A resilient community is not just your retreat or your cabin in the woods. It is a community. Numbers are important. You need numbers to provide adequate manpower, security and the array of skills needed after TEOTWAWKI.
Small communities have been the backbone of civilization since the dawn of man, and remain the smallest group needed for long term viable survival. Call 'em tribes, clans or whatever else you want--it's a group of several families who have banded together for mutual benefit and survival. Community members are bound together by co-dependence, trust, tradition and beliefs. These tight-knit community bonds last for lifetimes and generations.
These kinds of communities have been around for thousands of years, but have become rare in our modern world. Families are spread across continents and only see each other occasionally, people move and relocate frequently, friends lose touch with each other and few of us are more than casually friendly with our neighbors. Many of us yearn for a sense of community, belonging and need--we yearn for the "tribes" that mankind has thrived in for millennia. It's pretty sad.
So, it's this kind of small, tightly knit community that we want to make resilient and self sufficient. And it's this kind of survival group that would stand the best chance post-TEOTWAWKI.
Advantages of Technology
Modern technology has given us massive advantages that our ancestors did not have. We have electricity and all of its benefits, combustion engines, the list goes on. The resilient community seeks to "harden" their access to those technologies so that they will be available no matter what happens to the global grid. When TEOTWAWKI comes, a resilient community will still have electricity, transportation and so on.
Worldwide electronic collaboration/open source idea sharing is one recent "technology" that holds a particular interest to a resilient community. Communities of the past were usually isolated from each other. Their ideas and knowledge were limited to the community's immediate members. Today, we can communicate and share ideas and information with people across the world. This information sharing is incredibly powerful--now you are not limited to just the ideas of people that you know, you have access to the ideas, practices and techniques of everyone. Through this open source collaboration, the best ideas can be identified, refined and perfected.
Manufacturing
When you add in small-scale automated manufacturing technologies, you can see the vast potential that collaboration holds for resilient communities. A small community typically lacks most any manufacturing capability. If you want a new machine/widget/gizmo, you've got to buy or trade for it. If you can't buy/trade for it, you're screwed. Take the Native Americans, for example--they had none of the advanced manufacturing capabilities of the settlers/pioneers/foreign devils--and were defeated and conquered (in part) because of it. Today, we are all very dependent on manufacturing, and dependence is not good.
Take a car part for example. Today, it's produced in a factory hundreds or thousands of miles away--maybe even across the ocean. It's then shipped to a distributor and then shipped to your local shop before you buy it. We're dependent on that system working in order to get that part.
What if you could just load a schematic into your community (or basement) automated manufacturing machine and have it built right in front of your eyes? Now what if thousands of others had collaborated together to make that part more durable, safer and more efficient than the original? Now what if instead of a car part, you were building an entire car?
Small communities have been the backbone of civilization since the dawn of man, and remain the smallest group needed for long term viable survival. Call 'em tribes, clans or whatever else you want--it's a group of several families who have banded together for mutual benefit and survival. Community members are bound together by co-dependence, trust, tradition and beliefs. These tight-knit community bonds last for lifetimes and generations.
These kinds of communities have been around for thousands of years, but have become rare in our modern world. Families are spread across continents and only see each other occasionally, people move and relocate frequently, friends lose touch with each other and few of us are more than casually friendly with our neighbors. Many of us yearn for a sense of community, belonging and need--we yearn for the "tribes" that mankind has thrived in for millennia. It's pretty sad.
So, it's this kind of small, tightly knit community that we want to make resilient and self sufficient. And it's this kind of survival group that would stand the best chance post-TEOTWAWKI.
Advantages of Technology
Modern technology has given us massive advantages that our ancestors did not have. We have electricity and all of its benefits, combustion engines, the list goes on. The resilient community seeks to "harden" their access to those technologies so that they will be available no matter what happens to the global grid. When TEOTWAWKI comes, a resilient community will still have electricity, transportation and so on.
Worldwide electronic collaboration/open source idea sharing is one recent "technology" that holds a particular interest to a resilient community. Communities of the past were usually isolated from each other. Their ideas and knowledge were limited to the community's immediate members. Today, we can communicate and share ideas and information with people across the world. This information sharing is incredibly powerful--now you are not limited to just the ideas of people that you know, you have access to the ideas, practices and techniques of everyone. Through this open source collaboration, the best ideas can be identified, refined and perfected.
Manufacturing
When you add in small-scale automated manufacturing technologies, you can see the vast potential that collaboration holds for resilient communities. A small community typically lacks most any manufacturing capability. If you want a new machine/widget/gizmo, you've got to buy or trade for it. If you can't buy/trade for it, you're screwed. Take the Native Americans, for example--they had none of the advanced manufacturing capabilities of the settlers/pioneers/foreign devils--and were defeated and conquered (in part) because of it. Today, we are all very dependent on manufacturing, and dependence is not good.
Take a car part for example. Today, it's produced in a factory hundreds or thousands of miles away--maybe even across the ocean. It's then shipped to a distributor and then shipped to your local shop before you buy it. We're dependent on that system working in order to get that part.
What if you could just load a schematic into your community (or basement) automated manufacturing machine and have it built right in front of your eyes? Now what if thousands of others had collaborated together to make that part more durable, safer and more efficient than the original? Now what if instead of a car part, you were building an entire car?
Sound crazy? It's not. People are already open sourcing car design:
