We live indeed in a very fragile society / eco-system. I doubt technology would help very long. Whatever runs on fuel or batteries can only run so long. Depending on the type and location of the event there are bound to be at least a number of services affected for months. Huge amounts of money have been spent under the homeland security umbrella (quite a bit of it not so wisely), but it is not monetarily possible to equip all public services for catastrophic events and have them on stand by. Maybe if the US were not engaged overseas and not hugely indebted.

We've seen what a hurricane can do to a city. What a tsunami can do to whole regions. The sad part of society, shown with some of the hurricanes has been that quite a number of people think the government should step in on day 1 and provide them all with all kinds of amenities and luxuries. Despite living in a hurricane zone, with an active hurricane warning ... some people had no food, no plan, ... Unbelievable.

Truth, we personally don't have emergency supplies either (we probably should) but are pretty flexible and pro-active. We can go without shopping for many days. Should there be an ice storm here, we have an emergency generator ready and depending on how bad the situation is, with moderation and zoning off some areas of the house, I should be able to keep the house from freezing for several days, at least. ( in a region like this, one should have a heating source that's not dependent on electricity, but this old house isn't easily retrofitted with a couple fire places ) Creatively one could join up with neighbors. Drain the pipes. Heat one house a bit instead of two.

But, generally speaking, it is sad how much of society lives day to day, without any concept nor preparation for a stormy day.

Our year in earthquake-prone Wellington convinced us to make some survival preparations in case of a break in the fragile chain that supports our non-wilderness existence. "Civil defense" in the UK is practically invisible, but NZ is much better organized. We followed most of the EQC suggestions in case of fuel rationing (thus inability to go shopping) or flooding (clean water rationing)—both of which have happened in the UK since I've been here.

You might think this funny, but over Xmas while my wife was in Germany the queue (this is Britain) to get into the local supermarket stretched back 2 roundabouts. I aborted my supply run and broke into the tinned reserves in our emergency kit!

Back to the point: we're fragile, not the daisies. I sometimes wonder to want extent our technology would protect us (compared to the rest of the animal kingdom) during/ after a cataclysmic event. I suspect most technology would simply cease to function, and that we might as well hide our nakedness under a pile of flower petals.

Very good points and question.

Have you checked out "idiocracy" at the video store? For all we know, going green may indeed be futile. Why worry, spend extra money and effort on going green? Miss Daisy's great great great grand daughters?

I'm up for being conservative with resources and making an effort where possible. It's just that right now certain things are still prohibitively expensive and/or pretty new to market; and this is not the house to upgrade in that sense.

Some of the things that have always interested me are survival techniques and more recently also going back to basics and conserving / living green. If you are (suddenly) without power, water, creature comfort xyz for a few days, it makes you think a little. We sometimes talk about having a remote place in case things go 'south' where we can live off the grid and with proper planning and scaling down might be able to live semi-sustainably. There was a guy who retired into a cabin he built himself with hand tools, somewhere in Alaska and lived there by himself for 20 years or so. A plane would drop off some supplies a couple times a year. Powerful stuff and pretty inspiring too. "Alone in the wilderness" We bought the DVD. I think I may very well build a cabin at some point. Might go crazy from solitude ;) but it would be interesting to build it.