a) Preface
My dear friends.
I love you all.
This blogpost is the end point of almost 18 years of blogging, the crown that crowns it. I have put a lot of effort into it. And I want it to be the most important practical, spiritual and prophetic information I can ever offer.
A big love adventure lies before us, and it is about returning to a simpler lifestyle, forced by the deepening collapse of industrial civilization, a collapse which is deepening at an accelerated rate, i.e. exponentially.
Don't take it as an accident, a disaster or catastrophe, but as a great liberation from the
horrible slavery that we have lived in inside industrial civilization (just think of office work 8 hours a day), a return to our real origins, to a wild and free, grounded and earthed life, in small communities, where love and relationships are our main focuses again, not serving a horrible zombie economy that destroys virtually everything, not the least community and Nature itself. This view of the collapse is shared by
anarcho-primitivist ecophilosopher
Derrick Jensen (b. 1960), in this youtubeinterview from November 2019:
"Derrick Jensen: "The Collapse of Civilization Will be Cause for Rejoicing" "
In this blogpost, my last one, I have tried to help you make the transition easier.
We begin with what you should invest in financially:
b) Prepper/survivalist things to buy, in priority order:
1) Warm blankets (täcken), preferably with down (dun), if the electric grid fails in the winter time. This is especially important if you live in some northern country. Many ordinary, cheap blankets on top of each other, is cheaper than warm winter sleeping bags. A warm winter sleeping bag is good to have if you in the winter time have to escape from the cities to the countryside to get a job in a farming community (because of collapse). Then it is also necessary to have a good, big backpack in which to carry your necessities, and a good sleeping pad. This is a very good investment. Do it early on. It can be really difficult to escape cities in cars or public transport when the collapse really hits your city. The highways and other roads will be chaotic, and your car could easily be stuck. Then it's ideal to escape by hiking with your backpack and sleeping bag. Hiking you can navigate through forests and small roads and paths, without being dependent on car roads. Traveling with bicycle does the same trick almost as well. It is therefore good to own a bicycle, if you for some reason cannot hike.
2) Warm clothes and good shoes. Preferably wool clothes. If you have to hike much, use shoes that you have used for a longer period of time, so that you avoid blisters on your heels. Don't go panic buying good shoes and then hiking long distances with very new shoes. This is the recipe for blisters.
3) Stored water for at least 3 weeks. You can collect a lot of 1,5 liter or 1 liter or 1/2 liter soda bottles and fill them with water, if you do not have money to buy bigger water canisters. Building rain water collection systems is also very useful.
Here is an easy introduction to that.
4) Basic food to survive for at least 3 weeks. It could suffice to store 15 big packages of oatmeals (havregryn), which when stored in a dry place last for one year according to the grocery stores, for decades according to my experience.
5) Batteries and a manual CD-player or Cassette-player with radio. This is important in order to receive emergency information from the government, if the electric grid fails and wars erupt in your country. If you do not have one such, make sure you know where you can go to listen to a radio. And check out where the nearest bomb shelters are.
6) Candles to light up the night if the electric grid fails. A reserve of lighters or matches to light the candles. If you can, learn to make fire without advanced technology, like they did in the Stone Age.
Here and
here and
here are some education videos about that.
7) A good and wide mosquito net so you can more easily sleep outside during the warm half of the year, if you live in the north, and the year around if you live in the south.
There is more, if you want to have comfort (as in
this article), but this is the most important, from where to start.
c) Here is more to do:
Try at once to learn the basics of composting and soil improvement. This will get really important, because the soils are so destroyed by monoculture, synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides and tilling. You can begin with
this article on composting. For soil improvement, I recommend
Ray Archuleta's work, recommended by Andrii Zvorygin & co.
