Post-apocalyptic weapons

The other day, Corum asked:

Scrub, i wanted to ask this for a while, are you going to practice with weapons too?
If your tribe is going to be the only ones with food in the area, or even if you are going to have just more comfortable lives than other people... you sure as hell will need to defend your way of life.

I/we haven't put a whole lot of thought into this, and at this point my sole experience with guns involved missing a soda can with my one shot from an air rifle. I may well change my mind about what I write tonight, but I might as well start brainstorming somewhere!

I expect us to have weapons of some kind, if for no other reason than for hunting. Beyond that basic decision, I see two immediate next questions:

1. What sort of weapons?
   
2. What emphasis will we place on defense rather than simply hunting skills?
   

For question #1, I see two general approaches to hunting given our desire to ultimately depend on primitivist skills: 1) start off using all the heavy equipment, guns, and ammo we want to buy, and incrementally replace them with more and more primitive tools and techniques; or 2) start from scratch with primitive tools & techniques, using civilization-dependent technologies only if and when we need them.

For question #2, two aspects of our envisioned way of life help mitigate against a need to explicitly prepare for defense: our focus on learning skills such as nature awareness, silent stalking, and tracking; and our preparedness to rely entirely on mobile hunting & gathering. Those first skills should give us an advantage in many situations of conflict, assuming evenly matched weapons and numbers. I have no idea though to what extent those skills can compensate for an uneven match of weapons and/or numbers! Unfortunately, to whatever extent we carry out horticultural food procurement (permaculture) in one or even multiple fixed spots, we will present an attractive target to others if the shit seriously hits the fan. We do expect to involve ourselves with the community to whatever extent they welcome our input, to share our thoughts (and especially successful experiences once we have them worked out) with whomever will listen. Hopefully we can make ourselves too valuable a resource in knowledge and community support to leave anyone who knows us wanting to knock us off for a mere partial-year harvest. And if worst comes to worst, we hope to have developed the skills to disappear into the woods to hunt and gather (perhaps from plots we tend to some extent) in a roving lifestyle, where we never have enough accumulated food or other wealth for anyone to bother with us.

So, my practical plans for the next couple of years include:

• Buy a slingshot and learn to use it
  
• Practice throwing a rabbit stick
  
• Maybe experiment with other weapons - atlatl, those twirly bola things, nets, others?...
  
• Try to actually kill some squirrels (and eat them, of course)
  
• Make and/or buy a bow, and learn to use it
  
• Buy one or more guns, take a gun safety class, and start learning to shoot. (I might wait on this until we live rurally and can practice shooting without needing to pay at a city shooting range.)
  
• Practice body skills - fox walking, balance, etc
  
• Keep learning about bird language, learning from my sit spot, learning tracking, etc
  
• I don't feel really inspired about this, but maybe I'll start again with some form of martial art
  

Book review: The Nature Handbook by Ernest Williams Jr

I picked up this book from the library on a whim, and enjoyed it enough to think I should mention it here: The Nature Handbook: A Guide to Observing the Great Outdoors, by Ernest H. Williams, Jr. The book gives readers insights and shortcuts to understanding various patterns in nature, from bird/animal/insect behavior to plant/tree characteristics to patterns seen across entire landscapes.

The author divides the book into 14 chapters, categorized under three broad headings of Plants, Animals, and Habitats. Each chapter describes about a dozen patterns, and each pattern includes multiple illustrative photos.

I had already picked up some of the plant information from reading other sources, and a smaller amount of the animal and habitat information, but I learned a lot of new stuff across the board. I especially enjoyed learning about:

• "puddle clubs" of butterflies, mostly males, who gather at wet muddy spots, or carcasses, or animal excrement, or urinals, to drink up sodium, a mineral they have a hard time acquiring otherwise. In at least one species, the males offer sodium to females along with their sperm, a sweet little nuptial enticement.
  
• "sun and shade leaves", where trees have larger leaves towards the shaded bottom, and smaller leaves at top where sunlight strikes with more intensity. Makes sense, but I'd never noticed that!
  
• "leaf retention" of many oaks and beeches, where the trees hold onto dead deciduous leaves for months into the winter, possibly to keep the nutrients from leaching away all at once over the winter. Trees tend to keep leaves at the bottom more often than the top, possibly because lower leaves will more likely fall close to the trunk where the tree can easily recapture the nutrients. Right after reading this chapter I started noticing the retained leaves on the oaks at the local park.
  
• Wind-pollinated deciduous trees flower before they make leaves which would block the movement of air and thus pollen. Makes sense! I had noticed that all the catkin-trees have their catkins over the winter, instead of flowering with the insect-pollinated trees. Now I know why!
  

The book doesn't have enough hardcore details that I need to have it in my library as a reference book, but I feel very glad that I found it and read through it once. I highly recommend it to anyone at a beginner or intermediate naturalist level!

Post-Apocalyptic Vision

With one exception, I can pretty easily see how future tribe and I can meet all our physical needs and substitute hand-made items for civilization-dependent, or adapt to going without. But I haven't really known what to do about my dependency on glasses! I have five ideas:

1. Figure on going without glasses. This would suck, since I have very poor eyesight and without my glasses I can't make out any details of anything more than a foot away from my face.
   
2. Make my own glasses from remaining fragments of glass. I haven't read of anyone experimenting with this; I worry that if it doesn't work out well impaired vision will permanently handicap me. Perhaps not as badly as with option #1, but any impairment in vision will significantly impact my ability to hunt and gather, and even to grow food.
   
3. Practice natural vision healing techniques, such as those pioneered by Dr. William Bates. Ran Prieur has done a lot of work on this with significant results, but his progress has taken quite a while and he still has a long way to go before he could discard his glasses altogether. I have heard and read some encouraging testimonials as to the effectiveness of healing your eyes, but I have also seen at least two accounts of case studies showing no improvement in vision tests from months of eye excercises, even when the subject felt his or eye eyesight had improved. All in all, I feel reluctant to depend on healing my eyes back to normal vision with no backup plan.
   
4. Eye surgery such as Lasik or PRK. I really like the idea of walking in with my current crappy vision and walking out with normal vision. The pricetag (maybe $1000-$3000 range for both eyes?) definitely crimps my excitement. Most of all, my uncertainty as to the long term effects of eye surgery scare me off from wanting to try it. Doctors have only been performing these surgeries for 20 years, so no one knows what happens 30, 40, 50 years down the line. I fear some unexpected side effect that leaves my vision in worse shape than if I'd never had them cut open my eyes, or chronic dry-eye or something even more painful.
   
5. Stockpile glasses! Ran Prieur mentioned Zenni Optical, an online store which sells complete glasses (frames & prescription lenses with UV protection and anti-scratch coating) starting at $8, plus a $5 flat shipping cost.
   

I expect to follow a strategy combining #3 and #5. I will experiment with eye excercises to see whether I can improve my vision, and I'll probably order a bunch of glasses. For $165 I could get 20 pairs of glasses with a wide range of prescription strengths from weaker to stronger than my current need. I can stash glasses in multiple places so that if a disaster breaks, burns, or buries one stash I'll still have others available. Ideally I'll find a frame that meets my normal frame needs (basically lenses as big as possible so I don't lose much of my peripheral vision but still attractive for Theressa to look at), plus has interchangeable left and right lenses. I'll order that frame for all the pairs, and have even more options for mixing and matching lenses to customize my glasses for years to come! Basically I'll have (say) 20 frames and 40 lenses to use, mix up, cannibalize for parts, and so on.

New Year's Resolution

I didn't make an official New Year's Resolution, but the changes I started in my life a few weeks ago could count! I don't know whether writing this up will have any value for anyone besides me, but I don't have the energy to tackle anything else tonight so this will have to do.

Diet: Getting back towards the Paleodiet, especially cutting out wheat and sugar. I know I have had a sugar addiction for the past 10+ years, and I feel pretty suspicious that eating wheat messes up my body, so I've detoxed from wheat & sugar. I felt miserable for the first week, then OK for the second week, then a little more energetic for the third week. Two nights ago I ate a lot of corn and felt somewhat miserable yesterday, so now I wonder whether I should just take the plunge and commit to a fully grain-free diet. Or maybe I just ate too many carbs at once and that adequately explains feeling crappy yesterday, or maybe...

Schedule: I want to kick the internet addiction as well, and direct my time and energy into more useful pursuits. About a week ago I decided to reimplement the idea of a schedule I stick to as best I can each day. (I tried that earlier this year but didn't stay with the idea for long.) Basic schedule:

• Wake up
  
• Eat
  
• Go to my sit spot, figuring about half an hour travel time and one hour sitting/exploring time.
  
• Come home and work on projects until:
  
• Eat
  
• Work on more projects until:
  
• Eat
  
• Finish eating by 6:30 to do the following in roughly this order:
  
• Write something for the blog, 1/2 hour
  
• General internet email & waste-of-timing, 1 hour
  
• Research naturalist stuff (read Arthur Bent's life histories of birds I see, look up pictures of different birds or mammals to try to identify unknows or answer questions that came up at the sit spot), etc, 1 hour
  
• Process food (crack nuts, extract acorns, peel wapato, etc), 1/2 hour
  
• Get in bed by 9:30, maybe read a little longer especially if I don't feel tired yet.
  

It hasn't worked out quite so cleanly so far, but I have actually made it to my sit spot every day (before I only went every other day or maybe two days out of three), I have gone to bed earlier and awoken earlier, and I think it has helped me cut down a little on computer time. And I have posted more to the blog the past few days!

National Plant Germplasm System

For those unaware of its existence, I wanted to point out a resource I have found very valuable: the National Plant Germplasm System, at http://www.ars-grin.gov/npgs/index.html

NPGS preserves genetic diversity of plants, and makes germplasm (ie, seeds and cuttings) available to scientists, organizations, and individuals conducting research. I have requested various rare seeds and cuttings over the last two years to integrate various plants into our food forest and find out what works well together. I plan to request many more species this year, some of which I've only been able to find at NPGS!

Our Humanure Setup

Paul requested a write-up of our experience doing the humanure thing, so here I write! We've been shitting in buckets for two and a half years now, except for the 6 months we lived at the Portland Permaculture Institute. We're following the system laid out in The Humanure Handbook by Joseph Jenkins, which covers pretty much everything you need to know about the topic. Basically, we poop in a bucket, cover our business with sawdust, and when the bucket fills up we dump the bucket in the compost pile and cover the new addition well. We mostly pee in a second bucket and spread that through the yard.

I don't have the skills to build a nifty throne for our shit bucket, and my one attempt at adapting a wooden regular toilet seat lid to a bucket promptly resulted in the lid falling off and breaking (luckily with no messier damage than that). So we still use a plastic toilet seat contraption designed for camping which snaps onto the top of a 5 gallon bucket. (We bought two back in 2005 from the local survivalist shop for $10 each, give or take.)

We used one bucket for poop and pee for a while, but eventually decided to add a bucket just for pee. This allows us to return nutrients to our garden more quickly, reduces the frequency with which I have to dump the poop bucket into the compost pile, and reduces the amount of sawdust we need to use. Enough moisture seems to make it into the compost pile between what urine does go in and the water from cleaning out the poop bucket when I dump it, that the compost pile still seems to get plenty hot and doesn't require extra water in the summer. I empty the pee bucket every 2-3 days (generally when it start to smell, which besides the obvious cue of unpleasantness also tells us we're losing nitrogen to the air). I empty the poop bucket maybe every three weeks or so.

So our bathroom currently has a poop bucket, a sawdust bucket (center), and a pee bucket (left). The standard ceramic toilet makes a fine stand for toilet paper, phone book pages for those who don't want to wipe their ass with trees killed just for that purpose, and candles and incense because Theressa likes that sort of stuff.

Way back when we tore out the driveway in a big work party, I wrote up instructions for how to use our bathroom, just in case it confused anyone. Occasionally when we have normal core folks over we clear the normal toilet off so they can easily choose their preference, but I think only about three people have used the ceramic toilet in the last year.

I haven't measured the temperature of the compost pile. When I shovel out a little hole in the center of the compost pile for the new additions, I put my hand over the divot and always feel some heat, which satisfies me that things are working. We plan to follow the schedule of one year to actively build the pile, then start a second pile and build that for a year while the first pile sits. So everything in each pile will sit for at least one year, and up to as long as two years, which should adequately kill off any potential pathogens.

I don't know what else to say, so I'll leave it at that unless I get any questions!

Liquid gold calculations revisited

David William House replied to my Nitrogen Fixers Vs Liquid Gold post with some alternate numbers for nitrogen content and daily human production of urine and feces:

"One adult on an ordinary diet will produce from 100 to 250 grams of feces per day. On a vegetable diet, an adult will produce from 300 to 400 grams per day. (Respectively, 0.22 to 0.55, and 0.66 to 0.88 pounds per day.) Feces are usually neutral to slightly alkaline in pH, 24% to 27% TS [total solids] (dry weight), with a C/N [carbon-nitrogen ratio] of 6 to 10, nitrogen 4% to 6% of TS, VS [volatile solids] is 85% of TS. Normal values for urine are 1 to 1.6 liters volume per day, average pH 6.0, 4% to 6% TS, with a C/N of 0.8, nitrogen 15% to 18% of TS, VS is 72% of TS. (That's 1.06 to 1.69 quarts volume produced daily). Every liter of urine weighs about 1,020 grams. Every quart of urine weighs about 2.9 pounds." [The Complete Biogas Handbook, p 69.]

Substance	%N	%C	%H20	Comments
feces	4-6		73-75	reported variations
feces	5.0	40.0	74.0	median
mixed	10.9	26.0	92.0	median
urine	15-18		95-96	reported variations
urine	16.5	13.0	95.0	median

Using the median values for the range of urine data means 1.3 liters urine/day (very close to the 1.26 liters I used in my other calculations), with 5% of the urine as "total solids", and 16.5% of that as nitrogen. 1 liter of urine weighs 1,020 grams, so we have 1,020 * 1.26 * .05 * .165 = 10.6029 grams nitrogen/day from urine. (Lower than the 14.112 grams nitrogen/day I used in my other calculations.)

Using the median values for the range of feces data means 175 grams feces per day for adults on "ordinary diets", and 350 grams feces per day for adults on vegetarian diets, with 25.5% as "total solids", and 5% of that as nitrogen. So for "ordinary diet" we have 175 * .255 * .05 = 2.23125 grams nitrogen/day. For vegetarian diets, double the figure for 4.4625 grams nitrogen/day.

So by these numbers, adults on "ordinary diets" produce a grand total of about 12.8 grams nitrogen/day. Vegetarian adults produce a grand total of about 15 grams nitrogen/day. Using the same assumptions I used the other day, the former could provide enough nitrogen for 3730-4660 square feet of forest garden (for canopy demands of 8 grams/square meter to 10 grams/square meter). Vegetarians could provide enough nitrogen for 4370-5460 square feet.

Obviously we don't have the precision of numbers with any of this to make truly exact calculations, but having numbers from two different sources give us results in the same ballpark gives me more confidence in the general idea: one adult can provide the nitrogen for around 4000-5000 square feet of forest garden.