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1978: Could You Survive Without Modern Technology?

“Because it’s inconceivable that it won’t isn’t it?” That’s what struck me most in this BBC clip from 1978 further below. Although I recommend watching the entire several minute discussion, that statement is a nightmare for all of us, preppers included. Because as much as I believe in stockpiling supplies, having food storage, and even transforming your smartphone into a survival tool, without power as the backbone to modern life, we’re little better than animals without it.

And while I agree with many of the questions posed in the video below, the questions didn’t go far enough. Perhaps there was more to the original video than what was shown below, but it concludes with the belief that you must be able to farm to survive. And, while I agree, what about your safety, medical needs, sanitation, and even entertainment? There are, after all, a myriad of wonderful “miracles” that modern life offers us besides those I’ve mentioned, all of which will be sorely missed if/when they go away.

What I can say is this: if you aren’t preparing for hard times now, while there’s still an abundance of the items you might need, you’re not thinking far enough ahead. Yes, there’s always a reason to be concerned about the future, and there’s often reasons to believe those fears are overblown (at least in the short term), but this isn’t a video game; there’s no reset button or a do-over. We, humans, have built our lives to NEED power.

The fact is that energy in all of its forms has only become more intertwined in our lives since 1978. The global supply chain, as discussed in the video Wednesday, is equally cruical to our survival. And while the benefits have increased from just-in-time delivery and global supply chains have increased, so too have the consequences when something happens to disrupt it all. This is precisely what I try to explain in my book, Why We Prepare, if you haven’t read it yet.

So, you either prepare to do without power as much as possible or you provide your own. Better yet, you do both. I don’t know what the future holds, but I do know that the future may be short-lived without power … even for us preppers.

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Damian Brindle

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Comments

One response to “1978: Could You Survive Without Modern Technology?”

  1. Greg Everard

    Many good points raised but a little too apocalyptic I think – several issues occurred to me, 1) if you are going to take over a farm you first need to be able to survive for a couple of growing seasons until you can “get the bugs out”, 2) you don’t need to start with a plough, it might be more appropriate to cut as much grass/weeds as possible and perhaps use the Ruth Stout “no till” method perhaps using a scythe or other manual cutting methods, you won’t be doing large field work unless you have a fair sized community with you, even medieval farmers only dealt with narrow strips of land, 3) the meat on the hoof mght be better employed as power sources for grinding grain, plowing (as suggested in the video) or transporting goods on a cart (or towing a useless i.c. vehicle (with engine removed), 4) you might need to resort in the first instance to foraging although that needs skill with local plant knowledge that can be quite difficult to obtain e.g. in Australia, the aborigines used to eat a flour produced from seeds of a tropical “grass tree” which are quite poisionous but by soaking them in a running stream for several days to leach out the poisons then roasting them and finally grinding them to make a type of flour they could render the final product edible (although according to some accounts pretty tasteless) so the answer is yes, you can survive without modern technology but it would help to have members of your party along who have skills appropriate to the situation, many indigenous peoples still preserve useful knowledge and some people like the Amish also manage without much of our “modern” technology. In many cases you could jumpstart your return to a more modern system by raiding a museum where you might find old steam traction engines or even early diesel tractors that could run on cooking oil? It is at least worth cconsidering how one might prepare for such an eventuality so whilst I think the video is a little simplistic and mainly decries the dependence on our all singing, all dancing modern tech, it does provide a reminder that a lot of people might need to at least think about what skills they would need to survive. Just my 2 cents worth!

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