Try to learn the basics of home gardening. Learn first conventional gardening, and then, later, if you ever can,
permaculture gardening (attending a permaculture course would be very helpful, I've done it myself), which means to work with nature instead of against nature. Begin with learning how to grow potatoes, which is the maybe easiest crop to grow, in my experience, and which has got, among all crops, the biggest amount of energy for the amount of labour you put into it, per kilogram (which means that it is
a real survival crop, in emergency situations, the crop you depend on most in hunger and starvation situations. This was experienced by the Russians in the Soviet collapse. This also pertains to sweet potatoes in warmer climates). For conventional gardening of potatoes, you can start with this article: "
How to Grow Potatoes in Your Home Garden". For permaculture gardening of potatoes, which is cultivating potatoes with
cover crops (which means that you don't till the soil, but, instead, fill up with compost and other stuff over your crop), you can start with this article and video: "
Growing Potatoes with Cover Crops".
Please learn then all the rest of gardening basics, with the help of the valuable linklist in the end of this blogpost, which is mostly about permaculture.
Please learn good English skills, this will help community building (an incredibly important thing) in a multicultural society, which almost the whole world has morphed into by now.
If the electrical power goes out during the winter for a long time, it is good to have built in advance a teepee or cot with
a fireplace, which you can make from clay and straw, where you can warm yourself without using too much firewood, this is especially important if you do not have a fireplace in your house.
Here is a video of how to build a teepee from scratch. A very small timber house or a
yurt does the same trick, i.e. saves firewood. We cannot afford to waste firewood in a post-collapse world. A big house takes incredibly much fire wood to warm up, so it's impractical to use such ones in a post-collapse world.
It is very important to abandon your house (if you live in a city or suburb) and seek out to the countryside if the Collapse goes too far, and much violence and wars starts taking place, which is usual during big civilizational collapses. Weaponized gangs of bandites can go searching for food and necessities in your area if you have bad luck. Prepare for that. But not with arms, but by building resilience. This will serve all. Serve even your enemy.
Try to befriend farmers and people with allotments (kolonilotter), so that you have easier to get a job in allotment areas and in farming on the countryside after the Collapse. Observe: jobs in these places will usually go to those with money or those with contacts.
On this blog there is a lot of education videos about primitive technology, a phenomenon which will become more and more important, and exponentially so. For Swedish readers I have collected the most important videos from that blog
here, in Swedish. I have translated the blogpost into English
here.
Here are collected lists about edible (ätbara) wild plants, both in English and in Swedish. You should know that one of the most dangerous things you can do in a collapse situation, is to, in desperate hunger, try to fill your stomach with wild plants like grass, leaves and buds. You can die from that, your stomach is not suited or evolved for such things. Use wild edible plants with reason. Educate yourself first. Buy some books in advance about wild edible herbs and plants, or, if the internet is up, search for information on the internet.
It is very important to know that when civilization collapses,
it will never recover, because of Peak Oil, overall energy decline and scarcity, and, not the least, ecosystem collapse. This makes you quit all false hopes, and prepare accordingly. If you have bought into the official Green Transition
boondoggle crap, you will be in for a rude awakening. Prepare also for the fact that gardening and farming will get very chaotic and difficult because of Global Heating, and "
Global Weirding".
In the End Times, it's even more important to make friends with death than with farmers, people with allotments, rich people with survival bunkers or survivalists and hippies.
d) Introductions to our predicament
We are, right now, living in the early beginnings of a
1) global Peak Oil collapse, a
2) global ecological collapse and
3) a global financial collapse, the first most visible in the decline of the oil industry and, because of that, a long time of rising energy prices, the second one most visible in the extremely rapid and
abrupt Global Heating that we are experiencing, and the third one most visible in the US banking crisis of last year, the skyrocketing global debt bubble and "Everything Bubble", and the
deglobalization process that began in 2011 (see
this article about it), after globalization having peaked in the
Global Financial Crisis 2008.
