• 101. Beginnings. My first set of blog posts offer a basic understanding of our species, and how our unique adaptations helped us to thrive when others failed, with particular attention to the last 10 thousand years, or the Anthropocene.

• 102. Being Human. The second set identifies social behavioral dynamics that set the stage for us to exceed the sustainable equilibrium we had enjoyed through most of the Anthropocene.

• 103. The Great Collapse - DRAFT. A third set identifies intersections between humans and the environment that led us to the Great Collapse, perhaps even near extinction.

• 104. The Big Sort - DRAFT. The fourth set discusses the social political context and infrastructure underlying the Big Sort less than a year ago.

• 105. Pods, Guilds, and All the Rest - DRAFT. The final set explains the infrastructure and logistics of how we ended up in two fundamental different sets of living situations, living in profoundly different lifestyles.

• As you can see, the latter three are still in draft, schedule to be completed latter in the yearhttps://ogallalacommons.org/oc_blog/what-is-the-ogallala-aquifer/. Together these sets of blog posts represent Dr. Farmer’s take on our collective history vis-à-vis the planet.

This blog is a work of fiction by a main character in the novel, By 2030: A Survival Story by Julia E. Hammett. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

Dr. Farmer completed her graduate work at University of Oklahoma where she studied ethnobotany and archaeobotany with Professor Paul Minnis. Farmer’s doctoral research investigated sustainable and resilient plant use by Indigenous Andeans living in the San Martin Province of Peru. During her career she’s worked in regions throughout the world, but her core interests remain in the Americas.

As an anthropologist, Dr. Farmer frames her blog posts from a holistic perspective. For example, in her reflections on the Great Collapse, she outlines the multiple lines of evidence that led scientists and experts to issue dire warnings for both society and climate stability. Both were tragically were dismissed, downplayed, or ignored by most Americans and the media. Farmer’s blogs offer another dimension by explaining how social, political, and economic factors intersected to further accelerate the rate of climate change during the early 2020s, and ultimately led to the cataclysmic Great Collapse and the subsequent Big Sort.

Throughout her blog posts she provides links to her sources and additional information, definitions of technical terms, and images to help readers visualize and understand more complex ideas. Her agenda is to provide information and solutions from her areas of expertise, with the goal of helping people find relief from their pain and grief and also may help Americans learn from the missteps and mistakes and begin the process of rebuilding America as a somewhat united set of durable and sustainable communities. Dr. Farmer hopes her posts spark robust discussions.

Dr. Farmer currently lives in the Life Sciences Complex in Pod Sector 5 with Sir Maxwell, an orange and white short hair cat, another survivor of the Great Collapse.

• 101. Beginnings. Her first set of blog posts offer a basic understanding of our species, and how our unique adaptations helped us to thrive when others failed, with particular attention to the last 10 thousand years, or the Anthropocene.

• 102. Being Human. The second set identifies social behavioral dynamics that set the stage for us to exceed the sustainable equilibrium we had enjoyed through most of the Anthropocene.

• 103. The Great Collapse - DRAFT. A third set identifies intersections between humans and the environment that led us to the Great Collapse, perhaps even near extinction.

• 104. The Big Sort - DRAFT. The fourth set discusses the social political context and infrastructure underlying the Big Sort less than a year ago.

• 105. Pods, Guilds, and All the Rest - DRAFT. The final set explains the infrastructure and logistics of how we ended up in two fundamental different sets of living situations, living in profoundly different lifestyles.

• As you can see, the latter three are still in draft, schedule to be completed latter in the yearhttps://ogallalacommons.org/oc_blog/what-is-the-ogallala-aquifer/. Together these blog posts represent Dr. Farmer’s take on our collective history vis-à-vis the planet.

Farmer wholeheartedly believes that an exchange of ideas is critical for rebuilding our communities, with a mind toward better, more durable communities and a more sustainable quality of life for generations to come. With a keener understanding of our past mistakes and our current dynamics, we stand a better chance of creating a sustainable and rewarding future. Hers is a righteous and time-honored cause. Let’s hope she succeeds. 6/13/2030

This blog is a work of fiction by a main character in the novel, By 2030: A Survival Story by Julia E. Hammett. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

In 2030, it’s moot to say “a new historic record” or “a record was shattered” because since around 2022, all we’ve done is break record after record for toxins, temperature, water levels, etc. It’s been estimated that we broke over 100k environmental records in the five-year period between 2022 and 2027. One record is worthy of note here: the last time the CO₂ levels were this high was about 3.5 million years ago, and our genus Homo hadn’t even emerged. Our distant hominid ancestors who lived at that time were Australopithecines, in particular Australopithecus afarensis, nicknamed Lucy.

