Life After the Oil Crash: Our Village

Our Village

How about some self sufficiency hints from a small village in Russia? Interesting article with some tips worth keeping in mind. I especially like the part about saunas. Great way to stay clean and conserve water and energy.

A few years after the Soviet Union collapsed, I spent some time living in a small Russian village where my wife’s side of the family owns a house. There is nothing special or unique about this particular village; I am sure that it is just one of thousands like it, scattered over the vast expanse of Russia. It is a simple place that caters to simple needs. Like many such places, it was only very slightly affected by the collapse of the Soviet economy: you’d have to know what to look for to detect changes, and none of them made obvious the fact that elsewhere life had changed in dramatic ways.

The United States is now facing a predicament similar to the one the Soviet Union confronted some two decades ago. There is a great deal of discussion, among those few who try to think for themselves, about the right way to respond to the permanent energy crisis that has already started to grip the country. The entire American way of life is an artificial life support system that runs on fossil fuels, and it is going to get knocked out as these fuels run low. Of the few people who have any notion that this is happening, even fewer can imagine what might come next, beyond the gut feeling that it will be unpleasant.