My baby brother, who is now in his fifties, was the only one of my siblings to reproduce. As such, he is the only one with a serious stake in the future of the planet. I'm afraid my cynicism kept me from betting anyone's life that humans would get their heads on straight and avoid the many forms of destruction now set on what appear to be an unstoppable course toward a major disruption that many of us would call disaster.
From cursory study of snippets of information that flit across my screen, I gather that New England won't be a bad place to weather the new climate. At least it will be less worse than a lot of other places. My brother referred to this when he asked me about available tracts of land on which to establish a survivalist homestead. When he first mentioned it, the idea was for all of us to go in on a parcel of more than 100 acres for us all to use. This overlooks the fact that none of us have any money, and that the coronavirus pandemic has skewed real estate values sharply upward. My part of New England has seen a bit of a building boom as people who can work remotely have joined the existing flow of homesteaders of various persuasions coming up to establish their private kingdoms independent of government interference.
Once we've really gutted government, no one will hold you to any standards homeschooling your kids. You can teach them any damn thing you like without worrying about "accreditation." It will be man against nature once again, on a smaller scale than strip mining and multi-national corporations. The person polluting your well and clouding your skies will more likely be your neighbor, if it isn't you yourself. There will be fewer lawsuits and more blood feuds. Keep it simple.
My brother's next thought was a mere ten acres, which is quite doable. But you want to guarantee good sun exposure for the garden, good water, and decent soil. Soil can be improved, but if you have to do a lot of clearing and stumping it will take a lot of time. Early settlers spent years enlarging a small patch and improving its soil, and still saw subsequent generations high tail it to the Midwest as soon as the country expanded to a place that already had actual soil instead of fields full of rocks.
A farm that will support a small family will not support two, three, four small families as the offspring mature and want to breed. This simple math propelled our species from central Africa all up and out across the globe, and then led to all the restless back-and-forth invading, repelling, emigrating, assimilating, and general wandering that has created our tribes, our borders, and our generational habits of enmity and sharp dealing.
In the 1970s, apocalyptic fiction and predictive nonfiction were already popular. As a fencer, I looked forward to a post apocalyptic world in which firearms were reduced to primitive forms or had perhaps become impossible to maintain. I was vague about how it would happen, but it fit my preferred scenario. I grooved a little on all the cool opportunities to win in single combat and receive the favors of impressed females. But you have to be pretty intellectually and emotionally stunted for that image to survive any lengthy contemplation. Besides, after college I was starting to value the fruits of modern civilization. I didn't really want the world to end, and I couldn't understand why so many people seemed eager for it.
Sadly, I understand it better now. A lot of people have never gotten the hang of civilization, and yearn for a genuinely simpler life. Nasty, brutish and short it might be, but it will be straightforward. Survive to maturity. Breed. Stay alive as long as you can. Cooperate only as necessary to enhance your individual survival and that of your bloodline. It's basically a reset to the invention of civilization in the first place.
Some apocalypticists are more well read than that. They've studied history, and know some of the pitfalls to avoid. It's not going to be a sudden reset to a dispersed population in a renewed wilderness or perfect pastorality.
The wealthy only want enough disruption to keep the general population frightened and vulnerable. All of their wealth is based on abstract things. There will be no stock market, and, therefore, no vast fortunes with which to hire all of the professionals a king will need to maintain power and security in a reality-based world.
Most apocalyptic fantasies of the post World War II era were based on war as the societal disruptor. Violence would usher in the change very quickly, possibly with a period of conventional warfare as well as nuclear destruction. The climate catastrophe is more of a slow-motion collapse, in which the combat will be more widespread, at a lower level than full-out conventional war. There will be no logical reason for nuclear blasts, although some psychotic despot somewhere might decide to chuck what he's got, just to see what it looks like, since we're all boned anyway. Let's assume that doesn't happen, and that the collapse unrolls steadily in waves of migration, crowding the spaces with water and soil beyond their capacity fairly rapidly. Even though a lot of people will be dying, the remaining population will have to use a smaller area than we have now.
You can't really hedge the bet. Even though our best chance is to try to head off the worst effects, that requires a commitment to civilization, staying in place as much as possible while working to improve conditions from where you are. Or you can run off now and set up your fortifications, but you can't really contribute to the solution if you've assumed its failure.
Homesteads will be hard to defend. I see a meme online that sneers at the people stockpiling weapons and doing nothing to acquire tools, supplies, and skills with which to make and grow what they will need to live, but the weapon fanciers have learned from history that you don't need to do all that stuff yourself if you are well armed and skilled at hurting people, because you can go take what you want from the farmers and the makers. Who were the kings? Not the farmers and the makers. They were warriors, who held their place by kicking ass. Your Second Amendment types will say that it couldn't happen here because we have a tradition of armed citizens with a right to defend themselves. Sure, but what happens when the badass with more or better guns, and more people, comes along and wants your stuff? What happens when you're concentrating on farm work, because you know how to do that too, and a sniper blows your head off as the first move to invading your farm?
Before you know it, we've recreated society with a warrior caste, and farmers and makers all beholden to their defenders, and it's a long damn time before someone suggests that maybe we should just vote on stuff.
If it's all just going to evolve into the same mess we have now, let's just operate the mess we have now, and try to tweak it into a better form. Either that or completely demolish any semblance of civilization and go back to living naked in warm climates and scrounging for whatever we can find. And you'll still end up getting jumped by some bigger scrounger who figured out he can beat your ass and take your fruit.