Since Lucy went extinct, about 3 million years ago, roughly a dozen hominid species have emerged, and all but one also went extinct. Only we have survived, and apparently even thrived on extreme climate fluctuations, but the other hominids’ failures and successes can serve as lab experiments that selected for our specific evolution and survival. This is noteworthy.

According to Dr. Rick Potts of the Smithsonian Institution, there are three possible outcomes our hominid ancestors had, when dealing with extreme climate fluctuations: they became more mobile, they adapted which sometimes led to evolving through natural selection, or they went extinct. Apparently our ancient hominid ancestors did some of all three. Over 3 million years a dozen species of hominids emerged and all went extinct except for us, Homo sapiens. All adapted behaviorally and evolutionarily to a degree, and a few migrated from Africa to Europe and Asia. Their failures led to their extinction while we emerged as their descendants, having inherited their most adaptive innovations, the very best of them.

Some evolutionary innovations over those millions of years include our ability to stand upright, to walk on two legs, and even to run. Unlike any other primate, we are fully bipedal. This increased our mobility and freed our hands to create, invent, and carry tools, weapons, and essential items, like our young. Because of our increased dexterity, and because of our enlarged brains we developed a greater ability to analyze, plan, and invent. We also made increasingly more sophisticated tools for processing food and manufacturing craft items. In every age we’ve invented new tools to help us harness and burn more energy, produce more food and commodities, and expand the global supply train and the built environment. This growth mindset finally caught up with us in the 2020s.

One of our most important innovations has been our ability to communicate symbolically so we can tell meaningful stories to pass information generationally in over 6500 languages worldwide. Writing came along over 5000 years ago. At first writing was limited to legal and accounting purposes. Gradually writing became more common until worldwide literacy exceeded 80% by 2000.

This was found in modern-day Turkey. The message was inscribed in three cuneiform languages: Old Persian, Babylonian and Elamite. It is a proclamation from the Persian King Xerxes (Turkey (486–465 BC) and begins: “Ahuramazda is the great god, the greatest god who created the sky and created the land and created humans Who gave prosperity to the humans Who made Xerxes king King of many kings, being the only ruler of the totality of all lands…”

Perhaps our sense of superiority over other organisms comes from our recognition that we can control our destiny more than others. We have the capability to dominate, exploit, and displace other species or even drive them extinct. Perhaps at a base level this is also the mindset behind one group of humans dominating another.

While this is much debated in the literature, we simply don’t know how old this kind of predatory mindset is or even exactly what it means to be human, but we know we’re here and the other hominids are not. No doubt our survival is tied to our ability to be self aware and to effectively steward and manage resources until quite recently, when our arrogance, or ignorance or naivete caused us to stop minding the store.

Over 3 million years ago, during the Quaternary, hominid species evolved physically and adapted behaviorally in response to their conditions of life, which included many climate fluctuations, periods of extreme heat and cold, and of wet and dry. Some hominid species migrated substantial distances to new regions or even continents, encountering entirely new plant and animal life necessitating new techniques for obtaining food and shelter.

Of all the hominids, only our species, Homo sapiens, emerged as survivors to this time. We are the cumulative sum of our unique adaptive traits, related to mobility, our ability to communicate with language, and to solve problems, devise plans, and innovate and invent tools. Our combined social and biological adaptations have been tested during previous climate extremes, which should have given us an advantage. But this time is different.

The damage we’d done to the earth was so extensive that by the mid-2020s, severe weather events happened almost as often as mass shootings in the United States did. The only distinguishable weather patterns were constant change and extreme events. This could also be said for our social climate. It begs the question, could there possibly be a correlation between our societal ills and the extreme weather events? My answer is yes.

