Hey folks.  I’d like to spend a little time on resilient water today.  It’s a rich topic, with lots and lots to write about.

Let’s start by talking a bit about rainwater harvesting.

If you live in the US or the EU, you probably associate rainwater harvesting with owning a rain barrel.

Rain Barrel

A rain barrel is a simple approach to rainwater harvesting.  It’s a ready source of water that you can use to keep your garden alive during the watering bans of the summer months.  For example.  The basic rain water harvesting system includes:

1. A roof (in rainwater harvesting lingo:  a drainage catchment).
2. A gutter system that allows you to direct the downspout into the barrel.
3. A large plastic barrel.
4. A wire mesh (small enough to block bugs) that filters the water.
5. A spigot and a hose to allow you to water your plants or fill a watering can.

However, the 55 gallons of water (or a little more with the larger models) you can collect in a barrel, isn’t much.  It won’t last you long if there is a serious disruption.

Real Rainwater Harvesting

If you are serious about rainwater harvesting and want to take it to the next stage, you need to  dig into the DIY forums on the topic.   Another option is to head to Australia.  Due to an intensely arid climate, Australians are at the forefront of developing, deploying, and debugging rain water harvesting systems from DIY to the low cost commercial systems.

Since there is such a big market for rainwater harvesting in Australia, there are low cost commercial systems for nearly every advanced function (while there is a commercial market in the US, it seems scattershot, if that isn’t the case, educate me to the contrary).  Here are some examples:

1. Wire mesh installed over the gutters to prevent leaves/debris from falling into the gutters.
2. First divert rain heads.  Prevents debris that gets through the mesh from getting into the system.
3. A first flush system.  The first water that falls picks up dirt/chemicals from the roof/gutter.  Flushing that water improves the quality of what you capture.

And that’s just the capture phase of the system  There’s lots more to learn from places with too little or too much water that we can apply to our efforts at personal and community water resilience.  Permaculture also offers lots of insight on how to construct our landscapes and structures to allow water to work for us, rather than against us.

You can expect to see some these excellent insights in future reports on the topic.

Your always learning more about resilience analyst,

John Robb

* Be careful.  Rules vary by location.  For example:  In Colorado, due to water rights treaties signed a century ago, private land owners aren’t allowed to capture rainwater off of their roof w/o a permit.  So, be sneaky.

Friends,

Here’s a short note on a new and promising development called community financing.   It’s going to be very important to our efforts to build resilient communities.

Here’s a simple question:  Outside of your home, what have you invested in?

For most of us, the answer is: Mutual funds.  Bonds.  Gold.  Basically, ways to speculate on the fate of the global economic system.  In contrast, we DON’T own many investments in what matters.  Business that are tangible, productive and local.

Why?  The way most businesses are financed is literally medieval.  Really, nothing much has changed since the Renaissance.  Fortunately, Community Financing is on the way.

In short, Community Financing is a set of legal and technological frameworks that makes early stage financing a market based activity.  How?  It allows customers (in aggregate, acting as a community) a way to finance a business they want to BUY a product or service from.

If you want to get a feel for how quickly the shift to how this works, give “24 hours” from Kickstarter blog a read.   As you can see, on financing platforms like Kickstarter, companies can now raise millions of dollars in financing from future customers.   Wow.

Why does this work so well?  This type of direct financing, via lots of small contributions, cuts out all of the extremely expensive overhead (banks, law firms, venture capitalists) that makes small scale finance impossible.  It also radically reduces venture risk by allowing customers to VOTE with their wallets on the companies they want to see built.

Community financing provides the legal and technological framework to make it possible for you to invest in:

• The establishment of a local farm or greenhouse that can deliver fresh seasonal produce (from veggies to beef) to you every week.
• A local energy business that leases solar heating systems to homeowners in your community.
• A company that has designed and plans to make a product for a new and emerging market (or a very small but passionate market you are part of).

Resiliently Yours,

John Robb

As most of us already know, the Greek government is bankrupt.

So far, it has been forced to cut expenses by 34%.

That means they have already made deep cuts in pension payments, government employee incomes, and government employee headcount.  And they are just getting started.

The Greek economy is in free-fall and likely to set the record for the most severe depression in a modern country so far this Century.

Our collective problem is that the Greek experience will soon seem commonplace.  Almost all of the nations in the West are headed towards a Greek style bankruptcy given current trends.  The US deficit alone is running at over a trillion a year with NO end in sight.  So, eventual bankruptcy of the US and most of the EU isn’t a question of what is right or just or what could happen in a perfect world.  It’s what is likely to happen.

Given this, the question you should be asking yourself is:  What would happen if the US and the EU cut their budgets as deeply as Greece?  What if there was an across the board budget cut of 40%?

This is an important question since it is almost certain to happen and it will be ugly.  Why?  The number of people that…

1. currently work for the government,
2. get a government pension (or military pension),
3. or get social security/medicare/income support payments

Or, what if you live in a community where more than half of the people also depend on government income?

I could go on, but you should get the point.

All of these questions wouldn’t be worrisome if you were a) resilient or b) lived in a resilient community.

