Why Bug Out States Are Not a Good Idea to Move Into

Photo by Phillip Goldsberry on Unsplash

I was listening to a podcast the other day on how we could sustain ourselves in a post-collapse world, but when it came to the best countries to survive the coming calamity, I burst out in laughter. It is one thing that the list of nations in question was assembled based on the western narrative of what makes a good state. It is quite another that it omitted a number of factors which could (and most probably will) upend civic order and make it impossible to sustain a high-tech civilization in these countries. I’m not saying that we will certainly end up in the stone age (or go extinct) before the end of the century, but that we will witness the end of high-tech modernity pretty much everywhere — together with social mobility, democracy, accessible healthcare, cheap gadgets, job and food security… Basically everything we took for granted a decade or two ago. In fact we are already knee-deep into this process and the locations, which ought to provide safety and shelter, might end up being the worst choices.

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The best places to survive societal collapse. Source: statista based on this study

The List

Before we go into the details, let’s see the best countries to survive a global apocalypse, at least based on this study published four years ago. (I haven’t found a more up to date list, but as you will see the age of this paper really doesn’t matter that much.) Without further ado, here is a shortlist of nations:

1. New Zealand
2. Iceland
3. Australia (Tasmania)
4. Ireland
5. The United Kingdom
6. USA

OK, that pretty much matches the notion what most Westerners think of as a good bug out place for global societal collapse. But are they? Based on what factors? Well, the authors took the following aspects into consideration: climate change resiliency, carrying capacity (the potential of the land to support the population), isolation and self sufficiency. That’s not a terribly long list to say the least. What’s worse — and this is really puzzling as we are talking about a global apocalypse — the authors managed to convince themselves that these countries will somehow become ‘nodes of persisting complexity’ in a collapsing world economy.

Climate resilience

A country’s ability to anticipate, prepare for and respond to hazardous events, trends, or disturbances related to a rapidly deteriorating climate is undeniably an important factor. Especially so, given the rising number and intensity of wildfires, heatwaves, droughts and the ensuing crop failures (with more to come in the future). And while New Zealand, Iceland or Tasmania might indeed look like a good place to go, if climate is your top concern, putting the UK or the USA on the list is at best puzzling.

Sea level rise is already threatening many low lying communities in Florida and coastal cities around the US and the UK. As oceans around the world continue to expand due to the massive amount of heat absorbed and the melting of the Antarctic and Greenland ice, the situation can be expected to get completely out of hand. And as the immense amount of melt-water continues to disrupt the warm currents of the North Atlantic, conditions might all too easily swing back to a little ice age there, blowing all your chances at survival in the UK, Iceland, Ireland and Nordic countries. That doesn’t mean that global heating will stop, in fact it will continue to gain momentum further south, turning the Amazon rain forest into a dry savanna and melting even more ice around the south pole.

Needless to say, adaptation to a climate catastrophe of this degree is not possible. If the collapse of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC) happens around the middle of this century, as suggested by more and more studies, then the question of finding refuge against climate change becomes moot. Not a single nation will be left unaffected on this planet. Note, however, that this event will take multiple decades to a century to fully unfold and will not happen overnight. It will come in the form of an unprecedented number of severe weather events damaging — and eventually destroying — infrastructure around much of the countries on the list over the many years and decades ahead.

Agriculture

This is where we arrive to the second major shortcoming of the report and the list of countries it produced. As I explained in an earlier post, carrying capacity calculations (the number of people a given land area can sustain) are all based on ‘prevailing technology and resource management practices’ as well as on an unfettered access to ‘global trade’. Neither of these are sustainable — tariffs or not — as both presupposes an unending flow of oil and natural gas. With a rapidly approaching global liquid fuel peak — following in the footsteps of a peak in crude oil output in November, 2018 — the days of mechanized agriculture are numbered. Again, this doesn’t mean that we will all die of hunger the day after oil and natural gas production peaks, but that food inflation will become persistent leaving you with less and less money to buy anything else. And why should anyone manufacture a car, a computer, furniture etc. if no one has the money to buy it? Thereby demand for oil can be expected to drop in tandem with supply over the decades ahead, sparing no business outside agriculture and military production. (Curiously enough tariffs and the ensuing trade war between the US and China might brought this point much closer. In the wake of collapsing oil and gas prices producers will find it increasingly hard to finance the replacement of depleted oil wells, threatening with a COVID-style crash in the years ahead.)