Every single state-level society that came before us has failed. Is this an inevitable outcome by the very nature of state-level societies? Was it only a matter of time until our current state-level societies destroyed their environments and came crashing down? In 2025, the stakes were so much higher, because we seemed to have triggered a mass co-extinction event, at least one. Our human species’ resilience has allowed us to be here today, when the rest of our hominid ancestors went extinct. But the question remains, do we still have the resilience to survive this time? I hope we do, but look how many didn’t.

The following blogs will “drill down” in

to some of the social and environmental dynamics leading to where we find ourselves today in 2030.

This blog is a work of fiction by a main character in the novel, By 2030: A Survival Story by Julia E. Hammett. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

All species are interconnected through the Web of Life. Organisms provide services for supporting each other in a sustainable ecosystem. We benefit infinitely from our relationships with nature, but we really haven’t been the best of stewards, particularly with our state-level societies that emerged over the last 10,000 years.

Tragically, tens of thousands of species have gone extinct on our watch, including a substantial number over the last several years. As we humans have impacted our physical world, we have dramatically altered landscapes and habitats and impacted millions of other lifeforms.

Because of the interconnectedness, or intersectionality of virtually all life on earth, scientists had warned us that extreme climate events could cause massive co-extinctions that could lead to the annihilation of planetary life. We were warned, and the scientists were right.

As Alphas, we haven’t always considered our impact on the planet we call home. At times in history, including the recent past, we have caused substantial numbers of co-extinctions (to be discussed further in a later blog). The loss of any species can lead to gaps in an ecosystem’s lifecycle, but the impact of co-extinctions is inevitably catastrophic for an ecosystem. This is our planet, and the time has come for us to embrace responsible stewardship with compassion for eternity.

Harlows Creek in Southwest Washington, near the Columbia River.

In order to understand how an ecosystem works, and how physical and spatial dynamics interplay off each other within a landscape, I am adopting the term intersectionality from Feminist Theory. I will discuss the term in more detail in a later blog, but for now, think of it as a theoretical framework for understanding the synergy between interconnected factors within a system.

Our wanton destruction of wildlife through deforestation, mining, urban sprawl, and warfare was deplorable and unconscionable. To expand our global supply chain, rivers were channeled, we dug canals between continents, tore down mountains, built highways and railways through fragile ecosystems, and we altered shorelines worldwide. We mined coal, and drilled, pumped, and piped oil and gas thousands of feet below ground and the sea floor, we spewed chemical toxins and particulates into our atmosphere during refinement and while burning fuel. And when oil, gas, and coal reserves began to run dry, we doubled down and fought wars over these fuel resources. In time, these same fossil fuels driving our economy, proved to be our state-level society dismantling. First we grew and grew, like cancer on the land. But we eventually ran out of stuff and there we were, on the brink.

This blog is a work of fiction by a main character in the novel, By 2030: A Survival Story by Julia E. Hammett. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

As we ran short on oil in North America we began the intense use of some of the most dangerous energy extraction methods ever. One was Horizontal Drilling which allow drillers to push pipe horizontally underground for up to 2 miles which can permanently poison water tables and soils. Another was Fracking, or the fracturing of bedrock using pressurized fluid including water and various thickening agents. The third was Deepwater Drilling offshore.

In some cases offshore drilling could be done without significant negative impact if the right equipment was used, including double cases for the drilling holds. Fish and other sea wildlife find the rigs to be protective for many species. The structures themselves are not always a detriment. Typically, abandoned rigs gradually become essentially reef habitats that support productive sealife.

But the Deepwater Water Offshore Drilling was a pretty awful development, particularly in the case of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill off the coast of Louisiana and Mississippi in the Gulf of Mexico. At a depth of 35,500 feet, or nearly 7 miles, it took over three months to cap the well and two more before they could declare it effectively dead, and countless years more of cleanup including an unknown, but significant amount of proprietary chemical dispersants to scatter the oil blob in the Gulf. If is believed these impacted the AMOC some 10 years later.

These technologies were used intensely over the last decade until the Great Collapse. For our last few drops of oil we discharged toxins and dispersants into waterways and water tables throughout the heartland, we transported that unrefined oil and gas and chemical dispersants thousands of miles to coastal refineries, mostly for gasoline powered engines. This doesn’t even touch the damage to our own health, to other organisms, or to the climate by the production and release of carbon and other toxins into the air.

