take a break from all the "how-to" and cuddle up with Earth Abides, One Second After, On the Beach, Lucifer's Hammer, The Road, or any of the other classic apocalyptica....... might cure your "hope" that things will get back to "normal". if you look back through history at other civilizations that have collapsed and what happened after, it takes hundreds of years before the land and the people on it recover enough to even begin to form the starts of the next civilization. digital info, books, possibly even our language itself will most likely be lost. those future people (if any exist at all) will look upon the rusted out remains of cars and crumbling buildings and infrastructure in the way we see rocks and trees now. while it is possible for a long slow decent to preserve a lot of the information and knowledge we currently posses, the statistically more probable event will be fairly quick (plague, EMP, nuclear war, collapse of world economy, severe drought, etc). the fast plunge back into atleast the bronze age, and more likely the stone age, will result in humanity having to find a much more sustainable population. translation: about 6.5 billion of "us" will have to be composted. the idea that remaining survivors would 1. be able to find your library, 2. it remained intact and didnt get burned for heat or used for TP 3. have access to the tools and materials contained within, 4. still have the knowledge of english language to read and understand is unlikely.
having said all that..... i think its cool what you're doing. my personal library would definitely qualify as a survival gold mine should any apocalypse survivor should ever find it. its just my opinion that there isnt much hope for mankind. the world is all ready degraded to a point where long term survival for humanity will be difficult even at fraction of the pre-industrial population levels. in my opinion, after climate change wreaks more havoc on the stability of the environment that gave rise to humanity the chance that we will continue on in any fashion resembling what we are now is extremely low. now add on Fukishima and the high probability that all the remaining nuclear plants will melt down shortly after the grid collapses, the high probability of nuclear warhead exchange, highly armed and easy excitability of the US population, the dependance of food availability on cheap, available petroleum, the stability of our fragile civilization on flimsy fiat currencies, the expansion of suburbia and other development, both civilian and industrial, and its impact on farmland and wild forests and their role in our survival, the high percentage of incarcerated peoples let free to roam the wastelands of USA, and the sudden thrust of people from highly specialized societal roles into survival role slashing the education of any new generations to the bare minimum to survive thus cancelling most all accumulated knowledge from being passed down and there isnt much hope for us. this list could go on and on.
i know most on here will recoil in horror at my opinion, and thats fine. im a realist in this situation. Management, i.e. the natural world, is harsh, and without all our modern luxuries like antibiotics and such, we will become equals with all the other wildlife on the planet...... which, i might add, are going extinct at the rate of 200 species a day. i hold no illusion that ill be one of the lucky (or unlucky) ones to survive whats headed our way. im just doing all the work im currently doing to make my life as comfortable as possible while i have it. ill leave all the hope for rebuilding humanity to others.
anyway, back to the point. dont let me pee in your corn flakes....... im a doomer and have little hope for the future. more importantly, good luck with you library! ill be cleaning out some of mine when we move to the Kaczynski cabin later this year. ill shoot you a pm and see if you're interested in anything im downsizing...... lots of premium Chelsea Green stuff will be getting the axe im sure!
