"The Great Die Off"

[Skvez]

LS: It depends a bit on what they define as “rural”.

People living in a town of less than 10 000 people may be considered to be rural but most of those people have no land and many will have preps that only cover some areas (they may have heat and power to survive power lost due to a winter storm but no long term food or water preps).

Most US land is mono-cultured, not homesteaded. One crops becomes available for only one or two weeks of the year. The area is vast and requires machines to harvest where it’s shipped somewhere else to be processed into food. Vast areas of food would be lost after an event due to lack of the infrastructure to process it. And while massive quantities of corn-on-the-cob may provide calories it’s not a balanced diet you can live on.

The unemployment rate is also very high in rural areas .Lots on unemployed people living in low quality housing with no job, no land and no preps worth speaking of.

I think 20% of rural yanks prepping could be optimistic. Of-course it depends in whether you mean prep sufficient to survive three days or three months. In a big event you may need food to survive 18 months (through the first lawless year and then until harvest the second year after the big die-off). I think very few people have preps that can last that long.

[Mortblanc]

Numbers, statistics and the rambling of writers living in US suburbia must all be taken with a grain of salt.

Rural life in the eastern US is a separate culture and the numbers and the writers do not reflect that culture accurately because they are not a part of it and do not understand it.

Rural areas often show higher unemployment and lower income due to these differences in culture. That culture is the very thing a self sufficient "prepper" might consider an ideal lifestyle.

Unemployed in the US officially means anyone between 18-65 that could be working who are not "working" (having taxes with held from their paychecks). In the rural areas one can be hard at work and the government never knows it.

In rural areas the culture accepts women staying at home raising their children, growing a garden and preserving food as an acceptable life style. If that means they are considered "unemployed" they do not give a crap.

An equally large number of people earn good incomes doing seasonal labor in the tobacco fields and on those "monoculture farms", or as unlicensed contractors and they do not show up on the statistics charts.

They may put most of their meat in the freezer during hunting season, never buying a mouthful of beef or pork all year, and in the summer they eat a lot of fresh caught fish and the veggies from the back yard garden patch.

Rates of home ownership are also much higher in rural areas, where even the "poor" own a small plot that can be, and usually is, placed under cultivation even if the crop is only the seasonal favorites of the family.

Substandard living conditions also often refers to a 20 year old mobile home, heated by a wood stove, placed on land the dweller owns, rather than a newly build government subsidized flat that requires 1/3 of the paycheck each month.

and their kids can go outside and play without dodging bullets or bullies while mom and dad never fall under the watchful eye of tptb or CCTV.

There may be more people in the city "working" and making a bigger paycheck, but most are not living as well, or would not be as happy.

If those rural dwellers wanted a factory job, a flat near a buss stop and a park for their kids to play in they would pack up and move. They stay where they are because they are independent by nature and self reliant by breeding.

Those "Nonprepper" rural folks are living right in the spot you would consider the ideal long term BOL, they are already geared to the lifestyle and already have the mindset.

They just do not consider themselves "preppers".

They prefer the term "Redneck".

[Lightspeed]

You old Redneck Morty!

Hope all going OK for you?

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Skvez,

Like Morblanc says. That's my take on rural USA too

[bigpaul]

like I said the article is American but the theory is universal. I was thinking more of how it applies to the UK-seeing as how this is a UK forum.

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believe it or not, the world does not revolve around everything the Yanks do, some of us have been known to be capable of independent thought!

[Lightspeed]

Back on track BP: So has anyone done the numbers for the UK?

[NorthernRaider]

LS are you freeing to the number of preppers in the UK?

If so that could be a doozy to calculate because there are so many folks like some allotmenteers, off gridders, eco activists, travellors, home steaders, small holders and bush crafters who could at a push come under that umbrella.

Then we would need to consider those already living in remote ereas like top of Scotland, Mid wales, High Pennines like hill farmers etc who live a prepper lifestyle by default but would not know what a prepper was if it bit him.

[bigpaul]

hello LS, as far as I can see its not so much about the numbers who will die-which will be lots- but about how many will survive. I researched this some years ago and it seems given the UK land acreage available if we have to be "self sufficient"(NO imports) and actually grow the food here in the UK we could not feed the current population as it is, in fact we are only about 27% self sufficient. we could only feed about 16 million people or about 25% of the population. here is the link to the figures: http://www.populationmatters.org/documen...ountry.pdf

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so if we take it from that context, the MINIMUM "die off" in the UK is going to be about 75% and could conceivably climb to 90% or even 95%.

[Lightspeed]

Thanks

[Skvez]

Quote:Unemployed in the US officially means anyone between 18-65 that could be working who are not "working"

No it isn't
Unemployment in the US is defined as anyone between 18 and 65 who isn't in prison, in training, on disability and WHO WANTS TO WORK. Huge numbers of Americans have given up trying to find a job and so are not included in their statistics.
But thats beside the point.

A lot of your other points are regarding their standard of living. Thats again not relevant when discussing their ability to survive in a grid-down-die-off.

A labourer who picks tobacco once a year isn't going to be able to feed themselves and probably lives in a home that relies on utility water and heat.

People in rural lifestily may have a smaller culture shock adjusting to a grid-down survival lifestyle but very few are prepared for it.

The UK is in much worse state. We have too many people for our food-producing land and what food we do produce tends to be speciality food that is expensive to transport but not optimal calories/acre (meat rather than carbohydrate).

There would be a tiny fraction of 1% of the population in the UK who would not be extremely adversly affected by the loss of the grid, water and retail infrastructure.
There may 'only' be a 90% die off but the other 10% will have to fight tooth and nail to be in the 10% that survives, they won't be carrying on as normal.

[bigpaul]

the majority of people in the UK now live in cities, I think its about 85% of the population, so this will be the % that are mostly affected when the power goes down and deliveries stop arriving at the shops, most of the newer houses are all electric or electric and gas(i.e. gas central heating but the controls are electric) and very few will have any kind of "alternative" lighting, heating or cooking apart from a few perfumed candles they only use at Christmas. very few people these days have any kind of food stores and a larder is probably something their granny had. so as soon as the stores are empty and the few days food they had in the house are used up, they are stuffed.