The Problems That I Ve Seen in Survival Planning at a Community Level Come from Trying

The problems that I’ve seen in survival planning at a community level come from trying to streamline costs by creating implicit bureaucratic systems of control. We’ll have a water team, that takes money from a budget, and Does Water. Farming team that Does Farming and so on.

But, in practice - and I urge you all as strongly as humanly possible to check this for yourselves - communes are incredibly difficult to organize, inflexible, conflict-ridden bureaucratic nightmares for the most part. Resource sharing and labor sharing for the “communal life” TURNS OUT TO BE THE PROBLEM, NOT THE SOLUTION.

Do not think of this as being “we’re all in this together” because then the questions of *governance* - who owns the resources, and who manages them - becomes the hub of community life. Central planning and so on then rapidly eat all the resilience and good will.

Far, far better for infrastructure to be scaled household by household whenever possible, and the excess costs eaten. If next door’s water filter breaks, and you want to share, by all means, but it is critical that essential infrastructure is owned at the individual level whenever humanly possible. Otherwise you wind up having to build, for *every single system* a governance and ownership structure that allocates resources and responsibility, and - as far as I can tell - that is incredibly problematic in the places it has been tried.

The crux of this is that survival is an individual endeavor. The medieval villages were ruthlessly independent, individual-driven places. Yes, there was a blacksmith, and he charged cold hard cash or goods and services for every transaction. Yes, there was a miller, and he took 20% off the top of your grinding job.

I urge everybody to look at the “effort to results” ratio of the commune movement, with it’s emphasis on sharing. As far as I can see, they’ve spent so much time haggling about consensus and trying to be efficient by sharing that they’ve gotten next to nothing done in spite of so many talented people sinking their entire lives into these efforts.

Hence my conclusion: the family is the unit for everything that can *possibly* be done on a family scale. For the few things where the cost gradient is just too high (i.e. well drilling - we’re not doing one well per family) the resources need to be either so abundant that no resource allocation is necessary (i.e. river water) or market driven. Market-driven means the resource has an owner, possibly chosen by lottery or changed every year or something who is responsible for purchase and operation of the hardware at hand, and can charge a fee for the job.

Grain milling is an example. You do not want people to use the grain mills carelessly. Feed a pebble through one carelessly, for example, and your community just lost access to a completely irreplaceable resource. So you have a miller, who’s job it is to make sure that grain mill works, and stays working, because that’s his livelihood, and he’s going to take much better care of it than bored teenagers send over there to mill the grain on the communally owned grain mill.

This is *not* an egalitarian model. It’s not a “we’re all in this together” model as many of the gun-toting survivalists have with their rigid chains of command and so on.

This is an authentic village model, in which individual households club together for mutual defense and for access to each-other’s skills, but in which property is owned individually except for a few resources like the well.

Cannot stress this enough: intentional communities return very, very little result for huge resource investments. Serious nightmare. Far better to deal with the family level, and extend notions like individual property rights and resource ownership, and make sure that the *fundamental* agreements over land and so on keep things balanced at a communal level, rather than relying on an essentially “socialist” approach to village management.

I’m not against community. But I am against the bureaucracies which control resource and labor sharing in communities, and the resulting irresponsibility and disengagement which are the banes of every resource sharing community I know of. That problem is far too difficult to solve in a survival setting, and my suggestion is that it be *avoided.*

In my model, the family is the basic unit of resource sharing and resource control. It *is* less efficient, **on paper.** But, in practice, try having three families share a car for a year, and tell me you wouldn’t rather have spent the money on a vehicle.

closing thoughts from a long day

If you want to change the world, get serious, get educated, and get to work. Pick a problem, whether it’s water quality or organic agriculture, and get good and educated. A lot you can get online - start with TED talks for an overview, then progress to UN reports and similar documents. It might take a year or two to master the language and get a sense of what’s going on in the field because, well, it’s a hobby - you’re doing this in the time you might be fishing.

But after a while, if you’ve got a reasonable degree of practical intelligence, you’ll start to say “I know how this works, I know why people don’t have clean water, I know what diseases they face.” Maybe you donate money to pay other people to work on this. Maybe you volunteer to travel and help somewhere as a part of an NGO project. Maybe you stay at home and tinker with things searching for a breakthrough.

If we had a few tens of thousands of people behind us with about this much involvement, we’d be fit to change the world in some big ways. It’s a Linux or Wikipedia amount of effort and labor. We have an operating system. We have an encyclopedia. Now we need an infrastructure workbook.

Practical back-yard engineering culture is what is going to save the world. Mass production has its role, but we still don’t have evolved designs on all of these basic systems like wood stoves. The field is wide open to innovation.

I’m just beginning to see the Hexayurt Project people supersede my understanding of what needs to be done in some areas. If you need to know where to buy tape, or what the supply chain issues are with boards in a given geography, or feedback on new door design, the mailing list is better than I am - lots of people, lots of thinking and independent study and experiment and organization.

That is very, very gratifying. It was hard when this was my project, but it’s much, much easier now that it’s ours.

Now let’s see if we can’t get similar movement on all these other areas, a great alliance to push appropriate technology development up to the point where it just starts growing like cell phones, and leaving goodness in its wake.

Bruce Beach Nuclear Survival Resources & Ark II Fallout Shelter Site
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Help in Forming Communities

We provide a Service for those of you interested in joining or starting a group to survive the events of this millennial times. Being in a group rather than by yourself or with only your immediate family will be tremendously beneficial both before and after any catastrophic events that may occur. So whether you are interested in survival from a point of concern about Earth Changes, Nuclear War, or Prophetic Teachings, please consider the following:

• In a large group, there will be enough people so that even if a few are injured, there will be enough uninjured to carry out the necessary tasks (food production, etc.), until the injured have recovered.