Fracking for gas diagram. Photo by jaddingt/via Adobe from 11/18/2016 PBS article, “Earthquakes triggered by fracking, not just wastewater disposal, study finds.”

l execs knew about these costs to people and the planet, all along. In 2016 we uncovered documents that confirmed the oil industry knew as far back as the 1960s about the harmful health effects of fossil fuels, and their environmental and climatic effects. Some of us knew where the fossil fuels were taking us, but we didn’t know how to stop it. The Fossil Fuel Industry and their lobbyists had control of many elected officials. The Military Industrial Complex doubled down, arguing for the critical need for our National Security, and also engaging in wars in oil-rich countries, such as in the Middle East.

“I’d put my money on the sun and solar energy. What a source of power! I hope we don’t have to wait until oil and coal run out before we tackle that. I wish I had more years left!” - Thomas Jefferson, speaking to his friend Henry T. Ford, 1931

Understandably, Thomas Edison’s ideas about solar energy and other alternatives got off to an incredibly slow start because the oil industry was so entrenched they were impossible to displace.

But our destructive use of fossil fuels was hardly the starting point for humans being on the wrong side of history. In other blogs I detail our beginnings, our historical path, and the many factors leading to what became known as the Great Collapse of our existing climate and our way of life prior to 2030.

This blog is a work of fiction by a main character in the novel, By 2030: A Survival Story by Julia E. Hammett. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

Part of our “secret sauce” is that we humans thrive on a certain degree of disturbance. Ecologists talk about three basic levels of disturbance: low, intermediate, and high or catastrophic. According to the Intermediate Disturbance Hypothesis, the highest degree of diversity richness in terms of numbers of organisms and available resources, are at the intermediate level. So like us, many mammals and other organisms thrive at these levels.

Systems with lower amounts of disturbance tend to have a few more dominant organisms that tend to outcompete others. In ecosystems with high (catastrophic) levels of disturbance, all organisms are at a high risk for extinction. So organisms that are most adaptable, such as humans, tend to thrive in ecosystems and landscapes with more intermediate scales of disturbance. By our very nature, we thrive in more diverse environments. Many of our food and medicinal plants (such as fruiting trees, berrying shrubs, herbs, seeds, and roots) and many food animals we rely upon also thrive in intermediate disturbance environments.

About 12,000 to 10,000 years ago we humans started learning how to increase productivity of many foods, even domesticating some plants and animals that thrived in environments with intermediate disturbance levels. It is not fully understood why this time period was when we began to manipulate the earth. There may have been underlying climate events at this time that humans adapted to, alongside starting to take the wheel, much of this still needs to be sorted out, but regardless, it is fair to assume there was a strong climate component in this new set of human adaptations and a degree of synergy between them, until there wasn’t.

One of the earliest places known for early domestication was the so-called Fertile Crescent region between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers where we have our earliest dates for domestication of plants and animals and also early city-states such as Ur, Uruk and Eridu. Symbiotic human/plant relationships were evolving over time on six different continents.

I suspect the sparse reporting is a lack of research on this subject in some regions is due to a the sparse research in some regions for a variety of political and historical reasons. For well over 2000 years there is evidence of mutual benefits exchanged between humans and various plants and animals, and there is solid evidence of domesticated species in Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia, and the Americas. but there are numerous plants and animals exploited in virtually every continent on earth.

Upon our initiation of landscape modification for small gardens and burning and clearing small patches for hunting and gardening we were changing the landscape. As our populations grew, we created city-states and later nation-states. The impact on the earth’s landscapes was profound. We can now look back and see how we impacted the earth, through our insatiable political games and quest to grow economies. For example, much of the original Fertile Crescent area was dead and devoid of most lifeforms by 2023.