Stay tuned.

A man that’s very confident that we can figure out solutions together,

John Robb

PS:  For extra credit, here’s a map that shows which counties in the US are the most dependent on government income support (by type of government support).  It might be useful when you are trying to decide where to live.

PPS:  If you know someone that is reliant on the government for their income and they are oblivious.  Forward them this article.

If you want a glimpse of the future for the US, UK, etc. all you need to do is tune into what is going on in Greece.

Greece is financially bankrupt, like all Western countries.  They just happened to get there first.

So what is going on?

If we use my friend Dmitry Orlov‘s five stages of collapse as our reference, Greece is at stage 4.

1. Financial collapse.
2. Economic collapse.
3. Political collapse.
4. Social collapse.  <– Where Greece is
5. Cultural collapse.

What does social collapse mean?

In the case of Greece right now, it means people turn on each other:

• burned out shells of buildings due to regular riots,
• a spike in crime that reaches into even the smallest towns (where thefts, let alone murders, were unusual), and
• a boom in corruption as government employees see their wages slashed in half.

As bad as this is, it can and will likely get worse.

A Resilient Option

This is the future for the West.

It isn’t something that some canned goods and bottled water can help you with.  The crisis in Greece has already been going on for four years and it is likely to last more than a decade (even if things don’t get worse everywhere else, which they will).

This is a future that we can prepare for.  A future we can avoid.

In fact, by becoming resilient we’re going to do very well, despite the challenges of collapse.

AoPC (Ahead of the Power Curve),

John Robb

Here’s a little bit of DIY ingenuity that I thought was worth sharing with you, because it’s both useful and something I haven’t seen before at less than industrial scale.

Given how useful it looks, it may become a commonly seen item in many resilient communities (at least in mine, since I have a good relationship with my back).

What is it?   It’s a self propelled, solar powered gardening cart that I found on Build-it-Solar (via NoTech magazine).

Randy, the inventor of the vehicle had a problem (an itch in tinkering parlance).   It was something that almost everyone over 30 would agree with:

I really Love gardening but I have a bad back and when it comes to staying bent over in the garden it gets rough. So I built this Helper Machine. I  call it My P-Machine. Planting/Picking/Pulling weeds/Putting around the garden machine. 

Here’s what he built (how he scratched that itch):

You can instantly see how useful this cart would be in reducing the difficulty of maintaining a large garden.  You can also see how valuable this cart would be in a community garden or as an amenity that’s part of a housing complex garden allotment or community supported agriculture (where the owners can reserve it’s use online).

What does it do?  Besides saving the backs of aging gardeners that want to eat well, here are some details:

• The top speed is a walk.
• It can turn on a dime.
• Joystick control (like a wheelchair) that can be easily moved.

Here are some engineering details on the cart for those that are interested:

• Simple 1″ tubing (1/8″ thick) for the frame.  Welding + bender.
• Drive motors + harness were removed from a powered wheelchair.
• Geared 4.6 to 1 to produce lots of torque.
• 4x T105 6-Volt Golf Cart batteries hooked up in series for 24 v.
• 2x 12-Volt 80 Watt solar panels in series keep the batteries charged via a 20 amp 24 volt charge controller.

If you build one of these.  Let me know.  I’d love to see the pictures.

Sincerely,

John Robb

OK.  So, you want to become more resilient.   That’s great.

But how do you start?

One good do-it-yourself way (that you have probably heard a thousand times) is learn how to feed yourself by starting a garden.

To make it an easy choice for you, I’ve searched around for the absolutely easiest, lowest labor method of starting a garden possible.  It’s so simple and easy it’s almost criminal.  So that means there are NO excuses for not doing it.

The method is called a Sheet or Lasagna Garden since it is built in layers.  The big benefit of this type of garden is that it uses a no till approach.  That means digging is NOT required and it can radically reduce the amount of weeding you need to do.

If you have the land* that you can use for a garden, here’s a recipe for how to do it.

The big reason it is so easy is that it trades time for effort/expense.  You need to give the soil time to repair itself.  To become healthy enough to support growing food.

So, here’s what you do.

Let’s assume you have a good area picked out.

1. Trim it down.  Mow it.  Weed whack it.
2. Cover the area with a weed barrier.  How?  Put down a layer of cardboard.  Another option is put down a layer of newspaper (5-10 sheets thick).  That’s it.
3. Add layers of compost.  Everything from grass clippings to leaves (rich in minerals) to manure to kitchen scraps.  Layer it up to a foot deep.  As you add the compost material, push it into row mounds to make it easier to plant in the spring.
4. Let it cook for a couple of months.

If there is demand for it, I’ll do a how to video on putting together a lasagna garden.

Hope this was helpful.  If you know someone that has said they want to start a garden but always seems to put off doing it, send this recipe for a lasagna garden to them.    It may be all it takes to get them on a resilient path.

Resiliently yours,

John Robb

* Don’t have land to start a garden?  I’ll share some ways to get around that soon.

Hey folks, I have an interesting and unusual approach to building a resilient community today.

