Survivalism is at its most basic a selfish endeavor. I don’t state that as being a negative thing, but rather as being morally right and good. We are supposed to want to live. And to that end, we obviously want those that we love to live too. Environmentalism on the other hand, often seems to push selflessness. It is usually built around messages of sacrifice, restriction, and admonition of the self for the greater good of society. I get frustrated listening to environmental rhetoric that beseeches me to seek out environmentally friendly actions for no other reason than eco- altruism, when there are plenty of great selfish reasons to be environmentally friendly. I think the case can be made that environmentalism and survivalism are two sides of the same coin, and have more in common than one might think, but for very different reasons. In that common ground, there are many useful applications for decreasing dependency on external entities and adopting attitudes and philosophies that make us all better preppers.
This common ground, despite differing motivations, can be seen in the hot topic of incandescent bulbs. The environmental message seems to be that you should want to switch to compact fluorescent bulbs because they are better for the environment. Forget the environment. It will be better for you too! The point I am making is that for a survivalist, the reason you should switch to compact fluorescent bulbs and stockpile compact fluorescent bulbs is that they will last longer after TEOTWAWKI than incandescent bulbs will, and they will require less power from your solar, wind, or other type generator. As a survivalist, when you do what is best for you, it usually happens to be good for the environment too(with regard to electrical efficiency). The awesome thing is that this is true for many environmental issues. We can call it “Good for the Goose-Good for the Gander-ism”.
To approach this more conceptually, I have identified three philosophies that are central ideas for environmentalism that deserve a page in the survivalism play book as well: sustainability, permaculture, and minimalism. I will touch on each concept and describe how it is applied for environmental issues and how we can apply it to our attitudes and strategies for prepping.
Sustainability: Sustainability quite simply refers to the notion of designing products and processes that can be sustained over a period of time, ideally indefinitely. Sustainability as it is applied to the environment is usually in reference to the use of natural resources. Many of the resources we are dependent upon exist in a finite amount or are being used faster than they are being replaced. So unless we find ways to augment the use of these resources, or find a resource to replace them, our use of these resources cannot be sustained into the near future.
The prepper needs to think of his stockpiled supplies in the same way. When you are making plans for TEOTWAWKI, hopefully you are thinking not just about how you are going to survive the next month, but also the next year, next decade, etc. You can be dependent on stockpiled supplies for some amount of time, but unless you are also planning/prepping for a way to augment and replace those supplies, then your survival plan is not sustainable and therefore your survival has an expiration date. So by all means put back cans of gasoline and batteries, but also invest in solar panels and other types of power generation. Stockpile a deep lauder of non-perishable food, but acquire skills for gardening and trapping as well. Always be thinking about short term survival for what you have stored, but be able to support that storage with skills later on.
Permaculture: This is a fairly new branch of systems ecology where naturally balanced in-put/out-put systems are recognized and replicated in other applications (usually agricultural).
I once saw these glass globes for sale that were a completely enclosed ecosystem. They were filled with salt water, a single live shrimp, a small piece of drift wood, and a little bit of algae. The gimmick was that this enclosed system could survive on its own for 2-4 years because each part of the system provided the necessities for the other parts of the system. For example, the algae produced Oxygen for the shrimp to breath and the shrimp produced waste and Carbon Dioxide for the algae, etc. All parts of the system balanced with all the other parts. This is what permaculture is all about.
A more applicable example is one used for landscaping. You may have noticed that dense forests do not need to be watered, fertilized, or weeded to continue to grow and prosper. This is all because the organisms in that system have organized themselves so that their inputs and outputs balance with the other members of the system. Trees leaves fall and provide heavy mulch that holds moisture and provides nutrients to the lower level plants, who in turn process the trees leaves into different sets of soil nutrients and also hold water in the soil, which in turn benefits the tree and allows it to grow more leaves, etc. We can apply this to our gardens and orchards by pairing plants together based on the different soil inputs and out puts and by pairing according to differing heights to maximize sun exposure for all plants in a smaller area. For example, carrots and tomatoes have complementary soil in-puts and out-puts. So planting these near each other benefits both plants. Furthermore, if the carrots are planted on the south side of the tomato plants, both crops can be grown in the same space without either suffering loss of sunlight.
Another application would be the use of rain-water harvesting in conjunction with on-site sewage composting. This is just the simple recognition that we can insert ourselves into a system without negatively disrupting the in-put/out-put balances. In the normal system, rain falls and is absorbed by the ground, then used to grow plants that we eat (or feed animals that we eat). All we have to do is catch that rain water before it hits the ground, drink it, and then it will reach the ground through sewage or drainage to complete its loop as normal. In this case, the system is augmented slightly for human benefit without its in-put and out-put being negatively impacted. In fact, as we use the water and add our own waste products to it, we enhance the flow of nutrients back into the soil which actually brings greater balance to the in-put/out-put of the soil.
Minimalism: We have become a consumer culture of stuff. The idea of stuff is that is supposed to make life more convenient, but I find that more often than not, stuff makes me more dependent on other stuff. The environmental application for minimalism is that we are squandering limited natural resources to produce unnecessary products like the newest iphone that is only slightly different from the one that came out a year ago. Then we all get rid of our old iphones which then go into a landfill somewhere or require some other kind of energy in-put to dispose of.
For a survivalist, minimalism is about removing all that stuff that makes you dependent on anything but yourself. Note the root word of minimalism is minimize. This could also be translated as simplify. There are certainly degrees of minimalism and I am not advocating that you sell all your belongings and try and live bare foot in sack cloth. But I am advocating things like learning to bake bread from scratch rather than buying a bread maker, or buying older vehicles where it is still possible to work on them yourself rather than them requiring a computer engineer to run diagnostics, or recognizing that a knife serves just as well as a motorized letter-opener. In the broader sense, minimalism helps you acquire skills rather than stuff and makes you dependent on you rather than on someone or something else that may not be around after TSHTF.
All three of the above concepts fit very nicely in the “Good for the gander-ism” category. Applying these concepts to your prepping will certainly have positive environmental benefits, but more importantly, they will have positive benefits for you as well. What we should begin to realize whether we find ourselves in Green Party or the Tea Party, or anywhere else on the spectrum, is that concern for the environment and natural resources is a morally justified selfish concern that is born of the noble desire to survive. We often think about environmental concerns as if the environment were external to us. But we are in the environment and of the environment, and if TEOTWAWKI comes, we will be more dependent on the environment and its resources more than ever. So go green! But not because some tree-hugging left-wing hippie tells you to. Do so because in most cases it will provide you with better natural resources, make you less dependent on outside entities as you acquire new skills and new attitudes, and because it will encourage more long range sustainable planning should things go bad in the future.