[ars]

> can dig wells, practice permaculture, organize a farm, keep sheep, spin yarn, blacksmith, prep lumber, fire pottery and glass, hunt, fish, manage woodlands

I'm very confused by why you think this is sustainable - this type of life uses FAR FAR FAR more resources than modern living. It only works with a low population.

England for example basically cut down every tree it has in order to sustain this type of (old) life. They found coal because they had no choice, they were about to run out of energy.

If you just want to kill lots of people and have a low population, I suppose you can advocate for that, but it's completely orthogonal to the type of technology we have.

[gen220]

FWIW, 17th Century Europe didn't have access to the technology and knowledge that we have today, that do not require any fancy devices or technology to improve our efficiency of resource usage in the hypothetical scenario discussed in this thread.

At the time, there were many incentives to deforestation, but the main ones were to procure wood as fuel, and to clear arable land for agriculture and animal husbandry. I can at least speak to these two.

It was true in the past, that wood was an unsustainable source of heat. However, with modern wood-burning stoves, even in the nordic latitudes, this is no longer true.

Sweden and Norway have done a lot of innovation in this department in the last 80 years, because it's a matter of national security for them. They've found that it's actually more sustainable, affordable, and environmentally-friendly, to use wood as the main heating source for homes, rather than oil or coal. Again, this is only true if you're using wood stoves whose construction is informed by modern (post-WWII) knowledge. But the stoves are cast-iron, their manufacture doesn't require nanotechnology, pure silicon, etc.

On the agricultural front, it's difficult to overstate how far we've come in the last 400 years. Our caloric yield per acre on the same acreage of arable land would be much higher, today, even if you were to take away the products of modern industry (fertilizers, etc) that would presumably be inaccessible in an apocalypse.

Especially given access to new world domesticated produce, like potatoes, maize, various nuts, squashes, legumes, yams, tomato, maple, rubber.

[ClumsyPilot]

A man with a tractor and a combine harvesters can cultivate over 100 acres. With manual labour you can't cultivate 1 acre

[cheese_goddess]

> I'm very confused by why you think this is sustainable - this type of life uses FAR FAR FAR more resources than modern living.

Living in a society without heavy industry, without, electronics and without internal combusion engines uses up "FAR FAR FAR" more resources than living in a society with them? How so?

[ars]

Because the internal combustion engine is surprisingly efficient.

Did you know you release more CO2 walking a mile than driving a mile? It's surprising, but it takes a lot of energy to grow food, and then a lot of energy is lost by the time that food powers you.

Yes the CO2 from food is from the air, so not the same, but it's just an example of efficiency. Ignoring the source of CO2, a tractor emits less CO2 than a horse, for the same farm work.

You still need to heat your home, you still need to find fertilizer somewhere, you need fuel for cooking. You need to make clothing.

All those things take energy, and modern living uses less energy. The main difference from the past is there are more people now. And in the past a lot of that energy came from the sun, rather than being mined.

But back to resources (rather than just CO2): To live like a farmer you need wood, and you need more wood than can re-grow in the area available to you. Look at peat moss mines in Ireland - they mined so much, just for basic living, there's not much left.

[cheese_goddess]

No, the main difference from the past is that we have been taking fossil fuels out of the earth and burning it for the last 200 years, and releasing in that very short time the CO₂ that has been stored in them for many millions of years. This is much more than the amount of CO₂ that the environment's carbon sinks can bind and so we are warming the environment, and at a very fast pace.

Like you say, the CO₂ we breathe "comes from the air". Specifically, that CO₂, like the carbon gasses released by farming and agriculture, is part of the atmospheric carbon cycle that circulates carbon gasses between the biosphere and the atmosphere. This cycle is stable, it has been stable for millions of years and it has never caused a greenhouse effect, neither is there any risk that it will cause a greenhouse effect, now or in the future. There is certainly no chance that the CO₂ we exhale will cause the amount of CO₂ in the atmosphere to shift, because that's where we get our carbon in the first place.

The internal combustion engine on the other hand, efficient or not, is burning fossil fuels and is a primary driver of release of the CO₂ bound in fossil fuels, to the environment. This is a major mechanism of climate change.

That having been cleared up, you're making a weird argument that is very difficult to support. If I understand correctly your earlier comment that I quoted, you're saying that living, in summary, without burning fossil fuels, is not less sustainable than living while burning fossil fuels. You 're saying that this is because the internal combustion engine is efficient. You mean that it makes good use of the fuel it burns, but its fuel cannot be easily replaced (because it takes billions of years for it to be created by natural processes that we can't replicate at scale) and burning it is causing a greenhouse effect and climate change.

So, no, it doesn't make any sense that living without burning fossil fuels, without combustion engines, without all the trappings of modern life, is not more sustainable than living with them. We can discuss the benefits and risks of either way of life (I'm not keen to return at a pre-industrial time myself) but it is abundantly clear which way of life is sustainable, and which isn't. And that's not "more sustainable". Burning fossil fuels is just not sustainable anyway you cut it.

[notriddle]

> It only works with a low population.

That’s the point. Killing lots of people lowers the population, but it doesn’t stay low. Over time, the population will always approach the carrying capacity, so the only way to permanently lower the population is to make the carrying capacity lower.

[oldsecondhand]

Going back 300 years in tech won't reduce the carrying capacity permanently. We'll either rebuild modern technology or will cut out enough trees to cause an environmental catastrophe.

[ars]

> is to make the carrying capacity lower.

What's the point in that? You end up using the identical amount of resources, but having fewer people. What goal exactly did you accomplish?

[throwaway892238]

I mentioned woodland management, which would have prevented deforestation. There's actually many practices we can implement to make more use of the land than we've done in the past. Just picking different crops would enable us to feed the entire existing planet with a fraction of the land area we use today. And we certainly know a lot more about sustainable climate regulation than we did in the past, requiring fewer fuels and enabling more sustainable ones.

Producing more technology to keep swelling the population obviously isn't working either (hello, climate change). Human civilization needs downsizing, or at least more rational and sustainable resource use/management.

[imchillyb]

SO... you think that the country of England had no woodland management?

The leaders of the day decided, that the protected lands would no longer receive protection, there was no populace vote.

You think post-apocalypse would be different from a monarchy /how/ exactly?

The strong rule, and without rule of the masses and enforcers of law, we're back to warlords and kings. Good luck with your processes...

[wrycoder]

It's certainly sustainable, but a three-generation nuclear family will need two or three farmable ("arable") acres to prosper. Expect the population to diminish substantially.

What is not sustainable is high technology, which likely can't be quickly restored, once it crashes. It might take a couple of centuries to put all the systems back in place, if the crash is deep enough.

[rm_-rf_slash]

I think parent meant that absent the high tech and energy dense supply chains that underly modern society, people would have to do a lot of things to sustain a society that for us these days can be solved by going to Walmart.