• A large group will not be as vulnerable to raiders as a small group would be.

• Larger groups, using their money collectively, will be able to build a more desirable living structure, and prepare more sufficiently than smaller groups who have less funding available.

• Larger numbers of people provide greater support psychologically and emotionally, which will be essential to prevent depression in the aftertime.

• Large groups, with more people at their disposal, will be able to re-build themselves in the aftertime more quickly than small groups working with fewer people.

• A large group will be able to form some sort of actual "community" in the aftertime, as opposed to a smaller group or family who will be relatively alone.

If you're interested in joining a community, or are at least seriously considering it, you may wish to take advantage of our free survival group formation service. We'll help you find a group of like-minded people to fit your needs. Once you've formed a group or joined a pre-formed one, we'll give you some suggested guidelines and help your group get started with their preparation."

Our List Philosophy

There are currently several survivalist expectations:

1. The nuclear holocaust expectation
2. The millennialist expectation that anticipates catastrophic events.
3. The earth change expectation that anticipates catastrophic events.
4. Survivalist expectations that wish to establish a place of refuge from natural (hurricane, earthquake, etc.)
or man made (social disruption, war, terrorism) disasters.
5. Lesser disaster expectations that can be responded to by neighborhood and existing community preparedness.

In this list you will find many representative entries of communities of each of the above expectations. Therefore, in selecting a community you want to be sure that their expectations match OR EXCEED yours.

Some communities, and some lists, are VERY exclusive. Some lists, from which we pick up entries, and ask if they would reciprocate by listing our list, refuse because we list communities that are not Christian. Other communities ask to be removed from our list because of some narrowly defined non-Christian life style.

But, we list EVERYONE, Christian and non-Christian. Racists, and anti-racists. Actually bigots of almost every stripe. Racist, national, political, religious you name it. Our guide is the old poem:

Heretic, Pagan was his shout!
as he drew a circle that left us out.
But Love and I had the wit to win,
as we drew a larger circle,
that took him in.

At this point, you may wonder, who we won't list. Well, we try to not list:

People Selling Products (There are many other such lists elsewhere)

People with messages (religious, political, or otherwise) who are not actually trying to form groups or communities.

Still, there are some borderline commercial entries that make it onto our list.
(Recreational Vehicle facilities that are selling survival space,
Some people who are perhaps trying to help form survival groups,
but who are perhaps really just trying to sell their consulting or training services).

If you find any in these latter categories, who are really just selling a service and who are not trying to form a cooperative group or community, please tell us and I will remove them from the list.

Click here to return to the
INDEX of STATES

The "Other" Category of Communities

These are often some additional community names listed under each state that we have heard about, but that we have not located, and that we know nothing about.

They are what are called INTENTIONAL COMMUNITIES (as are all the communities on our list) but these particular ones will generally be found in the source: Intentional Communities which as of June 1st, 2000 lists over 700 intentional communities.

Disregard for your purposes (we have), ones that say or indicate:

Co-op (These are cooperative housing arrangements - most often in cities and very often students).
House (These are generally a single house, oftentimes again in a city).
Recreational (Camps, retreats, convention or meeting centers)
Special communities for mental or physical handicapped and aged
Realtor and Architectural Developments
Religious ashrams, monasteries and such that are for meditation only
Schools, training and conference facilities
International communities
Communities that are Networks, Organizations, and Affiliations, without having a fixed geographical location for member's residence.

Neither a non-geographical loosely knit community of common interests, nor an urban setting that does not have a specific catastrophe orientation met our requirements, and we do not think it should meet yours, for what these web pages are about.

We do not feel that a survival plan that does not include a provision for future agriculture, meets the needs of someone who is relocating because they feel that the potential for catastrophe is that great.

It may be possible to find monasteries and other religious communities that meet one's requirements. One source states that there are 500 "cult" communes in the U.S., that may require one to surrender all their worldly goods in joining, and to completely subscribe without question to the ideas and leadership of the organization.

In general, we do not mean to use the term "cult" in a pejorative sense. Any distinction between acceptance of old line Amish and similar groups, and many modern "fringe" communities, is probably in the eye of the beholder. We have made no attempt to locate and list such organizations, but neither would we exclude them if they requested listing. However, if you are interested in some such particular group you can probably find them without our aid.

While in our personal philosophy we feel that far too much emphasis is generally placed on "compatibility", and that "exclusionary" communities of religious, political, or philosophical orientation, of any kind, are inclined to become inbred in their thinking and attitudes, (to their detriment), we do list a very wide spectrum of differing religious, political and philosophical oriented communities.

In these pages you will find hard core right and militia groups, as well as, at the polar extreme, a number of communist (commune - common) groups. There are many fundamentalist Christian groups, as well as those who deal mostly with channeling from the "space brothers". There are groups devoted to celibacy, and others devoted to eroticism. You will find racists, and anti-racists. Monogamy, polygamy, free-love, and homosexuals.

We provide STA (Service To All). This is not to say that we approve of all. My personal philosophy may be relatively conservative, and even Puritan, regarding, Monogamy, Alcohol, Drugs, Religion, Politics, Social Organization and so forth, but still we provide the services of these pages to all.

Aside from that, if YOU have any suggestions on how we may improve our listings, I would love to hear from you.

For further information about myself, and our survival organization, you can follow the links at: