

In the survivalists schemata their MRE's, bottled water, and generator will 
keep them going while they break ground and plant a garden.  I remember 
very well how so many of my Y2K'er friends bought those one pound sealed 
metal 
cans of seeds so they would have something to eat when the industrial world 
came to and end a decade ago.  They were undaunted when it was pointed out 
that the Y2K phenomenon would occur in January and that 1 lb can of tomato 
seeds would at best yield some tomatoes 7 or 8 months later, by which time 
they would have starved.  The epitome of ill-thought-out plan is this website:

http://www.survivalseedbank.com/

Here you can get $25 worth of seeds commonly available in garden stores for 
a mere $149.   The first entry in that list is October beans which are sold 
by the pound in grocery stores around here.  The "seed bank" contains 1000 
onion seeds with the survivalist buyers blissfully unaware that raising an 
onion from seed takes a great deal of experience and very well developed 
ground.

The homesteader began preparing good soil 10 years or more, or much more, 
ago against a collapse, or not.  In fact the prospects of a collapse are 
almost immaterial to the proposition.  Food, fuel, and seeds are stashed and 
cached ... but not for some future time, they are in a continual cycle of use 
and replentishing.</HTML>