Anthropogenic landscapes are constructed by and for humans. Ideally Anthropogenic environments should be built with a regard for sustainability and resilience but they rarely have been, in the history of humanity, with the rare exceptions of Indigenous societies and some other smaller-scaled societies, where landscapes are consciously maintained to provide food and shelter at a subsistence level for that community. Larger-scaled societies have tended to develop landscapes with growth in mind. As the earliest larger societies produced surpluses, there became a need for trade centers and then cities. With a surplus there was also a need for a standardized form of currency, or money for trading large quantities of goods. This was the beginning of Capitalism. Two other basic characteristics of state-level societies are bureaucracies, to help manage trade and regulations, and a standing army, to protect their wealth. Both consumed a significant amount of resources just to maintain their roles within societies. Both are now obsolete as neither proved to be sustainable.

Back in the ancient world, it wasn’t too long before early city-states began competing for land, resources, and labor. Soon there were wars as various historic figures vied for control and expansion of lands and people under their jurisdiction. More people meant a need for more food, resources, and security. Before long we overshot local city-state landscapes and microclimates, with our insatiable hunger for more of everything. Ancient Roman and Greek writers describe how they expanded and colonized to obtain more goods, labor, and forested land because local resources were exhausted. They helped extend global supply chains along with Vikings, Mongolians, and many others. Instead of stewards seeking balance, many of us species became overzealous consumers and takers.

Most anthropologists who have studied the current Anthropocene epoch, think it dates back about 10 to 12 thousand years ago, around the time of plant and animal domestication. There is evidence of the carbon record from then, probably from the clearing and deforestation when people began to cultivate plants and herd animals in the Middle East and elsewhere. Stewardship by the ancient Greeks and Romans and their impacts on the earth in the 5th and 4th centuries B.C., were considered by Socrates (quoted in Xenophon ca. 362 B.C. in Oeconomicus 5.12):

“The earth willingly teaches righteousness to those who can learn; for the better she is served, the more good things she gives in return.”

Our species has significantly impacted the earth for at least 10,000 years. The climate record indicates an additional uptick in carbon dioxide concentrations during the Industrial Revolution (1700-1800s), although it doesn’t appear on all global Ice core profiles, and yet another around 1950, characterized by researchers at the Stockholm Resilience Centre as the Great Acceleration, which is when many climate scientists think should mark the beginning of the Anthropocene.

To sum up, in my view there are three basic eras or phases within the Anthropocene: 1) beginning roughly 10,000 years ago, with early plant and animal domestication and the formation of city-states; 2) in the late 1800s with the Industrial Revolution, and finally; 3) the boomer age marked by the end of World War 2. All changed the trajectory and the rate of change in our path into the future in terms of technology, industry, Carbon Dioxide (CO₂) levels, and temperature.

The Anthropocene is roughly parallel to the Holocene in large temporal scales. But use of the term Anthropocene also signals the role of humans in the changes to the climate. Perhaps the most notable difference between the two is the type of evidence used to date these epochs. I don’t think it’s clear whether the Holocene was entirely physical, or environmental forces, or if humans caused an impact. What is clear, is that never have we ever been closer to complete extinction than we were during the current climate emergency flanked by recent pandemics and massive waves of violent rebellions and insurrections.

It’s important to consider why most people ignored the warning signs. Many Indigenous groups worldwide were some of the first to sound. They tried to sound the alarm and tell the rest of us that something was dramatically changing. Again and again they told us that we all needed to focus on protecting our water, our air, and our forests, as well as many species we relied upon for food. But for the most part, their warnings were ignored.

In the United States Indigenous people stood on the front lines protesting against new oil pipelines being built in order to protect water which they consider sacred as a fundamental source of life. They built a “Water is Life” movement with thousands of Indigenous Water Protectors and millions of allied supporters. Not a single President, nor did the Congress dare to stop the flow of oil, even well after the damage to our health and to the planet were understood. Americans, even those supporting the Water Protectors, were too hooked on oil, plastics, and pop culture to change course. until well into the 2020s when the global temperatures started to overshoot.

By 2025 our “climate” really went off the rails, and we simply didn’t have the bandwidth to shore up vulnerable spots, so many ecosystems collapsed. Our historical actions had caused the creation of the Anthropocene on steroids, but we hadn’t done it mindfully. We were told again and again that climate scientists predicted a catastrophic outcome if we didn’t drastically reduce emissions of toxic gasses including methane and C01 and C02, but Americans had no appetite for limiting our use of fossil fuels in any way.

