2nd hunter gatherer post.
Pretty much everyone I know still eats seafood and fills their freezer with salmon. I am the only paranoid eccentric I know who has stopped eating salmon. The bird die offs, strange ocean plumes/blooms and open soars on seals makes me suspicious. Of course the experts just don’t know what’s causing all the problems.
So sorry to hear of your fruit/blossom loss, and more importantly the bees. 
In 2015, Colorado’s west slope had a spring frost that decimated the peach & apple crop. In 2016, the fruit growers had a bumper crop. This ‘feast or famine’ cycle may be the new normal, as climate becomes more variable and extreme. It’s saddening, frustrating, and frightening.
The “six weeks want” is the notorious period when the root cellar is nearly empty and the garden not yet producing. Perhaps we’ll see the “three years want” with respect to peaches and other crops, due to the vagaries of weather & climate.
Food preservation skills are moving up on my list of priorities. My parents canned and froze and dried food back in the 1970s when food wasn’t cheap and it was actually less expensive to grow your own. These days, I often pick up an extra package of canning lids at the grocery store. And I have two electric dehydrators and several good books on food preservation. It doesn’t seem like it’s time to fully put all of this knowledge and equipment into use, since fresh and dried fruit are still available in our grocery stores. But it feels like the time is nigh.
Nothing tastes better than a fresh peach. But a two-year old jar of canned peaches might get us through the six weeks’ want or (curses) the three years’ want.
As for moving to a more hospitable climate. Who knows? Areas with milder climates may suffer from drought or floods. There aren’t enough “perfect places” for all of us to move to and grow our own food. Some of us will just have to hunker down where we are, and try to survive as best we can. Survival is not about me, it’s about our species (and other species). Nature swings a powerful bat.
They are probably the two most important traits for survival (for all life on earth), two abilities that more than any others determine which individuals and species live on and which ones do not. But humans have triggered a pace of climate change off the charts, one that most species have no way of adapting or adjusting to (fungi, bacteria, microbes, and some insects might be able to a & a).
Even without the coming financial, economic, and energy crises, humans would have great difficulty staying alive. Given those crises proximity and certainty, we have no chance. And that’s without factoring in the likely chaos and violence we’ll unleash on one another when food, water, money and energy become in short supply. There’s already a scary amount of hostility and animosity out there (on top of a whole lot of guns and ammo), and that’s with grocery shelves and gas stations are fully stocked.
Call me negative, pessimistic, or whatever else, but I don’t know how anyone can be informed, realistic and objective and come to any other conclusion. I don’t think any amount of preparation will lead to a life worth living once things start unraveling. Chris is finding how difficult self sustenance is under present conditions, and he’s a smart, competent guy w solid understanding of the natural world. It’s only going to get more difficult as climate disruption intensifies. How will millions of others that are far less knowledgeable, prepared and physically incapable react?
I may end up being a grasshopper while many of you become the ants, but I’ve decided to devote my time and energy to living an environmentally hedonistic life, living for the moment and doing what I enjoy most while minimizing my footprint (mainly due to habit, conscious and belief in karma). So why even bother w this site? B/c I’m fascinated by the whole situation, got addicted to the info here years before reaching this conclusion, and enjoy reading the blogs and reader responses.
for an event of some kind that is scary as hell without causing to much death and destruction. I have issued that prayer here many times before. Seems like we are getting closer, so many possibilities now that it is starting to feel like an near inevitability. Nothing like a little fear to focus the mind. Humanity might start playing the survival of the species game in earnest.
The question is, will we discover that the most power trait for survival is cooperation and not competition in time. Or will we leave it to mother nature to sort that out for us.
Sorry too to hear about the bees and trees. I am not to far to the south of you, did not think that things had sprouted enough to be damaged. Buds all still look pretty tight around hear. A ways to the south of us (Connecticut coast) the buds are really starting to swell. Around here the witch hazel has bloomed and the magnolia buds have swelled, but the apple and peach buds still look tight. Have not tried to keep bees. Have noticed significant decrease in the naturally occurring wild bee population, but it does not seemed to have impacted garden productivity yet. It seems that blue berries and raspberries are still productive even when we loose peaches and apple buds to late frosts. Hoping for the best and preparing for the worst (to a point).
Sorry you’ve come up against climate change in a personal change way Chris with the failure of the peach trees and the bees. It reinforces just how dependent on nature we all are and maybe having to move is something lots of us will be coming to terms with.
treebeard wrote:
Seems like we are getting closer, so many possibilities now that it is starting to feel like an near inevitability. Nothing like a little fear to focus the mind. Humanity might start playing the survival of the species game in earnest.
The question is, will we discover that the most power trait for survival is cooperation and not competition in time. Or will we leave it to mother nature to sort that out for us.
BRAVO, Chris. Maybe we all need to stop being polite, especially when it comes to the devastation of nature.
Sorry to hear about your trees and bees. This happened to us last Spring and will probably happen again this year as we went from 65 degrees last week to below zero this week in northern New York. Sigh. No peaches again and we have a “northern” variety, Reliance.
Don’t lose hope. We will all have to learn to adapt our farms and gardens to the ever unreliable weather. There will always be good years and bad. Let’s hope more of the former, but plan for the latter.
We all hear the moans about the terrible state of infrastructure. I live on a road where washouts are repaired with gravel. Upside, it keeps speeders down. Now the internet is down. Probably another squirrel just like last time. My point is that all of us gravitate toward lots of built infrastructure. It’s what humans do. Especially since agriculture took over.
The plains people of the Asian steppes, Native Americans, Bedouins all were nomads. Goats eat anything and travel well. The buffalo are gone, but foraging and annual crops still work. Maybe we all need to minimize built infrastructure. Whiplash weather patterns are more, not less likely in the future. Have any “prosperors” in this group explored a more nomadic lifestyle? Maybe 2 small properties and a trailer, or even more nomadic.
What you don’t have invested in buildings, trees, etc.won’t be exposed to future losses.
The biggest downside would be loss of community. Travellers as the Brits call them have community, but only with themselves. On the flip side, most historians give credit to the nomadic hoards escaping a mini ice age for the fall of Rome.
The new section on telling our stories would be a good place to post thoughts on this.