Today, at the peak of technological civilization, agricultural yields are twice as good as they were prior to the 1960's. The “green revolution” with all those herbicides, pesticides and fertilizer sprayed liberally on crops has not only contributed to a hitherto unprecedented growth in agricultural output but a similar growth in population which, coinciding with peak farmland worldwide, also began to recede. Mechanized agriculture has not only replaced many, previously inaccessible natural habitats with farmland, but also laid waste to the land and the sea alike. Algal blooms and dead zones in nearby waters and the sea caused by rainwater runoff, an insect and bird apocalypse (Silent spring, anyone?), soil and plant nutrient depletion — are all signs of an unsustainable practice. The past six decades of magnificent yields will prove to be a temporary blip in output growth, achieved at the expense of future generations. Mechanized, high-yield agriculture is not something which we should take for granted for centuries to come.

Since fossil fuels will be much harder to come buy (let alone afford) in a post-collapse word, we can thus expect a return to more manual labor and the use of draft animals in many cases. Without fossil fuels, herbicides and pesticides, let alone gene modified crops with artificially boosted productivity, we can also expect a return to much lower crop yields — even with the use of regenerative agriculture. (Remember, you won’t have that many tractors and combine harvesters in a post collapse world, so many will have to grow their food with the hard work of their own hands, meaning more calories consumed and even more food needed.) All in all we can expect the minimum area to grow food per person to grow drastically in the decades ahead (1).

In post fossil fuel, post industrial world, we would also need to reserve forested areas to harvest firewood, and fence off grazing land for draft animals (2). Heating and animal draft power would thus increase the per capita agricultural land needed to keep a person warm and well fed to 1.75 acres or 0.7 hectares at best — an almost tenfold increase from its current value of 0.086. (One hectare equals to 2.47 acres.) Yes, fossil fuels have not only made agricultural work more productive, but has freed up and made a lot of land accessible to grow even more crops and feed even more people. A think to ponder on.

Now, consider also that we would have to rotate land in and out of use to regenerate the soil, and we would also need land to grow plants for fibers (clothing) to replace plastic fibers (made from oil and gas). With increased calorie demands, together with all these additional uses of agricultural land, we could easily return to the historical average of 1.5 hectares needed per capita. With soil nutrient depletion, erosion, or climate change wreaking havoc on crop yields already (droughts, heatwaves, floods, not to mention the potential return of icy conditions to Europe etc.) it would actually be quite a feat if we could feed everyone using just the historical average in the future.

In light of the above let’s review the figures provided in the report (table 3) listing the top countries for survival. (Here I’m converting square km to hectares by multiplying them with one hundred for the sake of consistency.) Now tell me, how could Norway, with an agricultural land per capita as low at 0.2 hectares feed its own population without fossil fuels, mechanized agriculture, international trade and food grown elsewhere? Using even a rather optimistic 0.7 ha/capita figure the country is already severely overpopulated. If we indeed need to return to the historical average of farming (1.5 hectares per person), the land we call Norway today could support only a tiny fraction of its population today. Or how about the UK (0.3 ha/capita)? Germany, perhaps (0.2 ha/capita)? The US has at least a bit more land at 1.2 ha/capita, but Europeans have terribly overshot the carrying capacity of their land. At least three to four times over. Putting any of these nations on a “best countries to survive global apocalypse” list is stupid at best, irresponsible at worst. Over the centuries ahead people will most likely need to migrate away from the old continent, reversing current trends in a rather unexpected way.

