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ENGLISH VILLAGE - WEEK 29 - UPDATE FROM "Terminus" | |
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WARNING
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INTRODUCTION A while ago my wife and I realised that the current period of "stabilisation" following the arrival of Peak Oil is simply a short respite before never-ending Energy Descent shreds our current society. We do not believe that a handful of people switching to bicycles or setting up vegetable patches will prevent a social collapse. We therefore decided to "go underground" whilst we work with others to build a few small "stealth" communities and associated information libraries & resource banks to provide support to those who survive the coming bad times. We have now started our work and I have received permission from the community to send you and update, as long as I don't reveal our location. |
UPDATE ... There are several teams at work in the community. My wife is working on collecting & archiving seeds of all types - she may describe her work in a later update. Other teams are working on tasks such as collecting old hand tools, designing rugged solar power systems, stockpiling vital medications, stockpiling entertainment DVDs & CDs etc. I have been asked to work in The Library. We are collecting as many printed books which cover useful skills as we can. In addition to modern Encyclopaedias, we are making major efforts to find older Encyclopedias and handbooks printed just prior to the advent of oil. A page from one of our older farming books  We are scanning the better books and where possible enhancing their legibility through text recognition software. Before we can scan a book, sadly we have to remove its binding & spine with a guillotine  One of several book scanning machines that we have  We are also printing .. or more accurately reprinting ... books, especially those which cover practical skills such as farming, woodwork and so on. One of our web offset printing machines  We have also bought in large quantities of single volume well illustrated children's Encyclopaedias. These are intended to show "those who follow" how far humanity climbed before the fall. One picture should dispel a thousand myths! All modern books we buy in and any books that we print here have a plastic laminate applied to the pages in order to enhance their lifespan. One of our laminating machines  We aim to buy-in and/or print many thousands of useful books of the next few years. The majority of these will be sealed in metal "time capsule" chests for distribution around the country. Many will be hidden in places which might lead to accidental discovery over the next decades ... or even centuries. A book "time capsule" storage chest under test ... this one is made of lead which will be soldered shut  In addition to printing "hard copy" books, we are also mass producing DVDs, CDROMs and CDs. We feel that many computers, CD players and DVD players will survive almost any social crisis. We also believe that very few useful CDROMs, CDs or DVDs will survive ... the world that follows will not find Kylie Minogue tracks or Bruce Willis films very useful. For this reason we are "burning" large numbers of useful audio lectures, DVD training courses etc onto disk. Initially we concentrating on medical training and farming courses, although we plan to expand the range greatly. By far our biggest problem at the moment is a lack of skilled DVD, CD & CDROM editing staff. It is a very time intensive & tiring task and we urgently need to find some more community members with these key skills. The room where we edit and mix DVDs, CDs, CDROMs etc.  Our main DVD "burning" machine ... I spend way too much time operating this!  The DVD-R disks we are using have a lifetime of 100 years if stored in ideal conditions. For this reason we use nitrogen filled containers to store our master copies .. and backups of course! Part of our secure media vault - the cartridges contain nitrogen filled DVD & CD capsules  We plan to use a different type of "time capsule" for some of the DVD sets. These containers will be made of concrete and will be hidden in remote woodlands just under the layer of dead leaves on the ground. The containers will be lined with plastic foam thermal insulation and will also be filled with dry nitrogen to protect the disks. DVD "time capsule" container  Well that's about it for this update. Here at the community we have an incredible amount of work to do to ensure that our grandchildren and their children don't live in a primitive, superstition filled world. They may live in a very low energy world but at least we may be able to ensure that they have some of the knowledge necessary to live in a civilised way. Until next time ... although I'm not sure when that will be, in view of my workload ... ... regards, Hari |