2008 was a very important year in prophecy, according to American Christian prophet
Jonathan Cahn (b. 1959), who counts seven year "Semitah-cycles" (see
this book by him from 2018 about that). 2011 was also a very important year in Christian prophecy, remember American Christian veteran prophet Harold Camping's (
1921-2013) rapture date 21.5.2011 (see
this Wikipedia-article), Marita Mäntyniemi's prophetic angel vision late in the evening 22.1.2011 (see
this blogpost of mine) and my own date for the Second Coming/Rapture/Doomsday, 11.11.2011. Deglobalization began in earnest in late 2011, according to the journal "The Economist". It was exactly 7 years before Peak Oil (All Liquids) in November 2018.
All these three predicaments are just symptoms of a greater global "
ecological overshoot". I recommend you to read William Catton's book "
Overshoot" from 1982, that laid the foundations for this understanding.
1) The best introduction to the present Peak Oil collapse that we are living through, I think is this classical collapse-Youtubevideo from 2011 by Russian author and engineer Dimitry Orlov: "
Dmitry Orlov: Peak Oil Lessons From The Soviet Union". It is remarkably relevant even today. Mind that Orlov has for several decades lived in the US, isn't it strange that the collapse had proceeded so far already in 2011?
How critical the situation has become today, I think can be best studied in
Peak Oil Exports, about which I have written
this book from 2023, about the end of global net oil exports, especially diesel exports, which end I think will come in 2027-2032. Then more than 160 countries will be without oil/diesel to import.
One of the most important features in the Peak Oil story, is that oil costs more and more, exponentially, to extract and distribute, i.e. its
EROEI (Energy Returned on Energy Invested) is declining at an accelerated rate (see
this graph about the Energy Cliff). Remember that exponential functions tend to surprise us greatly in their endings. And surely the exponentials of oil and energy will.
It doesn't matter how much oil we have (we can brag about it however much we want), if it is costing us more and more, exponentially, to extract and distribute. Because this is almost impossible to calculate, do not expect to hear much about it, before it's too late to do much about it.
2) A good introduction to the ecological collapse that we are living through, is ecological economist Chris Martenson's classical and fateful blogpost "
Collapse is already here" from
26.1. 2019 (one of the most important blogpost ever written, it is also corroborated by
this similar article by David B. Lauterwasser more than a year before, and
this similar article by learned collapsologist and systems thinker Nafeez Ahmed later in 2019), almost exactly at the time when I, in
an extremely wonderful epiphany early in the morning 9.2.2019 in Poland (where Greta Thunberg had preached, on COP24 a couple of months before) . This was exactly after a sharp decline, about 3 mbd or 3 %, in global oil production had taken place in January 2019, which confirmed that the terminal decline had really begun, see (1) below this first part of the essay. This epiphany is documented in
this Swedish book of mine. I saw in the spirit that
The Doomsday had begun, the doom over civilization, with
Peak Oil (All Liquids) in November 2018 and Greta Thunberg's climate revival that started in the autumn of 2018, what a synchronicity! In December 2018 I was in Flensburg in northern Germany, preaching that the Doomsday had begun, and I saw in my epiphany that the first sprouting of the seed of "
The Millennial Kingdom" (i.e. "heaven on earth") had begun
in Nature (the seed being the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ) by then. A new age, a new dispensation if you like, began with Greta and Peak Oil, an age which I call "
the age of the Green Transition". Everybody is talking now about the "Green Transition", even dirty businesses.
Maybe that beautiful Aurora in 2019, with Greta and Peak Oil, an Aurora that made me cry, was one of the loveliest Auroras that has ever taken place, a little like the resurrection of Jesus Christ. It felt like that. It was the most heavenly experience of my life, by far. I was part of that Aurora, and I think I still am, and all others who feel that the wellbeing of Nature is their real wellbeing and their real riches.
After that nothing has been the same.
Civilization is shrinking, global GDP is shrinking (I mean here the uncorrupted GDP numbers, numbers that are not inflated, manipulated or debt/credit-fueled. Despite corrupt numbers, official global GDP growth has been on a slowing trend since 2018, see this article and this chart), and Nature is, finally, taking its long awaited "revenge".