I’d like to introduce you to the Tempelhof community.

After three years of planning and raising money, the Tempelhof community found the perfect place in late 2010.

Their foundation bought a medieval manor and associated village on 31 hectares of land in a rural area of Baden Wurtenburg, Germany for 1.5 m Euros.

The manor had been used as a home for handicapped children for decades, but had been vacant for 6 years prior to the purchase.  Translation:  the building’s amenities were in rough shape.

However, on the positive side of the ledger, this manor house and its associated buildings were built to easily last centuries.  They aren’t the type of structures you find in the US.  Structures made of “wood” that only last a couple of decades.

To get things ready for the community, 15 members with construction skills started work. As you would expect the first priority was to make the interior livable:

• Insulation
• New Pipes
• Remodeling

Outside the manor, PV solar was added to provide power for the structure.

The next phase (2011) added agricultural buildings like the greenhouse to the right.

I’ll have more on the Tempelhof resilient community and the progress they are making in future posts/reports.  They have figured out ways to govern a community like this and how to attract highly talented members/visitors that should be useful to us.

Resiliently yours,

John Robb

Today, I’m writing to ask you for some help.

So far, things are going great.  We’re building a great community here on resilient communities.com   A community that I hope will play a big role in making it possible for us, our families, and our communities to become truly resilient over the next couple of years.

However it could be better.

Over the past couple of years, I’ve posted research on a variety of topics:  from newly emerging resilient technologies to ways to think more resiliently to methods for building communities to how to make your home truly future proof.  Since many people have found this research very valuable, I thought a site dedicated to the topic of resilience would be useful to many people.  So far, that’s proven to be correct.

To make it even more useful, here’s what I need help on.  I need YOU to tell me what I should write about and research.  What are the topics and issues that are holding you back from becoming truly resilient? What can I research to help you and your community to become resilient?

If you’re interested in helping out on this, here’s what I need you to do:

1. Do a little research.  Ask your friends and family what’s holding them back from becoming resilient.   Ask them what they would like to learn about resilience.  If they don’t understand what resilience is, show them the about page on this site (there’s a good definition of resilience at the top of the page).
2. Formulate a response that ranks the topics that I should focus on, from the most important to the least, and either post it in the comment section below or send it to me directly via e-mail ( systemdisruption-web @ yahoo.com ).  If your friends/family want to directly post their responses in the area below, that’s fine.  In any case, I’ll read and respond to every response.
3. Thanks again in advance.  This is going to really help make resilientcommunities.com an amazing community.

Simple lesson in today’s post.  Resilient communities are based on trust.

Here’s what happens when trust isn’t something that is considered important.

_____________

Everyone knows that a MAJOR reason for the financial crisis that kicked off our current economic depression (US/EU) was caused by widespread banking fraud.

In fact, there was so much fraud going on in the industry by so many people and firms, that the US government intervened to mitigate the damage.  At the urging of the banking lobby, it negotiated a settlement with the industry.  The feds then pressured all of the state governments to sign on (49 of 50 have signed on already).

What was the settlement?

Given that the terms were written by the financial industry’s lobby, the settlement terms were entirely financial.  By taking the money, the feds and the states promised not to bring criminal charges for fraud, forgeries and document fabrication.  So, how much money are we talking about?

Only $2,000 per fraudulent loan (see this excellent analysis for more).  Or 1% of the average loan amount.   It gets even worse.  The banks found a way to pay only 1/5 of that amount, or $400 per loan.  The rest is coming from investors.

It’s pretty clear that with this settlement, the US government has now made a major step towards becoming a kleptocracy.  It has told financial institutions that criminal fraud only costs $400.  Pay it and you can walk free.

Wow.  Nothing points to economic collapse like corruption on this scale.  This entire failed system is based on ZERO trust.

__________

So why does this story belong on the resilient communities site?

It’s to remind you that a resilient community isn’t only about material things.  It’s about TRUST.

A resilient community scales down human relationships to a level where we we can build trust.

It’s an environment where we can expect trustworthy behavior from others in return for our own.

It’s a refuge from the insanity of a system that is about to generate a globe sized smoking hole (the term for what is left of an airplane that hits the ground at a high rate of speed).

Here’s a very simple tip on how to get your community moving towards resilience.

It’s a library.  But instead of books, it has all of the tools you need for construction, maintenance, and craft work.  From power tools to garden tools to woodworking tools.

Makes sense.  Why should anyone spend thousands of dollars on a power tool only to use it once a year?

But it goes deeper than that.  By building a tool library (usually built by donations, grants and volunteers like any library), you are breaking down the silos and the barriers associated with tool use.  Not only are people more likely to use the tools, they are more likely to share the knowledge required to use them well and to good effect.

Does a tool library provide a beneficial impact on personal and community resilience?  You bet.

Let’s take a look at the North Portland Tool Library.  It was formed/built by four smart and energetic volunteers (seen below) in 2004.

They currently run workshops on basic skills (how to drill, etc.) and on repairing tools.  Here’s a taste of the types of tools they currently have at the library.