Even after scientists sounded the alarm that we had a real chance of going extinct along with much of life on earth, most Americans doggedly stayed distracted with pop culture and still burned oil for fuel and consumed lots of imported unessential merch. Not until social upheaval led to collapse of the government did we face the hard truth that we had lost all government institutions including all emergency services. That was 2025 and 2026 when we desperately needed our infrastructure to hold us together in the face of the superstorms and the rioting and looting but they were gone, all that was left was chaos. We were on our own.

Ironically we had finally realized we were living in the Anthropocene and how we had changed landscapes and built environments. But it was too late. America was born out of colonial invasion of refugees from Europe seeking freedom from religious persecution but as we declared our freedom in the Declaration of Independence 250 years ago.

In 2026 we should have been grooving on our Semi-quincentennial but many Americans were dug in just trying to survive and President Trump managed to suck all the air out of the room with his various attempts at distractions, which included serious damage to the White House and the Reflecting Pool on the Mall.

Ultimately our addiction to consumerism and materialistic economic growth mindset kept us from making the prudent sacrifices needed to avoid the climate crisis. Corporations and the billionaires who controlled our government prevented us from ever taking the necessary steps to prevent the planet from catastrophe. It wasn’t just gasoline for fuel and coal and oil for heating but all the plastic and synthetic junk we constantly bought, at the urging of social media outlets all in the name of growing the economy. We never created any sort of comprehensive plans to mitigate the tremendous wave of superstorms we faced. Fires, floods, winds, and earthquakes took their toll, destroying hundreds of thousands of homes, hundreds of roads and bridges, and most of the transportation hubs throughout the U.S.

Mother Nature wasn’t waiting any longer for humans to get their acts together. Permafrost ceased to exist. Icebergs were melting, and when the methane gas that was frozen in them back during the last ice Age was released, literally all hell broke loose. It was what scientists call a self-perpetuating feedback loop. No longer could any human put the lid on it, as we had done when we learned there was a significant ozone leak back in the late 1970s. Pulling the plug on aerosol chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) may be about the last, and perhaps one of the only smart moves regarding the climate that we ever made.

Superstorms wreaked havoc, not only in coastal areas, but also in the heartland, and wildfires stretched from the western coast of the U.S. northward through boreal forests of the subarctic to the Northeast United States where Americans suffered the same kinds of severe droughts as the Spaniards and French on the other side of the Atlantic.

By 2025 self-perpetuating feedback loops were uncontainable, so much so that massive stretches of coastlines worldwide, including the majority of major urban centers and global ports were deemed uninhabitable. For the most part, all we could do was ride it out. Those who were lucky, found refuge from the storm, at least for some of the worst of it. Humans do have ingenuity on our side, and remarkably millions did survive, even if it was due to luck as much as anything else.

This blog is a work of fiction by a main character in the novel, By 2030: A Survival Story by Julia E. Hammett. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

Most people living in industrialized nations thought they were past having to struggle to survive, that their ancestors had to worry about it but it wasn’t for modern populations, that was something of the past. Of course this totally ignores the fact that every single state level society has had members in desperate need for the basics, long before environmental and social conditions severely deteriorated the standard of living in the 2020s. Most disregarded all the signs including the massive acceleration in the number of displaced people, far exceeding the post-WW2 record held until 2015. All the signs were there, that like all historic state-level societies, ours would surely fall, but this time it would be epic, as a collectively global event due to our interconnections.

Some luckier survivors avoided much of the worst chaos and hand to hand combat by escaping the urban and suburban areas, and obtaining refuge in naturally occurring refugia, isolated relic habitats that had the key ingredients for human survival. They would vary in different regions, but they would often have a good, reliable water source, natural protection from the elements, like a shelter or a cave, and a variety of vegetation to provide fuel, shelter, tools, and hopefully even a little gardening and perhaps raising of some animals. These naturally occurring habitat remnants might have been relatively stable for hundreds, even thousands of years, with long records of wildlife taking sanctuary through bad times over the ages. Finally, after hundreds or more years, it was our turn again, but only for some of the luckiest and smartest of us who had the skills, know-how, and resources to truly get off the grid for a while.

Most successful survivors who stayed near former urban areas had to respond to the crisis using a collective model because individuals would easily be overrun. In some cases where several families banded together like a bubble during COVID-19. If someone claimed a refugia space too close to a former urban area they had to constantly defend their refugia for months, if not years.