The Swedish economic blogger and author Lars Wilderäng at the "Cornucopia?" blog, a very initiated peakoiler and collapsologist, stated it this way in 2021, in
this blogpost: "
Det kan varit så att 2018 var mänsklighetens höjdpunkt. Och kanske även Sveriges." (ENGLISH: It may have been that 2018 was the pinnacle of humanity. And maybe even Sweden's.")
In
late 2018 a series of absolutely
unprecedented forest fires, droughts and floods began in the world. Do you remember the gigantic floods in the US during
the spring 2019, the horrible Californian forest fires in
November 2018 that destroyed the town "Paradise" (an important and baffling sign in itself, because the paradise of Antichrist, its tower of Babel, Civilization-Babylon, began to fall after that event), and then the Amazonian forest fires
in 2019, the Siberian forest fires
in 2019 and the gigantic Australian forest fires during
our winter 2019-2020, when
3 billion animals died or were harmed in the fires?
The trend has just continued, last summer we had the gigantic Canadian forest fires, and this winter we had
the biggest forest fires in all of history, in Australia.
An area as big as Ukraina burned. It was a whopping
7,8 % of Australia's area. This baffles my mind.
In
2018, scientists rang the alarm bell about the "
insect apocalypse". For me it was like
the angels of the Book of Revelation sounding the Last Trumpet. It had tremendous impact on me. And the insects were the angels this time around. See what New York Times wrote about this apocalypse in
November 2018 (see
here, "The Guardian" also had an important and famous article about it in late 2019,
here), the most famous article about it, and the first, I think,
exactly at the time of Peak Oil and the beginning of the "Greta-revival".
In
2021 (see this first article ever about it) another very special and incredibly moving
Doomsday Sign appeared in many animal species, that has, as far as we know, never happened before:
crazy circling behaviour. The veteran eco-author
Arthur Firstenberg (b. 1950) has written about it recently in a newsletter
here, and attributes the behaviour to wireless radiation and high technology at large. Many news outlets wrote about it, scientists measured it. You can for example read about crazily circling sheep in China in
this article from 2021. I blogged about the whole phenomenon in 2022,
here.
A good introduction to Global Heating is
this long essay by environmental emeritus professor, ecologist Guy McPherson.
3) The best introduction to our present financial predicament, I have found to be, for Swedes, the blog "Nybörjarens guide till samhällskollapsen" at
http://kollapsologi.se/. For English speaking people, I think it could be good to watch some of US economist
Peter Schiff's youtubevideos, like
this interview with him from one year ago. If you do not want to be energy blind (
which Schiff and most economists, in fact, are), it could be good to read a little on ecological economist Tim Morgan's blog "
Surplus Energy Economics". It's very basic stuff. Most, if not all, ecological economists, are not energy blind.
The best short course in financial collapse, and in overall collapse awareness I can recommend, is to watch Chris Martenson's video series "
Crash Course" from 2008, and then read
the book with the same name, which was published 2011, based on the videos. Lately he has published
an update (2023) to these things.
For deeper studies, watch all the Peak Oil video chats that Ukrainian-Canadian hippie and peakoiler Andrii Zvorygin has got on Youtube, with distinguished Peak Oil scientists Simon Michaux and John Peach, environmental artist Iver Lofving and other interesting people, they are all collected
here (you can ignore those videos about spirituality, they are fuzzy New Age things). This is grounded and earthed information, that will help you to locate where we are and where you are in this grand End Times story.
According to
this blogpost of mine from March 2024,
America could reach the 100 trillion benchmark of national goverment debt in the beginnings of the next decade. This would practically mean the bankruptcy of America, the fall of the world's biggest superpower, and this will drag all other countries with it into the abyss, because we live in a globalized world where everything is extremely interconnected.
This simple mathematical fact puts the Collapse in perspectives. How close we are to the CLIFF.