Self sufficiency and isolation

This takes us to the last two factors of the report. At this point it’s perhaps needless to elaborate on these two metrics, as both can rapidly become meaningless in a truly post apocalyptic world. Global food, resource and product supply chains are hopelessly intertwined and should the global south be cooked “thanks” to climate change, or should a major war disrupt the flow of oil from the Gulf, severe disruptions to trade worldwide would ensue. Technology is dependent on products and inputs produced elsewhere, and should any nation manage to preserve its advanced status and successfully isolate itself from the great unraveling, it would soon find itself without spare parts or critical raw materials, forcing it to shut down most of its technology base.

There are very few, if any, truly self sufficient states around the world. Russia comes closest with its vast resource base (oil, gas, minerals, wood, you name it), and a truly huge landmass with a whopping 2.6 ha/capita on some of the world’s best agricultural lands. None of the nations listed above could tell the same. (Not even the US with its plateauing — and soon to be declining — oil production and high import dependence.) Ever wondered why Western Europe tried to conquer, subdue, weaken, colonize and break up Russia over and over and over again? Look no further for the answer. This is not to say the Russia has no problems of its own, or that I would love to live there… Nor does this mean that then we should all sail south to New Zealand, a remote island lacking it’s own independent technology base and with a very limited land area.

What’s been left out of the list

And this is where we get to the most interesting stuff: What has been left out of the list of factors to consider above? By understanding the true nature of our polycrisis we can start to appreciate the utter nonsense of putting together such a list of bug out states based on a few criteria and a set of demonstrably false presumptions. So, here is a non-exhaustive list of other things to aid our thinking:

1. The depletion of high quality energy and mineral resources. Europe already imports a third of its energy — at an ever higher price — while renewables failed to provide the kind of power needed to maintain a high-end civilization. America is about to face the same fate with the coming decline of it’s most important oil province: the Permian. With an onset of a global oil production decline later this decade (or perhaps as soon as this year), energy depletion will become a critical issue and a source of geopolitical tensions around the world. That doesn’t mean that we will run out of these resources from one day to the next, or at all. No. It means a constant rise in the energy costs of extraction, eventually cannibalizing all of the surplus energy this civilization can produce. And as there will be less and less energy left to do anything but extracting energy, demand will shrink and energy production will begin to decline, leaving most of the land’s hard-to-reach oil and minerals underground. Forever.
2. The loss of economic, trade and military hegemony. Note how these supposed ‘nodes of persisting complexity’ are all situated in the Western sphere of influence and exist only because of their unfettered access to global trade (in no small part thanks to their colonial past and overvalued currencies). The now rapidly dissolving post-WWII world order has allowed these nations to import resources and technology on the cheap and to sell goods and services at a premium. With this enormous privilege rapidly coming to its end and after losing so many wars trying to protect it, the rise of a new world order has become inevitable. Expect the purchasing power of Western nations to fall drastically in the decades ahead.
3. The loss of social cohesion. Western societies have become completely atomized over the past half a century. Personal greed and individualism has gone on a rampage. Politics have become a spectacle, and various world views have turned into religions. The lack of a coherent narrative holding Western nations together has led to a lack of imagination and a lack of strategy from the ruling class, now unable to find a way out. Not a recipe for long term success —if you ask me — especially not in a world already showing the first signs of collapse. As that collapse deepens, however, we can expect the same tendencies to unfold everywhere else around the world.
4. The failure of technology and science. Diminishing returns are everywhere: the more we spend on science and technology the more complex and energy hungry things become with less and less benefit provided to society. The attempted “energy transition” (which never was) is a good example: after investing trillions into “renewables” we have realized that we must continue adding fossil fuel power plants to balance out their shortcomings (intermittency and a lack of energy density). The result: an immensely complex and fragile electric grid, now in dire need of costly expansion.
5. The failure of the financial system. Our debt based currency system (conjuring money out of thin air) has by now become completely unsustainable. Since the material economy can no longer grow due to resource and energy limitations (it can only get more complex and elaborate) the still growing financial system has become the greatest source of instability. Once (and not if) this Jenga tower falls, it has the power to take down the entire world economy with it.
6. Growing inequality and wage stagnation. The gap between the poor and rich has reached unsustainable levels (especially in the West). Former democracies have turned into a rule of the rich, by the rich and for the rich, aka oligarchies. The risk of society — and with it the entire economy — becoming permanently two tier has now become a reality.
7. An ageing population and a lack of births. Is this any wonder? Falling living standards, a lack of vision for the future, constant anxiety, industrial pollution disrupting our endocrine system, do I need to continue? The global economy / financial system based on perpetual consumption driven by growth is in the process of losing its consumer base. (Link courtesy of Charles Hugh Smith.) High income population worldwide has begun to shrunk, most of the babies born today will simply be unable to afford the lifestyle of previous generations.