In many cases, refugia accessible to larger urban populations were already occupied by preppers and survivalists, some who bugged out decades before the Great Collapse. Typically some forceful group established cultural boundaries around prime resources. Many have small arsenals to protect them and stockpiles for disaster scenarios. These refugia are often called camps or reserves. They quickly became subject to power grabs by despotic camp leaders who compelled people in their jurisdictions to play by their rules.

In densely populated areas, such as in Southern Coastal California, well known refugia in the Santa Monica Mountains became places of contention that were fought over in near feudal war like pieces on a game board. I hope a historian tells their story someday.

Toward Climate Change Refugia Conservation at an Ecoregion Scale (Balantic et al. 2021)

In the end, most refugial areas adjacent to large urban areas were destroyed by explosives, earth movement, depleted food resources, and in local springs and creeks the water was fouled by human refuse and other toxins. In most cases, the better choices for refugia were located far from urban areas. The Megarich identified many of these “islands” of key resources and created fortified bubbles for their families and their extended support staff. In fact some of the billionaires had engineering and design experts who helped the patriarch seek out existing climate change refugia that were preadapted for the purpose of creating bubbles. Once the billionaires secured these areas with their private police, access was restricted.

Without sufficient sanctuaries in the form of naturally occurring refugia, most people were left to fend for themselves. Many had to keep moving from place to place trying to avoid the looting and the violence. One option left to those living in the wildlands with the proper set of skills and knowledge was to construct a niche, to rebuild an ecosystem as a small-scale anthropogenic landscape. This had essentially been the goal for decades of many preppers and those trying to live off the grid (OTG). During the Great Collapse, when we lost our global supply chain, we were suddenly forced to live within their means, which meant what was available within the local region and nearby landscapes. We were essentially all OTG at that point in time.

Lots of people tried to survive in more urban areas but even then they were looking for some kind of shelter where they could camp with some access to food and water. And a good number of us had no reliable shelter and had to move around, either in urban areas, or camped in what used to be suburbs or even more distant wildlands.

It came down to what kinds of skills a person had before the Great Collapse or how quickly they could gain those skills. Those clueless souls who tried to rely on the skills of others or thought they would shoot to get what they needed with guns mostly ended up dead. Most of those who had the basic skills of camping, and reading landscapes and maps managed to find or make a refuge and survive. The other major group of survivors just had to stay mobile. Many still are in 2030. We should also never forget the tens of millions of people who were already on the move worldwide, more than ever in history, displaced political, economic and climate refugees. I’ll talk more about mobility in a later blog.

Some of the best, most sustainable anthropogenic landscapes replicate naturally existing land features such as refugia, and have healthy numbers of native species of plants and animals. In a sense it is only possible to construct a sustainable niche by living in balance with many other organisms within that ecosystem. This goes counter to what many human groups, particularly state-level societies have done in the past. States and some chieftainships had a long history of exceeding their existing landscapes and expanding into new areas by relying on growth-based economies, or by “conquering” a land. This more forward-thinking strategy with sustainability as core value, requires living within one’s environmental means, something thousands of Indigenous nations worldwide have done for many generations.

So long as these new groups of humans, either extended families, or small communities lived within their means and didn’t extract resources from other areas, they could potentially remain sustainable indefinitely. Refugia would have been used during climate crises and perhaps to stay hidden from other people at various times in the history of human occupation in North America. These spaces could end up being ranches and farms, and even small communities over time, depending on their size. Some refugia were so small that they could only be temporary and support a very limited number of people.

Of course we all hope that at the very least, some of these OTG anthropogenic experiments in using refugia and other remote places in the wildlands will have proven successful. It is evident that many nearer what had been larger population centers, were overrun by the same kinds of violent gangs of disruptors who brought down much of the surviving suburban areas and even many communities living in Small Town U.S.A. But by what many consider a miracle a number of us managed to move around and find shelter and manage to still be here when so many are not. This is an important time to take measures and write down some of the lessons we have learned the hard way.

This blog is a work of fiction by a main character in the novel, By 2030: A Survival Story by Julia E. Hammett. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.