A case in point

As a result of these trends discussed above the UK, which was fifth on the list of countries to hide from collapse, has already began to decompose. The British economy is unraveling, the quality of public services is in a free-fall and democracy is slowly turning into autocracy. Regulations galore, elite overreach, a two tier justice system, censorship and a nation slowly drifting into civil war. A lovely place to bug out climate change, huh?

Britain’s civil war, a fate awaiting most Western nations, is not your great-grandparents American Civil War, though. There is no north vs south divide, rather a form of constantly brewing violence, with various small factions fighting the establishment, creating no-go zones for the police or attacking infrastructure in desperation. No wonder that there is an ever harsher crank down on free speech there: the government and police is actively trying to stomp out even the smallest of fires online, before the country is engulfed in flames. Unlike in previous civil wars however, it’s improbable that the currently brewing low-level insurgency will turn into a large scale organized armed conflict. There are simply too many factions, wanting too many radically different things, all at the same time. Instead, this eerily resembles the early stages of a complete breakdown of society. Aka collapse. And not just in the UK, but throughout Europe and also in America.

The unraveling of modern societies is already well underway. It’s not caused by a single factor, and you won’t have to wait till global temperatures will reach 2°C above pre-industrial levels. It’s already happening due to the combined effects of the depletion of rich easy-to-get resources, an unsustainable financial system, growing inequality, the complete lack of social cohesion, the failure of science and technology, the loss of global hegemony. And the list goes on…

Focusing on one aspect might lead you to believe that there is a solution — or at least an escape hatch conveniently handed down to you — but understanding at least a tiny fraction of the polycrisis unfolding in front of our eyes reveals that there is no salvation. We will have to muddle through, and find ways to cooperate with each other to survive, while accepting that there is absolutely no going back to our wholly unsustainable past. The great unraveling of this high tech civilization will arrive everywhere, but not according to a predictable plan and not from one day to the next. No one can tell where the safest place will be. In fact you are far better off at a place you already know and where you are known. If you move, there is no guarantee others will open their doors for you, or won’t look at you suspiciously once the turd hits the fan there. The best thing we can do at the moment is to educate ourselves and prepare to weather the storm when it arrives. With that said, let me leave you with one of my favorite quotes from the arch-druid, which I find truly apt here:

“Knowing many stories is wisdom.
Knowing no stories is ignorance.
Knowing only one story is death.”

— John Michael Greer

Until next time,

B

Notes:

(1) According to a study made by the Slovak University of Agriculture the plant commodities necessary to cover basic nutritional needs required 0.0862 ha of agricultural land. All this using prevailing technologies powered by the above described unsustainable use of fossil fuels and minerals. Without those inputs you can easily double that number.

(2) In order to heat a modest 1000 sq ft (92 sqm) dwelling you would need 3 cords of wood (3.62 cubic meters). An average woodlot, when sustainably managed, will yield approximately one cord of firewood per acre, which translates into 3 acres for that modest family home. If that family of four wanted to have a horse, too, which is kinda necessary if they didn’t plan to break their backs too early, they would also need to add 2 more acres of grassland, totaling 5 acres per family or 1.25 acres per person (0.5 acres), just for heat and draft animals.